Consider the following quote:
"Genocide is
a natural phenomenon, in harmony with the societal and mythologically divine
nature. Genocide is not only permitted, it is recommended, even commanded
by the word of the Almighty, whenever it is useful for the survival or
the restoration of the kingdom of the chosen nation, or for the preservation
or spreading of its one and only correct faith."
Hitler? Pol Pot? Some local crackpot white
supremacist? No, the author of this sentiment is Franjo
Tudjman and the quote is from his book Wastelands of Historical Reality.
He is the same Franjo Tudjman that the American media has embraced as a
democratically elected president of the "freedom loving" state
of Croatia.
Let us consider another quote from another
source:
"There can be
no peace or co-existence between Islamic faith and non-Islamic faith and
institutions...The Islamic movement must and can take power as soon as
it is morally and numerically strong enough, not only to destroy the non-Islamic
power, but to build up a new Islamic one..."
Ayatollah Khomeini? Some Hezbollah terrorist?
Colonel Khadaffi? No, the author is Alija Izetbegovic and the quote is
from his work Islamic Declaration, the same Alija
Izetbegovic who is seen by the American media as a very model of a
liberal democrat presiding over the liberal democracy of Muslim Bosnia.
And so we have these
two men, the first a racist and a crypto-Fascist, the second a theocratic
Islamic fundamentalist, both representatives of the most extreme form of
narrow ethnic nationalism, being embraced by the western media as victims
and martyrs for the cause of freedom. Both Franjo Tudjman and his
independent state of Croatia and Alija Izetbegovic and his Muslim Bosnia
are clients of the huge Ruder-Finn public
relations firm with decades of experience in representing foreign governments
in Washington. Perhaps therein lies the explanation of their popularity.
The civil war in what used to be called Yugoslavia is being fought on two
fronts with two distinct kinds of casualties. While
men, women and children of all the factions die in Yugoslavia as a result
of the war itself, the truth about the war, and the kind of war it is,
dies daily in The New York Times and other media outlets around the country.
Hannah Arendt, an
expert on totalitarian regimes and totalitarian mindsets, warned us a long
time ago that a time could come when not only would philosophical truths
be considered irrelevant but factual truths as well: Names and dates,
who did what to whom,
who was the victim and who the aggressor, would cease
to matter as facts and be replaced by opinions.
We seem to have arrived at such a time and
to have done so not in some totalitarian regime, but in a free country
with a free press. Events in the world are no longer judged by hard evidence
or impartiality. Even the normal journalistic standards of trying, merely
trying, to get the whole story have been discarded as too cumbersome, too
demanding, too complex for their readers. What has replaced the tradition
of truth seeking, both philosophical and factual, is a kind of soap opera
over-simplification of good guys and bad guys, of victims and villains, of
worthy victims, and
unworthy victims.
In this new way of doing things, actual
events count for nothing and have no intrinsic value in determining who
is right and who is wrong in a given conflict. It's now become a question
of who seems to be right, who, in our opinion, moves us to have sympathy
for them. Those sympathies are shaped by the media which in turn is shaped
by professionals from public relations firms acting on behalf of their
clients so that reality becomes twice removed before it reaches us. "Selective
victimology", as
Nikolas A. Stavrou points out in
his essay The Balkan
Quagmire and the West's Response, "is a growinq media business... The
public relations and lobbying accounts of aggrieved ethnic clients have
become lucrative prospects in Washington." (Mediterranean Ouarterly,
Winter 1993).
The War in the Gulf in this respect and
in many others has become the model of media manipulation and of the media
being manipulated itself for the international conflicts which followed.
Kuwait spent $12 million in a lobbying campaign
to help drum up American support for Desert Storm.
In a well-documented and memorable incident,
the public relations giant Hill and Knowlton presented a fifteen-year old
girl whose name was given only as Nariyah and had her testify before a
congressional committee that she had seen Iraqi soldiers tearing Kuwait
babies from hospital incubators. It was later revealed that this girl was
the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador and that her story was a total fabrication.
