| To
the Editor:
AFTA Newsletter
June 21, 2001
"I just returned from Kosova, which is what the people there call their
country," an AFTA member who was part of the last delegation reported
to a recent gathering.
But, however referred to, Kosovo is not a country. According to the United
Nations, it is a province of Serbia, part of the former Yugoslavia, and now
under the protection of the United Nations, which does not support its independence
as a nation.
As I sat in that audience, I thought back to my initial misgivings about the
project when it was first presented to the Board in February 2000. At that
time, daily video footage of ethnic Albanian refugees fleeing war-torn villages
brought home to the world the scale of human suffering occasioned by ethnic
strife in the former Yugoslavia. Milosevic was the autocratic President of
Serbia, and his brutal campaign against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo mobilized
NATO to intervene militarily, bombing Serbia in an effort to end the conflict.
Two years later, KFOR, as the allied troops are known, and the United Nations
presence is still necessary in order to (less than successfully) keep the
peace.
Why, then, was I concerned about AFTA joining the University of Pristina,
the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Chicago Center for Family Health
in forming the Kosavar Family Professional Education Collaborative (KFPEC)?
First, I did not share the analysis of regional politics that the spokesman
for KFPEC presented. I know that one family's freedom fighter is another
family's terrorist. Milosovic was unquestionably a certifiable despot,
spearheading a brutal suppression of the ethnic Albanian forces. But I thought
then, and still believe now, that the violence in the region, while certainly
greatly disproportional, was not one-sided, and that all of Serbia, not just
Kosovo, needed to be released from Milosevic's grip. After NATO bombed
Serbia into retreating from Kosovo, Americans interviewed in newspapers or
on television reported feeling shock that the ethnic Albanians were talking
about ridding the province of Serbs as a necessary "ethnic cleansing,"
a term we had been led to believe was the exclusive property of the Serbs'
oppressive actions toward Albanians. The Serbian government was guilty of
war crimes, but the Serbian people are among the more ethnically tolerant
in the region. Alone among the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, they protected
their Jewish population during the Second World War and discriminated less
against the Roma (Gypsies) than did their neighbors.
I knew that the AFTA delegations, in going to Kosovo, would be making an invaluable
contribution to people desperately in need of such services. Working closely
with people who had clearly suffered so greatly, it was inevitable that they
would be deeply affected by the experiences of the people with whom they came
in contact. I have no reservations about the importance of the project, both
in terms of the benefits it confers on a terrorized population, the value
of the experience for all participants, and the laboratory it provides for
generating models of intervention in other war-torn and underserved regions.
My concern is for the unintended consequence: that the participants, deeply
affected by the stories of the people they meet, may be inadvertently contributing
to nationalist ambitions.
It is not for nothing that Balkanize became a generic verb. As the region
democratizes, it is not surprising that people tie their desire for self-determination
to their ethnic identities. But nationalism is the problem, not the solution.
There is no way to create ethnically homogeneous nations from the variegated
populations of the region without wholesale dislocation, as one province's
or country's minority groups are cast out from their homes of many years,
decades, even centuries. As an example, in Bosnia, already carved into three
autonomous regions by the Dayton Accords of 1995, there is already continued
"ethnic cleansing" within the Croatian-controlled sector and discussion
of further fragmentation into smaller ethnic enclaves.
I would like to continue to support AFTA's humanitarian efforts in Kosovo.
But it is vital that AFTA not support ethnic Albanian nationalism in the province,
a nationalism that continues to destabilize the region. Contemporary events
in Macedonia are a partial replay of Kosovo two years ago. Once again, ethnic
Albanian paramilitaries are assassinating government soldiers and mayors who
are Slavs (this time using Kosovo as a staging area, including rebel leaders
broadcasting from Pristina). This, despite a democratically elected coalition
government that includes two ethnic Albanian political parties. The Macedonian
army, unlike Milosevic's forces, has so far (at the time of this writing)
shown considerable restraint by refusing to respond to provocation with overreaction;
but the Macedonian officials cannot ignore criminal activity, even when it
is performed in the name of national liberation. The army attempts to route
the paramilitaries, the local population flees or is caught in the crossfire,
and the people are polarized in ever-hardening positions. In Macedonia, as
in Kosovo, the only enduring resolution to ethnic tension are political solutions
that accept multiculturalism as a given, a "fact on the ground,"
an inevitability. I implore AFTA to refrain from using nationalist language
and, instead, to face the daunting challenge of creating multicultural alliances
in Kosovo. To do otherwise is to risk further destabilizaton and, indeed,
bloodshed, threatening the peace, not only in Macedonia, but in the entire
region, as Greece, Albania, and Turkey may be affected by the contagion of
competing nationalist agendas in the Balkans.
Anne Bernstein |
