he
other day a friend from home, New York, called me in Bari -- where I am
living for a couple of months -- to ask whether I am all right and inquired
in passing whether I can hear sounds of the bombing. I reassured her that
not only could I not hear the bombs dropping on Belgrade and Novi Sad and
Pristina from downtown Bari, but even the planes taking off from the nearby
NATO base of Gioia del Colle are quite inaudible. Though it is easy to
mock my geographyless American friend's vision of European countries being
only slightly larger than postage stamps, her Tiny Europe seems a nice
complement to the widely held vision of Helpless Europe being dragged into
a bellicose folly by Big Bad America.
Perhaps I exaggerate. I am writing this from Italy -- weakest link in
the NATO chain. Italy (unlike France and Germany) continues to maintain
an embassy in Belgrade. Milosevic has received the Italian Communists'
party leader, Armando Cossutta. The estimable mayor of Venice has sent
an envoy to Belgrade with letters addressed to Milosevic and to the ethnic
Albanian leader with whom he has met, Ibrahim Rugova, proposing Venice
as a site for peace negotiations. (The letters were accepted, thank you
very much, by the Orthodox primate following the Easter Sunday service.)
But then it is understandable that Italy has panicked: Italians see not
just scenes of excruciating misery on their TV news but images of masses
on the move. In Italy, Albanians are first of all future immigrants.
Susan Sontag is the author, most recently, of
"The Volcano Lover: A Romance." She is completing a new novel.
|
|
But opposition to the war is hardly confined to Italy, and to one strand
of the political spectrum. On the contrary: mobilized against this war
are remnants of the left and the likes of Le Pen and Bossi and Heider
on the right. The right is against immigrants. The left is against America.
(Against the idea of America, that is. The hegemony of American
popular culture in Europe could hardly be more total.)
On both the so-called left and the so-called right, identity-talk is
on the rise. The anti-Americanism that is fueling the protest against the
war has been growing in recent years in many of the nations of the New
Europe, and is perhaps best understood as a displacement of the anxiety
about this New Europe, which everyone has been told is a Good Thing and
few dare question. Nations are communities that are always being imagined,
reconceived, reasserted, against the pressure of a defining Other. The
specter of a nation without borders, an infinitely porous nation, is bound
to create anxiety. Europe needs its overbearing America.
Weak Europe? Impotent Europe? The words are everywhere. The truth is
that the made-for-business Europe being brought into existence with the
enthusiastic assent of the "responsible" business and professional elites
is a Europe precisely designed to be incapable of responding to the threat
posed by a dictator like Milosevic. This is not a question of "weakness,"
though that is how it is being experienced. It is a question of ideology.
It is not that Europe is weak. Far from it. It is that
Europe, the Europe under construction since the Final Victory of Capitalism
in 1989, is up to something else. Something which indeed renders obsolete
most of the questions of justice -- indeed, all the moral questions. (What
prevails, in their place, are questions of health, which may be conjoined
with ecological concerns; but that is another matter.)
A Europe designed for spectacle, consumerism and hand
wringing ... but haunted by the fear of national identities being swamped
either by faceless multinational commercialism or by tides of alien immigrants
from poor countries.
In one part of the continent, former Communists play the
nationalist card and foment lethal nationalisms -- Milosevic being the
most egregious example. In the other part, nationalism, and with it war,
are presumed to be superseded, outmoded.
How helpless "our" Europe feels in the face of all this
irrational slaughter and suffering taking place in the other Europe.
nd meanwhile the war goes
on. A war that started in 1991. Not in 1999. And not, as the Serbs would
have it, six centuries ago, either. Theirs is a country whose nationalist
myth has as its founding event a defeat -- the Battle of Kosovo, lost to
the Turks in 1389. We are fighting the Turks, Serb officers commanding
the mortar emplacements on the heights of Sarajevo would assure visiting
journalists.
Would we not think it odd if France still rallied around
the memory of the Battle of Agincourt -- 1415 -- in its eternal enmity
with Great Britain? But who could imagine such a thing? For France is Europe.
And "they" are not.
Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond to
the Serb shelling of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege of Sarajevo. The
Europe that let Bosnia die.
A new definition of Europe: the place where tragedies
don't take place. Wars, genocides -- that happened here once, but no longer.