But in a public relations game "later" is irrevelant. What counts
is the impact a lie can produce now on the American public and their sympathies,
not what the actual truth is revealed to be later. It's "now"
that shapes public opinion and the girl's false testimony, engineered by
her P.R. firm, mobilized overwhelming public support for U.S. military
action in the Gulf. The truth when it was revealed on 60 Minutes had no
effect on the situation.
We should keep this in mind when we read
stories about Serbian atrocities and only Serbian atrocities in the civil
war in former Yugoslavia.
Consider a brief sample of what the huge
P.R. firm Ruder-Finn had managed to do for its clients the Muslim Bosnians
between June and December in 1992. The list comes from an
article in The Atlanta Journal/The Atlanta Constitution and is dated February
28, 1993. The headline of the story reads: "Secret Weapon: Public
Relations Firms in U.S. Selling Serbs As Foes."
In that six-month period, Ruder-Finn "set
up more than 30 interviews with major U.S. news organizations and distributed
13 news releases, 37 'fax updates', 17 official letters and 8 official
statements. It arranged meetings between Bosnian officials and vice presidential
candidate Al Gore, acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, and
10 influential senators, including Majority Leader George Mitchell and
Minority Leader Robert Dole. It made 48 phone calls to the members of the
House, 20 calls to members of the Senate and more than 80 calls to newspaper
columnists, television anchors and other journalists." It is impossible
for the Serbian people and the Serbian nation to fight back in this loathsome
P.R. war which has been waged against it for the simple reason that having
been branded as an international pariah by the U.S. media and having
sanctions imposed
upon it by the U.S. government, no powerful P.R. firm is willinq
to take them on as a client. It wouldn't be good for the business image
of these firms to do so and the business
of these firms is, after all, image and not facts or truth
of any kind. Should the actual truth be revealed later, after the image
of a whole people has been smeared, after the damage has been done, that's
fine. Retractions, as we all have come to realize, are meaningless these
days. Character assassinations of individuals as well as nations, once
achieved, can take decades and lifetimes to reverse.
In a classic example
of an error in logic which Aristotle called the "fallacy of the consequent",
Serbia and Serbians are perceived as villains because the press says they
do villainous things and the press says they do villainous things because
Serbia and the Serbians are villainous people.
The circularity of
this kind of reasoning looks like a joke until we consider that many minorities
in this country are image victims of just such "fallacy of the consequent".
The blacks, the homosexuals, the native Americans, women, are treated as
inferior because they are inferior. It goes around and around without need
for supporting evidence of any kind because this kind of mythology has
become self-evident.
Let us now examine some of the mythology
and images that have come out of the civil war in former Yugoslavia.
The most enduring and ongoing image is that
Croatians and Bosnia Muslims are victims of Serbian aggression and that
their respective governments represent western style democracies.
Ethnic
cleansing, the mythology states, is a Serbian invention and an exclusive
instrument of the Serbian government.
This
mythology persists despite the factual evidence that
the Serbian minority in Croatia were themselves the original victims of
ethnic cleansing.
Simon Wiesenthal notes
in the Austrian Journal News, March 1993: "We must never forget that
the first refugees, even before the outbreak of the war, were the 40,000
Serbs who escaped from Croatia when President Tudjman changed the Constitution
and converted Serbs into a national minority without rights."
The American mass media was not interested
in this story. It did not exist as a story when the
Croatian Ustashe
were terrorizing Serbians, killing them, burning their homes, raping their women
as an inducement to making them leave so that Croatia could become an ethnically
pure state. No, the story, as far as the American media was concerned,
only came into being when Serbians from Serbia came to the rescue of Serbians
still in Croatia. But since nobody was really interested in victims of
Croatian atrocities, coming to the aid of these people was seen as an example
of Serbian aggression and Serbian nationalism.
