************ Sebastian Lütgert ************ ************ REWIRED April 12, 1999 ************ REWIRED April 19, 1999 ************ Declaration of the FZLN against the War in Yugoslavia ************ Theweleit URL (corrected) ************ REWIRED April 12, 1999 REWIRED April 12, 1999 Living in Bombland: A Serbian Diary: Continued? by Vladislava Gordic April 9 People from Novi Sad and Belgrade started two nights ago protecting their remaining bridges. Human shields will be present night after night. They decided to ride bikes over the bridges tonight. A report from the Yugoslav Ministry of Foreign Affairs reached me today. It sums up the victims and damage done between March 24 and April 7. During that time, there were 1000 air strikes with 430 planes. 800 cruise missiles and 3000 tons of explosives 'landed' on Serbia. 300 people were killed in these attacks and 3000 wounded. Six bridges completely destroyed, eight damaged. Five airports damaged. Ten petrol storage facilities were destroyed, which endangers thousands of people because of gases released in the explosions. Thirteen hospitals, 150 schools and ten monasteries, either destroyed or irreparably damaged. If we live through this, at least 500,000 will be left without jobs because their factories are destroyed. And that means two million people without income. And more intensive attacks are yet to come. Today is orthodox Good Friday. It rained today, which is a good sign, as folk belief says. Let us hope for the best. News reaches us saying that a group of Norwegian pilots refused to take part in bombing Yugoslavia. A ray of hope. April 10 A seemingly peaceful night. Still, I slept in the shelter. We had the first all-alert in the daytime in April. My grandpa is dying. I'm off to the village. -- Note: I'd been hearing from Vladislava every day, but the last message I received was on April 10. -- Elsewhere: "Compliance with the Alliance" introduces Spiegel Online's latest feature: breaking news summaries, analysis and background in English relating to Germany and Europe. http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,16865,00.html And in the interest of full disclosure (plus it just feels so damn good mentioning it), look for my byline on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Check the home page, find the flag and click. http://www.spiegel.de/ -- To subscribe, send email to rewired-news-request@rewired.com with the message: subscribe To unsubscribe, send email to rewired-news-request@rewired.com with the message: unsubscribe If you have subscription problems, send mail to the human at: owner-rewired-news@rewired.com ************ REWIRED April 19, 1999 REWIRED April 19, 1999 Living in Bombland: A Serbian Diary by Vladislava Gordic Wednesday, April 13 My grandpa died on Sunday. On Orthodox Easter, in his 92nd year. His agony lasted more than a week -- during that time, he did not say much; he mostly fought for his breath. He was born in 1908 in a small village in Herzegovina, a day's walk from Mostar, to a family of seven children. He fought in the Second World War as a "partisan" (a member of Yugoslav anti-fascist resistance movement which mostly consisted of Serbs). Later he became commander of a partisan battalion. After the war, he came to Vojvodina with his family and settled in a small village some sixty kilometers from Novi Sad. He was just an ordinary farm worker who struggled hard to make ends meet and make life happier for his four children. Since 1996, he had been completely blind. His basically good health was gradually failing him and he ended his life like a candle in the wind. He could well be a Raymond Carver hero -- quiet, unassuming and tight-lipped right till the end. Doing no lip service, just fighting for his breath. His name, Krsto, contains the Serbian word for cross, "krst". I tried hard not to draw parallels between his name and the date of his death. I say I tried. On the night after the funeral, planes were roaring over the village, flying very low. I lay in my bed, paralyzed with fear. I knew that in the old manor house there was no shelter and the only thing to do was to stay in bed. so I stayed wide awake. I heard voices on the street but could not move my finger. You have already guessed what a panic-stricken coward I am. When the morning came, my grandma told me how villagers saw a strange light coming from the graveyard. They went to search for it, fearing fire, an explosion or something similar. But they found nothing. Absolutely nothing. Light was not coming from the sky, nor from the ground, it was just there, seemingly coming from nowhere. I cannot help thinking how my grandpa's soul may have sent a ray of hope to all of us. I cannot help drawing parallels between heaven and earth. Thursday, April 15 Another day filled with shots of demolished apartment buildings, kindergartens, schools -- in Rakovica, a residential area near Belgrade, ALL schools have been either irreparably damaged or destroyed. Buildings can be rebuilt. As