What is a "Serb" ?

[Mjellma]

Had Christ been teaching in the park somewhere in America today, it is likely that one question he would have been asked would be: "Who is my enemy?" rather than "Who is my neighbor?"

The wave of nationalism that swept my country after September 11, 2001, began as a beautiful thing: candlelight vigils, enthusiastic and spontaneous choruses of "God Bless America," and a real sense of identity--an appreciation for what being "an American" meant, not only to residents and citizens of my country, but for individuals around the world who were shocked and outraged and insulted along with us.

It wasn't so long ago that Tony Blair's words, "We are all Americans now," were echoed by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in the streets of Europe and Asia, as well as here in the United States.

How long ago that seems, doesn't it? Sadly, that wave of nationalism became perverted by the leaders of my country, who dusted off their post-Cold-War agendas for a New World Order, and prepared an Enemies List, harnessing a force that had once seemed poised to perform so much good. Nowadays, I am told that if I don't agree with these leaders, I must "hate America." Nowadays hundreds of thousands, if not millions, march in the streets of Europe, Asia and the United States stating almost the opposite of Blair's September 2001 remarks.

And we are reminded--at least here in America--on airwaves carrying unfiltered propaganda, just who are enemies are. The problems in Palestine, they say, are the fault of just one man, Yassir Arafat. He is the barrier to peace. Or they blame the problems on one man in Iraq. The words are dictated to us: "These are your enemies!"
Stubbornly, I resist the dictators of these exhortations by asking questions. Who are my enemies? What should I do to them? I ask these questions to God. I ask them to the newspapers, magazines, books and Internet sites that I scan to search for answers. I ask them to my refugee clients, who know all too well of the costs of war. They know that the men who are singled out by the propagandists, are seldom the ones sacrificed to the Dogs of War.
"These [targeted] men never pay the price for their actions," said Fadumo, widowed by the civil war in Somalia in 1991. "It is always the people who suffer." Her husband murdered and with herself and her two daughters vulnerable to madmen first in Somalia then in the refugee camps of Kenya, she had paid $4000 to be smuggled with them to America, where she had received asylum. A son remains in Kenya, awaiting reunification.
She was right, though. For every Mohamed Farah Aidid--the Somali warlord who had humiliated American forces in 1993, yet had died in agony eight days after being wounded in a 1996 ambush--there was a Pol Pot, a Stalin, or a Mao who died peacefully in their sleep.