In November 1991, when America was bombarded
with newspaper and television reports about
the shelling of Dubrovnik
by the Yugoslavian National Army, the people in twenty-seven Serbian villages
in Croatia were given forty-eight
hours evacuation notices, after which eighteen villages were burned
to the ground. (San Francisco Examiner, August 14, 1992). In the end, the
much publicized destruction of the old city of Dubrovnik
never happened.
Damage was negligible to the ancient port city and yet the image persists
in the minds of many of a city in ruins. Not in their minds, because it
was not widely reported by our media, are the images of the homeless refugees
from those twenty-seven villages in Croatia and the images of eighteen
villages burned to the ground.
Despite this, despite
the fascist trappings
of his regime, and the change in the constitution which made citizenship
subject to ethnic purity, despite his monstrous views on genocide
mentioned earlier,
Franjo Tudjman
is perceived as "democrat" and "statesman"
and Croatians as "freedom-loving people". The question "Freedom
for whom?" is never asked. As Nikolas Stavrou points out in the Mediterranean
Quarterly, Winter 1993, "It was only in late 1991, under the double
pressure of the E.C. and the CSCE process, that Croatia came around to
the legal definition of the rights of minorities living within its confines.
But it was too late and irrelevant civil war was already in process and
force had replaced reason. In sum, self-determination was defined by Croat
leaders as the right to mono-ethnicism."
Lest we overlook the obvious, "mono-ethnicism"
is just a scholarly word for racial purity along the lines of Nazi Germany,
the original sponsors of the
Independent State of Croatia.
John R. MacArthur, in his book Second Front,
states that "In modern wars exaggerated or manufactured enemy atrocities
played an important part in the cause of boosting war fever at home."
Nowhere has this become more true than in the fighting which still goes
on in Bosnia.
"Thus far,"
Mr. Stavrou states, "condemnation is selective. Myths parade as reality
and the tragedy goes on. We do not know whether all television and newspaper
accounts correspond to reality, are a reasonably approximation of it, or
are substantially the product of an effective public relations campaign.
Congressional sources have indicated to me that in eight months of warfare
in Bosnia, approximately $36 million have been spent to shape American
public opinion."
One of the enduring myths created by the
American media is that the Muslim Bosnians are essentially defenseless
people, fighting against the Serbians, armed to their teeth with almost
nothing but hunting rifles and antiquated weapons.
In the paper written by the Task Force on
Terrorism & Unconventional Warfare for the House Republican Research
Committee on September 1, 1992 and entitled
"Iran's
European Springboard?" we get a different impression.
I quote from the paper:
"Indeed, since the early summer, Muslim
troops have been reinforced by 'volunteers' from the ranks of several Islamic
organizations. They arrived in Bosnia-Herzegovina in answer to Tehran's
call to fight the Jihad and eager to commit martyrdom in the name of Islam.
They included highly trained and combat-proven volunteers from Iran, Afghanistan,
Lebanon (Hezbollah) and several other Arab countries. Most of the Arab
volunteers had previously fought in the ranks of Palestinian terrorist
organizations in Lebanon and the resistance in Afghanistan, and in fact
General Amin Pohara of the Bosnian Army confirmed that some 180 Mujahedeen
had arrived from the Middle East by mid-August. (Iranian sources insist
that their number is more than one thousand.)"
"Additionally, the flow of arms to
the Muslim forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina also increased markedly during
August as the Iranians flew into Zagreb strategically important weapon
systems as part of their emergency 'humanitarian' assistance program. At
the outset, Tehran began supplying the Muslim forces with high-quality
weapons that might offset the tactical superiority of the Serbian forces.
The weapons included 'several' Stinger SAMs provided by the Afghan Mujahedeen
to Tehran for further distribution to 'brothers' in need."
"Since then, massive quantities of
weapons needed to create a larger army capable of waging mid-intensity
wars have been shipped from Iran, Turkey and Pakistan. For example, a 32-truck
weapons convoy arrived in Konjic in southwestern Bosnia in early August
on its way to Sarajevo, and a 60-truck weapons convoy arrived there in
late August."
