ichael . benson on Sun, 11 Apr 1999 16:44:47 +0000 |
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Syndicate: The NYT and collective responsibility |
While I've taken good note of Sally Jane Norman's recent awesome "some fucking nightmare scrapbook" posting, I'm also taking the risk of sending a mail that references the "ultimate mortal urgency" of the messages being sent at present. I'm doing it with at least the intention of attempting the critical awareness that she identifies as a long-term hallmark of the syndicate list. I understand the point being made about the danger that this community could "simply let itself get taken over by another as a function of external events." I for one wouldn't want to contribute to the feeling by others that they've come to the wrong place, especially as my postings here were quite minimal over the last few years. I sometimes think that maybe the solution is not to write on this topic, which after all is quite different than the (I suppose statistically definable) larger aggregate concerns more typical, traditionally, of syndicate. But then again, those external nightmarish events are in fact happening, and would inevitably impact, one way or the other; so I wonder how to address that in a way more typical of syndicate topography, so to speak. Not that this is what is being requested by SJN, exactly... Anyway, apologies in advance to all who would rather hear less about this topic. Here goes: If I would have to chose one thing that bothers me about the generally, but not exclusively, Serbian-origin e-mails filling this list over the last weeks --- yes, from my safe, distant position at the *other* end of ex-Yugoslavia, the un-bombed end -- it's that the plight of the Kosovar Albanians almost never comes up. When it does it's frequently, for example, to accuse "them" (all of them? Some of them? It's apparently not relevant) of "terrorism." Well, one man's terrorist, of course, is another's freedom fighter, and the prolific Mr. Markovic, who professes not to have taken sides in this conflict, feels free to post a twelve-year-old NY Times article in support of his thesis (I assume) that the Kosovars deserve what they're getting. He also denies that what they're getting is real; it must be an exaggeration. It's impossible that this number could have been expelled from their homes, he says, because that's almost the entire number of Albanians that live(d) in Kosovo. (Yes -- suspicious how those numbers seem to match up, isn't it?) Westerners from as far away as California take him up on these views; this is because, a-priori, any use of Western military force must be considered evil, and any statement from NATO must be stuffed with lies. Well, let's assume that "war is evil" -- hard to disagree there -- and that NATO doesn't always tell god's honest truth. Personally, I'm shocked -- shocked -- to discover these things, but I still suppose I'm not alone in seeing a certain double standard at play here, in which that same writer probably wouldn't hesitate to say that the New York Times is of course an organ of the establishment (to use a no-longer-fashonable 1960's phrase), a mouthpiece of the duplicitious Pentagon, etc etc., if the views of the paper don't coincide with the views of the writer. But if the paper's decade-old report can be seen to justify the Serbian onslaught against the entire civilian population of Kosovar Albanians, it's of course used as truthful evidence, provided to the readers of this list with a kind of spicing of knowing cynicism about the double-standards of the western media in general. All of this serves as a preface a piece in today's Times by Michael Kaufman which I'm attaching below. I don't expect it to change many minds, just as I don't expect people to be sanguine and objective when buildings around them are being destroyed from the air by bombs. But I would hope that the implications of the story be at least *considered* in Serbia, and not just rejected immediately as more lies, slander, and propaganda. I would like to submit the idea that both of these stories -- the one forwarded by Markovic, and the one I'm attaching below -- have substantial elements of truth to them. But does the truth of story "A" justify the mass expulsion of close to two million people from their homes? Does it justify the attitude captured, with a certain uncomfortable accuracy, in story "B"? It's an interesting question. And I would add that, simply by virtue of it's distance in time, the twelve year old report doesn't include the story of ten years of patient pacificism on the part of the Kosovar Albanians under Ibrahim Rugova's leadership. In other words, almost the entire time after Milosovic Serbia took direct control of the previously autonomous province, reducing the Albanians there to second class status in a kind of Balkan apartheid. My own opinion is that, as in the Warsaw ghetto more than fifty years ago, their uprising was a last resort, and a fight to preserve their dignity and humanity. (Story follows) April 11, 1999 LOOKING FOR THE LINE BETWEEN PATRIOTISM AND GUILT By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN In view of the accumulating