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Charles Jaco has written opinion and commentary pieces for dozens of magazines and newspapers. Each week, read and comment on a fresh on-line version. The discussion page enables you to share your view points world wide. If you would like to make a comment go to the " Join the discussion" link below. If you would like to view past editorials visit the Editorial Archive.
Editorial: 4/4/99 AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS COLUMN, THE NAMES AND E-MAIL ADDRESSES OF SOME OF THE GROUPS HELPING BALKAN REFUGEES ARE LISTED. PLEASE VISIT THE SITES, DECIDE WHICH ONE SHOULD RECEIVE YOUR MONEY, AND DONATE. Maybe, I told myself later, the baby hadn't really died in my arms. Maybe he had actually died when the doctor took him from me. Maybe he was just almost dead as I held him. But I knew better. The Ethiopians fleeing the famine and civil war in Eritrea and Tigray provinces had walked, some of them for hundreds of miles across scorching desert, to get to this refugee camp. The boy I had in my arms should never have made the trip in the first place. He was, they told me, eight months old. He seemed no bigger than a baby sparrow. His tiny belly was disdended, hard as a ripe melon. I had to brush the flies away from his eyes, since he was too weak to blink. There was a soft rattle inside his impossibly small chest, and then even the shallow breathing stopped. The nurse gently took the body from me and closed the tissue paper-thin eyelids. She had seen more of them die in a week than she could count. "He is so light," she said to no one in particular. "How much does a soul weigh, I wonder? He is so tiny. Is there enough room for a soul inside?" Look in the eyes of the refugees spilling into Macedonia and Albania. I've seen that glazed, lost, helpless look dozens of times from the deserts of the Sudan to the jungle of Honduras to the iron-hard mountains between Iraq and Iran. Whether Eritreans or Kurds or Miskito Indians or Kosovars, they had all been through forced marches and murder and starvation and war. But even calling them "refugees" slaps on a convenient label. It makes these people abstract and antiseptic. They may be refugees to us, but they are still what they always have been--fathers and mothers, housewives and farmers, sons and daughters, fishermen and truck drivers, old people and small children. They have been given a choice: flee or be killed. The Serbian police at the borders seem to be having a grand old time. They take bottles of scarce infant formula or milk and smash them before a mother's eyes. They snatch money and jewelry and documents. They seize vehicles and luggage and then say "Now that we've taken all this contraband, you can leave." And behind them, they remember neighbors shot in the streets, villagers with their throats cut, men rounded up and taken out of their towns in trucks, never returning. U.S. intelligence analysts think spy planes and satellites have spotted dozens of suspected mass graves. The spy photos showed the same thing around the Bosnian city of Srebrenica four years ago. By the time U.N. monitors arrived, the mass graves had been emptied by the Serbs. How, they asked with a smile, can we be commiting genocide? Where are the bodies? All of this in Yugoslavia--the murder, the refugees, the bombing, the three G.I.'s taken prisoner--is the result of an American and European foreign policy designed for the benefit of major corporations. American national and strategic interests have been subordinated to increasing overseas market share for corporations like McDonalds and Boeing. The privatization of U.S. overseas interests kicked into high gear with Clinton's election. The mantra "It's the economy, stupid" was perfect for the post-Soviet yuppies running U.S. policy. Clinton stopped having daily national security briefings. Instead, he largely turned U.S. foreign policy over to Ron Brown and the Commerce Department. So it was global trade that was on the front burner, not national security concerns or, God forbid, actually doing the right thing. Then, we have the Republicans. Last week, I interviewed Illinois Senator Peter Fitzgerald, a freshman Republican. Fitzgerald, ironically enough, was elected by trouncing former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, whose idea of foreign policy was how much she could get from Nigeria's bloodthirsty dictatorship. I asked him if the G.O.P. majority's reluctance to support force in Yugoslavia made them the heirs to Congress's pre-World War Two isolationists. "Not at all," the senator replied. "Most Republicans are not isolationist at all. We believe strongly in global free trade." There you have it. Genocide? Who cares? Mass murder? How does that affect Coca-Cola's profits? A forceful foreign policy? That's bad for business. So we now have the appalling spectacle of a timid president who has never considered strategy beyond next month's poll results trying to formulate policy, while the Congressional right wing sits cawing like crows on a power line. Neither the Administration nor Congress has any idea as to what to do simply because they bought into the myth of the new, improved, global-trade-solves-everything post-Cold War world. But son of a gun if Slobodan Milosevic didn't forget to read the script. He thought, in his naive, unsophisticated way, that if the West was too flaccid to do anything about genocide in Bosnia, they probably wouldn't do much about Kosovo. So now all of our post-modern leaders find themselves in an old-fashioned situation. A tyrant is bent on murder and pillage on a grand scale. But in the corporate world that passes for foreign policy now, they're unable to find an old-fashioned answer--kick his butt. Instead, the Board of Directors (read: NATO) has to have unanimous consent from all 19 members to do anything. So they're dithering around in tiny half-steps. Let's not bomb too much, there might be political fallout. Let's not even talk about ground troops, the stockholders (read: voters) would never stand for it. Let's just send our men and women on the border out in undermanned patrols so they might be snatched. Maybe it's time for a grown-up--and here I nominate Senator John McCain--to remind them of some old truths. The only way to stop a tyrant is to stop him cold. There are some things more important than next quarter's balance sheet. And the biggest burden the United States might have to bear is not from a political risk from the bombing. It's the weight of all those souls either dead in the fields or wandering the roads. THE FOLLOWING WEB SITE CONTAINS A GUIDE TO ALMOST ALL OF THE RELIEF AGENCIES CURRENTLY WORKING WITH BALKAN REFUGEES: www.interaction.org. THESE ARE THE WEB SITES OF SOME OF THE RELIEF AGENCIES: AMERICAN RED CROSS--------www.redcross.org CARE----------------------www.care.org CATHOLIC RELIEF SERVICES--www.catholicrelief.org CHRISTIAN CHILDREN'S FUND-www.christianchildrensfund.org DOCTORS OF THE WORLD------www.doctorsoftheworld.org DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS --www.dwb.org INT'L. MEDICAL CORPS------www.imc-la.org INT'L. RESCUE COMMITTEE---www.intrescom.org MAP INT'L.----------------www.map.org MERCY CORPS INT'L.--------www.mercycorps.org WORLD VISION--------------www.worldvision.org |
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