home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
- Path: sparky!uunet!haven.umd.edu!darwin.sura.net!wupost!mont!pencil.cs.missouri.edu!daemon
- From: CATHYF%EARLHAM.BITNET@UICVM.UIC.EDU
- Subject: REPORT:MIRacles #8 (ex-Yugoslavia)
- Message-ID: <1992Aug31.095116.10320@mont.cs.missouri.edu>
- Followup-To: alt.activism.d
- Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
- Sender: news@mont.cs.missouri.edu
- Nntp-Posting-Host: pencil.cs.missouri.edu
- Organization: ?
- Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 09:51:16 GMT
- Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
- Lines: 180
-
- /* Written 6:05 pm Aug 17, 1992 by gn:jsax in cdp:gen.quaker */
- /* ---------- "MIRacles No. 8" ---------- */
- Subject: MIRacles No. 8
-
- ==================================================================
- MIRacles No. 8
- Joel GAzis-SAx
- Zagreb, 17 Kolovoz 1992
- Copyright 1992
- ==================================================================
-
- "When you cut off communications totally," the Beograd journalist told me, "
- you help the totalitarian regimes here. They don't want witnesses!" I had
- come to witness life under sanctions at the invitation of Jozsef Kasza, mayor
- of Subotica, Vojvodina, Yugoslavia, to be a witness to life under sanctions.
- Subotica and Beograd, I discovered, are not quite the places I expected them
- to be. When I told some of my Croat friends about my plans, their eyes
- widened and their mouths uttered phrases like "Be careful!" The walls against
- the free flow of information have made it impossible to understand the extent
- and determination of the opposition to Milosevic or to comprehend how the
- Serbian, Croat, Hungarian, and other residents of Vojvodina view the war.
-
- To view the war at all from Yugoslavia can be a challenge. Aside from
- graffiti on the walls, the evidence of war in Subotica and Beograd is sparse.
- In one week, I saw seven soldiers on the streets of Subotica. (I see that
- many in Zagreb in fifteen minutes!) The patiotic banners, war toys, and other
- militaristic mercantile trappings that exist everywhere in Zagreb are seldom
- found in these two Yugoslav cities. You could travel in Yugoslavia for
- months, I think, and never notice the war unless you happen to talk to some of
- the people who have suffered from it.
-
- Three incidents should illustrate some of the peculiar difficulties of peace
- witness in the new Yugoslavia:
-
- 1. I and other members of the Peace Camp in Subotica meet with Drusko
- Stepanovic, the local head of the Serbian Socialist Party, the same party as
- Slobodan Milosevic. He considers himself a Yugoslav because he has Serbian,
- Bunjevac, and Croatian ancestors. He denies that there are any ethnic
- problems in Vojvodina or anywhere else in Yugoslavia and insists that the
- Yugoslav National Army has completely withdrawn into the borders of
- Yugoslavia.
-
- It is a tumultuous meeting as he challenges one questioner after another with
- some grim fact about their own native land. When I ask him about
- conscientious objectors, for example, Mr. Drusko tells me about how much he
- admires Muhammad Ali and reminds me about how the champ lost his boxing title
- for his resistance to the Vietnam War. I respond by admitting that my own
- country does mistreat its COs. "However," I add, "as a man who objects to all
- war, I am concerned with how my brothers in my belief are treated everywhere
- and I intend that wherever I see mistreatment, I will speak to it." He pauses
- as he realizes that he cannot silence me so easily before going on to another
- questioner.
-
- Over the deep murmurs and outraged whispers of my fellow peace activists, I
- manage to tell him that I am willing to accept his word that the Yugoslav
- National Army has withdrawn from Bosnia and Croatia. "But what," I add, "is
- your government doing to ensure that Serbs from Yugoslavia are not crossing
- into Bosnia or Croatia to join the irregulars?"
-
-
- "What can it do?" he responds. "When somebody feels that he is a Serb and he
- sees that his fellow Serbs are suffering, there is nothing I can or want to do
- to stop him from helping his brother Serbs."
-
- 2. I share my conviction against cultural sanctions and military intervention
- with a group of Beograd peace activists. Not surpisingly, many of them object
- to economic sanctions and one journalists goes to great lengths to expose what
- he feels is the futility of the military sanctions. I am moved to rethink my
- position based on their assertion that sanctions serve more to strengthen
- Milosevic's hand than to weaken it. The President of the Serbian Republic has
- been using the sanctions to rally jingoist sentiment. "It is us against the
- world," is his message, "and we are right."
-
- "Now I understand how you can feel how the sanctions actually help Milosevic,"
- I confess to the associate director of the Beograd Peace Center Zorista
- Trifunovic afterwards."As long as the sanctions are enforced, he can unite the
- people in a struggle against the Croats, the Bosnians, and the United Nations.
- If we change our minds and they are lifted, he becomes a hero, the man who
- stood up to everyone and won."
-
- The strong feelings about the sanctions do not surprise me. As I leave the
- meeting, however, a Serbian woman runs to stop me. "How can you be against
- military intervention?" she asks with panic in her voice. "How else will we
- stop the killing? Can't you just be for wiping out the artillery positions
- around Sarajevo? Don't you understand if we do not stop the killing in
- Bosnia, the Croats and the Bosnians will kill everyone there. Then they will
- come to Yugoslavia and they will not stop until they have come to Beograd.