for human lives, they are irretrievably lost. My heart bleeds when I see shots of Kosovo Albanians killed in yesterday's NATO attack. You cannot bring seventy people back to life. No formal apologies by NATO spokesman Jamie Shea can compensate for this loss, ever. Still, if he thought apologies would do, he could apologize for other victims as well -- for 17 people killed in Aleksinac, for 27 persons killed on the international train Belgrade-Salonika, for 120 wounded in Kragujevac... not that it helps. But it would be humane. >From the very beginning of these manic air strikes, I feared they were meant to destroy both the Yugoslav infrastructure and the Kosovo Albanian populace. Now I am convinced no one and nothing will be spared. Friday, April 16 Another restless night in which walls and windows shook with detonations and skies were painted in loud colours of air clashes. The Yugoslav army, in which many of my friends and colleagues are drafted, protects the infrastructure of my town, Novi Sad, from NATO air strikes best as it can. Thus I am defended by the people I know -- there are high school and university professors, painters and poets among them -- by ordinary people as I am, by people who love this country as much as I do. These people are not paid mercenaries; they are patriots defending their homes and families from NATO's quasi-humanitarian mock heroic crusade. Nothing more and nothing less. I'm not the only person who feels this way. Through the night, you can hear a choir of voices shouting in support of the Yugoslav air defense. Many people swarm in front of their buildings so that they can view air maneuvers in the dark and support defenders. War is a spectacle, even when your life is at stake. In spite of ardent defenders, the Novi Sad petrol refinery was bombed for the umpteenth time last night. Serves us right? No, just leaves innocent and impoverished people without city traffic and central heating. New targets emerge -- even more risky and more dangerous ones. One of these new targets is Subotica, a town on the very border between Yugoslavia and Hungary, situated in the area inhabited mostly by the Hungarian populace. Is NATO trying the Kosovo Albanian scenario on Hungarians? Is it trying to banish them out of their homes, same as it did with Kosovo Albanians? I hope my prophetic soul is wrong this time. To all the beautiful, loving and caring people who read this: Send your home/office address to insomnia@eunet.yu, so that I can send you a postcard of my town and bridge the ugly war gap between us. Saturday, April 17 Day twenty-five. Three weeks ago, I would not believe air strikes would last this long. Today, I find it simply miraculous that NATO still allows me to have water, electricity and the Internet, although it destroys factories, schools and monasteries. I guess that is at least one proof of the alliance's boundless humanity. Thank you, your NATOness, for your unrestrained mercy. Thank you for fooling me into believing that I can still live a normal life, at least in the day time. For my nights are still spent in the shelter, that goes without saying. When speaking of mercy, I always remember Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice"; Portia, who is impersonating a judge, says that "the quality of mercy is never strained," since mercy is a gentle rain dropping from the sky, blessing both those who give and receive it... She also says that mercy, "an attribute to god," seasons justice. The very next moment, she forgets about mercy and ruthlessly ruins a man who may have been stupid, blundered and short-sighted, but who only wanted his justice unseasoned. She excels in humiliating a Jew named Shylock and calls it mercy. She strips him of his property and civil rights and calls it justice. Rhetoric wins in all times, obviously. Today as well: For instance, terrorists are called a "liberation army," and thus their atrocities are turned into martyrdom. Still, in Shakespeare's time nobody was fooled into thinking that a war can be humanitarian. Are people getting stupid today, or just a bit more brain-washed? Maybe it is me who is stupid -- I should understand that this war led by NATO is humanitarian because I am still allowed to have water, electricity and the Internet. On the other hand, I am denied petrol and central heating, but you cannot have it all, not even in a humanitarian war, can you? Sunday, April 18 What a night! What a nightmare! Between 10 pm and 3 am, Novi Sad was heavily attacked by NATO planes once every hour. This was the hardest night up to now. Planes made infernal noise. Pieces of missiles destroyed by the Yugoslav air defense were falling from the sky, some of them hurting people. At first, I tried to observe the light show in the night sky, but the flashes and noise soon became [unbearable]. I ran back to the shelter, now packed with all these poor darlings, with jumpy and edgy kids who kept crying and wailing, and told my neighbour how the sky was sprinkled with colours. "Sky