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Date:         Tue, 5 Jan 1993 21:37:49 EST
From:         Habib Benhamza <benhamza@STUDENT.MSU.EDU>
Subject:      Re: MIRacles No. 14 (Balkans)
              "CATHYF%EARLHAM.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU" at Jan 5, 93 11:16 am

In a word, I believe MIRacles No. 14 is only a pure propaganda that would
ultimately benefit the criminals, the Serbs.  The only solution in the
balkans is a U.S. led military intervention along with militarily
empowering the Bosnians to defend themselves.
Ben hamza
---------------------------Pure Propaganda Down under----------
>
> =================================================================
> MIRacles No. 14                                    Joel GAzis-SAx
> 22 Prosinac 1992, Palo Alto California                        QEP
> =================================================================
> Copyright 1992 by Joel GAzis-SAx
>
> The following talk was delivered by me at the Mennonite Church in
> Seattle on 5 December 1992.  The audience, assembled by Seattle
> area Fellowship of Reconciliation staff, included members of the
> Croatian, Muslim, and Serbian communities.
>
>
> Dear Friends:  Tonight, I am going to talk finding the hope in the
> despair.  You know the despair.  Every one of you whether Serb or
> Croat or Muslim feels it.  You all have answers, you feel hate.  I
> have many friends where you have family back in Croatia and
> Serbia.  I know their complex, painful, and difficult feelings.  I
> have walked in neighborhoods shattered by bombs and by hatred and
> fear.  I have SEEN Vukovar and I have talked to some of those who
> try to live in its ruins.  I know the stories which have not been
> told about this war, stories of friends and families who saw the
> twin walls of guns and hatred come between them and the people
> they loved.  I share their frustration with this war that never
> ends, this beast which consumes their cities, their lives, their
> dignity.
>
> War has changed.  The Gulf War showed us the devastating effect
> conventional weapons had on cities.  I cannot help but reflect on
> the irony of UN inspectors in Iraq scouring the country for
> nuclear weapons while all around them was the terrible evidence of
> the real problem:  the debris left by conventional, high-explosive
> weapons.
>
> The reasoning of War allowed for this.  Less than six months
> after the Gulf War ended, the senior officers of the Jugoslav
> National Army or JNA thought they had a just cause for war.  When
> Slovenia, then Croatia seceded, they invoked the memory of the
> American Civil War.  That terrible struggle, which turned brother
> against brother, friend against friend, bears comparison to this
> struggle.  I have often spoken to young people, especially, who
> miss their friends on the other side.  Even more compelling is
> the thought that, in the reasoning of War, the destruction of
> Vukovar resembles nothing so much as it resembles the burning of
> Atlanta and Sherman's March to the Sea.  American myths about the
> shameless virtue of the Union Cause led, I think, to Vukovar, to
> Dubrovnik, to Brod, and to Sarajevo . . . .
>
> Not everyone in the Union supported the killing.  Friends,
> Brethren, and Mennonites -- all supporters of the abolition of
> slavery -- refused to take up arms, refused to pay war taxes,
> refused to make goods for the destruction of human life.  War,
> they felt, was never justified, even in a good cause.  Today,
> in Serbia, Catholics and Orthodox Christians -- Serbian Orthodox
> Christians -- refuse mobilization and protest the policy of
> "ethnic cleansing" which extremists in their government support.
> Up to half a million Serbs at a single time have shown up to anti-
> war demonstrations in Beograd.  In Pancevo, Serbs cut out yellow
> stars and pinned them to their breasts to protest extremist attacks
> on their Croat neighbors.  "If the Croats go," they said, "we will
> go with them."  The Hungarian Yugoslav and Serbian residents of
> Oremhegyes declared their "spiritual" independence from the
> policies of New Yugoslavia last May.  For three days, ninety-one
> Serbian Republic tanks surrounded them.  The people of Oremhegyes
> faced the tanks with the words:  "We will not kill Bosnians.  We
> will not kill Croats.  And we will not kill you."  There was no
> exchange of fire, no killing.  The Army left.  These brave
> villagers include some of the 100,000 young men in Vojvodina,
> alone, who have refused to take part in the killing of Croats and
> Bosnians.
