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'A real betrayal' Detroit-area Serbs say media cloud truth on war
By Michael Betzold Journal Staff Writer
To 20,000 Serbian-Americans living in the Detroit area, the U.S.-led war against their homeland is an outrage.
"We've been demonized so much," says Milan Stevanovich, a local Serbian activist. "We've got to the point where we're borrowing money from hard-working bakery owners and factory workers to pay for ads to tell the truth."
The truth, they say, is:
* NATO's bombing has exacerbated a civil war sparked by secessionist Albanians. * Serbs are more the victims than the perpetrators of "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans in the 1990s. * The United States never aided democratic opponents of Slobodan Milosevic, and the bombing has now destroyed such opposition.
While most European members of NATO are besieged by protests against the war in Yugoslavia, there is little outcry in this country against the bombing. That's largely because American journalists aren't bringing the historical and political facts of the conflict to the public, say Serbian activists.
Walk into the Serbian-American Hall on the northeast side of Detroit and you can find a group of Americans confused and angry about how quickly they have gone from being seen as good citizens to outcasts.
Martha Teshich describes herself as a loyal Democrat. She worked for both of Bill Clinton's presidential campaigns. A teacher in Center Line, she is a union activist. But these days she can't even get Democratic political leaders to return her calls, much less listen to her pleas to stop the bombs from falling on her relatives in Yugoslavia.
"It's a real betrayal," says Teshich, referring to the overwhelming support of Democrats for the war. "It's extremely frustrating being an American at this time. Everything I believe has been totally turned against me."
Indeed, in a recent magazine article in the Nation, California state Sen. Tom Hayden calls the NATO war "the liberals' folly." As in the early days of the Vietnam War, which he protested, liberal Democrats have "painted it with a coat of international altruism that blinded them to folly," says Hayden.
Father Radomir Obsenica, a fourth-generation Serbian-American, has been pastor of St. Lazarus Serbian Orthodox Church in Detroit for nine years. He says that earlier this decade, Croatia waged a brutal campaign against 300,000 ethnic Bosnian Serbs in Krajina. NATO refused to enter the dispute.
To Obsenica, then, it is hypocritical for NATO to justify its bombing campaign by saying it is the only way to stop ethnic cleansing. There is little dispute that before the bombing began, about 2,000 people died in the insurrection by ethnic Albanians in Kosovo; only a minority of them were Albanian citizens.
"The past eight years this administration has done everything possible to eliminate Serbs from the face of the Earth," Obsenica says. "If you bomb innocent people with cluster bombs, does that make you a war criminal? If the Serbs did it, it would be called a massacre. If NATO does it, it's OK." Antipersonnel bombs explode on the ground, rocketing chunks of shrapnel in all directions. Hayden writes that "it is morally meaningless for liberals to send charitable contributions to refugee aid organizations ... while silently supporting the use of these personnel bombs."
Stevanovich says he usually changes the minds of pro-war people he meets if he can talk to them for 15 minutes or so. "They don't have any idea of the facts," he says. Accurate reports about the extent of the atrocities are available on the Internet, he says. But most people get their news from network or cable television, which has largely toed the U.S. government's line on the war.
The willingness to swallow that line has been alarming to many Serbian-Americans. When NATO bombed the main Serbian television station, Stevanovich wondered: "Where's the outcry from the journalists themselves over the killing of journalists?"
Nikola Ristivojevich came to Detroit from Yugoslavia in 1989 to pursue a master's degree in business. He is disturbed by the bombing of infrastructure and civilian targets in Yugoslavia. If the goal is to get people to rise up against Milosevic, the effect is the opposite, he says.
"There was a huge democratic movement three years ago, massive demonstrations," Ristivojevich says. But the U.S. government did nothing then to aid opponents of Milosevic.
NATO started the war after giving Milosevic an ultimatum. The Rambouillet agreement would have required Serbians to give up sovereignty over Kosovo and accept NATO occupation of the province. Ristivojevich says it is well-known that Serbians don't accept such ultimatums.
Teshich says she feels patronized when Clinton says he has no quarrel with the Serbian people, even as NATO drops cluster bombs on their homeland. But she is trying to keep her anger in check and her goals in sight.
"Our message is 'stop the bombing,' " she says. "We want a negotiated peace. And we want our sovereignty, not NATO occupation."
Most disturbing to many Serbian-Americans is the precedent set by what they see as a massive propaganda campaign, aided by the media. Says Stevanovich: "If they can bomb Yugoslavia based on these lies, they can do anything to anybody."
To contact the Serbian-American Relief Fund, call 810-755-5550. A Web site which contains information and arguments in opposition to the NATO war against Yugoslavia is maintained by the Committee Against U.S. Intervention at www.antiwar.com. -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Charles Brown" <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> Subject: Detroit Sunday Journal (Strikers) on war on Yugoslavia Date: Fri, 21 May 1999 09:24:08 -0400 Size: 6611 URL: <../attachments/19990521/297cadac/attachment.eml>