On War: From the Peacework mailbag

Ned Hanauer, Framingham, MA

Your coverage of Kosovo (May 1999) was seriously marred by Diana Johnstone's thinly veiled apologia for the brutal expulsions, mass murders, and cultural genocide carried out by Serbian forces in Kosovo. Johnstone's suggestion that Albanians are partly responsible for their fate is a case of blaming the victim. She blames Kosovars for wanting cultural autonomy and ignores Serbia's cultural and political oppression of Albanians in Kosovo. Her approach is comparable to rationalizing Chinese oppression of Tibetans, Turkish oppression of Kurds, and so forth.

Johnstone suggests NATO wanted massacres of Kosovars and that massacres can be "arranged." She also claims Croats fired on their own cities so that Serbs would be blamed! Can she believe that? What is her point? That the Serbs did not destroy hundreds of Muslim and Croat villages, along with their mosques and churches, destroy Vukovar, and perpetrate scores of massacres, including the murder of 7000 Bosnians at Srebrenica?

If Serb forces were massacring and expelling Jews or Blacks, (or even Palestinians) Johnstone's article would probably not have appeared. If it had, a great deal of protest would have resulted. But Muslims and Albanians are not very vocal in New England. If the Organization of African Unity or the UN-or even NATO-had used military force to end Apartheid or the massacre of Blacks in South Africa or to stop genocide in Rwanda, would the US peace movement have opposed such use of force?

The peace movement, including AFSC and Peacework, could do the following: 1) help bring together in dialogue Serbs and Albanians in New England; 2) publish and encourage the mass media to publish the views of conflict resolution specialists - people who abound in this area but whose voices are seldom heard; 3) support Serb and Albanian human rights and peace groups; 4) oppose the bombing by NATO and Serbia's barbaric war crimes, and 5) insist on the obligation of the international community both to protect (by armed UN forces) the right of Kosovar Albanians and Serbs to live in freedom in Kosovo, and to bring Serbian war criminals to justice.

Diana Johnstone replies:

Not all historic conflicts take place between angels and devils. Many, perhaps most, take place between human beings in complex and flawed societies. To call mention of this fact "blaming the victim" is simply a currently fashionable way of refusing to face complex reality.

The centuries-old conflict between Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo has left a bitter heritage of rights and wrongs on both sides. Reconciliation would require mutual recognition of this fact. Outsiders who enjoy the vicarious self-righteousness of proclaiming one side to be angels and the other to be devils bear a heavy responsibility for fanning and perpetuating ethnic hatred.

As for the Croats, I did not "claim" anything, I quoted strictly Croatian sources as stating that Croats fired on their own cities for public relations purposes. I hoped that this might alert some outsiders to the fact that in such conflicts as have torn apart Yugoslavia, things are not always as they seem at first glance. Especially when outside powers show readiness to intervene, quite imaginative means can be employed to gain their sympathy and support.

The blacks of South Africa never called on NATO to achieve their liberation, nor has any other authentic social liberation movement. The "Kosovo Liberation Army," in contrast, invited NATO bombing and adopted a strategy of armed attacks intended precisely to provoke Serbian repression and thus attract NATO support. It has no democratic political program, no social program for the welfare of the people of Kosovo, only a power program of armed territorial conquest, with help from NATO. The United States and NATO are to blame for encouraging this foreseeably disastrous strategy which has brought such suffering on the people of Kosovo.

The prevailing one-sided anti-Serb version of the Yugoslav civil war, echoed here by Mr. Hanauer, is keeping the murderous conflict going and justifying the destruction of a whole country. It has undermined concrete efforts, such as those of Jan Oberg's Transnational Foundation for Future and Peace Research (Lund, Sweden), to bring Serbs and Albanians together. Peace-making requires fairness and open-minded search for truth. Blame is less important than understanding. Today, championing one national group against another is too often mistaken for morality and vengeful condemnation for justice.

