wfn.org | The View From Kukes

[PCUSA NEWS <pcusa.news@ecunet.org>]

26-April-1999 
99167 
 
    The View From Kukes 
 
    by Duncan Hanson 
    PC(USA) Coordinator for Europe 
 
Editor's note: These reflections were written by Duncan Hanson shortly 
after he returned from a recent mission to Albania to assess the situation 
there and visit with Presbyterian missionaries in the region. - Jerry L. 
Van Marter 
 
KUKES, Albania-How could it happen in Europe?  And how could it happen in 
Europe at the end of the twentieth century?  And how could it happen that 
Europe did not see what was occurring and intervene sooner?   And, most 
importantly, what can be done now, to stop even more killing? 
 
    These are the questions that occupied the thoughts of my companions and 
I as we sought to make sense of what we saw around us in Kukes, the small 
town on the Albania-Kosovo border that has become the first safe haven for 
refugees fleeing from Kosovo. To us, as to everyone else we met, whether 
refugee, relief worker or reporter, it was no longer a question of whether 
genocide was happening but how genocide might be stopped. 
 
    The stories would have been monotonous in their similarity if they had 
not been so horrible in their content.  The Serbian police knocked on the 
door of a young Kosovar woman as she was nursing her baby.  "You need to 
leave now," they said.  "Let me pack my bag," she said.  "No, leave now," 
was the reply.  Down the hall she heard gunshots and was told that her 
neighbor had been killed for not moving more quickly.  When I met this 
woman at Kukes, she had not eaten for five days. 
 
    Several other women came from the same village.  The police had come to 
their doors and said that all Kosovars had to gather before the village 
school.  Quickly the police separated the men from the women and the 
children.   Then, while the women and children watched, the men were shot. 
The soldiers said, "Now it's time for you to leave."  They begged for time 
to bury their husbands and fathers and sons.  "No," the police replied, 
"leave now, or we'll shoot you too."  So they started walking. 
 
    Eighteen hours later they arrived at the border and told their story to 
an Englishman, John Campbell, who works for the United Nations High 
Commission for Refugees.  He telephoned the War Crimes Tribunal for the 
Former Yugoslavia in the Hague and reported what these women had told him 
along with their names, since they now were not only mourners but also 
potential witnesses for the War Crimes Tribunal. 
 
    So it happened over and over again.  Almost shyly someone would come up 
to me and begin to tell her story.  Soon many others would gather around. 
There was no reticence to talk.  Each one wanted to say what had happened 
to her husband, her son, her father or herself.  I saw few tears, perhaps 
because most of those I talked with were too weak to cry, not having eaten 
for days, or maybe because they were too weak to cry, having had to sleep 
on freezing mountain hillsides without adequate clothing.  Or perhaps they 
were just numb from what had happened.  Even so, hungry, cold or numb, they 
wanted to tell what had happened to them. 
 
    I knew the question would seem preposterous to those I asked, but I 
wanted to ask anyway, to be able to report the answer later.  Did you leave 
because of the bombing?  "The bombing?" they said.  No one I spoke with had 
even seen any bombing.  They had heard airplanes overhead.  Some had seen 
fires they understood had been caused by bombing.  The idea that they had 
left because of the bombing was ludicrous to the refugees with whom I 
spoke. 
 
    "You want to know why I left?," said one woman who appeared to be in 
her early twenties, "I left because my husband was murdered."   An older 
woman, who looked very tired, said, "we left because the police came to our 
door and told us we had to."  A teenage girl said, "we left because all the 
inhabitants of the next village were killed." 
 
    A young man, one of the relatively few adult men at Kukes, said, "I 
left because I saw the police coming to my house and I ran out the back 
door before they could find me."  Another young man said, "I left because 
when I came home from a friend's house, my house had been burned." 
 
    In spite of all the stories we had heard of men being shot singly in 
their apartments, or in groups in public places, or burned in school houses 
or blown up in cars, we were even more struck by the number of women who 
did not know the fate of their men. Where were these men? 
 
