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Date:         Mon, 31 Aug 1992 03:48:00 EST
From:         CATHYF@EARLHAM.BITNET
Subject:      MIRacles No. 8 (ex-Yugoslavia)

/* 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Yugoslav National Army has completely withdrawn into the borders of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.
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