It's something that happens in Africa. (Or places in Europe that are not
"really" Europe. That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps I exaggerate. But
having spent a good part of three years, from 1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo,
it does not seem to me like an exaggeration at all.
Living on the edge of NATO Europe, only a few hundred
kilometers from the refugee camps in Durres and Kukes and Blace, from the
greatest mass of suffering in Europe since the Second World War, it is
true that I can't hear the NATO planes leaving the base here in Puglia.
But I can walk to Bari's waterfront and watch Albanian and Kosovar families
pouring off the daily ferries from Durres -- legal immigrants, presumably
-- or drive south a hundred kilometers at night and see the Italian coast
guard searching for the rubber dinghies crammed with refugees that leave
Vlore nightly for the perilous Adriatic crossing. But if I leave my apartment
in Bari only to visit friends and have a pizza and see a movie and hang
out in a bar, I am no closer to the war than the television news or the
newspapers that arrive every morning at my doorstep. I could as well be
back in New York.
f course, it is easy to turn
your eyes from what is happening if it is not happening to you.
Or if you have not put yourself where it is happening. I remember in Sarajevo
in the summer of 1993 a Bosnian friend telling me ruefully that in 1991,
when she saw on her TV set the footage of Vukovar utterly leveled by the
Serbs, she thought to herself, How terrible, but that's in Croatia, that
can never happen here in Bosnia ... and switched the channel. The following
year, when the war started in Bosnia, she learned differently. Then she
became part of a story on television that other people saw and said, How
terrible ... and switched the channel.
How helpless "our" pacified, comfortable Europe feels
in the face of all this irrational slaughter and suffering taking place
in the other Europe. But the images cannot be conjured away -- of refugees,
people who have been pushed out of their homes, their torched villages,
by the hundreds of thousands and who look like us.
Generations of Europeans fearful of any idealism, incapable
of indignation except in the old anti-imperialist cold-war grooves. (Yet,
of course, the key point about this war is that it is the direct result
of the end of the cold war and the breakup of old empires and imperial
rivalries.) Stop the War and Stop the Genocide, read the banners being
waved in the demonstrations in Rome and here in Bari. For Peace. Against
War. Who is not? But how can you stop those bent on genocide without making
war?
We have been here before. The horrors, the horrors. Our
attempt to forge a "humanitarian" response. Our inability (yes, after Auschwitz!)
to comprehend how such horrors can take place. And as the horrors multiply,
it becomes even more incomprehensible why we should respond to any one
of them (since we have not responded to the others). Why this horror and
not another? Why Bosnia or Kosovo and not Kurdistan or Rwanda or Tibet?
Are we not saying that European lives, European suffering
are more valuable, more worth acting on to protect, than the lives of people
in the Middle East, Africa and Asia?
One answer to this commonly voiced objection to NATO's
war is to say boldly, Yes, to care about the fate of the people in Kosovo
is Eurocentric, and what's wrong with that? But is not the accusation of
Eurocentrism itself just one more vestige of European presumption, the
presumption of Europe's universalist mission: that every part of the globe
has a claim on Europe's attention?
If several African states had cared enough about the genocide
of the Tutsis in Rwanda (nearly a million people!) to intervene militarily,
say, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, would we have criticized this
initiative as being Afrocentric? Would we have asked what right these states
have to intervene in Rwanda when they have done nothing on behalf of the
Kurds or the Tibetans?
Another argument against intervening in Kosovo is that
the war is -- wonderful word -- illegal," because NATO is violating the
borders of a sovereign state. Kosovo is, after all, part of the new Greater
Serbia called Yugoslavia. Tough luck for the Kosovars that Milosevic revoked
their autonomous status in 1989. Inconvenient that 90 percent of Kosovars
are Albanians -- ethnic Albanians" as they are called, to distinguish them
from the citizens of Albania. Empires reconfigure. But are national borders,
which have been altered so many times in the last hundred years, really
to be the ultimate criterion? You can murder your wife in your own house,
but not outdoors on the street.
Imagine that Nazi Germany had had no expansionist ambitions
but had simply made it a policy in the late 1930's and early 1940's to
slaughter all the German Jews. Do we think a government has the right to
do whatever it wants on its own territory? Maybe the governments of Europe
would have said that 60 years ago. But would we approve now of their
decision?
