Omar Qourah, a Palestinian, is a graduate student at American University in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at Omar at MiddleEast.Org.
As a Palestinian who was born a quarter of a century after and spared the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 that galvanized Palestine and sent most of our Palestinian people then fleeing to nearby later-hostile Arab countries, I have often wondered what it must have been like to be there and witness it all. Surely, I have read numerous books about Palestinian history, heard the endless recitals of refugee stories by many including some of my relatives, and witnessed the rare video footage that showed Palestinians boarded unto trucks and sent away to be, or at least as the Zionists then erroneously hoped, forgotten. I was often told stories by my father, who himself escaped when he was five years old with his family from their ancestral Lod, about how they escaped on foot and had to survive on UN rations for a while until they, as a fortunate few, where able to settle outside the refugee camps.
Today, I do not have to tax my imagination trying to reconstruct the scenes in my mind, or the horrors and sense of loss the Palestinians went through then. Mass Media has provided us all with similar images from the ongoing Kosovo crisis. And I emphasize images here since some of the real motives behind the US led NATO shelling of Yugoslavia and the fact that the evacuation of ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo was pre-determined and expected by the NATO Allies and the Clinton administration are hidden from us. A number of seasoned journalists, intellectuals, and observers have pointed to European, mainly German, territorial expansion plans for the area of former Yugoslavia, and to certainly the fateful mistake of trying to settle deep historical problems by force. The pictures of and stories about Kosovar Albanians being terrorized to leave their homes - by means of fire, force, murder, and rape - are not different at all form the account about Zionist gangs that evacuated three quarter of a million Palestinians within a year from their homes. Incidentally, one of the who did this was General-turned -"Peace-Maker" Yitzhak Rabin who was personally responsible for driving out 40,000 Palestinians from Lod and Ramla in 1948. Also, they too are losing everything they ever owned as they run for their lives, again as the Palestinians did 51 years ago. The Kosovo Albanians are demographically similar to the Palestinians refugees then as mainly rural, traditional Muslims. They are, as the Palestinians then and now, without real leadership and institutions.
There are legitimate comparisons that can be made between Kosovo crisis today and Palestine of 1948. The Serbs' religious and historic claim to Kosovo is similar to modern-day Israel's religious and historical to the historical land of Palestine, but certainly no excuse or reason, in my opinion, for cleansing another people that has been there for hundreds of years. The real sick motive behind it of course is to create an ethnically-homogenous society. Another impressive similarity is, as the Kosovars will soon discover, the number of parties and the countries that are involved in this crisis and are promising help to the refugees which, I believe, will never go in their efforts far beyond giving food, refugee camps, and maybe for the lucky ones, resettlement in other friendly countries. One could safely assume, given the evidence of the Serbian pre-determined mindset to evacuate the Albanians out of Kosovo, the NATO's awareness of that and its preparations to receive refugees at the borders a while before the bombing began and the talk about partition of Kosovo and resettlement of ousted Krajina Serbian refugees in their, hint at a future not-too-pleasant for the Albanians. Does not that sound sadly similar to the 1930's and 40's Zionist plan "Dalt" to evacuate Arabs out of Palestine? What about the UN Partition Plan of 1947 which aimed at dividing Palestine into Arab and Jewish states? What about Britain's and the UN's utter failure to remedy the situation in Palestine peacefully and its looking-the-other-way when it came to Zionist armament? What about the resettlement of European Jews, who escaped the horrors of anti-Semitism and Hitler, in their place? And finally, what about Israel's insistence first that there are no Palestinians and its till today continual main-stream deferment ideologically and politically of discussing the problem of the Palestinian refugees' and their descendants' just and fair claim to recognition, compensation, and apology? How ironic that Israel have admitted to date 104 Albanian refugees while still stubbornly refuses to deal with and discuss the refugee problem it has created of 4 million Palestinians who have lost everything to become wanderers or persona non grata, referred to by Israel's revisionist historians as Israel's original sin. Perhaps that is why Israel's Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon at first decided to oppose NATO's bombing campaign of Yugoslavia for fear of applying the same criteria on Israel in the future. It could be a manifestation of his own insecurity as a long-time proponent of the transfer solution, which calls for driving out the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza to Jordan to establish a state there.
It is unfortunate that after a century of war and destruction the "civilized world" as the NATO/West loves to call itself, has failed to bring about a civilized resolution of a potentially explosive crisis in an area that witnessed the start of both World War I&II. The solution for NATO leaders seems to be bomb, bomb, and bomb. The Kosovo crisis has so far caused the ire of other countries and threatens to drag on longer. Already there is talk about calling 33, 000 more US troops an NATO plans to continue bombing for months to come, in the meantime certain segments in the Russian society are expressing their anger against the US and pressuring their government for action. Perhaps this crisis will be settled temporarily with the partition of Kosovo and resettlement of some of the Albanian refugees in neighboring countries. That, again, is a temporary solution since partition and displacement of original inhabitants has never been a fair and just solution as we can derive from post-1948 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Arab-Israeli wars, and the continuous sham of the "peace process". To quote the words of the journalist Christopher Hitchens writing recently in The Nation Magazine (4/17/99- 5/3/99):
"Somewhere at the back of NATO's mind there is a project for
the partition and amputation of Kosovo, and nobody who has
studied the partitions of Ireland, India, Cyprus, Palestine and
Bosnia can believe for an instant that partition can be
accomplished without ethnic cleansing
Of course, all
partitions lead to further wars and further partitions."
No one can safely predict what the outcome of this crisis will be. But for now at least, the Kosovo Albanians, although receiving exceptional media coverage, have joined the list of the twentieth century's most dispossessed and displaced peoples: the Jews, the Armenians, the Kurds and the Palestinians.