The World of Computer Software/World_Of_Computer_Software-02-385-Vol-1of3.iso/s/serbia.zip/SERBIAN.TXT

Text File | 1993-01-16 | 13KB | 232 lines

      SERBIAN  SORROWS

by Dr. Alex N. Dragnich and (em. prof. at Vanderbuilt Univ.)
Fr. Alexander Webster (priest in Orth. Church in America)

  Any sincere Serbian Orthodox Christian must categorically
reject the unjust conduct of the wars in Yugoslavia by at
least some Serbs, whether in irregular "rogue" militias or
orchestrated by the government of Slobodan Milosevic in
Belgrade.
  Three particularly egregious offenses cry out for
condemnation.
  First, the deployment of snipers and the use of artillery
and other means of indirect fire against civilian targets
in urban areas is, whatever the political objective,
a violation of the just-war principles of proportionality
and discrimination (or noncombatant immunity). Not only
cities but also humanitarian convoys of vehicles loaded with
food and medical supplies have had to endure shelling, some
of it no doubt by Serbs. In a lengthy statement issued on
May 29, the Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church, to its
credit, condemned Serbian attacks on civilian targets.
  Second, the strategy of "ethnic cleansing" proves that some
Serbs have drunk too deeply from the poisoned well of their
 former Nazi persecutors in Croatia. Whether motivated by
paranoia or by a reasonable fear of oppression by non-Serb
majorities in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the systematic
displacement of people based solely on their ancestry through
acts of physical intimidation and terror is regarded by the
international community as a war crime. It also mocks the
Christian moral imperative to love and to offer hospitality
to one's neighbor.
  Third, the mistreatment of prisoners-of-war in detention
camps constitutes another violation of the law of land warfare
as codified in the Geneva Conventions of 1925 and 1949.
Without resorting to charges of Nazi-like "death-camps",
a fair-minded observer could not but wonder if they were fed
properly.
  But these sickening pictures do not justify the daily
pounding of Serbia and "the Serbs" in the Western media.
Reporters and pundits of varying politician persuasions seem
determined to convict Serbian alone without considering all
the evidence.
  "Evidence" is sometimes created out of whole cloth,
especially by political cartoonists. An Associated Press
Photograph showing a smiling Serbian soldier waving as he
departed Sarajevo airport on June 29 was "revised" by Chuck
Asay for the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph: his cartoon
(reprinted by the Washington Times on ]July 12) depicted a
young child impaled on the soldier's bayonet.
  A particularly odious example was the "ethnic cleansing"
cartoon of Jim Borgman for the Cincinnati Inquirer, which the
Washington Post reprinted on August 9. Skeletal figures
labeled "Croats" and "Muslims" are shown entering the
"showers" of a "Serbian Concentration Camp." Not even the grim
accounts given by former inmates of the detention camps in
Bosnia suggest Nazi-like gas chambers.
  In the current media frenzy, photographs and film footage
have been grossly mislabeled. One of the spectacular video
icons printed and broadcast during the week of August 3
purported to show a Croatian  child-initially identified
by New York Times reporter John F. Burns on August 3 as
Vedrana Glavas, a mentally handicapped  three-year-old
girl-being buried as the mourners were pounded by artillery
shells, presumably of Serbian origin. The British newspaper
The Independent reported two weeks later that the United
Nations forces on the ground in Bosnia were convinced that
Muslims with grenade-launchers; not Serbian mortars, had
attack the cemetery in a ploy to curry international
sympathy. Further, when a former resident of Sarejevo now
living in Paris saw a fuller version on French television of
the film footage from which the sound bite on Cable News
Network in the United States was taken, he identified the
site as a Serbian cemetery with a Serbian Orthodox priest
conducting the burial service for a Serbian child!

