NATO COULD NOT HAVE ACTED DIFFERENTLY
Predrag MATVEJEVIC,
writer, Croatia:
I left Yugoslavia eight years ago. Staying in that country any longer
would be hard for me. I was born in Mostar. My father, a White Guard officer,
arrived from Odesa in 1921. Our family knew other difficult situations
in Yugoslavia. There was the conflict with the Soviet Union in 1948 and
Russian-speaking families found themselves in a dangerous situation. They
were considered a fifth column and were often deported to Hungary where
they would be picked up by the NKVD and sent to the Gulag. My uncle and
grandfather died there, and my grandmother went insane. I left Yugoslavia
because there was no way I could truly fulfill myself. My father is Russian
Ukrainian and my mother Croatian. Actually this is what makes such mixed
families suffer in that country. My wife, daughter of a White Guard officer,
found herself in a similar situation. Here in Ukraine you don't know much
about White Guard officers' children in Yugoslavia. They consider us traitors
and in any other socialist country my parents would be considered counterrevolutionaries.
After leaving Croatia I taught comparative Slavic literature at the Sorbonne
in Paris for four years and then I was offered a job in Rome. At present
I teach the same discipline at the Sapienza University. We had to leave
Yugoslavia and we loved that country. It was a positive country and very
many people treated each other with true affection, and we weren't all
nationalists, but then nationalism became prominent in Serbia. The Oriental
satrap Milosevic came to power, and there was that crazy Tudjman. Too bad
that the Serbs should support Milosevic, for this people is his victim
in the first place. And I love the Serbs. They treated Ukrainians and Russians
well after the revolution. But supporting Milosevic is madness. He is a
criminal. His army shot 7,000 Bosnians in Srebrenica. And war broke out
at Vukovar in Croatia. God knows how many people were killed. Then there
was the siege of Sarajevo lasting three and a half years. Shooting and
grenade explosions in the streets. It was horrible. And all this was Milosevic's
doing! How can one support him after that? What kind of Orthodox Christian
union can one talk about? Of course, I have nothing against religion. (My
father was an Eastern Orthodox believer and died several months before
the war. In his house there were 27 letters from Berdiayev, addressed to
him as the Russian philosopher's young disciple and I am not sure that
anyone will see them again.) How can you make such alliances at the very
end of the twentieth century? Religion and politics are totally different
things!
Ion CARAMITRU,
actor, Romanian Minister of Culture:
First, we have to recognize that this war was caused by a crime, I mean
ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Secondly, there were negotiations to try to
settle the conflict. Third, the war began after the Rambouillet talks failed.
Thus, we have three stages of the conflict, three acts in a tragedy. In
the first act the plot is always revealed, the second one shows conflict
among the personae, and the third ends the story. It's the epilogue which
can be either happy or tragic. The Kosovo conflict is an ethnic tragedy.
We are witnessing a whole nation being destroyed. We cannot tolerate this.
People living in the countries bordering on Yugoslavia have to do everything
possible to stop the spirit of this war. Before this conflict we saw a
religious war between Christians and Moslems. Like in Central Europe in
the sixteenth century when the Catholics fought the Reformation. In fact,
Yugoslavia is gripped by hatred which President Tito stopped for fifty
years. At that time Yugoslavia was a federal republic and people lived
in peace there, although they did have enemies. Hitler first and after
World War II the country came under the sway of the Soviet Union. We couldn't
imagine even for a moment that Yugoslavia, a truly free country with a
market economy, while we were behind the Iron Curtain, would ever experience
such woe. Such a return to the Middle Ages is so strange and horrible.
Personally, I see this as additional evidence that nothing has actually
changed in the history of mankind, except that we are better equipped now
than 100 or 500 years ago. We no longer ride horses but drive cars. We
do not aim dueling pistols at each other but fire missiles. Unfortunately,
man remains very like an animal. I expect that the crisis in Yugoslavia
will be resolved and an end put to Milosevic's actions. He is the last
nationalistic Communist leader. Regrettably, the Yugoslav population does
not know everything and is being manipulated. But local residents must
stop the dictatorship, otherwise Yugoslavia will destroy itself.
Jaan KAPLINSKI,
writer, Estonia:
I cannot condemn NATO, not in so many words. Because I feel that at
this stage of the conflict it had few alternatives. Of course, many other
things ought to have been done before resorting to air raids. Now the main
question is what "protecting the world" is all about. The military operation
was begun precisely to protect people, the Kosovars. Now they have to experience
things that are much more horrifying than anything they had to reckon with
previously. Thus the people we are supposed to be protecting are dying
at the hand of terrorists and are kicked out of their homes. So who is
protecting whom? Likewise, I do not think that Serbian journalists and
intellectuals are enemies of the West or the Albanians. They have to do
what they are doing.
Ivan DZIUBA, Academician,
Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences:
My feeling about events in Kosovo is first of all bitterness and outrage
at NATO's barbarism. The conflict in that country has complex and deep
causes. It cannot be solved in a single day. Thus the use of force by NATO
and the US is unreasonable and will have even worse consequences. They
should have intervened earlier and sought less bloody ways to settle the
conflict. Specifically, they should not have sided with the extremists
but moderate Kosovars. De facto their bombing serves only to exacerbate
extremism. Kosovo is now controlled by extremist forces that will not listen
to anybody. For them autonomy will not do, only independence and ultimately
the creation of a Greater Albania. But then an even bigger problem will
emerge, in Serbia as well as elsewhere in the Balkans and the North Atlantic
bloc. In general, without going into details about what is happening and
why, I will just say how I personally feel about the whole thing. How can
they destroy one people in order to save another? The highly accurate ruining
of industrial assets, roads, and bridges using cruise missiles and graphite
bombs - all this is nothing but computer-aided barbarism in my view.
Yevhen
SVERSTIUK, poet, human rights activist:
I think that Slobodan Milosevic, like Saddam Hussein, is a small devil
in the same pattern of such bigger ones as Stalin and Hitler. These are
devils of creating enemies, and everything possible has to be done to isolate
them as criminals, to put them in front of the world as a dangerous precedent.
This would be a particularly useful action for the postcommunist states.
But how do we do this, how do we keep them from linking up with certain
social forces? The NATO military operations are maladroit and ill considered.
They create for the North Atlantic bloc a reputation in Europe that it
doesn't deserve. Society has begun to view NATO as playing an inadequate
role. However, it is easy to condemn intervention, but everything happening
in Kosovo is an international issue. I repeat, it is a matter of destroying
diabolical creatures, They simply chose an awkward way of doing it. They
should have tried all other possible methods, primarily diplomatic ones.
But there are much deeper forces at work there than may appear at a superficial
glance. As for Ukraine, we must end all the demagoguery and exacerbation
of Stalinist and Bolshevik stereotypes, for this poisons the people, calling
forth dark forces in Ukrainian society, forces without the slightest idea
about what is actually happening in the world around them at the end of
the second millennium.
Compiled by Natalia VIKULINA (Strasbourg-KЪln-Kyiv)
and Dmytro DESIATERYK, The Day











