THE WAR IN KOSOVO: What is a pacifist to do when confronted with the wholesale slaughter of civilians?
Douglass, James W.
James W. Douglass I n March 1994,1 stood in Republic Square in Bel grade in support of a courageous group of Serbian peacemakers, Women in Black. The women were holding their weekly vigil in...
...But even such limited spaces for peacemaking in Belgrade have now been politically demolished by our bombs...
...Kosovo's own massive nonviolent resistance to Milosevic was driven into political oblivion by the West even before our planes started bombing...
...The secretary general would begin to assemble a "nonviolent army" to be led by influential world figures such as (a) religious leaders including bishops delegated by the pope, Orthodox patriarchs, Islamic, and Jewish leaders...
...In the case of Kosovo, this nonviolent brigade would have been divided into two units...
...Veran Marie, leader of Radio B92, another dissident Belgrade group I visited in 1994, writes that the grassroots movement which struggled against Milosevic for years feels betrayed by the NATO bombs: "These people now feel compelled to take up arms and join their sons serving in the army...
...The Serbian and Kosovar nonviolent movements were threatening his power...
...b) Nobel Peace Prize winners, such as former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, the Dalai Lama, Mairead Corrigan Maguire of Northern Ireland, President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa...
...e) experienced activists trained in nonviolent tactics, such as veterans of the civil rights movement and Christian peacemaker teams that have worked in the West Bank and Haiti...
...Is the primary obstacle to nonviolent alternatives in Kosovo and elsewhere our own attitude that only violence can respond to violence...
...Dayton's lesson was that violence pays...
...Dressed in black for the victims of war, the Serbian women were regularly attacked by their fellow citizens...
...With bombs falling all around, nobody can persuade them—though some have tried—that this is only an attack on their government and not on their country...
...Stasha Zajovic, one of those Women in Black, sums up in a recent e-mail letter the plight of current Serb and Koso-var peacemakers: "This conspiracy of militarism—global and local—dangerously reduces our space...
...The KLA then provided a convenient military rationale for Milosevic's razing all of Kosovo...
...c) retired world leaders such as Jimmy Carter and Mikhail Gorbachev...
...How could the struggling peace movements of Serbia and Kosovo have been effectively supported by the West, rather than ignored, driven to violence, and now bombed into oblivion...
...The women were holding their weekly vigil in resistance to Slobodan Milosevic's policies of ethnic cleansing, then decimating Bosnia and Croatia and increasingly threatening Kosovo...
...Milosevic on the ground...
...d) diplomats from Russia and all the other European neighbors of Yugoslavia...
...The realistic assumption behind the Nashville proposal was that the power of a government is dependent on the support and cooperation of its people...
...Milosevic's hold on power was in fact shaky before the Dayton agreement and the NATO bombing...
...For most of the 1990s, the Albanian Kosovars waged a remarkable nonviolent struggle against Serbian oppression with strikes, marches, widespread noncooperation, and even their own parallel government, schools, and medical clinics...
...Yet every Wednesday afternoon they publicly stood their ground with smiles and banners...
...the other would have gone to Kosovo to interpose itself between Serbian forces and the KLA and to begin dialogue and mediation between them...
...For a while Milosevic seemed stymied by the Kosovar popular movement...
...Let us consider the following proposal for a nonviolent intervention in Kosovo, issued in late March by Nashville peace activists Karl Meyer, Pam Beziar, and Angela Schindler: • As the conflict began to develop, the United Nations Security Council would define the principles for UN intervention and a just settlement...
...It encouraged Milosevic to intensify the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, while spurring the rise of the Kosovo Liberation Army...
...James W. Douglass is the author of The Nonviolent Coming of God (Orbis...
...Soon there won't be this space...
...With the November 1995 Dayton accords, the United States made a deal with Milosevic on Bosnia that failed to secure autonomy for Kosovo, yet recognized Bosnian borders created by ethnic cleansing...
...With the horror the people of Kosovo are experiencing in this NATO intervention, they are paying a price even greater than before: NATO in the sky...
...But what alternative international response might there have been to the policies of Milosevic...
...But it Commonweal 1 7 June 18,1999 received little support from the Western governments and was demoralized by the Dayton peace agreement...
...Commonweal 1 8 June 18,1999...
...For that reason nonviolent resistance based on truth and supported by the world community can dislodge any unjust government's popular support...
...One would have gone to Serbia to engage in dialogue with all sectors of civil society...
...They then organized for peace the rest of the week out of an unidentified office that was often moved for security reasons...
Vol. 126 • June 1999 • No. 12
