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Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 19:26:03 -0400
To: kan-l at alb-net.com
From: Teresa Crawford <tmcrawfo at mailbox.syr.edu>
Subject: [kan-l] PEACE KAN-MOBILIZE!!
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**** Kosova Action Network Discussion List ****
********************Action Appeal***April 30, 1999***********


For those of us watching the agony of the suffering in Kosova--the worst of 
the suffering we cannot watch as it is happening in silence, without 
witnesses, in remote villages, in apartments, in mountain valleys and 
gorges--we must acknowledge that a new model of peacework is needed. And it 
is needed immediately. 

No national army has the legal right to kill one segment of its population, 
and if this occurs, the international community then does not have the legal 
right to force this ethnic community to remain within that same nation-state. 
The equivalent action by Milosevic's army against the Albanians in an effort 
to solve "the Albanian problem," would be if the U.S. Army set out to 
systematically erase the presence of all blacks in the United States. Or 
Hitler's army set out to erase all Jews. Or Hussein's army sought to recreate 
and restore ancient Persia by eradicating Kurds.

Unfortunately, we, the peace community, have failed in the former 
Yugoslavia--just as surely as the military has. So let us acknowledge it. 
Loudly. For ten years, every conflict resolution model in the book has been 
tried and re-tried. Frankly, local former Yugoslav citizens gag at the site 
of another troop of do-gooders approaching them with handbooks on how to 
solve conflicts, usually civil rights conflicts. But that isn't the problem 
here.

 There have been no civil rights in Kosova for ten years. There have been no 
human rights. Kosovars do not even have the right to exist nor the documents 
to prove they ever existed.There is no traditional conflict here. There is no 
balance of power. There is only the brutal use of force to terrorize and 
destroy an entire population within perhaps two months. While we watch.

Meanwhile NATO is fighting a war run by committee. A cautious war that they 
claim is just. Milosevic must be stopped. That is true. The time has come. 
Does that mean we must let him take 2,00,000 Albanians down with him, while 
Serbs stand at rock concerts claiming to be innocent victims of this whole 
mess?

We in the peace community have several huge tasks to confront--and fast. In 
the information age, cirucmstances change overnight. Milosevic knows that 
even if NATO doesn't.

1. We must force the Serb people to acknowledge their complicity in the 
repression and brutality being waged in Kosova. How should we accomplish that?

2. We must discipline ourselves and give up the comfort of email statements 
of outrage sent back and forth. Only 1% of the world population has email. 
After its primary use in dispersing information widely and quickly, there 
must be action.

3. We must move on from the 1960's model of peacework, which was based on 
loss or abuse of civil rights. That model does not work for genocide at all. 
The insistence on its appropriateness at this time is patronizing and further 
degrades the true suffering of the Albanians. 

4. We must focus on the immediate goal that we all share: to help both the 
Kosovar refugees and more to the point, to help feed and provide justice for 
the hundreds of thousands still inside Kosova. Estimates state that there are 
still two thirds of the 1.2 million Albanians trapped inside Kosova. Like the 
population of the death camps in World War II, for that is what Kosova has 
become in the past four weeks, we watch helplessly while the systematic abuse 
and massacre of these people goes on. Too afraid to use the armed forces of 
19 nations, even to drop food and medical supplies, the young and the old of 
Kosova are probably already dying of starvation.

To confront genocide as it occurs is not easy. When Greenpeace wants to save 
a whale from extinction, its members go out in motorized rafts and place 
themselves between the whale and the boat. When there is no time, this model 
works. Both Hussein and Milosevic know the power of human shields in 
brutalizing the innocent. What prevents us from using that same model to save 
human life?

The world peace community is large, educated, and relatively wealthy. We need 
to mobilize. Truly mobilize--not to stand in front of a college 
administration building or the White House, but to go to the region. By the 
thousands. Why not?

If  our army is afraid to enter Kosova for relief purposes, if joining the 
KLA is not the right commitment, if the Red Cross has rejected you as a 
volunteer who will simply be in the way, then the peace community needs to 
become a chain of human kindness.

We must intervene at once.

There are ways to get into Kosova. There are ways to overcome all the 
objections and obstacles blocking this path. But there is not much time.

Alice Mead
Kosova Action Network--coordinator
alooscnon at aol.com

*****************************************************************






contact information:
teresa at advocacynet.org
(315) 471-7790 voice mail
Syracuse, NY 13210

http://www.advocacynet.org






------------------------------------
Submitted by: Teresa Crawford <tmcrawfo at mailbox.syr.edu>