Jewish World Review /April 13, 1999 / 27 Nissan, 5759
Is U.S. Right in Kosovo?
IT'S EASY TO BE TORN about what to do in
Kosovo. The idea of risking lives in yet
another foreign intervention, especially
one as seemingly insoluble as the Balkan civil
war, doesn't sit well with most Americans.
But neither do the images of the slaughter and expulsion of
innocent men, women and children that have become our daily
news staples.
It's also clear that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's
decision to continue defying NATO by stepping up his efforts to
crush Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority presents us with a
situation that we can't walk — or fly — away from.
Failure to try to defend Kosovars by continuing NATO attacks
would turn the allies into little more than windbags. If expanding
NATO air strikes in Belgrade this week is what it takes, then so
be it. A cave-in would only provoke new repressions by Milosevic
and his Serbian forces not just in Kosovo, but elsewhere in the
multi-ethnic Balkans.
Bloody ethnic wars there didn't begin yesterday. They hark back
eight centuries and are rooted in the same tragic angers, fears and
jealousies that so often give rise to self-defeating ethnic and
religious hatreds.
Nor have the conflicts in Yugoslavia been consistently black and
white. During World War II, it was the Serbs who were
slaughtered. Muslim volunteers fought side by side with the
German SS. In Hitler's puppet state of Croatia, fascist Ustasi
forces helped slaughter tens of thousands of Serbs, not to mention
most of pre-war Yugoslavia's Jews and Romanies.
In these current conflicts, it's easiest to place blame on the more
powerful Serbs — it's they who've orchestrated so much of the
ethnic cleansing. But all sides in this many-sided battle have
perpetrated their own brands of horror. In Kosovo, members of
the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army militia have demanded
independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia and have been
willing to wage bloody war to win it.
Most of the Kosovar leadership says it's ratcheted down
ambitions to autonomy, not secession. Milosevic and his followers
aren't buying it. They believe autonomy will be followed by
independence and the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo's Serb minority.
Their solution: Crush the Kosovar Albanians before they crush us.
The result is the patterns of wanton murder and rape, of burned
homes and farms, of masses forced to flee that have been
Yugoslavia's trademark since strongman Josip Tito died in 1981
and his fragile coat of many peoples began to unravel.
No one may ever be able or want to put Yugoslavia back together
again, and ultimate solutions for the region have yet to come. But
right now, we simply can't turn our backs on human suffering.
Our times have seen too many lives lost because the world
shrugged its shoulders. How many victims of the Holocaust might
have survived had the world taken firm and early action, had
church leaders issued unequivocal condemnations of Nazi killings
or the Allies bombed the rail tracks to Auschwitz. How many
people in Rwanda might have been spared if the world had moved
more quickly. And how much safer would we have been if we had
aided the Iraqis who rose against Saddam in 1991 and begged for
the help that never came.
Dealing with the Yugoslav mess is the primary business of the
European Union. But the U.S., as the world's only superpower,
must take the lead.
History and conscience allow nothing else. That's the message that
allied bombs deliver in Yugoslavia — and that allied troops will
carry if ground intervention becomes
Yes, We Can't Accept Genocide
By Richard Z. Chesnoff
JWR contributor and veteran journalist
Richard Z. Chesnoff is a senior correspondent at US News
And World Report and a columnist at the NY Daily News. His book on the wartime plunder
of the Jews, Pack of Thieves, will be published by Doubleday in this summer by Random House.
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