Posted on 03/25/2004 8:16:52 PM PST by MarMema
"You can count on aid and support from Russia," promised President Vladimir Putin to the people of Serbia Tuesday. While many other international leaders have voiced their support for Serbia in the wake of the recent Albanian ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo, only Russia has so far backed up its words with actions.
Out of all the great 'humanitarian' nations of Europe and America, Russia alone has taken the initiative to deliver tangible aid to the refugees driven from their homes one week ago. As Serbia marked the fifth anniversary of NATO's air attacks yesterday, the Russian government began its emergency dispatch of humanitarian aid for Kosovo Serb refugees- the final victims of a long and bitter tragedy not of their own making.
Two Ilyushin-76 transport jets containing tents, beds, bed linen, and lighting devices took off yesterday from Russia, with two more expected to leave for Belgrade tomorrow, reports Itar-Tass. On the planes will also be transported ".a mobile hospital with the capacity for giving medical aid to about 600 patients a day." In addition, a convoy of 10 trucks containing tents, blankets and mattresses is on the way.
Russian Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu visited a refugee camp in Pancevo on Tuesday, and expressed his country's astonishment at "the world community's placid reaction to the annihilation of Serbian churches in Kosovo."
"It goes beyond a mere destruction of buildings," Shoigu charged. "It was an attempt to wipe out from the face of the earth, from human memory and from history the things that had been there [in the land of Kosovo] for centuries."
In contrast, the response from the West has been far more muted. While righteous condemnations and statements of sympathy have trickled in over the past week from the US, Britain, Germany and others, these have seemed largely uninspired and unsympathetic to the Serbian position on both the pogrom and the provinces final status. And so blowhards like Richard Holbrooke continue demanding Kosovo's independence, something which is reiterated by Albanian leaders and other supporters of their cause. Yet shouting that 'only independence will stop the violence' has the unpleasant ring of a ransom pronounced by terrorists or kidnappers: 'pay up now or your boy gets it!'
Of course, this has been the operating logic throughout the past decades of Albanian separatism in both Kosovo and Macedonia. In every case, a provocation followed by a protest followed by mob violence and terrorism; the quintessential gunboat diplomacy more befitting great powers.
At first, those selfsame Great Powers did not decry these methods as perfected by the Albanian KLA. That's because they were on 'their side.' Perhaps they thought that once the war was won, Serbia bombed and UN administrators went in, the aggressive and well-armed young men who'd spent the previous decades planning how to take power for themselves violently would just melt away, cheerfully re-enlist in the ranks of the peaceful, and perhaps take up a useful hobby such as gardening.
One marvels at the West's total inability to comprehend local realities and local power struggles before committing to war and its inevitable aftermath. To be sure, there were many top leaders who did understand what was going to happen, but they in all likelihood weren't planning to be anywhere near Kosovo, except for the obligatory post-war baby-kissing promenades. On the highest levels, the Kosovo bombing seems to have been motivated very little by real humanitarian concerns, and most of all by a cynical pragmatism determined to sever the Balkans into smaller and thus more 'manageable' pieces. However, Kosovo is beyond management, and the Albanians know it.
This is their trump card: the understanding that the UN and NATO forces are not prepared to die for the values they claim are mandatory for the province. In the long run, the occupiers will be driven out, panicking and covered with blood.
Thus all the outraged comments by the spokesmen for the West take on a rather farcical tone. For example, former Kosovo boss Michael Steiner declared that the international community "cannot tolerate and will not tolerate" ethnically-motivated violence such as occurred last week. And EU Foreign Policy chief Javier Solana also declared that the Kosovo Albanian parties are in need of a "purging." We're sure he plans to purge them himself.
After Solana waxed eloquent regarding the need for tolerance, a Serb man, "pointing to burned houses in the distance, shouted: 'This is your Western politics.'" Indeed.
Michael Steiner is perhaps the archetype of the UN-bureaucrat in Kosovo: an upwardly mobile, overpaid foreigner in the colonial bureaucracy, who promulgated many decrees, married his much younger local assistant, and left soon thereafter. The domiciles of the peacekeepers back home are littered with Kosovo's escaped young women (and, in a few cases, young men). As if watching the frivolous foreign courtships unfolding every day wasn't irksome enough for them, the locals have also experienced their share of suffering at the hands of their benefactors: to wit, the sergeant and the girl, or the maiden and the Egyptian, among others.