>
> The existence of a widespread and persistent peace movement in
> Serbia affirms my basic premise:  that it is the reasoning of war,
> not ethnic tensions, which fuels the killing.  Thomas Merton, the
> great Trappist anti-militarist, pointed out that madmen seldom get
> the chance to start wars.  We sane men and women, good people, go
> to war because we think we have good reasons to do so.  There were
> good reasons for attacking Pearl Harbor, for invading Poland and
> France, for destroying Coventry, for turning Dresden and Tokyo
> into firestorms, for causing Hiroshima and Nagasaki to disappear
> in a flash of light.  Sane men made the decisions.  Vukovar and
> the Serbian campaign in Slavonia may have been as military experts
> claim, a botched job, but I say to you that the mythic memory of
> the American Civil War provided a set of reasons which the JNA and
> Serbian irregular leadership used to justify the leveling of these
> towns.  I ask you all, Serb, Croat, and Bosnian Muslim, what
> sane reasons are you claiming to keep the insanity going on and
> on?  As Maria Chapman wrote:  "We may draw good out of evil; we
> must not do evil, that good may come."
>
> In Osijek, Croatia, a conflict has developed between the civil and
> military authorities over what to do about the Serbs.  One of the
> first Quakers, George Fox, observed that the law exists to punish
> wrongdoers, not to persecute those  who do well.  Civil
> authorities in Osijek agree that Serbs who take up weapons to
> shoot their Croat neighbors should be contained.  Military
> authorities and militarist extremists, on the other hand, identify
> all Serbs as potential enemies.  There have been evictions,
> violent attacks on Serbian civilians, and house demolitions in
> Osijek -- all well documented by human rights groups.  The former
> mayor of Osijek said again and again that the rule of law -- like
> all city functions -- applies in war as well as in peace.  He is
> arguing for nothing less than the standard of treatment that the
> U.S. Supreme Court and Congress agreed was due all citizens in
> wartime.  Americans have finally acknowledge that no matter
> what the government in Tokyo was doing in the Pacific, our
> government here had no right or business persecuting, in any way,
> those citizens of Japanese ancestry who were living lawfully.  I
> think it is time that other nations of the world stop using
> reasons which led to American injustices in the Civil War, in the
> Gulf War, in Vietnam, in Panama, and in the Second World War, to
> support injustices in these wars.
>
> I have found that many vulgar stereotypes have arisen, especially
> in communities of the Diaspora, about each other.  The Pakistani
> student of engineering at Stanford who leads the "Students for
> Bosnia-Hercegovinia" told me, after I described what I had seen of
> the Serbian anti-war movement "Regardless, there is something
> about the way the Serbs think, the way that they have always
> thought, which makes them keep doing things like this.  They'll
> never change."  He has never set foot in former Yugoslavia nor
> known any Serbs.  Croats are expected to bear the brand of
> "Utashi" on their foreheads.  I understand this hardship, too.
> Mere nationality should never be a reason for shame.  Nor should
> religion.  Long before this struggle began, many people equated
> "Muslim" with "fanatic".  A Serb I know in the San Francisco area
> told me that he feared "Islamic Serbs".  I think we all have to
> watch our prejudices.
>
> Edward Said criticizes Orientalism, which he sees as those
> attitudes of Western scholars and other observers that tend to
> cast people and cultures from "the East" as inferior to their
> Western counterparts.  "Orientalism's failure," he writes, was "a
> human as much as an intellectual one; for in having to take up a
> position of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it
> considered alien to its own, Orientalism failed to identify with
> human experience, failed also to see it as human experience".
> Said, I remind you all, insists that the proper -- the
> compassionate -- response to Orientalism can never be
> Occidentalism.  I see both Orientalist and Occidentalist
> mythologies and ideologies at work in former Yugoslavia and I
> implore you all not to deny one another's humanity in this room or
> the humanity of those you cannot see.  Our Orientalist and
> Occidentalist hatred, I think, lead us to forget the primary
> solution for the despair in ex-Yugoslavia.  What I believe
> everyone in this room wants is an end to the killing.
>
> We've all been short-sighted.  I have mentioned or addressed some
> of the myths that your communities use to support the hatred.  Let
> me discuss some of mine.  Since the publication of "All's Quiet on
> the Western Front", pacifists have been concerned about the
> condition of soldiers on the battlefield.  I found that both
> Croatian and Serbian soldiers have already suffered from post war
> traumatic stress disorders. These men go crazy and kill whoever is
> there.  The guilt of being a soldier can be tremendous, especially
> when you are called to attack women and children.  The maimed and
> the injured can be seen on the streets of Zagreb and Beograd.
> We must never forget that while soldiers are the victims in
> war, they are also victimizers.  Last July, the men of the
> International C.O. conference in Lausanne who wrote a statement
> against the war in ex-Yugoslavia forgot to mention in their litany
> of stands on behalf of C.O.s, soldiers, and other men affected by
> the war, the suffering of women and children.  "What about rape?"
> a woman rightly asked.
