I was a crew chief on Blackhawks, in an air assault company. Our job was to fly the infantry troops around and put them where they needed to be. A lot of the time, we would fly through the hills north of [Camp] Bondsteel. When we went that way, we usually flew over a mass grave. One morning, Serb gunmen showed up in a little Albanian village in the hills. They drove everyone out of their homes, forced them to dig their own graves, and then murdered them. Men, women and children. Fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, grandparents.
There was a little memorial with flowers.
Whenever someone starts talking about maybe voting is useless and perhaps other means are necessary to take back our country, I think of Kosovo. That EXACT rhetoric was part and parcel with the disintegration of the Balkans. The rhetoric I see people casually bandying about, we need to confront them everywhere and they deserve no peace, this is the rhetoric and the justification the Serbs used on their way to killing a quarter of a million people in the Balkans. Their former neighbors; often literally.
It’s worth considering whether all those who killed people in Kosovo started with killing in mind, or were they merely trying to right the wrongs that the other side had perpetrated against them? Civilization is a millimeters thin veneer on top an ocean of violence a billion years of evolution deep. If you think it’s acceptable to use violence for political gain, or if you fantasize for revolution, you’re a monster.
Revolution is not what you think it is. Revolution is civil war. Civil war is driving your neighbors from their homes and forcing them to dig their own graves. It is leaving your grandmother behind because she cannot move fast enough to escape the gunmen; and they won’t stop. Yes, there are monsters in places of power, but you are not absolved of your obligations to humanity because of it. That others have foresworn theirs is no excuse. You fetishize misery you cannot fathom. You are in good company, we are all monsters in civilized clothes; do not be insulted or ashamed.
Endeavor to be more.
Again.
Please.
John Chmelir (@JohnChmelir), Twitter (part of a 20-tweet thread), 2018-10-20.
April 4, 2021
QotD: Revolution and civil war
February 10, 2015
The cautionary tale of the Kosovo intervention
Michael Brendan Dougherty looks back at the UN’s intervention in Kosovo and the situation in Kosovo after more than a decade and a half:
It’s been almost 16 years since a NATO coalition banded together to defeat Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević in Kosovo. Ever since, it has been exhibit A in the case for “humanitarian intervention.” A swift short war, a thug removed from power, a series of oppressions redressed. After the hostilities ceased, Kosovo’s government was overseen by the United Nations, and declared full independence from Serbia in 2008.
In the meantime, the U.N. bungled possibly the easiest show-trial in world history, letting Milošević score a lot of points from the stand as the trial dragged on longer than it took F.D.R. to declare war on Germany, mobilize a few million men, and beat Hitler. Milošević died of a heart attack in prison before his trial finished. NATO troops are in Kosovo, a decade and a half after the “short” 78-day campaign.
What’s the political scene like in liberated Kosovo? Well, here’s a story. Last week Aleksandar Jablanovic, an ethnic Serb who served in the cabinet as minister of communities, was sacked by Prime Minister Isa Mustafa, in order to appease ethnic Albanians who were planning riotous protests against him. Kosovars threw rocks at government buildings. About 170 people were injured in the clash between protesters and police.
What did Jablanovic do to cause the unrest? He had described a group of Albanians as “savages” in January. Why? Because they had blocked (with the threat of violence) the route of Serbian Christians making a traditional pilgrimage to a monastery in Western Kosovo.
Sounds unpleasant, right? It gets worse. Unemployment in Kosovo is around 45 percent. (That’s not a typo.) The electricity is very unreliable, and Kosovars often don’t pay their electricity bills to the state. The government is considering canceling all debts that citizens owe to the government, to rebuild trust (and popularity) and start putting services on a firmer footing. About a third of Kosovars live on less than $2 a day.
[…]
But there’s also no doubt that Kosovo should serve as a permanent warning against the idea that humanitarian interventions are easy. The bombing was a perfect example of the moral hazard involved in “Responsibility to Protect” interventions. The roar of NATO jets so raised the stakes for Serbian forces and for Milošević, that Serbians killed five times as many people after the intervention became a fait accompli than they had before that time, under the theory that rubble makes less trouble.
