THE WAR IN KOSOVO: What is a pacifist to do when confronted with the wholesale slaughter of civilians?
Egan, Eileen
THE WAR IN KOSOVO Pacifism & ethnic cleansing Eileen Egan T he long line of the newly homeless, the men, women, and children brutally thrust from their homes in Kosovo, Yugoslavia, face us in...
...In the Sermon on the Mount we find the core of Jesus' teaching and the basis for a pacifist perspective on war...
...It was Day who stayed with the words of Jesus, above all in the Sermon on the Mount, and led us from the teachings of Cicero to the teachings that came from the lips of the Messiah...
...One bomb strayed over the border into Bulgaria, another struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade...
...The sufferings and uncounted deaths of the expellees were given minimal attention in the press...
...My response to a personal attack, or to a call for participation at any stage of the social or-ganization known as war, would be the same: gospel nonviolence...
...A leading pacifist of our century, Dorothy Day, asserted the power of the spirit of Jesus at the opening of World War II...
...Jesus' legacy to his followers is the Table of the Lord where they can partake of his body and blood, thus becoming one with the Lord and closer to each other than to their own mothers...
...Are not nations justified in employing military means in a moral response to the evil of unchecked ethnic cleansing...
...How could the followers of Jesus partake of his body and blood and then proceed to destroy the bodies and shed the blood of any of God's children...
...This time a remedy was at hand to stop the depredations of the Serb armies...
...The former secretary of the U.S...
...Errant bombs and missiles terrified the inhabitants of Kosovo as they landed on homes, markets, bridges, a hospital, and refugee convoys...
...The holy places of the Serbs, and the place from which they take their identity, are in Kosovo...
...Their fate had been decided, along with the redrawing of borders, at the Yalta Conference...
...In order to keep mercy before our eyes, Jesus told us he is the hungry one, the thirsty one, the shelterless one, the one who is suffering, the one in captivity...
...To many it denotes passivity, a refusal to struggle for God's kingdom and his justice along with the generality of citizens, in wartime, for example...
...Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount," she announced in the Catholic Worker...
...THE WAR IN KOSOVO Pacifism & ethnic cleansing Eileen Egan T he long line of the newly homeless, the men, women, and children brutally thrust from their homes in Kosovo, Yugoslavia, face us in the press and fill television screens...
...More and more Catholics in the nuclear age are proclaiming themselves pacifists...
...To her, many of us owe our persistence in pacifism, our insistence that pacifism was a tenable position for the Catholic, long before it was accepted by church authorities...
...The gospel of Jesus is often lost in the adulation of the nation and its power...
...Yet the weapons of the spirit are all that the pacifist has...
...Following sessions which were presumed to be negotiations, the NATO alliance decided to launch its first war...
...What was problematic in the just-war tradition, which the church taught for fifteen hundred years following the nonviolent teaching of the first few hundred years of the church's existence, is that, regrettably, it was captured by the nations, as every war was declared just by the warring party, which was then empowered to draft its people to maim and kill in good conscience...
...They were herded into a destroyed and truncated West Germany...
...To live by pacifism, we try to love our neighbors, near and far, friendly or unfriendly, as persons for whom a Person died...
...My refusal to accept the response of violence arises from my conviction, that of a pacifist, and by the grace of God, a Catholic pacifist...
...We will continue our pacifist stand...
...What vision brings me to a rejection of NATO air strikes to remedy the Kosovo crisis, and in fact, to the rejection of violence in Vietnam, the Gulf War, Grenada, and Panama...
...Catholic Conference's Department of Social DevelopCommonweal 1 5 June 18,1999 merit and World Peace, J. Bryan Hehir, pointed out that after John XXIII, Catholic teaching on peace has been in a state of movement...
...They tell of rapes, executions, and massacres by the soldiers...
...The honor due God was wrongly given to the nation...
...soldiers in uniform must obey orders to maim and kill the enemy, to destroy his home, to prevent food from reaching him...
...In my vision, pacifism consists of the daily acceptance of the struggle for God's kingdom and his justice by nonviolent means...
...The answer, which may seem heartless, but which I give from the bottom of my conscience, is "No...
...Harrowing scenes fasten on the heart, the agony of a weary old woman being trundled in a wheelbarrow or that of a young woman giving her breast to her baby while continuing the march...
...Paul reminds us that as followers of Jesus we become "new creatures," putting aside the concerns and desires of the "old creature...
...In the Beatitudes we are told that the merciful are blessed and will themselves be shown mercy...
...Modern warfare, in contradistinction to earlier wars which interrupted the performance of the works of mercy, now reverses them, a betrayal of the relationship between human beings that was taught by Jesus...
...We would place among the marks of the old creature an undue love and attachment to tribe and nation...
...On March 24, with Americans flying most of the aircraft and firing most of the missiles, air strikes began against Yugoslavia...
...Each one is a sacrosanct being, imaging in a unique way the Creator...
...Many American citizens, as well as the citizens of such nations as England, Germany, and France, asked the question: Do not justice and a common humanity call for support of so just a cause...
...For the Catholic pacifist, the ultimate basis for refusing to participate in violence against human beings is the Eucharist...
...As a member of a voluntary agency, Catholic Relief Services, I was present in West Germany in those years, and I heard accounts of the horrors inflicted on these people, and the immeasurable sufferings they endured...
...The compassion of millions around the world has been aroused by seeing at first hand what some human beings are forced to undergo when torn from their homes...
...Now almost 1 million refugees are begging for entry into the poor places of Europe—Albania and Macedonia...
...I am aware that the term pacifist is poorly accepted (and poorly understood) among Catholics...
...My mind travels back to an earlier ethnic cleansing...
...The inacurracy of air and missile strikes soon became news...
...Such weapons of the spirit as prayer, fasting, and peaceful resistance are puny things indeed in contrast to the strength and might of armies...
...Eileen Egan's most recent book is Peace Be with You: Justified War or the Way of Nonviolence (Orbis...
...Day reminded us that it was the just-war concepts of a great Roman, Cicero, that helped Saints Ambrose and Augustine fashion their conditions for just war...
...Jesus is the suffering enemy in every war...
...First of all, the undergirding of my vision is seeing every human person, enemy or friend, as a child of God, a repository of the divine...
...The Serbs, fiercely loyal to the Orthodox church, see in their Muslim neighbors a reminder of the Serb defeat by Muslim armies six hundred years ago and their long travail in subjection to the Ottoman Empire...
...I refer to the mass expulsion from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II more than 12 million people of German ethnic origin...
...War is about mercilessness...
...The Second Vatican Council was a prime source of this movement, particularly by validating conscientious objection to military service and the witness of nonviolence...
...The situation of the uprooted in 1999 is mightily different...
...Dorothy Day went to the Table of the Lord daily...
...An answering agony springs up in the viewer...
...On the pragmatic level, the air strikes initially increased the number of Kosovars made shelterless by army actions...
...The principal development," he asserted, "has been the legitimization of a pacifist perspective as a method for evaluating modern warfare...
...We know that it is by his blood that we have been redeemed "from every tribe or tongue, from every nation and people...
...The ethnic Albanians, almost all Muslims, are being systematically expelled from Kosovo in an ethnic cleansing devised by the regime of Slobodan Milosevic and carried out by the army of Serbia...
...When Jesus commanded us to love one another as he has loved us, he was calling for an imitation of his sacrificial, redeeming love...
Vol. 126 • June 1999 • No. 12
