On July 4,1776 our forefathers claimed the right to wage war. Thirteen of Britain’s North American colonies declared their separate, sovereign independence. The very first right which they asserted  was “that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War...” 

Nearly 223 years later America makes war on Yugoslavia. For humanitarian reasons, we take sides in a civil war in the Serbian province of Kosovo.  Kosovo’s population is now mainly ethnic Albanian. But to Serbs with long memories, Kosovo remains their heartland, birthplace of bloody myths of nationhood. Serbs are less likely to give up Kosovo than Texans are the Alamo. As easily will India hand over to Pakistan Muslim-majority Kashmir, the home of the great Hindu myths. 

In World War II, Italy annexed Kosovo to its puppet  Albania. The ethnic Croatian-Slovenian Marshal Josef Broz Tito drove the Italians out and reclaimed Kosovo. In 1974 Tito pressured the Serbian government to grant Albanian-majority Kosovo autonomy, especially in education. That very generous autonomy elevated  Kosovo to just under the legal status of constituent Yugoslav republics such as Slovenia.

Tito died in 1980. A rotating presidency kept internal peace for nearly a decade. In 1987 the ancient Serb minority in Kosovo  accused  majority Albanians of violating rights and stealing property of Serbian individuals, families and monasteries. In 1989 Belgrade protected  Kosovo’s Serbian minority by revoking Kosovo’s autonomy. In 1991 Slovenia and Croatia seceded from the Yugoslav Federation. Groups in Kosovo also moved to secede from Serbia. Knowing their military weakness, the Democratic League of Kosovo and its leader Ibrahim Rugova said they would not use violence. Within Kosovo more radical groups gradually found one another and repudiated Rugova’s peaceful approach. In 1993 hotheads formed the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). 

The Dayton, Ohio agreements of 1995 brought to nearby Bosnia-Herzegovinaa fragile peace through partition. But those accords did not advance the independence or restore the autonomy of Kosovo. Ethnic Albanians rallied behind KLA violence. The KLA launched hit and run terrorism. By 1996 the Kosovo Liberation Army was bombing police targets. By July 1998 Belgrade had lost control to the KLA of roughly 40% of the province. The minority Serbs in Kosovo were fleeing for their lives. This persuaded Belgrade to strike back ever more ferociously at the KLA-led rebels.

The government of Serbia is now unleashing great violence, ostensibly to protect Kosovo’s Serbian minority from Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority. The United States is levying war on Yugoslavia to protect Serbia’s ethnic Albanian minority from Serbia’s majority Serbs. One side’s minority is thus the other side’s majority. 

Some minimal violence in human affairs may be unavoidable. For wherever people have formed independent nation states, they legitimize a legal structure asserting its right at least to controlled, moderated, limited violence. Moral progress either within a state or internationally often means simply declaring more and more areas of human activity off limits to internal state violence. Thus our city, county, state and federal governments may not use violence to prevent people from voting simply because they are black or female. Our governments may not violently conduct unreasonable searches and seizures. Governments may not forcibly prevent people from worshiping God or assembling peaceably to protest abuses.

In the early 1930s, through the  Kellogg-Briand Treaty, the U.S.  formally renounced aggressive war as an instrument of national policy. When the United States joined the United Nations, we further refined and restricted our right to “levy war.” 

Do we Americans, both as individuals and as a nation, reach too quickly for arms? Benjamin Franklin said that he had never known a good war or a bad peace. Do our policy-makers believe that a good peace is achieved by pouring on the violence? 

Just a few years ago,  Bulgaria forced over 300,000 of its ethnic Turkish citizens to flee into Turkey.  A change of government in Bulgaria has since allowed expellees to return to their homes. This demonstrates that, through the mercy of God, hardened hearts are sometimes softened. 

We created the United Nations both to manage unanticipated crises and  gradually to eliminate the underlying causes of war. It is hard  to discover a convincing basis in American or international law for NATO’s making itself a non-subordinated instrument of peace in Yugoslavia’s civil war. Undisputed, by contrast, is the paramount legal right of the Security Council of the United Nations to impose its will on Yugoslavia and Kosovo. Yet the United States, doubting its ability to persuade the Security Council to act as we might like, runs from the one undisputedly legal avenue to a solution. Is, then, the road to an ever worsening Yugoslav hell  being paved with America’s good intentions? Remember this: a subordinated NATO is legally in Bosnia under a United Nations mandate. The three American soldiers captured in Macedonia were there under legal United Nations’ authority. If the U.N. is good enough for those neighbors, why not for Kosovo?

There are 350,000 Serbs displaced from Croatia by war now living as refugees. Would it come as  a total surprise if Milosevic were now to dream of resettling those and other Serbs in a Kosovo newly denuded of ethnic Albanians? Serbs have waited for more than 600 years for this excuse provided by the KLA and NATO to avenge their defeat by the Ottoman Turks and the ensuing partial islamicization of the Serbian heartland. The highly literate, Orthodox Christian Serb nation  might conceivably consider a few years punishment in a crusading war with America both a duty to God and a price worth paying in order to re Christianize its province. Never mind that Christ Himself would most emphatically disapprove. 

What can we do as individuals? Analyze. Discuss. Learn from the rich literature of largely ignored 20th Century peace techniques. At the very least we must pray. Every day we can petition the Prince of Peace to show mercy and to soften those hardened human hearts which have plunged Serbia and Kosovo into civil and international war.

-OOO-

for Asheville TRIBUNE