Recently I got the chance to finally learn some answers about a war with which I was all too familiar. Last Wednesday night, I was invited to eat supper with a Kosovar Albanian family in Nashville. It was a chance to practice speaking Albanian--and I never pass up an opportunity for Albanian food.
The food was great: white-bean soup with onions and hot sauce, Mediterranean salad, and of course buke--rich, delicious Albanian bread. My friend Feride's mood had been dampened somewhat by news from Kosova. The international peace-keeping force, UNMOVIK, had just arrested four Albanian veterans of the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA). They would stand trial in the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague for the murders of both Serbian and Albanian Kosovars during the war.
"They didn't target women and children," she said, referring to the KLA's attacks with led up to the war. I thought back to the terrorist attacks that led up to the Kosova Crisis: how a grenade thrown into a Serbian pub was reciprocated with a similar attach on an Albanian bar, and then escalated. Had anyone been truly spared by the violence that led up to (and followed) the NATO-Serb War?
War is organized crime, I explained. A war can truly end in only one of two ways: all of the criminals on one side must either be destroyed or driven away (as in the case of World War II or Vietnam), or all of the criminals on both sides must be rounded up and brought to justice (as in South Africa, Rwanda, and the Former Yugoslavia).
Feride wasn't satisfied. The arrests seemed to her to be tit-for-tat police work: arrest-a-Serb-then-an-Albanian just to appear unbiased. Her highly developed Balkan sense of vengeance had recognized the pattern immediately. We had little to agree upon on that issue, so our attentions turned to her two nieces, ages 8 and 11.
"Do you remember the refugee camps?" I asked. "Oh yes," they replied, and out spilled the details. They had slept on the floor, they had taken showers in crowded little stalls. I added memories of my own from the camps I had visited in Albania (they had sojourned in Macedonia).
"I would like to see the camps in Albania," said Feride, who plans to vacation in Kosova and Albania next summer. I grimaced. "I wouldn't," I said, happy to have put such miserable places behind me.
Next I asked the youngest niece, Deniza, if she remembered the crisis. She smiled a bright smile. "I was the first one to see it--the first in my family," she chirped.
See what? "The tank!" she continued. "I woke up that morning and looked out my window and there was a tank there!" Out spilled details of the soldiers talking to her parents--they were given five minutes to leave--their hurried packing of clothes and their flight across town to her aunt and uncle's house.
Feride looked at me, her face serious. "She has never told me about this," she said.
Deniza continued: "A few days later at my aunt's house, a man came up to my uncle and he said, 'Do you want a light?' When he reached up with his hands, though, he put a gun to his head!" She then recounted a story that I was all too familiar with, from my experience in Albania. The irregulars had separated the men from the women & children, but later she had found her daddy and uncle again (how fortunate, I thought, and--sadly--how rare), and they had left for Macedonia.
I studied her closely as she was saying this. Deniza had been four years old at the time of the Crisis. I wondered at the psychological impact of such a scene upon a child so young. But while her memories were the stuff of nightmares, her beautiful brown eyes danced as she spoke, and she intoned her memories with the same cheerfulness that we had previously counted to 20 in Albanian or that my own little daughter would have recounted her last birthday party.
There was silence after she was finished. I didn't really want to build upon the story any further. I don't remember if it was Feride or me who closed the dialogue with a reference to the people who had ordered their flight from Pristina--and their family's subsequent resettlement in the United States.
Feride and I got up to go over some of her homework on the computer, but Deniza wasn't done yet. Her memory awakened, questions still remained. "Jay," she said, following me, "What is a Serb?"
I was astonished by the question, especially considering the context of her story. I stammered for an answer, drying reciting facts that could have come straight from a social studies book: the Serbs are a race of people who live with the Albanians in Kosova.
Should I have said more? Should I have identified the driver of the tank, or the man who said to her uncle, "Do you want a light?" Should I have taught her, "They are your mortal enemy"?
I couldn't. As deep as the Balkan sense of eye-for-an-eye may have run in Feride's thinking that night, an instinct appeared that night from my own culture, rooted in Christianity. I have been taught to ask, 'Who is my neighbor?' And I have been bred to answer: "A teacher, a lawyer, a Samaritan" (and further) "a family with delicious buke and a niece with dancing eyes, a tank driver, a man who uses a pick-up line to terrorize a family" (and, still further) "a man who just might be my mortal enemy."
The answers one finds depend upon the questions he asks. Sometimes the most naive questions lead to the best answers of all: such as the question, spoken from an Albanian refugee, "What is a Serb?"
The more I think about that question, the more wonderful it seems to me. The question gives me comfort now, as I think about it. It gives me hope for a future where children with dancing eyes innocently ask, "What is an 'enemy'?" Perhaps I can even dream that the parents of those children--or the leaders of their countries--can say, "I don't know."
For if the most innocent victims of war can grow up to ask this question, what of us who are currently under a concerted bombardment of disinformation designed to dictate to us just who our enemies are? Can we look past the smoke and mirrors? Can we reach down deep into the heart of our own culture and ask the questions that will engender restoration, if not hope?
The prophet Isaiah described heaven as a place where a lion would lie down with a lamb, ignorant of the primal urge to destroy and consume such vulnerable prey.
Perhaps that's why Deniza's question struck me so much. The question, "What is a Serb?" has become to me a Isaiahesque moment of heaven here on earth, and a glimpse of a world without enemies, if only in the heart of an eight-year-old refugee.


Te drejtat autoriale i takojn James Dittes

JD
February 2003

[iql]

o mjellma tani jemi te gjethe amerikane e ka thene zhak shirak