Push the supposition into the present. What if the French
Government began slaughtering large numbers of Corsicans and driving the
rest out of Corsica ... or the Italian Government began emptying out Sicily
or Sardinia, creating a million refugees ... or Spain decided to apply
a final solution to its rebellious Basque population. Wouldn't we agree
that a consortium of powers on the continent had the right to use military
force to make the French (or Italian, or Spanish) Government reverse its
actions, which would probably mean overthrowing that Government?
But of course this couldn't happen, could it? Not in Europe.
My friends in Sarajevo used to say during the siege: How can "the West"
be letting this happen to us? This is Europe, too. We're Europeans. Surely
"they" won't allow it to go on.
But they -- Europe -- did.
For something truly terrible happened in Bosnia. From
the Serb death camps in the north of Bosnia in 1992, the first death camps
on European soil since the 1940's, to the mass executions of many thousands
of civilians at Srebrenica and elsewhere in the summer of 1995 -- Europe
tolerated that.
So, obviously, Bosnia wasn't Europe.
Those of us who spent time in Sarajevo used to say that,
as the 20th century began at Sarajevo, so will the 21st century begin at
Sarajevo. If the options before NATO all seem either improbable or unpalatable,
it is because NATO's actions come eight years too late. Milosevic should
have been stopped when he was shelling Dubrovnik in 1991.
Back in 1993 and 1994, American policy makers were saying
that even if there were no United States intervention in Bosnia, rest assured,
this would be the last thing that Milosevic would be allowed to get away
with. A line in the sand had been drawn: he would never be allowed to make
war on Kosovo. But who believed the Americans then? Not the Bosnians. Not
Milosevic. Not the Europeans. Not even the Americans themselves. After
Dayton, after the destruction of independent Bosnia, it was time to go
back to sleep, as if the series of events set in motion in 1989 with the
accession to power of Milosevic and the revocation of autonomous status
for the province of Kosovo, would not play out to its obvious logical end.
f Europe is having a hard
time thinking that it matters what happens in the southeastern corner of
Europe, imagine how hard it is for Americans to think it is in their interest.
It is not in America's interest to push this war on Europe. It is very
much not in Europe's interest to reward Milosevic for the destruction of
Yugoslavia and the creation of so much human suffering.
Why not just let the brush fire burn out? is the argument
of some. And the expulsion of a million or more refugees into the neighboring
countries of Albania and Macedonia? This will certainly bring on the destruction
of the fragile new state of Macedonia and the redrawing of the map of the
Balkans -- certain to be disputed by, at the very least, Serbia, Bulgaria
and Greece. Do we imagine this will happen peacefully?
Not surprisingly, the Serbs are presenting themselves
as the victims. (Clinton equals Hitler, etc.) But it is grotesque to equate
the casualties inflicted by the NATO bombing with the mayhem inflicted
on hundreds of thousands of people in the last eight years by the Serb
programs of ethnic cleansing.
Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars
are equally unjust.
No forceful response to the violence of a state against
peoples who are nominally its own citizens? (Which is what most "wars"
are today. Not wars between states.) The principal instances of mass violence
in the world today are those committed by governments within their own
legally recognized borders. Can we really say there is no response to this?
Is it acceptable that such slaughters be dismissed as civil wars, also
known as "age-old ethnic hatreds." (After all, anti-Semitism was an old
tradition in Europe; indeed, a good deal older than ancient Balkan hatreds.
Would this have justified letting Hitler kill all the Jews on German territory?)
Is it true that war never solved anything? (Ask a black American if he
or she thinks our Civil War didn't solve anything.)
ar is not simply a mistake,
a failure to communicate. There is radical evil in the world, which is
why there are just wars. And this is a just war. Even if it has been bungled.
Stop the genocide. Return all refugees to their homes.
Worthy goals. But how is any of this conceivably going to happen unless
the Milosevic regime is overthrown? (And the truth is, it's not
going to happen.)
Impossible to see how this war will play out. All the
options seem improbable, as well as undesirable. Unthinkable to keep bombing
indefinitely, if Milosevic is indeed willing to accept the destruction
of the Serbian economy; unthinkable for NATO to stop bombing, if Milosevic
remains intransigent.
The Milosevic Government has finally brought on Serbia
a small portion of the suffering it has inflicted on neighboring peoples.
War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for
a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be
as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize
that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia,
the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural
ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas,
one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon.
