Orthodox views
Garvey, John
JOHN GARVEY ORTHODOX VIEWS Religion & war in the Balkans t would be putting it mildly to say that I am less persuaded than the editors of Commonweal ("Stick to Your Guns," April 9) that...
...There are three religions in Albania...
...At the same time, the actions of the Serbs were planned, and have been astonishingly brutal...
...Interestingly, the anti-ecumenical strain in some Orthodox circles is not to be found in any of these countries, but has its greatest "A magisterial study...
...Serbs, many of whom have a bottomless capacity for self-pity and the adolescent feeling that no one understands them, remember that they were also victims of ethnic cleansing in the recent Balkan troubles, forced out of Croation territory with the complicity of the United States...
...Washington Post $19.95 at bookstores or order 1-800-822-6657...
...He writes with great empathy of those transcendent moments that slice through the humdrum of everyday life, infusing it with drama, intensity and meaning...
...I gave them a couple of addresses, and when I said that aid agencies had suggested that sending them money would be more helpful than sending them materials, which can be obtained more easily and less expensively in Europe, the family asked for the names and addresses of the agencies, so that they could send checks...
...It is misleading...
...And compassion in this country as well: One Jewish family on Long Island called me...
...ered in the Andes—victims of ritual and then I thought again...
...The last more-or-less decent census showed 70 percent of the people coming from Islamic backgrounds—an Ottoman legacy—with 20 percent identified as Orthodox, and 10 percent as Catholic...
...Albanians, Lebanese, and Indians (to take three countries where Orthodox minorities make up important parts of the population) are, in an interesting way, closer to America in not identifying religion with ethnicity...
...If there is any light at all in this dark time it is to be found in the outpouring of compassion—compassion from Albanians, people who have almost nothing themselves, who have gone to refugee camps offering to take people into their homes...
...Some KLA partisans wanted Kosovo ethnically cleansed of Serbs, and NATO has now become their air force...
...Now we are doing something...
...We had to do something...
...Archbishop Anastasios, the head of the Orthodox Church of Albania, has asked for aid in helping the refugees who have poured over the border from Kosovo...
...We have no clue at all as to how the Balkans will look at the end of what promises to be a very long engagement...
...Clinton and Milosevic will no doubt die in their beds...
...There have been many similar calls to all of our churches, and no doubt to Albanian Catholic churches, and to mosques...
...New Yorker Visionaries Tie Spanish Republic in the Reign of Christ William A. Christian Jr...
...University of California Press www.ucpress.edu Commonweal W May 7,1999 strength in those where Orthodoxy and nationhood are entangled...
...When well-preserved to bring about a desired end—I thought Incan mummies were recently recov- first of how strange that society was...
...So little real planning or understanding of the tangle that is Balkan politics was involved in this effort, and we broadcast in advance the fact that we would not put in ground troops—an invitation to the Serbian army and police (the greater threat to Kosovars) to do their worst...
...A Lebanese might be Muslim, Druze, Maronite Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, or Orthodox...
...Still, granting this, it could be said that we have learned the error of our ways...
...The majority of the people in our congregation certainly backed the bombing, feeling, like many Americans, that something had to be done...
...Serbs who are willing to overlook, defend, or regard as tragically inevitable, the use of rape and the murder of families...
...The church is already at work, but its resources are stretched to the limit...
...The church I serve is in the Albanian Archdiocese of the Orthodox Church in America...
...In recent years we have seen an influx of immigrants from Albania...
...I've been asked by many people where the sympathies of Orthodox Albanians lie in this struggle, given the support for Serbia among Orthodox Greeks and Russians...
...Collections to help Archbishop Anastasios in his efforts are being taken up in the parishes of the Orthodox Church in America...
...JOHN GARVEY ORTHODOX VIEWS Religion & war in the Balkans t would be putting it mildly to say that I am less persuaded than the editors of Commonweal ("Stick to Your Guns," April 9) that our current bombing campaign against Serbia was a good idea...
...and Americans and Europeans who speak, as people die by the thousands, of the need to make NATO threats seem credible...
...Although only the Clinton administration seems surprised that bombing made things worse, the horrible efficiency of an obviously planned evil is surprising, and it is easy to see why many people have a visceral support of the bombing...
...We call the brutal actions of Slobodan Milosevic a genocide, which, terrible as it is, it is not...
...A president with no sense of foreign policy suddenly leads us into the beginnings of a situation not unlike Vietnam, where we also had the arrogance to think that our enemies, cowards all, could be punished into submission, which we ourselves, of course, never could be...
...It is also found among some American converts to Orthodoxy, who often tend to define Orthodoxy as the refuge from the churches they have fled...
...In the south of India, the Malankarese Orthodox are an important Christian minority...
...Orthodox Albanians tend to be from the southern part of the country, and ordinarily do not have relatives in the predominantly Muslim north and Kosova (as Albanians call the province...
...The media have presented an image of a kind of Orthodox ethnic lock step...
...Quite apart from the obvious imperative found in Matthew 25, it is important for Muslims who have suffered at the hands of people who consider themselves Orthodox Christians to find help and consolation from other Orthodox Christians, who refuse to see them as anything other than suffering brothers and sisters...
...They had rushed out to buy tents and blankets and phoned to ask where they should send them...
...Not that much murders committed, as all of them are, has changed...
...I am not alone in suspecting that race and a feeling that Europe matters more than Africa had something to do with this...
...Well, we were quite capable of doing nothing in Rwanda, when a real genocide was going on, and the United States made sure that the UN did nothing when it might have prevented those murders...
...We should indeed have done something: But was bombing, after proposing unacceptable terms to the Serbs, the only or the best thing we could have done...
...While the traditionally Orthodox countries of Russia and Greece and Serbia identify being Greek or Russian or Serbian with being Orthodox, this is by no means a universal Orthodox reality...
...Understandably, they find Bill Clinton unpersuasive as a moralist on this subject, and this adds to their historical sense of being perpetually aggrieved, and to their steady denial of the magnitude of the horrors their countrymen are committing...
...At the same time, there are Albanians volunteering to help the Kosova Liberation Army...
...One complicating fact is that some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army in fact want a greater Albania, including not only Albania but parts of Montenegro and Macedonia, something unacceptable to anyone in the rest of Europe...
Vol. 126 • May 1999 • No. 9