No, Steiner symbolizes the sheer banality of the cumulative Western effort these past 5 years. The continual solution to Kosovo has been to defer, defer, to keep staving off the inevitable for as long as possible. The occupiers learned that eventually, the centrifugal pressures at work would cause a violent explosion, aimed against the well-meaning West. The strategy, therefore, has been to defer the final bloodbath until sometime after one's contract has expired, and the hot potato has been handed off to the next generation of peacekeepers.
Now, here at the end of the line, we can't really expect the Great Powers to apologize, or even accept any part of the blame for this fiasco. Javier Solana now blames the people of Kosovo, and not the colonial administration, for everything. That said, in consideration of the massive outpouring of aid and refugee relocations the world gave 5 years ago to Kosovo's Albanian refugees, is it too much to ask of them to follow Russia's lead and pitch in?
In this case, the lack of interest shown by the world for the plight of the Serbian refugees is a fairly astonishing (Sergei Shoigu indeed had the right word for it) proof of what the limits of political correctness will allow. Indeed, considering that the Western media has spent over a decade incessantly declaring that the Serbs are sub-human, imagining now that they might actually be normal people is proving difficult. Surely, guilty parties will protest that this is an outrageous lie; but the bias, so subtle and so pervasive, effectively precludes not only sympathy but support. And so the rhetoric of Western media reports has proven feeble, guarded, unsympathetic- shocked not by the horror of mass murder but by the possibility that anyone but Serbs could have been behind it.
Given that they clearly want to avoid all attempts at 'revising' the history of the conflict, the powers-that-be can only hope that the rest of the pogrom be nasty, brutish and short. Their lives can then go on untroubled, physically and mentally distant from the savage hypocrisy that was Kosovo.
I do love the line above about expecting the KLA to become gardeners. I think this may be the most well-written piece yet. Touche!
Then, let Russia, Italy, and Greece help the Serbs return Kosovo to the Serbs. And the Czechs if they want to help out.
Romania and Bulgaria would be wise to throw in a helping hand, if for no other reason than stability and less heroin in their immediate neighborhood.
If republicans can be made to comprehend that continuing these clintoniata policies is hurting them in the pocketbook, there might be hope.
Where is the best place to send aide here? I'd assume the Serbian Unity Conference in the absence of other info.
Suggestions anybody?
I think the best would be to send it through SANE. I'll look for it and get back to you. We collected here for them after the bombing and they sent containers into Serbia. They did a great job with low overhead.
Here is the home of Fr Aleksandr, whom I loved, and with whom we worked in the Seattle area to send help to Serbia a few years back. Fr Aleksandr personally went to Kosovo several times to help with the containers.
You can read about them on the SANE page under past projects....
Just my suggestion.
By the way, I am in for $100 too. And the letter. A great idea, thanks. Let's all coordinate and send them to the same location, where ever we decide....
Anyone else?
Please send clothes, hygenic supplies, blankets, canned food to:
St. George Church
65 South Keel Ridge Rd.
Hermitage, PA 16148
tel. 724-342-2600 (Fr. Svetislav Mirolovich)
In the past we have done shoe boxes. A shoe box has in it a postcard from your location with a brief note of support. Add a bar of soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a dried fruit bar or other easy to ship candy item, socks, a bag of peanuts, a washcloth perhaps, a small toy for a child....you can get really creative with this and they are inexpensive and easy to mail.
We shipped out about 500 of these babies to Fr Aleksandr just after the bombing. Each local Orthodox church had teen groups get together and make them. It's a terrific church activity.
I sent a bunch of boxes to our troops in Iraq. POSTAGE IS HORRID!
I would think donating money is more cost efective.
Don't give to them. The money will be diluted to help other causes in that organization. If you search their website you'll see they give to Palestinian (Muslims) and other non-Orthodox Christians. Little, if nothing, of what you send will reach the Serbs.
People are myopic. They treat they moment of glory (basically form their 30's to to their 60's, an insignificant period of human history) as something that will forever be remembered. Truth is, 99.99% of human endevour is in oblivion. HUman priorities are pittifully childish.
Those who bask in tirumph in Kosovo now are the most myopic.
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