    Rush to Judgment

  This rush to judgment is often characterized by what some
might describe, not without reason, as hysteria.  Prominent
reporters and commentators such as NBC television's John
Chancellor have made free use of such heavy-handed phrases
such as "Serb-Nazis"  and "Serb-Sadam" (for  Milosevic).
Throwing caution to the wind Democratic presidential nominee
Bill Clinton pushed for some kind of American armed might to
"force" "the Serbs" to open their "concentration camps."
Political pundit Morton Kondracke suggested that air strikes
on "Serbia's infrastructure" would deter these bellicose
bullies. Military analyst William Taylor of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC,
recommended that the Western powers bomb the Serbian
command-and-control center in Belgrade itself. Even the most
timid doves on the Persian Gulf War are flexing newfound
hawkish muscles against "the Serbs". Substitute "the Jews"
or "the Arabs' or virtually any other ethnic group and see
how long it takes before a storm of epithets like "bigot" or
"racist" would rain upon the head of an insensitive
journalist or pundit. Emotional excess is no substitute for
reasoned policy analysis. Meanwhile, the major print media
in the United States occasionally report the atrocities
committed by Muslims and Croats, but these stories are
invariably buried in the inside page, with virtually no
mention in headlines. The only noteworthy exception was the
lead editorial in the July 10 New York Times. Citing the
forcible seizure of southwest Herzegovina - approximately
thirty percent of the new Bosnian republic's territory-by
Croatian militias and President Franjo Tudjman's expressed
hope that the Croats there would declare an "independent"
secessionist Croatian "republic", the Times entitled its
critique, "Croatia the Butcher's Apprentice."
 Tudjman, like his counterpart in Belgrade an ex-Communist
and born-again nationalist, has skillfully exploited the
Bosnian civil war for his own ends.  This Croatian
aggrandizement reminds us of the Japanese "parable of the
waterbirds," which Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey
proposed as a model of causation in his 1973 book, The Cause
Wars: while two waterbirds fight over a fish, the fisherman
may snatch the fish away. With the world's attention riveted
on the Serbian-Muslim conflict in Sarajevo and northern and
eastern Bosnia Tudjman has proved himself the big fisherman
in the south.
  Some Serbs have committed terrible crimes in the wars of
Yugoslav Secession. Yet "the Serbs" as a people should not
be subject to the slanderous rewriting of their often painful
history that passes for journalism in the Western media. No
mention is made in news reports, for example, that Serbs were
thc original victims of "ethnic cleansing" in Nazi-satellite
Croatia in World War II (with hundreds of thousands of brutal
massacres) and during the thirty-five year of Yugoslav
(actually Croatian) dictator Josip Broz Tito's rule by proxy
through the Muslim Albanians Serbia's Kosovo province.
The brutality and harassment visited upon Serbs in Kosovo - the
cradle of Serbian religious and national culture has,
together with an increased birth rate among Albanians there,
reduced the Serbian percentage of the population in this
region from around 50 to 12. Those who never raised a voice
to condemn the ethnic cleansing perpetrated against Serbs
should think twice before they express one sided moral outrage
in the present Bosnian conflict.
  Further, the media have talked about the Serbs desire to
create a Greater Serbia but have ignored the stated aims of
the Muslim leader in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegovic.
In his 1990 book entitled Islamic Declaration, he wrote:
"There can be no peace or coexistence between Islamic faith and
non-Islamic social and political institutions."  Casting
aside any visions of a secular pIuralistic state on Bosnian
territory, he also declared: "The Islamic movement should
and can start to take over power as soon as it is morally
and numerically strong enough to be able to overturn not only
the existing non-Islamic government, but also to build up a
new Islamic one." And Izetbegovic is supposed to be a
moderate Muslim.
  The media continue to ignore certain inconvenient facts.
For example, in the Balkan Wars (1912-13) and World War I,
Serbia fought at great human and material cost to liberate
Serbian majority populations in Turkish-controlled Kosovo
and Austrian-dominated Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as
Serbian regions in Croatia and Slovenia. Serb's costly
alliance with the Triple Entente in the First World War
was duly rewarded in 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles
incorporated most of the region's Serbs into the new Kingdom
of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (renamed Yugoslavia in l929).
Although Yugoslavia prior to Tito's Communist regime was not
divided into republics, or other ethnic units, the Communists
carved up thc country so that one-third of the Serbs were
left outside thc Socialist Republic of Serbia. Yet the
Western media have behaved. as if the Serbs had no legitimate
interest in the Serb-populated areas of Croatia and Bosnia-
Herzegovina.

   Invaders From Mars?

  Over and over again, the media have reported that
"the Serbs" have "captured" two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina,
as if they had dropped there from Serbia or Mars. While they
constitute about one-third of the population in this region,
they resided in about 60 per cent of the area before any
fighting took place. And the media usually refer to the
smuggling of Serbian arms into Bosnia-Herzegovina by the
government in Belgrade, when, to the contrary, Tito had made
Bosnia-Herzegovina the primary arsenal of Yugoslavia after
his break with Stalin in l948. The Bosnian Serbs already had
ample firepower at their disposal when their war began in June.
  Sadly, many in the West who applaud the fall of Communism
seem determined to fight to defend one of Tito's worst
offenses against the Serbs-the artificial internal borders.
When Yugoslavia began to disintegrate, several voices in the
West declared that the wishes of the various peoples would be
respected. If they had studied Yugoslav history, they would
have known that, as Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia seceded from
Yugoslavia, Serbia would not stand by passively without
seeking resolution of its greatest  grievance-the unfair
territorial boundaries.
  Perhaps the most glaring example of journalistic inertia
is the apparent refusal of the Western media to pursue the
claim of the Holy Synod of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox
Church that Croatian forces have depopulated Serbian
villages in western Slavonia and western Herzegovina and
opened "concentration camps" for Serbs. In their May 29
statement the bishops provided place names and numbers: for
example, 4,000 Serbian soldiers in Odzak; 643 men, women and
children in Limn; 570 men and women in Duvno. Refugees have
also reported to the bishops that, in a revival of the
Croatian Ustasha barbarism of 1941, Serbs have been thrown
into "bottomless pits" at Surmanci near Medjugorje in
Herzegovina and at the Katina pit at Velebit. The Serbian
Orthodox bishops are a spiritually sober prudent lot not
usually given to political activism of any sort. They deserve
to be taken seriously in the West.   What is truly ironic is
that the governments of the United States and the European
Community may have helped to precipitate the current political
and military morass by their incomprehension of the ethnic,
religious and political complexities of the region.
Did these governments understood the likely consequences of
their acquiescence to the break-up of the Yugoslav federation?
  Did they care so little how the close-knit Serbian minority
in an independent Croatia would be haunted by the specter of
the last attempt by Zagreb at nationhood? Or how far from
sanguine the minority Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina would be at
the prospects of a Muslim-dominated government in the land
that served as one of the principal anti-Serbian "killing
fields" during the Second World War? And now the United States
and the European Community, struggling to cope with their
shortsightedness, have rushed further down this political
slippery slope by placing virtually all the blame for the
current troubles on "the Serbs".
    In an explosive military conflict beset with political
and moral pitfalls, one would think that caution, prudence
and fairness would govern the search for a solution that is
at once moral and practical. Among the most vocal critics of
"the Serbs" in the Western governments and media, however, these
virtues have been conspicuously lacking.