evidence of a genocidal campaign unleashed against Kosovo's Albanians by Serbian forces directed by President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, the conduct of ordinary Serbs is starting to attract the kinds of questions raised in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners, Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust." The controversial book examined how some longstanding "eliminationist" myths within German culture predisposed what might be thought of as normal citizens to accept, support and in many instances actively carry out Nazi policies of Jewish extermination. Those policies remain a benchmark of evil in this century, and there are, of course, great differences of scale distinguishing what happened in Germany from what is happening in Serbia. Nonetheless, focusing on actions of common men and women in both places and the willingness of many to follow murderous leads, does not, at the moment, seem inappropriate. Goldhagen himself thinks that questioning the behavior of the Serbian nation is essential. "Right now is the time when we must ask the question of how ordinary people have acted while it can still influence events. Those who support what has been happening in Kosovo should be made aware that they will be held complicit in what will most likely be the last enormous crime of the century," said Goldhagen, a professor of government at Harvard who is working on a study of genocide in the last 100 years. Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who is also a former U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, raised a similar point last week in an op-ed article in The New York Times: "Although Milosevic is the prime mover behind the murder and agony that have filled our television screens for the better part of a decade, he has not acted alone. He may plan the strategy, but the Serbian people are the willing instruments of his terror. There are, of course, many decent Serbs who decry the violence, just as there were decent Germans under Hitler, but that does not excuse the Serb nation for its part in making a killing field of so much of the former Yugoslavia." Usually, and probably rightly, issues of collective responsibility remain taboo in polite society. Within the pluralistic tradition, there is a reluctance to assign guilt to all, or most, or even many citizens of an offending state, and instead focus blame on culpable leaders. But as Goldhagen has persuasively argued, there was a correlation between Hitler's policies of extermination and the willingness of a sizable German population to support such ideas. In an escalating manner the actions of the Nazi leader and the approval of those he led mutually reinforced and encouraged each other. And while, as Eagleburger noted, there are Serbs who have deplored the violence, a similar reverberating process has been under way in Serbia since 1987, when Milosevic broke Titoism's major precept of never discussing ethnic tensions in public. Instead, he openly played to Serb nationalist sentiments, affirming widespread Serb feelings of victimization and martyrdom stretching back centuries. The sense of the collusive relationship between Milosevic and the populace that both empowers and follows him has been evident in the tone of such Serbian public expression as has reached beyond Yugoslav territory. Some has been in the form of e-mail messages to media organizations, universities, and addresses pulled out of the air, like messages placed in bottles and thrown into the ocean. There have also been the images of people at rock-concert rallies in Belgrade and other cities, dancing in defiance of NATO and in support of the man they call Slobo. According to sources in Belgrade, the first of these rallies, which included some placards critical of the leader, was spontaneous, but later ones were organized and criticism disappeared. What is so striking about these expressions is how stridently they clash with images of other people that the world has been watching, images of people burned out of their homes, standing in lines that have stretched for 15 miles trying to enter countries that have no room for them or do not want them. Or images of people from many different villages telling the same stories -- of their friends and relatives shot and killed, of men being taken away to places unknown. All of this is happening to Albanians at the hands of Serbs less than 200 miles from Belgrade, but given the responses of Serbs it might as well be taking place on the moon. Even in 1913, during a similar uprooting of Kosovars, there were louder voices of dissent in Serbia. Obviously, neither Serbs nor any other people can be expected to look much beyond their own fear and suffering when their cities are being struck by rockets and bombs. It is unrealistic to assume that any Serb might denounce the Serb assault on Albanians or that any such cry inside the country would be loud enough to be heard above the cheering and rallying around the chants of wartime chauvinism. Those few media organs in Serbia that have bravely struggled for years to maintain independence in the face of government control have been squelched. The