>
> I am disturbed that we pacifists proved to be susceptible to
> racism of the worst sort when we failed to see that conventional
> weapons were being used to kill civilians until a white war broke
> out in former Yugoslavia.  Civilians have been dying in greater
> numbers in Somalia and Sri Lanka:  why did we not see them until
> Boutros-Shali called our attention to them?  We ignored the
> importance of the weapons themselves as we put most of our
> energies into nuclear, chemical, and biological disarmament.
> Until the recent war for oil in the Gulf, we pacifists never
> seemed to acknowledge that the development, manufacture, and
> deployment of conventional weapons wasn't just setting the stage
> for slaughter -- these guns and bombs and mortars were killing
> people then.  And they are killing people now.
>
> I want to tell you about a fear that a Croat woman shared with me.
> This war, she said, will never end.  Of course, she knew that one
> day it would stop in her country, but, she told me, after that it
> would just go somewhere else.  Other people will die like they are
> dying in Bosnia.  Maybe it will be us.
>
> I think that the problem with military intervention is that when
> you intervene in one place, it creates an expectation.  People
> will refuse to attempt to resolve conflict except with violence in
> the hope that some greater power will see the justice of their
> cause and intervene.  This is what is happening in Bosnia.  Also,
> the Serbian insurgents in that country, hearing the calls for
> intervention against them, fight to seize all the land they can in
> preparation for the coming of the Allies.  The threat of
> intervention, like the fall of bombs, only strengthens their
> resolve to fight.
>
> Many of you think that the solution is simply tighter sanctions.
> If, you argue, we just keep the guns out, the war will disappear
> overnight.  I have a surprise for you:  according to a study by
> the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, arms
> sanctions have never stopped a war cold.  But this study goes on
> to say, the absence of sanctions or one-sided sanctions ensures
> that wars last longer and kill more people.  Do not forget that
> the biggest supplier of the Muhenjadein in Afghanistan was the
> Soviet Army!  The Viet Cong depended on the United States.  Do not
> forget that our shared objective is to end the killing.
>
> Pacifists must do more to stop the killing.  We can lend our
> support to no greater cause in the awful light of the atrocities
> in Bosnia, Somalia, Guatemala, and all the other places where war
> lives than to the cause of restricting, then abolishing the
> development, manufacture, and trade in arms.  SANE Freeze has
> adopted this as a policy objective.  Friends in Europe campaign
> against it, and so should you.
>
> I see wars on the horizon, not just in Yugoslavia and Somalia, but
> in many other places.  I believe that the promise of intervention
> has failed to stop the killing, only created the fear that is
> needed to sustain the "ethnic cleansing".  Military intervention
> will not mean the end of killing in former Yugoslavia, only the
> involvement of more parties and ultimately, more killing.  There
> is no solution, short of genocide, that will lead to peace without
> recognizing the concerns of all parties.  I cannot support any
> agreement that leaves out the Serbs or the Croats or the Muslims
> of Bosnia.
>
> Most of us outsiders must confront our racism.  Too often, I have
> heard us express indifference about the people of Croatia, of
> Bosnia, of Serbia.  We say things like "Those people just like to
> fight each other."  Since 1945, the United States has sent troops
> to Korea, Lebanon, Cuba, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Laos,
> Cambodia, Iran, Lebanon (again!), Grenada, Panama, and Iraq.
> Until last year, the people of former Yugoslavia had only taken
> part in the Greek Civil War.  WHO likes to fight?
>
> The people of Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia have more experience
> being neighbors than enemies.  Let us not forget this.  The unseen
> struggle of the people of former Yugoslavia is between passivity
> and violence.  It is better to be violent than to do nothing.
> One lesson that the experience of the Serbs of Krajina has shown
> us is that the use of violence for resolving conflict
> can turn the world against you, even when there may be seeds of
> justice in your cause!
>
> One God loves us all and whether we are Catholic or Orthodox or
> Muslim, all our love, all our devotions are directed to the same
> God.  We should not forget that, even in this dark hour, and we
> should also not forget that God still loves us all.
>
> In his great book, The Bridge on The Drina, the Serbian Catholic
> author Ivo Andric writes of a Bosnian Muslim who sees a bridge,
> the center of his community, destroyed in one of this century's
> earlier wars:
>
> "So be it, thought the hodja.  If they destroy here, then
> somewhere else someone else is building.  Surely there are still
> peaceful countries and men of good sense who know of God's love?
> If God had abandoned this unlucky town on the Drina, he had surely
> not abandoned the whole world that was beneath the skies?  They
> would not do this for ever.  But who knows? . . . Who knows?
