From: Lynn Gazis-Sax <lgsax@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia
Date: 17 Aug 92 18:38 PDT
Subject: MIRacles No. 8
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1475300360:000:10984
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!lgsax    Aug 17 18:38:00 1992


From: Lynn Gazis-Sax <lgsax>
Subject: MIRacles No. 8

/* 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 angrilly.  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 the 
world.   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's 
personal 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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