Letter forwarded by Dr. Joyce King, Boston, MA

The Los Angeles Times for May 21, 1999, has a front-page article that compares the Kosovar refugee camps in Macedonia with various refugee camps in Africa. The authors, T. Christian Miller and Ann M. Simmons, suggest that the much worse conditions in African camps are related in part to racial prejudice, as well as to the cultural affinity of donors to European refugees. Among the comparisons: UNHCR spends 11 cents a day per African refugee, and $1.23 a day per refugee in the Balkans. Some refugee camps in Africa have one doctor for every 100,000 refugees, while the Macedonian camps have one doctor for every 700 (this is a better ratio than in some communities in Los Angeles). While all refugees receive food rations with the same calorie count (2100 per day), the Balkans' food includes cheese, chicken, oranges, milk, coffee, and tarts, while the Africans are limited to wheat and sorghum. The article is filled with disturbing details, I recommend it to all of you.

Lawrence Reichard, Bucksport, ME

In his Letter from the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights (May 1999), Professor Vojin Dimitrijevic has it backwards in stating that "there will be no real peace in Yugoslavia unless Serbia embarks on the road to democracy and worker economy."

In fact, there will be no real peace in Yugoslavia, or anywhere, unless Serbia (and other countries) renounce the so-called market economy. As Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now" and some elements of the British press have pointed out, IMF-style market economy models have played a critical role in destroying the economy of Yugoslavia, thus exacerbating ethnic tensions and setting the stage for today's massive violence.

Let's carry it one step further. So-called market economies are not market economies at all. They are systems that grossly favor large, multinational corporations over smaller native companies. It is time to come up with a better term for these corrupt systems that are imposed on nations at gun point. Until a better term comes along, I propose "rigged market economies."

Karl Davies, Northampton, MA to Jean Grossholtz:

I read your article about the latest corporate war in Yugoslavia in Peacework (May1999) today. You described some of the patterns that the propaganda machine uses to set up these wars: statements about strategic interests, arming "insurgents," phony negotiations. I would add creating massacres. And of course there's the economic destabilization in advance. And there are always big economic resources at stake.

So now I'm wondering if there are enough examples, and if the patterns are clear enough that someone could write a book about it, so people would know better in advance what to look for. Something like Warring Signs. Or maybe the book has already been written?

I just read on one of the email lists about how they're gearing up for a war in Colombia now. And Congress is appropriating all this money for the military. I think they really are getting ready to fight several wars simultaneously in several different countries.

Maybe with all this excess capacity, they figure they always have to be destroying property and consuming weapons, and then rebuilding. Plus of course, it gives them complete financial control over the countries they've destroyed once they've come in with reconstruction loans and so on. It's a terrible thought, but it looks like continuous warfare and debt slavery are being built into the system.

To the Boston Globe, May 13, 1999:

Serbia is not the only country where we Americans are carrying out an undeclared war against a brutal tyrant who poses a threat to the stability of a whole region.

Let us not forget Iraq.

In both places the tyrant himself is not feeling much pain.

The economic sanctions which the UN, at the insistence of the US and the UK, has been imposing on Iraq for more than eight years, and the continuing US bombing, were designed to move the people of Iraq to rise up and declare a democracy and to stimulate the disarmament process which is the region's only hope for peace, but both policies have further entrenched the regime's hold on the population.

The World Health Organization, UN relief agencies, the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the group of Nobel Peace Laureates who recently went to study the humanitarian situation in Iraq, and other observers agree that the sanctions and the bombings have killed more than a million people there, from starvation and from the fact that, without medicines, treatable people have been dying from treatable diseases. They agree that 4500 to 5000 children die there from these causes every month. There has been almost a complete collapse of medical services and public utilities for sanitation and clean water supplies. Raw sewage floats in the available water.

Our economic sanctions and bombing of Iraq constitute weapons of mass destruction! Most of the population of Iraq is under 15 years of age, so most Iraqis know of the US and the UK only as people who are bent on destroying them. They will not want to model their society on ours.

Can we do anything about this war of the strong against the weak? The ordinary citizens of our country were able to bring the war in Vietnam to an end by pressing our elected representatives to end it. Let us do that again, with diligence, and bring the people of Iraq back into the community of nations.

-Sincerely, Nancy Haines,
Presiding Clerk, Wellesley, MA
Monthly Meeting of Friends