A pretext was needed for such military involvement
on the part of Iran and other Islamic countries. The need for this pretext
and the execution of it goes to the heart of some of the most enduring
images of the war in Bosnia, images of atrocities and war crimes exclusively
associated with Bosnian Serbia. I quote again from the above-mentioned
paper:
"...Izetbegovic became convinced that
it was necessary to undertake drastic measures of a kind that had long
been advocated by Tehran. The Iranians had argued that before any escalation
in the fighting could take place, it was imperative to either gain the
sympathies of the West or, at the least, to ensure that there existed a
legitimate excuse that would enable the presentation of any action undertaken
by the Muslim forces as justifying revenge for Serbian atrocities."
"To that end, beginning in May 1992,
a special group of Bosnian Muslim forces, many of whom had served with
Islamic terrorist organizations, began committing a series of atrocities,
including 'some of the worst recent killings,' against Muslim civilians
in Sarajevo was a propaganda ploy to win world sympathy and military intevention."
For example, around June 20, Serbian troops, besieging Sarajevo, engaged
a detachment of Muslim special forces dressed in Serbian uniforms who were
on their way to attack the Muslim sector from within the Serbian lines.
Such an attack, if successful, would have been attributed to the Serbs.
As it was, some of these Muslim troops were killed in the brief encounter
and a few were captured."
This action was not successful, but the
overall Muslim strategy of creating
atrocities themselves and having the Serbians take the blame was, and
still is.
The Independent of London, dated August
22, 1992 carries the following headline:
Muslims "slaughter their
own people."
I quote:
"United Nations officials and senior
Western military officers believe some of the worst recent killings in
Sarajevo, including the massacre of at least sixteen people in
a bread queue,
were the work of the city's mainly Muslim defenders - not Serb besiegers
- as a propaganda ploy to win world sympathy and trigger military intervention."
The newspaper, just like the Task Force
paper mentioned earlier, goes on to mention other examples of atrocities
staged by Muslims and blamed on the Serbs as a way of capturing the sympathies
of the west and demonizing the Serbians. These examples include the famous
August 4 explosion at the cemetery while two orphans were being buried.
This image was so powerful that, despite U.N. reports of its actual Muslim
perpetrators, Peter Jennings used it again against Serbians in his hour-long
look at what was called The Land of the Demons. The same U.N. report put
the blame on the killing of the U.S. T.V. producer David Kaplan on the
Muslims, but facts notwithstanding images endure. Setting the record straight
is possible on paper, but next to impossible in the minds of the public.
The televised carnage of those poor people killed
while waiting in
the bread line
is an image that cannot be retracted and
once the Serbians have been blamed for it the image lingers of Serbians
as monsters, not Muslims. Facts, when they do appear, lack the power to
erase or undo the harm created by ten seconds of television. It's "now"
that shapes public opinion. Truths revealed later which discredit that
"now" lack a counterimage strong enough to undo the harm which
has been done.
The
mythology and the demonization of the Serbians goes on.
In
this strange Civil War there seem to be no Serbian casualties, no atrocities
committed against them, no vivid T.V. images of their people suffering
and grieving over their dead.
It's Serbians that rape, and not just rape,
but without any evidence to support the claims rape
"systematically", rape as a matter of policy. Without any
factual evidence to support the accusations, there are stories of Serbian
rape camps, without any hard figures to justify their numbers the press
keeps on churning out figures of 20,000 and more Muslim women raped by
Serbians.
This is not meant to suggest that rapes have not occurred,
nor that they will not occur again, but the frivolous
and inexcusably inexact manner in which figures are tossed about can only
serve to exacerbate this already bloody conflict. There are no reports of
Serbian women being raped,
no images of their anguish on our T.V. screens
and yet the Boston-based organization Physicians for Human Rights states
otherwise. In an interview with U.P.I., dated March 13, 1993, the leader
of this group, Dr. Shana Swiss says:
"Certain Muslim women and women in
Croatia have been raped by Serbian forces. Also, Serbian women have been
raped by Croatian and Muslim military as well."