> Perhaps this impure infidel faith that puts everything in order,
> cleans everything up, repairs and embellishes everything only in
> order suddenly and violently to demolish and destroy, might spread
> through the whole world; it might make of all God's world an empty
> field for its senseless building and criminal destruction, a
> pasturage for its insatiable hunger and incomprehensible demands?
> Anything might happen.  But one thing could not happen; it could
> not be that great and wise men of exalted soul who would raise
> lasting buildings for the love of God, so that the world should be
> more beautiful and man live in it better and more easily, should
> everywhere and for all time vanish from this earth.  Should they
> too vanish, it would mean that the love of God was extinguished
> and had disappeared from the world.  That could not be."
>
> The best resistance is to persist in being builders.  In Osijek, I
> witnessed the best examples of resistance to the ultimate
> destruction of war -- the destruction of the community.  City
> officials refused to abandon their duties, refused to surrender
> city services, refused to give in to the relentless shelling by
> the Serbs and the attempts, by both sides, to divide their city,
> Serb against Croat.  There was no passive resistance in Osijek:
> there was singular determination to retain humanity.  Every
> pothole was filled.  Schools continued to teach.  The garbage was
> picked up.  The human spirit survived.
>
> Don't give up!  As Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian Americans, your
> friends and family look to you.  I leave you with an invitation to
> struggle, to the struggle for dignity.  For only if every human
> life enjoys the dignity that only freedom from needless death
> ensures, there is no peace.  The pacifist, like the soldier, must
> be willing to die.  I am only asking you to be willing to struggle
> to listen and understand, to help those you love live in peace
> with their neighbors again.  Dare to find God, for in that God's
> love, we can find the hope to lead us out of the despair.
>
>
> =================================================================
>
> ACTIONS:  The recent (apparently manipulated) election in Serbia
> indicates that some tense times are ahead for Beograd peace
> activists.  E-mail connections to the Center for Anti-War Action
> are available, but please do not flood their mailbox with
> questions.  The Center posts news in the conference yugo.antiwar
> and soc.culture.yugoslavia.  As news of further action comes, I
> will circulate it.  Demonstrations against the election may be in
> order.
>
> =================================================================
> NEEDS
> 1.  The Osijek Peace Center now has an American fiscal sponsor.
> You may send your checks made out to "PYM East-West Committee"
> (memo:  Osijek Project) to Joel GAzis-SAx, 2727 Midtown Court No.
> 37, Palo Alto, California.
>
> 2.  Contributions for supporting my work (including my return to
> former Yugoslavia in the spring) can be sent to the address below.
> =================================================================
> THOUGHTS ABOUT ACTIONS
> American activists concerned about the situation in former
> Yugoslavia should be certain that their work not only addresses
> military intervention and arms sales, but offers solutions which
> stop the killing of innocent civilians.  Our efforts should speak
> to the problem of militarism, not preventing Americans from dying
> in a foreign war.
> =================================================================
>
> GRATITUDES:  Special thanks to Patty Lyman for her excellent work
> in arranging my Seattle schedule and to everyone else who has
> arranged my talks.
> ==================================================================
> OFFERINGS:  I am available to speak about the conflict and the
> prospects for peace.  Send e-mail to jsax!igc.apc.org or call 415-
> 321-3449
> =================================================================
> ABOUT THE TITLE
>
> Brethren theologian Dale Brown once counted the belief in miracles
> as an essential component in the psychic constituency of the peace
> activist.  "Mir" is the word for "peace" in Croatian, Serbian, and
> most other Slavic languages.  The title, therefore, reflects the
> author's belief in the power of persistent peacemaking.
>
> =================================================================
>
> This publication is circulated over the Alliance for Progressive
> Communications Network, UseNet, EcuNet, Quaker-L, QuakerNet, and
> other networks  by Joel GAzis-SAx.  Users are free to download
> MIRacles for their personal use, but are asked to make a donation
> to support the costs of publication.  Checks or money orders made
> out in U.S. dollars to Palo Alto Friends Meeting and earmarked
> "Peace in the Balkans Fund" may be sent to:
>
>      Palo Alto Friends Meeting
>      957 Colorado Avenue
>      Palo Alto, California     94303
>      U.S.A.
>
> European Friends may send their donations to:
>
>      FWCC
>      1 Rue B. Haal
>      L-1711  LUXEMBOURG
>
> or via the FWCC postal account -> 32356-55/F. Perna/Luxembourg <-
> mentioning "Peace in the Balkans".
>
> These reports may be recirculated without editorial correction or
> comment via e-mail or photocopied for community use at a charge
> not to exceed the price of copying.
>
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