Kosovo: not another Holocaust

Back in my day
    By Chris Clemens

By now, most of North America has come to think of Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic as the new Adolf Hitler. Last week's issue of Time proclaimed Milosevic "the face of evil"; the accompanying article portrayed him a callous drunkard with little sense of reality—much less morality. The Time article, like similar pieces in the Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, and Los Angeles Times, bases many of its conclusions on the impressions of U.S. diplomats who have met Milosevic. These stories treat Serbian antipathy toward Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority merely as a political tool that the tyrant has used to maintain power. The message seems to be that if we could simply have removed Milosevic from power two or three years ago, this entire dilemma in the Balkans could have been avoided—the same message our history books teach us about Hitler.

As convenient as the memory of the Holocaust is for arousing public indignation, however, we must keep in mind that the two situations are fundamentally different. Milosevic's deep-rooted support among his own people reflects a collective desire for revenge against the region's Albanian population for the years of terrorist atrocities they have committed.

In 1987, the New York Times ran an article warning of a possible crisis in Kosovo, but back then no one was worried about Serbian hostilities; the side that presented the threat at that time was the Albanians. The article told of an Albanian conscript who infiltrated the Yugoslav army and murdered four of his Serbian bunkmates while they were asleep.

The Kosovo Liberation Army's longtime campaign to create a Greater Albanian nation stretched beyond its conscripts. According to the Ottawa Sun, throughout the 1980s Albanian men were encouraged to rape Serbian girls, and Slavic Orthodox churches were defiled and burned. Albanian political leaders joked that Serbian women should be used to "satisfy" Albanian men. Milosevic's popularity stems not from some sort of manufactured racist ideology, but from his promise to his constituency that he will exact revenge for the past decade of Albanian abuses.

This is obviously not the side of the story the State Department would like us to see. In addition to trespassing on another nation's sovereign territory and fighting a war in which no real U.S. interests are at stake, Americans now face the prospect of seeing their friends and neighbors called to fight in a faraway ground war.

The Clinton administration would like us to believe that our actions in the area are at least predicated on some sort of unassailable moral principles. The information the federal government passes on to the press, while not as strictly controlled as it was in the Gulf War, reflects this imperative. If we can see the Kosovo crisis in simplified terms—perhaps as an opportunity to redeem our national conscience for failing to intervene sooner to end the Holocaust—then NATO can pull off its operation against Milosevic with a minimum of comparisons to Vietnam and a minimum of political opposition from its constituents at home.

The truth, though, is that NATO has stepped into a conflict every bit as complicated as the one in Southeast Asia 25 years ago. The problem is not Slobodan Milosevic; it's that the two groups have hated each other for centuries and will continue to do so long after NATO has exhausted all of its available resources in the region and long after moral outrage over Serbian ethnic cleansing has subsided.

That the government would spin the Kosovo offensive as a case of repeated history is to be expected; that the media should swallow this story unquestioningly is not. Slobodan Milosevic is not the face of evil. He is the most convenient embodiment of an abiding hatred that permeates the region and goes beyond NATO's capacity to alleviate it. It is a cop-out for the media to dwell on comparisons between Kosovo and the Holocaust. If the experiences of the past 50 years have taught us anything about the nature of ethnic conflicts, it is that they rarely lend themselves to the sort of unequivocal judgments of right and wrong that were possible during World War II.

The slaughter of innocent Albanians in the Balkans is a horrible international tragedy, but by relying too heavily on comparisons to Hitler's mass extermination of the Jews, the media limits discussion of the true complexity of the issues at stake and fails in its responsibility to educate the public.

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
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• Of Bill Gates and black helicopters, 4/9/99
• The problem with trial by lawyer, 3/26/99
• There's more to life than 'The City', 2/26/99

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