In their report, The Physicians for Human Rights found
no evidence of rape camps
and could not state which side in
the Bosnian civil war was most guilty of rape. They did acknowledge, however,
that "some governmental and non-governmental
organizations in the former Yugoslavia were exploiting the issue of rape
for their own political aims". (Pg. 72 of their report).
There are no reports that the International
Red Cross or the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees have come across a
single Serbian "rape camp" in Bosnia-Herzegovina. And yet they
exist in the minds of the American public, along with the other myths and
manufactured images of this war.
In an atmosphere where it is just as important
to capture the sympathies of the American public by whatever means as it
is to capture real estate on the ground, the civilians have become the
victims of both sides. The April 15 shelling of
Srebrenica is a case in point. The Muslim fighters of that city refused
to allow U.N. forces to evacuate the women and children from Srebrenica
because they wanted to use them as a shield against Serbian forces. The
Muslims have done this throughout the war as a way of not only protecting
their fighters but as a way of using the civilian dead as further proof
of Serbian atrocities. This should not come as a surprise, coming
as it does from the same people who have
murdered their own men,
women and children
in documented cases mentioned earlier as a way of winning
the P.R. battle abroad. Although nobody knows for sure who actually broke
the ceasefire in Srebrenica, the blame fell on the Serbians and when over
fifty men, women and children were killed, the entire blame for their deaths
once again fell on the Serbian forces. There was no mention in the story
in the New York Times that these people were held there by their own forces
and used once again in their on-going P.R. struggle to portray themselves
as innocent victims and Serbians as war criminals. Yes, the Serbian shells
killed them, but who made sure they were there to die when the shells fell?
Surely there is enough blame here to condemn both sides.
But there no longer seems to exist even so much as an attempt to report
on the complexity of this war. The
New York Times, abandoning all pretense of impartiality, now uses only
the Muslim Bosnian figures without bothering to give the source of their
information. The Serbians in Bosnia
have claimed ownership of 64% of the land before the civil war ever started
and they were backed to this claim by even The New York Times as late as
April 10, 1992. However, since then, the official phrase in the Times,
repeated over and over again, is that the Serbians "have seized over
70% of Bosnia", thus creating the impression that the Serbians, instead
of having lived
in Bosnia for centuries, rode into this region like some nomadic hordes
from without and seized 70% of the land. It is a shameful distortion which
has turned this newspaper, as far as this civil war is concerned, into
little more than a P.R. agency in charge of
demonizing a whole people.
Their motto now seems to have become "All
the news which fits the spin we want to print".
Leslie Gelb and Anthony Lewis, their columnists
and the two talking warheads on this conflict, have repeatedly called for
the use of force against Serbians and the bombing of Serbia itself. Their
editorials have castigated our government and the West in general for doing
nothing to punish the Serbs.
The facts suggest that far from doing nothing, the West, America included,
has done far too much as it is. A large part of
the blame for the start of
the civil war in former Yugoslavia lies squarely in the West.
When Cyrus Vance warned the world against
giving diplomatic recognition to Croatia for fear that if it were granted
the civil war between Croats and the Serbs would not only spread to Bosnia,
but become a far bloodier war of nightmarish consequences, the world listened
but only for a while. The countries of the European Community were against
recognition for precisely the reasons Vance stated. And yet when Germany
unilaterally broke with its E.C. members, despite the provisions in the
E.C. charter against unilateral action of this kind, and recognized its
former
Nazi puppet state of Croatia,
everybody blinked. Germany
applied economic pressure on its European neighbors until they reversed
themselves completely and gave diplomatic recognition to Croatia. The U.S.
government, which had been firmly against such recognition, followed with
its own about-face. The recognition of Croatia caused Bosnia to declare
its own independence. The bloodbath began. Nobody knows how this conflict
could have resolved itself had the E.C. countries and the U.S. government
stood firm and defied Germany. Cyrus Vance, the man who first issued the
warning, thinks that our premature recognition of these breakaway republics
"brought about the war that is going on now." (New York Times,
April 14, 1993).
