[kcc-news] U.N. OPENS KOSOVO TO ANTI-FAMILY ZEALOTS

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U.N. OPENS KOSOVO TO ANTI-FAMILY ZEALOTS
By ROD DREHER
8/22/99

http://www.nypost.com/082299/commentary/1565.htm

NOW that NATO troops have ended ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, there's reason
to fear that the United Nations Population Fund will do what the Serbs
failed to: pacify the region by reducing the Albanian population.

So say Catholic human-rights activists, who worry that UNFPA's activities in
Kosovo dovetail ominously with Slobodan Milosevic's longstanding
determination to slash the ethnic-Albanian birth rate, which is far higher
than that of Serbs.

Last summer, Milosevic's minister for family affairs, Rada Trajkovic,
denounced the "demographic bomb" ticking in Kosovo. Using language worthy of
Nazi eugenicists, she called Albanian women "child-bearing machines."

She also claimed the high child-bearing numbers were the result of an
oppressive ethnic patriarchy - all the more reason for Slobbo, that noted
feminist and humanitarian, to call in right-minded progressives to save
Albanian maidens from brutish husbands.

UNFPA confirms that months later, Milosevic invited the agency into Kosovo -
and, tellingly, nowhere else in Serbia - to assess the situation.

Full-scale ethnic cleansing erupted before a report could be filed.

Today, with Kosovo administered by the United Nations, population-control
operatives are there running programs to ensure that, in the words of UNFPA
spokesman Alex Marshall, "women get decent basic reproductive health care."

To Austin Ruse, that's a euphemism for pushing a secular Western
"contraceptive mentality" - including acceptance of abortion, the
abortifacient "morning-after pill," birth-control tablets, condoms and the
like - upon an uninterested Muslim population.

Ruse, the director of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute, a U.N.
lobbying organization, recently returned from a tour of refugee camps in
Albania.

Ruse discovered that not only were the Kosovar women strong and confident -
hardly weak sisters needing rescue - but that they delight in motherhood.

"An American nurse in one camp told me that telling a Kosovar woman she's
pregnant is like making her whole world," Ruse says.

The concerns of Ruse and others are "garbage" to UNFPA's Marshall, who
claims his agency merely offers Kosovars "the kinds of services that women
in New York City would be outraged if they couldn't get."

Marshall maintains that if legitimate authority asks UNFPA to leave, the
group will. But for now, Slobbo technically still runs the place. That UNFPA
justifies its presence by claiming a Milosevic mandate should give Kosovar
Albanians sufficient reason to resist Belgrade's pill-pushing emissaries.

For the time being, nobody is forcing Albanian women to contracept or abort,
so what's the big deal?

Population Research Institute director Steven Mosher, the man who first
exposed China's forced abortion policy, says that's not the way
authoritarian regimes do population control. In countries like Serbia, he
says, "the state often runs roughshod over the rights of people, especially
poor people."

In Peru, for example, a PRI investigator found evidence - later presented to
Congress - that government agents denied food aid to illiterate campesinas
unless the women agreed to sterilization.

The same thing could easily happen with U.N. approval in a Milosevic-run
Kosovo, Mosher warns - and even in an independent Albanian-run state
desperate for Western financial aid. The World Bank often ties development
loans to the willingness of governments to implement population-control
schemes.

It's wonderful that the United Nations protects ethnic Albanians from
Milosevic. But who will protect these peasants from U.N.-backed
population-control zealots who evangelize for the same materialistic,
anti-child creed that has resulted in Europe's looming underpopulation
crisis?

Westerners have forgotten that large families are a blessing, not a curse.

The Kosovars, poor and unsophisticated, have not. Their strength and their
hope lies in their families, and not even the Butcher of Belgrade could take
that away from them. So why must we?


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