- They will exterminate everyone."
-
- 3. I am sitting in the camp cafeteria on the morning of our trip to Vukovar
- discussing the situation in Slavonia with some Romanian and Nigerian friends.
- When I refer to the area around Vukovar as "Occupied Croatia" (a designation
- which is in accord with internationally accepted boundaries), a young Yugoslav
- woman to react angrily. She insists that the land around Vukovar is not
- occupied by anyone. "I wonder," she says, "what you would think if you had
- visited this country before you had visited Croatia. You are not objective."
-
- These incidents only begin to illustrate some of the predictable and
- unpredictable reactions to foreigners' peace witness in Yugoslavia.
- Throughout my visit, I was repeatedly challenged by a curious dichotomy in the
- thinking of nearly everyone I met. On the one hand, I was told again and
- again that, as a foreigner, I could not possibly understand the problems of
- former Yugoslavia. "You come here and tell us what is happening," says Ivana
- Balen of the Beograd Peace Center. "I have been living it every day." The
- next step in nearly every conversation was a long lecture on what we
- foreigners had to do to solve the problems of former Yugoslavia.
-
- It is this curious dual expectations which was the hardest thing to address.
- I and the foreign activists who accompanied me reach a point when we began, as
- a matter of habit, to clearly tell everyone "You have to learn to solve your
- own problems." One lesson that I jotted down in my pocket notebook after my
- meeting with the Beograd activists was this: "When you use military
- intervention in one place, it makes peaceful resolution of conflict harder in
- other places. Parties will make war in the hope that a greater power will see
- the justice of their cause and annihilate the enemy for them."
-
- As in Croatia, the people of Yugoslavia have lost hope in their personal power
- to make peace. Still, everywhere I went, I met people who spoke with sadness
- at the loss of friends now living on the other side. The problem, they
- perceive to a person, is that people throughout the Balkans have forgotten
- this love. How do they can they ever reclaim it, they ask, now that the war
- has killed so many people and destroyed so much of what the living have? No
- one, they grieve, will be able to forget this war. And because they happen to
- be living in Serbia, they imply, they have no hope of explaining that they had
- no part in what is happening in Croatia and in Bosnia.
-
- The worst thing we foreigners can do is to allow the half story of hatred to
- dominate our attentions. If we forget that people mourn the loss of their
- friendships, we will lose a very important key to peace in this part of
- theworld. The machines of war can drive on forever as long as the agents of
- propaganda on both sides can turn the warm faces of friends into the grim mask
- of the Enemy.
-
- So the Serbian journalist saw only part of the picture. He was right to
- perceive that the loss of communication with the outside world served to
- shroud acts of brutality committed by the Serbian government and irregulars.
- He also sensed the need to receive alternatives to the news reports coming out
- of the Serbian government. Reliance on journalism as the source of knowledge
- for our moral choices, however, can be hazardous. Journalists tend to turn to
- communicate more with leaders than with ordinary people. And they disparage
- ideas in favor of the record of history, at least the history that the powers
- of this world see fit to teach.
-
- Ordinary people like the Croats I met in Osijek and the Serbs I met in Vukovar
- have a better understanding of the pain this war is causing and, in this
- understanding, know without knowing the way to create peace. What the Serbian
- journalist did not see as he lectured us from his highly rationale perspective
- was that the silence of the sanctions also prevented alternatives to the
- military path to peace from being heard in his country. The shrill cry of the
- Serbian woman who tried to move me to support military intervention springs
- from this ignorance. And this same silence keeps friends from talking to
- friends. This is important because where there is friendship there can be no
- war.
-
- If there is to be an end to the killing in former Yugoslavia, then friends
- must once more be allowed to talk to friends. And we foreigners must do
- everything we can to help people to talk once again.
- * * *
- GRATITUDES: I would like to especially thank Subotica's mayor Jozsef Kasza,
- his assistant Zoltan Toh, the Peace Camp translators Nora David, Stela Bampa,
- Zsuzsluna Kalmar, Jozsef Vida, and Mariana Petrovics for their help in
- preparing this series of MIRacles.
-
- ABOUT THE TITLE: Brethren theogian Dale Brown once counted the ability to
- believe in miracles as an essential component in the psychic constituency of
- the peace activists. "Mir" is the word for "peace" in Croatian, Serbian, and
- most other Slavic languages. The title, therefore, reflects the
- writer'spersonal belief in persistant peacemaking.
-
- * * *
- This publication is circulated over the Association for Progressive
- Communications Networks, Quaker-L, FidoNet, EcuNet, and UseNet by Joel
- GAzis-Sax. Users may download this article for their own use, but are asked
- to make a donation to help support Joel's work in the Balkans. Checks should
- be made in U.S. dollars and made out to Palo Alto Friends Meeting and
- earmarked "Balkans Peace Fund". The address is:
- Palo Alto Friends Meeting
- 957 Colorado Avenue
- Palo Alto, California 94303
- U.S.A.
-