Calling for peace

New England Serbs speak out against the war

Have the western "corporate media" slanted news coverage of the war in Kosovo, and thus biased our understanding of it? The members of the Serbian-American Alliance of New England (SANE) think so. The Newton-based group contends that the bombing of Yugoslavia is unjustified, illegal, and cruel, the product of misinformation and NATO's need to find a post-Cold War role. SANE calls for an end to the bombing, a peace agreement that returns Albanian refugees to Kosovo, and a "true political solution" for the region negotiated by the United Nations and "parties that did not take active part in the bombing and that enjoy friendly relations with the Serbian and Albanian communities."

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The media war
Diplomacy for hire
A dangerous chill

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SANE has been leading weekly protests against the war every Saturday in Boston's Copley Square. On May 19, Phoenix writers Michael Crowley, Ben Geman, and Dan Kennedy and Phoenix editor Peter Kadzis discussed the Kosovo crisis with three members of SANE: Miljana Bovan, Peter Mucic, and SANE president Gordana Todorov, all of whom were born in the former Yugoslavia. Bovan (who grew up in Kosovo) and Mucic (born in Belgrade) work in financial services in Boston; Todorov (raised in Novi Sad) teaches mathematics at Northeastern University. The following are edited excerpts from the 90-minute discussion. (For the Phoenix's view of the war, see our editorial.)

Gordana Todorov: As a mathematician, I analyze. So I see three issues that one can discuss about bombing: morality, legality, and then, technically, what's really happening. First, it's hard for me to understand that people could see this as morally justified. People like to talk about tragedy on one side, and they justify bombing with tragedy. I just don't see it. Next, everybody knows that this was an illegal act. Bombing a country is illegal, and I don't see how anyone can say that's not important. What kind of country do we live in if you don't obey international law? Third, why is Yugoslavia being bombed? Why are 11 million people terrorized by NATO every night and day? Yugoslavia was bombed because it didn't want to sign the Rambouillet agreement [signed by the Kosovo Liberation Army but rejected by Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in March]. But now anyone who reads that agreement can see that it was not something anyone could sign.

Miljana Bovan: [The Rambouillet agreement] was just a dictate that was imposed on both parties. The Albanians were told that if they did not sign, they would be out of favor with the West. And for the Yugoslavian side it was said, if you don't sign, we're going to bomb. The points that they did not agree on could have been easily negotiated. The Albanians were given the right to have a referendum on independence after the three years. What that meant was that Kosovo could secede from Serbia after three years. That's a really dangerous precedent. You might say that Albanians had the right to independence, their natural rights of self-determination. However, the same logic could be applied to various parts of the United States. Very few countries would allow that.

Phoenix: How do you respond to the statement that the bombing was essentially done in response to 10 years of Milosevic's ongoing human-rights atrocities against his non-Serb neighbors in various parts of what's left of Yugoslavia?

Bovan: As much as it was portrayed as a one-sided war, the war in Bosnia was a civil war where all three parties were committing atrocities equally. The side that really suffered terribly in this civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina is the Serbian side. We're talking about August of '95, when a quarter of a million Serbs were ethnically cleansed out of Krajina in five days. Very few Serbs remain in Croatia, and they have no protection. So just to claim that the Serb side has the primary responsibility for atrocities that were happening in Bosnia, [others] would say something totally opposite.

Phoenix: Why are hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians fleeing Kosovo now? Croatia is no longer at war. Serbia is.

Todorov: The fact is that before the bombing started and before March 24, there were no huge numbers of Albanians leaving Kosovo. So before the NATO bombing, there was no ethnic cleansing. You cannot always make the one single argument. There was no mass killing; there was no mass expulsion before the bombing started.

Phoenix: And do you believe that there were no plans to do anything like that? NATO has said that the bombing only accelerated what was inevitably going to happen over a longer period of time.

Todorov: I really don't believe that that could have happened. People who are not from Yugoslavia tend to believe that they understand Yugoslavian people. I am from Yugoslavia, and it hurts me immensely when people talk about how Yugoslav people hate each other. How they want to kill each other. You see, we don't need anyone from America to come and tell us, you have to live together. We know how to live together.

Bovan: Yugoslavia had a really strong democratic movement before the bombing. If you remember two years ago, in the coldest months of the winter, a third of Belgrade's population was on the street 24 hours a day. They couldn't topple him. And to expect that this bombing will topple Milosevic is highly irresponsible. It's not that the democratic movement had died in Belgrade . . . [but] there is no way you can have political opposition in the country that is being bombed.

Phoenix: Again, leaving the correctness of the bombing aside, why are the Albanians fleeing Kosovo in such numbers?

Todorov: There's not a single one reason, and the mistake is to say they're all fleeing because of the bombing. I mean, if you go and you watch TV here, they're all leaving because of Serbs, right? The American media, American TV paints one side. But there are several reasons. Let's just start with a simple fact. If you lived in Pristina and you're bombed, would you leave? I do not believe that it was a policy of the government. But it is very possible that there were [independent] groups who were expelling [Albanians].