Therefore, when the word "appeasement"
is used against the West in its dealing with Belgrade, should we not keep
in mind that the original appeasement was the appeasement of the Bonn
government in Germany and its reckless political and economic expansionism
into territories it had previously occupied by military means.
Now, miraculously,
all of the western nations, the United States included, claim to be totally
innocent of the bloodbath they have helped to initiate.
The Croatians and
Bosnian Muslims
are innocent as well. All of them are freedom-loving people
from freedom-loving nations and there is only one villain and one aggressor:
Serbia and the Serbians.
How simple it all is and how convenient
and how "conscience-cleansing" for
everybody concerned. And since there are so many nations who wish to escape
blame and derive their innocence at the expense of the Serbs, the Serbians,
in order to accommodate everybody, have then charged with crimes so vile
and heinous to make sure that there is enough guilt there to go around
for the hundreds of millions of fingers pointed at them from
the "freedom-loving" people of the world.
No single event better
captures this hyperbolic need for demonization of a whole people than the
war crimes trial of a Serbian mental patient named
Borislav Herak, who
has confessed to killing over twenty people and raping countless women.
Over and over he was shown on T.V. screens, demonstrating the manner in
which he had butchered people. His face and his image is now embedded in
our minds as a savage representative of the Serbs. It didn't seem to matter
during his trial that he was the only one supplying evidence of his crimes,
nor that it could not even be demonstrated that the names he gave of his
victims, some of them only first names, were names of people who had ever
existed. And if they had ever existed, there was no proof of any kind that
they were now dead. It was just a madman rambling, the same madman
who, among his many confessions, had claimed to have seen former U.N. commander
General McKenzie repeatedly taking young girls from so-called Serbian rape
camps and vanishing with them into the night. These girls, once they had
served their function, were then ordered killed by the Serbians in order
to destroy all traces of evidence. The New York Times, which featured Herak
prominently in an article dated November 27, 1992, entitled The Story of
a Serbian Rapist, made sure to exclude his allegations against General
McKenzie lest this poor mental patient's credibility be undermined.
Borislav Herak was found guilty of war crimes
and sentenced to death.
Even during the most nightmarish days of
the Stalinist show trials in Moscow, the trumped-up
charges were directed against intellectuals whose will had been broken
during interrogations, not against madmen.
It would appear that the treasured sympathies
and opinions of the American Public, that so many are trying to win over
to their side, has been so desensitized that only hyper-horrors and hyper-crimes
can be now trusted to arouse it. Nothing less than the ghoulishly inexcusable
spectre of "genocide" can be trusted to do the job and so now
we trivialize the unspeakable horror of that word and use it to casually
accuse Serbians of its implementation in order to prod awake the public
opinion of our people. It is as if, in their desire to arouse the American
public, our media has transformed itself, on this international issue,
into one gigantic National Enquirer.
And yet, there is no shortage of true horrors
in this war committed by Serbians, Muslims and Croatians alike. There is
no shortage of real victims, but factual truth has lost its power to move
us. It is not enough anymore to see children dying on battlefields or in
hospitals for
lack of medicine
brought about by our sanctions against Iran
and Serbia. If deaths of childen could move us, we would be moved to do
something about the violent deaths of our own children in our own cities
and our own ghettos. We are awash in violence ourselves
and over 30,000 of our own people are murdered every year by guns. Ten
childen are murdered every day by guns. (New York Times, July 4,
1992). There is an
epidemic of rape
and its perpetrators are getting younger
and younger and so are their victims. Eleven-year olds are raping nine-year
olds. Pre-teenagers are killing other pre-teens. In the not-so-distant
past lies the devastation of our former policies, three million Vietnamese
dead, over a million Cambodians, and the thousands who died and are still
dying as a result of our 100-day war in Iraq, of which 90% of us approved,
hailing its Generals as heros. Our only response
thus far to the three million dead in Vietnam has been to build a Vietnam
war monument to ourselves. How long, how many miles long would that wall
be if it contained the names of our victims?