radio station B-92 was shut down by police last week but even before that it reported that it was not able to report on what was happening in Kosovo. The journal Vreme has suddenly suspended its previous criticism of the government. The images of the Albanian refugees that have been telecast all over the world have not been carried by Serbian television and have been seen only by those Serbians who have dish antennas and cable service. Is it possible that people just don't know what is happening to the Albanians and that therefore they bear little or no responsibility for the support they show? Here too, Goldhagen saw similarities with the Nazi period. "How many Germans knew that there was a formal program of Jewish extermination? My guess is not many, but almost all knew that their civilization was killing Jews by the tens of thousands." He noted that it would require a sizable force to burn villages and set hundreds of thousands of residents to flight and that the people carrying out such tasks all have relatives and friends who would bring the accounts to general attention. The e-mail from Serbia is characterized by an overwhelming sense of defensiveness and unredeemed victimization. As the correspondents denounce NATO and the United States, there is no sense that the rockets are a response to Serb conduct. The Albanians, if they are mentioned at all, are referred to as Muslims who wish to establish a base for guerrilla terror, or narcotics traffickers, or former allies and beneficiaries of the Ottoman Turks. As for Serbs, they are persistently portrayed as defenders of Christianity in Europe, heroic fighters in two world wars whose contributions to civilization have gone unrewarded. Even writers who identify themselves as Milosevic's opponents show more scorn than sympathy for the Kosovar Albanians, blaming them for keeping him in power by boycotting elections rather than voting with the opposition. Many of the letters mention the sacredness of Kosovo to Serbs and cite the battle there in 1389 at which they were defeated by the Turks. There are far fewer references to the more contemporary history of Serb conflicts with Croats and Bosnians over the last eight years. For instance no one mentions the destruction of Vukovar by Serbs in 1991 or the massacre of Bosnian men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, an atrocity for which the military and political leaders of the Bosnian Serbs have been indicted. Such things appear to be missing from the current context although there are occasional accurate references to the Croats having waged campaigns of ethnic cleansing that chased Serbs into flight. But where does patriotism end and complicity in war crimes begin? Surely there is a difference between people who are chanting "Slobo, Slobo" and those who are burning homes, separating wives and husbands, and shooting civilians. Aryeh Neier, the president of the Open Society Institute and the author of "War Crimes, Brutality, Genocide, Terror and the Struggle for Justice," argues that in recent wars like those in Rwanda and Bosnia, there was a greater degree of criminal responsibility on the part of ordinary citizens than was the case in Nazi Germany. With the Nazis, he pointed out, the killing was highly bureaucratized, and the victims were generally unknown to those who killed them. In Rwanda and Bosnia, he said, many of the perpetrators knew the victims, often having lived with them, gone to school with them and in some cases married into their families. In both places, Neier said, because of the way people were killed, there were almost as many killers as victims. As for Kosovo, he said there was insufficient information to determine what was happening or how to apportion responsibility. In Tirana, the Albanian capital, there lives an Albanian writer named Fatos Lubunja, who under the regime of the late dictator Enver Hoxa spent 17 years in prison. Now he edits an intellectual journal and monitors human rights abuses. In a message to a friend he traced many instances of Serb attacks on Albanians, dating from expulsion in 1878 when Milan Obrenovic, a Serbian king, rallied his countrymen with the words, "The more Albanians you kick out of our land the greater patriots you will be." Lubunja cited ethnic cleansing campaigns of 1913 and 1920, and then he addressed the questions that Goldhagen raised in his book. He was, he said, suspicious of judgments based on assumptions that people inevitably repeat the conduct of their ancestors. "But if we can speak of collective guilt, I think we have to consider a long historical process of manipulation; all those politicians, historians, writers, teachers, who have created and nourished some dangerous myths, have manipulated history and, in the end, created those closed-minded horrible human beings who are ready to kill the others." Michael Benson <michael.benson@pristop.si> <http://www.ljudmila.org/kinetikon/> ------Syndicate mailinglist-------------------- Syndicate network for media culture and media art information and archive: http://www.v2.nl/east/ to unsubscribe, write to <syndicate-request@aec.at> in the body of the msg: unsubscribe your@email.adress