red and yellow?" she asked in disbelief, and then added: "I prefer it dark blue." Really, when is the night sky over Yugoslavia going to be dark blue again? When are things going to be "by default" again? The Novi Sad petrol refinery was shot by four missiles. The heavy, suffocating smell of gas and petrol spread fast and lingered over the city for hours and hours. Heraclitus said that if the world turned into smells, our nostrils would recognize it. Last night and today, we believe our nostrils more than our eyes. Monday, April 19 Last night, the all-alert sound came at 1 am! That has not happened yet. Another thing that has not happened yet was bombing the municipal council building, some time after one o'clock. Luckily, it was not destroyed, "only" damaged. It is a beautiful circular building of white marble, an architectural wonder which won a European prize for architecture. It is Novi Sad's equivalent of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, or the Sears tower in Chicago -- it is unique and an indispensable part of every postcard showing Novi Sad. Hitting it is like hitting the Piccadilly Circus. Are we entering the phase of NATO attacks which is called the "sightseeing destruction tour"? Seems so. On the other hand, the "killing children" phase started long ago. One of its numerous victims is three year old Maria from Batajnica, who was killed in her home while she was peeing in the bathroom. Elsewhere: The numbers are vague, but tens of thousands more people were driven out of Kosovo over the weekend and many predict that if the flow continues, the complete expulsion of all ethnic Albanians from Kosovo will be achieved within a matter of weeks. Independent verification of the stories they've been bringing with them for nearly a month now is next to impossible to come by, but the uniformity of the horrors they describe make it inconceivable to deny that something hideous is going on in Kosovo. Even if a mere fraction of the stories are true, the separation of families, the rapes, the robberies, the executions, the burning of houses, the mass graves are adding up to a series of systematic, premeditated atrocities that some, such as German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer to name but one, add up and call "genocide." Confronted with imagery of a sea of poor white Europeans in the camps, many can't help but think of the Holocaust. The problem here is that the two events are vastly dissimilar. The comparison is not only too easy and lazy but actually degrades victims of both in an almost willful misunderstanding of the crimes committed against them. But why should we stop to quibble over terminology? Atrocities are atrocities, and putting a stop to them is ultimate goal; does it really matter if the rhetoric gets a little carried away? Yes. For one thing, the 20th century's most powerful buzzwords have been called up to justify the bombings that, even if they haven't outright prompted, have escalated Milosevic's atrocities to begin with. At the same time, while consciously recognizing the distinct differences between the disaster in Kosovo and the Holocaust, the lessons of one may shed light on the other. This is the issue Stuart Klawans wrestles with in his review in The Nation of a disturbing and unique documentary, "Photographer." A set of 400 color slides taken by a Nazi accountant in the Jewish ghetto of Lodz in Poland was discovered in a Vienna bookstore in 1987. Director Dariusz Jablonski juxtaposes these with black and white footage of Lodz today, distancing the present even as the shock of color brings a terrible past uncomfortably close. "What can we know of the miseries of an entire population?" Klawans asks. "In what form does word of the atrocities reach us? And when hard information insensibly trails off into storytelling, how do we judge that story against the others that are pressed on us?" http://www.thenation.com/issue/990503/0503klawans.shtml Writing from Berlin, Richard Cohen (not to be confused with Roger Cohen, Berlin correspondent for The New York Times) ponders similar questions. http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-04/16/034l-041699-idx.html As does Ted Byfield on the Nettime list. http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199904/msg00298.html "Open Channels for Kosovo," a new project begun by Press Now with support from The Digital City, Radioqualia, the Society for Old and New Media and Xs4all, aims to encourage and collect: "Reports, analysis and personal stories from independent journalist from Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, Macedonia and other countries in the region." http://www.dds.nl/openchannels Press Now http://www.dds.nl/pressnow The Digital City http://www.dds.nl Radioqualia http://www.va.com.au/radioqualia Society for Old and New Media http://www.waag.org Xs4all http://www.xs4all.nl -- To subscribe, send email to rewired-news-request@rewired.com with the message: subscribe To unsubscribe, send email