We are inured to violence
and violent death. Ours has become a culture of violence. It is
not hard, then, to understand our need to demonize somebody, anybody, as
we once did the Soviet Union, so that we can be good and innocent by comparison.
If we can't have an enemy then, it would appear, we
will manufacture a straw man sinner so vile and inhuman that, by comparison,
our own humanity will be vouchsafed for the time being. The question
begs asking: If we are willing to trivialize genocide, if accusing somebody
of genocide is the new minimum it takes to rouse us from stupor and demonstrate
our humanity, what will it take down the road to do the same job when we,
having trivialized genocide, become inured to it.
It is important to
understand that there is no attempt here to exonerate Serbians from actual
crimes or atrocities they have committed. It is, rather, to insist
that all sides in this civil war have committed them and to insist that
those actual crimes should be sufficient to warrant condemnation for the
perpetrators and sympathy for the victims. We must
not exaggerate. To do so is more dangerous than we think, not just
to those we demonize and deprive of humanity, but to ourselves as well.
It undermines our own humanity to do so. It causes to atrophy the human
response within ourselves and creates the necessity for unspeakably hyperbolic
horrors to prod it into action. It is a death wish of the soul and the
human spirit.
Nor can we afford
to designate the sufferings of any people as being unworthy of our attention
because they are, by some definition we have accepted,
unworthy victims.
The sufferings of the Kurds, the victims
of Iraqi, moved us. They were, our media informed us, worthy victims. The
deaths and sufferings of the Iraqi, victims of our own massive bombardment,
did not. They were unworthy victims. The infant mortality rate in Iraq,
as a direct result of that war and the sanctions imposed upon it, is now
three times its former rate, but those children are still considered unworthy
of our sympathies.
And so now the Croatians and Bosnian Muslims
are the Kurds and the Serbians are the Iraqis. All are dying in
that unfortunate land. Atrocities are being committed by all sides
and yet only those we select as worthy of our empathy receive it.
In some profoundly disturbing way, we have decided that some men,
some women, some children are an island,
and when the bell tolls it tolls only for them, not for us. If some people
are an island, then the rest of us by definition are an island too. Once
we accept that possibility, it is very easy to look upon the sufferings
of the children in South Central L.A., Brownsville, the Bronx, Chicago,
Detroit and Washington as the sufferings of some island people whom we
regard as Iraqis or Serbs, or as the Germans once regarded the
Jews.
The world is now ringed with these volcanic
islands where dozens of civil wars rage. Each one of those wars is caused
by the ability of the participants to see their enemy as the "other",
an island. If we, on the outside of this ring of fire, not only condone
this view of man but, in effect, participate in it ourselves, our actions
can only contribute to more civil wars and worse civil wars. If we are
to be peacemakers, our condemnation of atrocities cannot be piecemeal,
nor can our empathy for the victims.
If the neo-communism
of Serbia's Milosevic is anathema to us, then why is not the
crypto-fascism
of Croatia's Tudjman and the theocratic
Islamic fundamentalism of Bosnia's
Izetbegovic anathema to us as well? There are no good guys in this troika,
but unless we stick to facts and pursue the truth, our opinions of them
are dependent on their public relations efforts.
Our indifference to factual truths in this
conflict, our disregard of them, our ignorance of them, is tantamount to
malice. If our own bloody Civil War taught us anything, it is that we must
have malice toward none.
In the electronic village that the world
has become, gossip once again threatens to become the only form of communication,
as it was in the village where I grew up. The
merciless pursuit of truth is our only choice, because when
truth ceases to matter, nothing else can.