    When we were in Kukes there were perhaps 170,000 people there -- 
perhaps 80% of the adults were women.  Any way you calculate, there are a 
great many missing men.  Some of these men have, no doubt, joined the KLA, 
the Kosovo Liberation Army.  Yet if all the missing husbands, fathers, 
brothers and sons that belonged to the women we saw in Kukes had joined the 
KLA, it would certainly be one of the largest armies in Europe. 
 
 If the Serbs were housing and feeding many tens of thousands of men as 
prisoners, it would be hard to keep it secret.  More likely, we concluded, 
the missing men are dead.  Indeed, a few days after we left Kukes, NATO 
satellite intelligence analysts reported they had made out in pictures 
taken over Kosovo the first indications of mass graves. 
 
    I believe that the Serb people as a whole simply do not understand what 
is happening in their name.  They have been told that there are terrorists 
operating in Kosovo, which seems credible, particularly since for years 
they (like all of us) have been reading newspaper accounts of terrorists 
all over the world.  They know that their police and soldiers have been 
trying to capture the terrorists and that sometimes some terrorists, not to 
mention police or soldiers, have been killed in the process.  They do not 
consider that killing a terrorist in a police action is a war crime any 
more than the average citizen of the United States believes that his 
government is committing a war crime when it bombs a suspected terrorist 
camp in Sudan or Afghanistan. 
 
    Clearly, Serbs have been influenced by the ferocity with which NATO 
countries and particularly the United States have gone after putative 
international criminals.  If the United States, which in some ways defines 
for Serbs what a democratic nation should be, would be so harsh in treating 
those it regards as terrorists, why should the Serbs not do likewise with 
their own terrorists in Kosovo? 
 
    There is, of course, a crucial distinction between targeting terrorists 
and killing, for instance, all the men in a medium-size village.  Even so, 
the willingness of the United States and NATO to use force, even when doing 
so sometimes puts civilian populations at risk, probably contributes 
subliminally to the willingness of Serbs to tolerate what they view as 
civilian casualties in their government's campaign against terrorism in 
Kosovo. 
 
    It is only partly enough to say that these Serbs consider that they are 
fighting terrorism.  Nor is it enough to say they view Kosovo as part of 
the Serb homeland and that they see the Kosovars as interlopers in it. 
Perhaps part of the explanation lies also in the negative beliefs about 
Kosovars that many Serbs learn so early in life that when they grow up the 
veracity of these beliefs seems self evident. 
 
    I remember, as far back as 1965 or 1970, traveling in what was then 
Yugoslavia and hearing young Serbs tell about how profoundly lazy and 
disloyal the Kosovars were.  Even then, I was struck by the passion with 
which these beliefs were expressed, all the more since most of us in the 
West then regarded Yugoslavia as a model of a successful multiethnic state. 
Of course, Serbia is not the only country in which the prejudices of adults 
are inculcated in the children. 
 
    Does the church in Serbia bear some responsibility for the genocide of 
the Kosovars?  The willingness of both the Roman Catholic and Protestant 
churches in the United States, including the churches from which the 
Presbyterian Church (USA) traces its decent, to accommodate themselves to 
slavery and segregation shows that it is empirically untrue that the church 
is somehow supernaturally protected from serious moral error. 
 
    In fairness, it must be said that Patriarch Pavle and Bishop Artemije 
of the Serbian Orthodox Church have long been critics of Milosevic and that 
many Serbian Orthodox clergy and laity oppose his policies in Kosovo. 
Still, on balance, the Serbian Orthodox Church in Serbia has probably not 
done enough to challenge the prejudices of many Serbs toward their Muslim 
neighbors in Kosovo and Bosnia.  Indeed, even after the killings at 
Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs in 1995, only a few church leaders were willing 
to acknowledge that the killings had even happened, let alone speak out 
against them. 
 
    The Serb people can be held responsible for tolerating one of Europe's 
last dictatorships, ten years after most of the rest of them have 
disappeared.  They have been willing to live in a society in which, for 
practical purposes, all politically significant news is either censored or 
manipulated.  For that too, the Serb people are also ultimately 
responsible. 
 
    It is hard to imagine that the killing in Kosovo could go on if the 
news media in Serbia were not so completely controlled.  But they can only 
be held responsible for the genocide of the Kosovars if they knew that 
genocide was happening and then did nothing to resist it. 

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