Kosovo-War: The End of Our Dreams of a Better World?

Steffi Engert, Germany

      The war started by NATO against Yugoslavia because of Kosovo has many different effects - also on the personal level. Predominant is a profound feeling of paralysis in thought and action. A strange detached look on how ideals or concepts that we, the post-68-political generation in the West, have come to believe in, are shattered, while we are aware, that for those who happen to live in the war area, everything is being destroyed - their livelihood, their health, their lives. And we are helplessly looking on. And this seems not to be just personal: where are the mass protests against this in the streets of the NATO countries? Why are we - citizens in NATO countries - quiet, apart from a few manifesting publicly their opposition, why are we getting involved only on the level of aid for the refugees?
      There are many reasons for that - on different levels of experience and politics:
      Firstly, undoubtedly Milosevic is heading and is personally responsible for a regime, which is totally unrespecting of human rights, demands of democracy and international agreements and contracts. This has been shown Bosnia and in all attempts to settle the conflicts erupting between the component parts of the former Yugoslav Socialist Federation. This makes it impossible to solidarise with Serbia, though in the immediate sense it is the victim of military aggression. The provocation of this aggression still is that of Serbian regime - it started persecuting the Kosovars in a drive of ethnic cleansing.
      But where was political wisdom on the side of NATO countries, in order to prevent a war, which hits not only the Serbian population, indiscriminately, but also the very people it promised to protect, the Kosovars.
      Probably, the "no war ever again" or "make love not war" - keywords at the time when I, but also people like Clinton, Blair and Schroeder began their political lives, was never 100% sustainable. It was (and hopefully remains) an ideal to aim at, but not a maxim to be followed to the letter - no matter what. But war should be the very ultimate decision and if it has to be taken, really, it should be done right, not only militarily, but politically, which means: to foresee its effects and to forestall as much of its unwanted effects as possible. For example: to prepare for masses of refugees not just logistically, but also in terms of understanding the effects of massive shifts in populations in socially and ethnically volatile areas.
      Was politics really at an end? Perhaps it was. But then, the leadership of the countries united in NATO have themselves helped bring about this end. Just two things on that:
- where was ever systematic support and cultivation of a political alternative to Milosevic?
- which lessons have been drawn from similar conflicts, especially those on the Balkans, where often the same set of people, and especially Milosevic and his followers, have been present and responsible? And where was the politics, which took up these lessons in order to develop a course of action different from war - or at least different from this war? By threatening military intervention - and not much else, the NATO powers themselves created the situation, where nothing was left than wage war in the form of massive bombing.
      It is one of the basic tenets of psychology, that things which cannot be learnt, cannot be overcome. The situation is repeated again and again until the pattern of reaction is changed, following a process of learning, which starts by foreseeing the situation. When studying the pre-history of the two World Wars in the 2oth Century one is struck by the inevitability of actions and reactions, which in their entirety created a mechanism of an automatic "sliding" into the catastrophe. Each time, when the hostilities ended, politicians and people surviving on heaps of rubble promised themselves and each other: "never again". But the ingredients, the patterns are still there and again as in a film we see the sequence of actions and reactions, which might so easily flare into a universal conflagration. Until now, we have been spared only thanks to the unwillingness of Russia to get involved in the war, perhaps based on the wise insight, that Russia has more to gain from an indispensable role in diplomacy.
      This war, ostensibly waged for human rights and humanitarian concerns, takes place under the responsibility and on the initiative of politicians, which come from the same post-68-leftish radical roots. Joshka Fischer, the Green foreign minister of Germany, has probably never imagined to be in that position as he is now. But though on some levels this is probably a nightmare for him, he did not hesitate to come out for this war and German participation in it. What are we to make of it? Is it enough to conclude, as we did on the (old, pre-WW-I) social democracy, that these are traitors and careerists, giving up their (and our common) ideals in favour of power? It might be all that. But where does it lead us, what kind of politics and which kind of politicians does this give space to? There is room for grass-roots protest on the ground of a principled opposition against all wars. But this does not effectively change anything by itself. We have seen this after campaigning and demonstrating for twenty years. This resulted in end of the illusion that it might be possible to create a new world on the principles of peace, brother- and sisterhood of humanity, ecological health and social fairness by building movements outside existing structures. From this followed involvement in parliamentarism and - in the last instance - governmental responsibility. It seems now, the war does away with another illusion: that it would be possible to use ones role in government to bring constant social and ecological improvement, step by step, in reforms only, not undiluted perhaps, but somehow forward. We see now, politics is really always "the art of the possible", principles only just guidelines at best, and this makes politics a messy business, and a corrupting one (remark: corruption here is not so much meant in the sense of being susceptible of being bought, but more in the sense of bending one's principles, and then giving them up).

A special note on women and feminism:

      Again we see women first and foremost as victims, as the first target of untold horrors perpetrated by military, paramilitary and police in their insane campaign to expel the Kosovars. A repetition of Bosnia. Women raped, women forced to see their menfolk die, women as refugees, traumatised and humiliated. We also see women amongst the "hawks" - namely Madeleine Albright, State Secretary of Foreign Affairs of the USA, or amongst those organising aid. Women volunteer for the armies of the Serbian as well as the Albanian side. Where is a common ground for feminism? Would women really be more peaceful? Perhaps if women were negotiating over conflicts on all sides compromises and understanding could be found more readily...We will not know for sure, before we have tje chance. But beware: we might be faced again with the insight that politics can only be the art of the possible ( and never the realisation of utopia).
      There may be one glimpse of hope, which has the potential for expansion into a real change based on real learning: nobody on the side of the warring nations of NATO is glorifying this war and there is no denigration of the people on whom the war is inflicted. Apart from the differentiation between the Milosevic regime and the Serbian people, which is maintained throughout, it is the nearness of the people through the mass-media and the Internet, which makes it impossible to dehumanise them as "the enemy". Perhaps in this lies the real hope, that we still will bring about the "European house" or a European civil society.