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Subject: MIRacles No. 7 from Croatia
Date: 13 Aug 92 17:51:00 GMT
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/* Written  1:19 pm  Aug  1, 1992 by gn:jsax in cdp:gen.quaker */
/* ---------- "MIRacles No. 7" ---------- */
Subject: MIRacles No. 7

===================================================================
MIRacles  No. 7
     Joel GAzis-SAx
Zagreb, 1 Kolovoz1992
 Copyright 1992
===================================================================
"I have to tell you what happened to me when I went to Geneva," Nina
Pecnik told me over coffee.  "I went to the QUNO office and there was
nobody there except for one woman.  When I told her that I was here
about the Yugoslavian refugees, she said 'Those people just like to
fight.'"

It is easy, I suppose, to invent the history of despair.  The Friend's
careless words hurt my Croatian colleague's feelings.  Now Nina
confesses that she dreads that "peace will come sometime in the next
century and then the war will only go somewhere else."  I empathize with
her sadness:  we are fellow sufferers.  When my clearness committee met
to discuss my concern with me, one of its members said "Those people
have been fighting for centuries."

Visitors and onlookers to the situation here often do more to undermine
hope than to build it.  Sometimes the remarks come out of personal
experience:  "You Europeans and you Americans are surprised by this
war," Alfred, a Ghanan who I met in a bar a few weeks ago, told me.  "We
Africans have seen this for years.  You get a tribe that is bigger and
stronger than the rest and it just wants to push the others around.  You
think you are different from everyone else, but you're not."

Others draw upon their intellects:  Andre Thomsen, a Danish volunteer
who devotes his annual vacation to helping others, thinks that the
answer lies in history.  "You can't separate the roots from the flower,"
he tells me.  "You have to go back to understand."

What I have found, however, is that if you go back just a few years, you
arrive at a mystery.  A young Dalmatian man, who works at the Center for
Peace, Nonviolence, and Human Rights, told me "I don't understand what
happened.  Not so long ago, Serbs and Croats in my hometown lived
together.  They knew each other and they were friends."  For him, the
war doesn't go back centuries:  it just began yesterday and he is
confused and frightened by it.

Nina suggests that historical and sociological simplifications serve to
distance outsiders from the war.  What we don't want to face is how much
the Croatians are like ourselves.  The longer I stay here, I find
cultural differences to be less important than similarities.  What
shocks me is not how different I am from the Croats:  Nina or anyone
else here could easily be my neighbor back in America.

This realization plus cold historical fact causes me to cast a very
skeptical eye on the "they just like to fight" argument.  The last time
the Croats found themselves in a war was during the forties.  In the
years since the Second World War, my own country has fought military
actions in Korea, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Cambodia,
Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf.  It has contributed
military advisors and weapons to conflicts on every continent.  Its
"national interests" have extended even to Fiji where it supported a
coup against a democratically elected regime.

The military invades even our life as civilians.  Americans consider war
toys to be an essential ingredient of a boy's childhood.  Operation
Desert Storm bubble gum was a big seller last year.  The glorification
of war is a mainstay of our contemporary commercial culture and now the
Croats, ever eager to imitate things American, have started their own
lines of war- inspired products.

The marketplaces are filled with keychains, patches, stickets, shirts,
hats, posters, pins and necklaces bearing military motifs.  Popular
items include toy tanks, guns, handcuffs, and shirts.  In the window of
a hat shop, I saw several patches from various Croatian battalions with
legends in English. One, emblazoned with a skull and crossroads, bore
the motto "Vukovar '92" and below, in English, "Kill 'em all!"
"Operation Desert Storm Bubble Gum" has been matched with "CroArmy"
(once again, the English name is used) and sticker books.  Today, I saw
a boy on the tram wearing a "Camp LeJeune NC" baseball cap.  Iron
Crosses and black shirts are other popular fashion items, inspired by
fascist movements from abroad.

We must, as Americans and as Europeans, take responsibility for the
culture of violence and militarism which is developing here.  If we
characterize this conflict as a historical phenomenon, we affirm the
manipulations of history which Balkan politicians have used to disrupt
the daily life of Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians.  If we do nothing to
promote peaceful dialogue or to relieve the sufferings of refugees
because we tell ourselves that the people here cannot be changed and
therefore not helped, we give substance to a myth:  We create a reality
that kills.


Nina told me about a Muslim woman who said, of the Serbs:  "We can
forgive them for killing us.  But we cannot forgive them for making
killers of us."  I do not think that the Serbs alone are to blame for
making killers of the Croats and the Bosnians.  "Those people who like
to kill" were us before they were the present generation of Croats,
Serbs, and Bosnians.  In their famous letter which affirmed their
pacifism to James II, Friends spoke of their "testimony to the whole
world".  Our best witness on behalf of the peoples of these countries is
to find that of God in ourselves and to seek it, to support it in the
Spirit of Love which is the root of our faith.  We must not and cannot
afford to be part of the culture of killing.  We must confront our
personal racism which separates us from the Balkan peoples. We are all
God's people, Croat, Bosnian, and Serb, American and European,
Christian, Muslim, and Jew alike.


* * *  NEEDS


1.  Continue to lobby against military intervention.  Suggest instead
that we establish an effective framework for dialogue and that more aid
to help with refugees be given to Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia.

2.  If you are a doctor or other health worker, consider spending your
vacation in Croatia.  Your skills are needed to help care for the sick
and wounded in refugee camps.  Call on Friends and others who are
doctors and dentists to consider this option.
3.  Upon my return, I will be available to talk to Friends and others
about the situation here.  I especially want to travel to Washington and
to Chicago.  Your help with air fare, housing, food, etc. is critical.

4.  Circulate MIRacles to Friends Meetings in your area.  Express my
desire to extend my witness in the Balkans.  This will mean helping my
wife as well as myself to establish ourselves (with other foreign
volunteers) in  Zagreb.

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's personal belief in persistant
peacemaking.
* * *
This publication is circulated over the Association for Progressive
Communications Networks, Quaker-L, EcuNet, Cerbreus, FidoNet, 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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