to rewired-news-request@rewired.com with the message: unsubscribe If you have subscription problems, send mail to the human at: owner-rewired-news@rewired.com ************ Declaration of the FZLN against the War in Yugoslavia April 20, 1999 DECLARATION OF THE ZAPATISTA NATIONAL LIBERATION FRONT AGAINST THE WAR IN YUGOSLAVIA STOP NATO'S AGGRESSION AGAINST THE PEOPLE OF SERBIA AND KOSOVO! The bombardment decided on by the new lords of war and money and led by the forces of NATO is not aimed at protecting the rights of the Kosovar people, denied by the chauvinist Great Serbia policy of the Milosevic government, but to further advance the goal of putting an end to the borders that previously existed, in the terrain of national states as in the international community. With this action, the North American financial oligarchy, very sensitive to the investment of capital in the military industry, brings to knees not simply the people and governments of the Balkans, but all the governments of Western Europe. There exists an inexorable relation between the emergence of the euro and the European Union and the North American action to place the various European governments in the position of pawns. The Clinton government, but above all the financial oligarchy, dictates a message to the world: there is no problem, large or small, that is not under the aegis of the United States. At the same time a warning to Europe: any process of transnational unity must be subordinate to North American foreign policy. In this sense, the principal losers in this war are France and Germany; placing in crisis, before its birth, the possibility of an economic bloc that can compete with the United States. The pain and oppression of the Kosovar people represents no more than an excuse for the lords of money and war. The hypocritical stance is evident in the manner in which the Kosovar peopleOs desires for independence were denied at the Rambouillet conference, violating their elemental right of self-determination guaranteed by the charter of the United Nations. The bombing has not signified an improvement in the lives of the inhabitants of Kosovo or a curtailment of the ideology of Great Serbia; on the contrary, there are now hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees, and the sentiments of ethnic purity in the rest of Yugoslavia have been inflamed as never before. The idea expressed by this cynicism disguised as humanitarianism--which can be rendered: "Sometimes you have to make war to prevent war"--has been proven completely false in the Balkans. Actually, it is necessary to make war because it is great business; it is simply necessary to watch the recent reactions of the various stock markets. The suffering of the Kosovar people is worth several more points in the speculative indices. The Zapatista National Liberation Front utterly repudiates the war of Clinton and his European peons, Jospin, Blair, Shroeder, Aznar, etc., who permit themselves to be used to consolidate United States world hegemony, who have demonstrated the profound contempt they feel for the international community and the national states of the world. Bombardment of a civil population has never served a noble end. At the same time we demand that the self-determination rights of the people of Kosovo be guaranteed. The Kosovars of Albanian origin represent 80 percent of the population. After the death of Marshall Tito, the Milosevic regime revived the ultra-nationalist ideology that oppresses ethnic minorities, eliminated Kosovo's autonomy statute, impeded the use of the Albanian tongue and repressed the traditions, culture and form of social organization of the majority of the people of Kosovo. The criminal bombardment cannot make us blind. Milosevic is a dictator. We can and should oppose the bombardments as well as the tyrannical and oppressive politics of Milosevic. Under the same logic of defending the the right to autonomy and respect between majorities and minorities that share the same territory, the FZLN denounces the actions of terrorist groups supported by the international oligarchies intent on crushing the rights of the Serb minority in Kosovo, and supporting the war and the NATO bombardment. The only exit that the FZLN proposes as ethically and humanly correct is the nonintervention of external powers in the conflict. The ethnicities which share the same territory in Kosovo are the only ones who, by means of dialogue, can and should protect their rights of self-determination and forms of coexistence. No to the bombardment of Serbia! Yes to self-determination for the Kosovar people! No to NATO! No to Milosevic! Zapatista National Liberation Front ************ Theweleit URL (corrected) The correct Theweleit/Very Important Grown-Ups URL seems to be http://www.taz.de/tpl/1999/04/23.fr/tbox?Ueber=&Tname=a0058&idx=3&re=ku&qu=TAZ ******************************************************************************** ROLUX h0444wol@rz.hu-berlin.de http://www2.hu-berlin.de/~h0444wol/rolux/