>ON KOSOVARS, APACHES, AND "ETHNIC CLEANSING"
>
>By Zoltan Grossman
>
>Back in 1991, I was a witness during the Wisconsin
>Ojibwe spearfishing conflict, monitoring harassment
>and violence by anti-Indian groups. One night, after
>listening to too many chants of "Indians Go Home" and
>"White Man's Land," I decided to warm up for a minute
>in a car. The car radio had on graphic news reports
>on the war in the disintegrating Yugoslavia. It struck
>me that the nationalists calling for a Greater Serbia,
>a Greater Croatia, and a Greater Albania were using
>the same rhetoric as the anti-treaty protesters on that
>cold boat landing. Rather than blaming their own leaders
>for their economic problems, they were manipulated to
>blame the ethnic group living next door, and to clear
>them out of "their" territory.
>
>Eight years later, we can see the United States at war in
>Yugoslavia, supposedly to stop "ethnic cleansing"--
>the genocidal forced removal of a population. In this
>process, Americans want to see white hats and
>black hats (like in a John Wayne Western), but in
>reality we can only see "gray hats," with the forced
>removal of civilians of all ethnic groups. Two wrongs
>are not making a right. The bombing and the forced
>expulsions are mutually reinforcing forms of violence
>that simply feed off of each other. In 1991, likewise,
>the aerial bombing of northern Wisconsin towns would
>not have helped the Ojibwe, but merely strengthened
>the ethnic violence against them.
>
>NATO claims the bombing is a "humanitarian intervention"
>to prevent the sort of ethnic cleansing that has escalated
>since the air strikes began. This selective humanitarianism
>spotlights human rights abuses by U.S. enemies like
>Yugoslavia and Iraq, but downplays the same abuses being
>perpetrated by U.S. allies such as Turkey, Indonesia, Colombia,
>and Croatia. Not only has Washington turned a blind eye to
>their ethnic cleansing, but has actually helped to facilitate
>it--including in former Yugoslavia only four years ago.
>
>A 1995 offensive by the Croatian Army--with the help of U.S.
>air strikes and military trainers--ethnically "cleansed"
>hundreds of thousands of Serbs from the Krajina region, where
>they had lived for centuries. The Serbs in Croatia had
>revolted against a government that prevented their self-rule,
>much like the Kosovar Albanians later did against Serbia.
>Many of the expelled Krajina Serbs were resettled in Kosovo,
>exacerbating the ethnic tensions that have now erupted into war.
>
>In neighboring Bosnia later that year, the brutal Serbian
>and Croatian "cleansing" of Muslim communities
>set the stage for the Dayton Accords. The U.S. rubber-
>stamped the de facto ethnic partition of the country between
>Serbia and Croatia, dooming any hope for a multiethnic
>future that includes all three Bosnian ethnic groups. The
>idea that NATO opposes Balkan "ethnic cleansing" flies
>in the face of recent U.S. approval of "pure" ethnic
>boundaries that were drawn by forced removals.
>
>The NATO double-standard also overlooks the history of
>harsh and methodical "ethnic cleansing" to build the land
>base of the United States itself. This history not only
>includes the Trail of Tears from the Southeast, but the
>forced removals of Navajo (Dine) and Apache from Arizona,
>many Ho-Chunk, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe from Wisconsin, and
>most Mdewakanton Dakota from Minnesota. It also
>includes modern forced removals, including of the
>Big Mountain Dine. If we cannot understand our own
>history, how can we dictate to other countries how to
>solve their historic ethnic conflicts?
>
>Given this history, perhaps the greatest irony is the
>U.S. Army's recent deployment of helicopter gunships
>nicknamed "Apaches." When the U.S. Army defeated
>the Apache Nation in Arizona, the troops rounded up the
>survivors, locked them in cattle cars, and shipped them
>to a Florida military fort. Most of the refugees died of
>malaria or other tropical diseases. California State
>Representative Tom Hayden observes, "...The much-touted
>Apache gunships with American crews are preparing to
>escalate the conflict. The real Apaches...were victims
>of a brutal, even genocidal, ethnic cleansing by the
>U.S. armed forces in the last century. That our government
>can self-righteously go to war to save Kosovo with
>helicopters named after the victims of our own ethnic
>cleansing measures the state of denial we are in."
>
>Another victim of ethnic cleansing were the Sauk and Meskwaki
>of Illinois. They became refugees who fled into Wisconsin,
>only to be massacred on the banks of the Mississippi River.
>They were led by Makatai Meshekiakiak (Black Hawk), whose
>English name now identifies another Army attack helicopter.
>
>No doubt the U.S. Army will justify the name of its attack
>helicopters in the same way that schools justify their racist
>school mascots--as historic symbols intended to "honor warriors."
>If that is the case, then certainly other national minority
>groups can be similarly honored by the armies that expelled
>them from their homelands.
>
>Perhaps, a century from now, when the U.S. government is
>forcibly removing Native Americans from another reservation,
>the Serbian Army will intervene to "rescue" the refugees,
>using helicopter gunships nicknamed "Kosovars."
>
>__________________________________________________
>
>To be published in the June issue of The Circle
>(Minneapolis), check it out online at
>http://thecircleonline.org
>
>Zoltan Grossman
>Midwest Treaty Network
>731 State St., Madison WI 53703
>mtn at igc.apc.org
>http://www.alphacdc.com/treaty/content.html
>
>To read perspectives of Serbians who
>oppose both Milosevic and NATO, see:
>http://welcome.to/freeserbia and
>http://www.keepfaith.com