Phoenix: But what about the hundreds of accounts from refugees who say they are terrified of the Serb army and are leaving because they fear for their lives?

Todorov: How many of these statements are encouraged by the media? How many get encouraged by the interviewers? Some of them are probably true. But how many are encouraged? Also, the other thing is that you don't see all these hundreds and thousands and thousands of them, you see just a few of them.

Peter Mucic: Is it possible that [Milosevic] is using the same military strategy that the US army used in Vietnam, which was called pacification? Which is basically, you come to a village or an area where the rebels have mixed in with the local population, you tell the population that they're free to leave --

Phoenix: It's entirely possible, and that's why a good case could be made that the United States was guilty of war crimes.

Bovan: When people say that Milosevic is bad, they don't distinguish between Serbs and Milosevic -- and then they bomb Serbs. We're talking about Milosevic, and yet Milosevic is not being bombed. All the people are being bombed; they're without water, they're without electricity. Can you imagine children who for two months sleep with the bombs and sirens? It is not Milosevic who has been wronged. He has probably at least a dozen bomb shelters. It is the 11 million people of Yugoslavia. That also includes hundreds and thousands of Albanian refugees. It is the humanitarian catastrophe, the ecological catastrophe. It is catastrophic for those who are getting caught in the middle.

Phoenix: So what do you think NATO's motivations are if it's not interested in preserving human lives?

Todorov: It was very clear that after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, there was really no need for NATO. NATO did not have a job. NATO found a job.

Mucic: They are going to buy planes and tanks. Who are they going to buy them from?

Todorov: But it does have a solution. That is the thing. It does have a solution. Stop the bombing. It is clear that as long as there is bombing, there cannot be a negotiation. The only problem is the nature of the ground forces in Kosovo. One thing that is not acceptable to the Yugoslavian government is NATO ground forces. For God's sake, NATO had been bombing them for eight weeks straight, killing people. The country of Yugoslavia will not exist if this is continued for much longer. It will be totally annihilated. People don't have factories, people don't have schools. They use 14th-century monasteries. So to expect from this population to think --

Phoenix: What kind of force would you use?

Bovan: Neutral ground forces. And that, again, has been accepted by the Yugoslav government, many weeks ago. We could have ended the war weeks ago, but NATO is firmly standing behind it. For NATO to insist on its role in keeping so-called peace in Kosovo, it really points in one direction and that is NATO asking for survival. A role to play after the war is over. If NATO's purpose is to protect minorities in the world, why wouldn't they intervene on the side of the Kurds in Turkey? They are in identical positions as Albanians in Kosovo. Absolutely identical positions. How about Serbian minorities in Croatia? Again, Serbia has 850,000 refugees in this country. How about the Basques in Spain? So what is -- I'm totally getting confused about their purpose.

Phoenix: But can you say a policy is wrong just because it's not applied consistently?

Todorov: I just want to concentrate really on what's happening in Yugoslavia and Kosovo. If you listen to the NATO spokesmen, can you feel any compassion? There is absolutely none. They are only concerned about their own existence. The whole Rambouillet agreement was set in such a way that the Serbs couldn't sign it and so that NATO could have a role. NATO miscalculated, they didn't realize what was going to happen, and now they're stuck. And they cannot just stop. They have to do it in such a way that they save their face. That's all they really care about.

Phoenix: What's the best move at this point?

Bovan: Stop the bombing, you know. Start negotiations. Help refugees come back. That's basically it. Now, negotiations have to be with respect to all the sides. And refugees should come back under some protection. The protection has to be protection. It is not invading anyone else or scaring anyone else.

Phoenix: If one were to take the position that this is a just war, then that would be acceptable, just in the way that German civilians suffered a lot on the way to getting rid of Hitler. The question is whether it is a just war, and, therefore, whether this suffering of the Yugoslav population is a proper thing. And that is entirely separate; that's an entirely separate issue.

Mucic: So the justification is basically Milosevic? There's an association being created between Milosevic and Hitler. The use of words like "genocide", "concentration camps." They're trying to parlay all of this into kind of a retro mood from World War II.

Bovan: What they had managed to do at the beginning, they associated the war with concentration camps and ethnic cleansing by the Serbs, even though it's been done by everybody in the war. It's only Serbs that walked out of the war with those kind of labels. It became acceptable in our collective psyche to pin everything on them and bomb 11 million people and that that is all right, that they somehow deserve that because they're Serbs. It is my personal belief that that's what happens after demonizing a group of people after eight years. It becomes acceptable to punish them because they "deserve it." It's happening on a personal level in our community. Very often in schools the kids don't want to play with our kids because they're Serbs. I have heard of many instances where teachers themselves in public schools, they say, you know, Serbs really like to kill. And this entire idea of collective guilt has been very fashionable, singling out a nation and making them responsible for everything without taking into account the entire picture. Being a Serb here and reading all this, it is extremely painful. It is as if you are constantly being bombed with hate mail, left and right.