Benjamin C. Works, Executive Director

--Celebrating Chaos Theory Since 1990--

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SIT 8-2; Sunday. August 2, 1998

Strategic Issues Today:  Self Defense, Kosovo, The Christian Right

 "Of this I am certain, that in a democracy the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority... and that oppression of the minority will extend to far greater numbers, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single sceptre."

- Edmund Burke; Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790

NOTE: I will be on vacation in Freedom, New Hampshire from Aug. 4-11 and will not be on-line that week. Radio stations know where to reach me.

In Friday's Part One of a piece on the right-obligation of self-defense, I considered the right of self-defense and the New Left. Today, it is logical to broaden the exploration to other immediate reactions, some based on correspondence with readers of the last report. It is the intent of SIRIUS reports to add symmetry to considerations over time in searching for solutions that may actually hope to work. What is clear thus far is that there are no short cuts or easy solutions in what is offered by the New Left's ideas, only rhetorical traps and topical solutions. Nor are there grand solutions from the religious right; our hope lies in Federalism and republicanism moderating undisciplined democracy.

Simply put, government agencies, programs and dictates cannot substitute for voluntary civic engagement in the community. Gun control laws, without other supportive activities treat the symptom and not the disease at best; more normally additional regulations are placebos or covers for political litigation. We have enough laws against murder, assault, etc.

Spectacular crimes reported in the media remain anecdotal and tell us something not only about a teen-age perpetrator --usually some troubled lad with a "Rambo" fantasy that's been apparent for months-if not years. In the Jonesboro, AK case, for instance, it was revealed that the boy perpetrator had been molested by a pederast in Minnesota. These cases though anecdotal, do tell us the family is missing something, the community is missing something and that the school may be less than ideally managed and may even by hopelessly overrun by a politically correct agenda. That appears to be the case in Half Moon Bay, California where an 8^th grader's disturbing essay focussed on the Principal, the Library and Science Lab.

America's civic cohesion is not irreparably broken, but in many places it is badly damaged. Cohesion requires a self-disciplined and engaged citizenry, its moral and educational institutions and its regulated law enforcement and judiciary. We shall soon look at how international self-defense of states follows the ancient right and duty of personal self-defense as this bears on the question of the necessity, right and duty to build missile defense systems as part of our national defense. Other considerations are to be found later below and in following issues.

A couple of items about how the Gegs of the KLA in particular, go about harassing those who dare to disagree. It is not reported at all well in the west, but a full half of the refugees reported in Kosovo (100-150,000 depending on which NGO relief official is being cited) are Kosovo Serbs, Serb refugees resettled from Croatia's ethnically cleansed "Krajina" districts and other non-Gegs. Others are Geg Catholics not directly associated with the KLA's movement. The following have been published by The New York Times and BBC and represent confirmed incidents of Albanian Kosovars depriving other non-Serbs of their civil and human rights through deliberate discrimination, harassment and terror.

This, from the Sunday Aug. 2, NY Times:

By CHRIS HEDGES

BREZNICA, Yugoslavia -- On a hardscrabble hilltop farm with a collection of sod huts, wooden outhouses, fields of corn and wheat and lines of newly dug trenches protected by sand bags, there live some of the dwindling numbers of what the Serbs proudly remind people are their "loyal Albanians."

The Yugoslav president and Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic is still master over these few acres in Kosovo. A photo of his face hangs on the wall of the central four-room house.

The separatist ethnic Albanian rebels, who have taken control of portions of Kosovo province in Serbia and who have attacked this farm several times recently, are known here as "terrorists." The Serbian police are "comrades," and the crumbling old order is revered.

"I am Albanian," Sali Krasniqi, 62, said, his voice quivering with nervous tension as he darted along the top of his earthworks. "But I respect all people. Everyone is against me because I defend freedom. I did not sell my soul to hate Serbs and build a greater Albania."

Krasniqi, whose family sheltered Serbs from local fascist [Geg] militias raised by the occupying Italians during World War II, went on to become a fervent supporter of Tito's communist state of Yugoslavia. His neighbors say he worked as a police informer, which he denies.

In this Serbian province, which is 90 percent ethnic Albanian, the support for the rebels has grown since a Serbian crackdown began in March. Very few Albanians here remain loyal to the Serbs.

Because Krasniqi's family decided not to back the separatist movement, they have been threatened, ostracized, beaten and then attacked by rebel patrols. He and his five sons, armed with a collection of shotguns and old carbines, stand guard all night around the family compound. They rarely go into town and when they do, they travel in an armed group. The family is a sad reminder that Kosovo has been divided into two bitter, irreconcilable camps.

"He is a traitor and has always been a traitor," said Jetish Shala, 56, another ethnic Albanian, who stood near his cornfield a few hundred yards away. "No one in the village speaks with him. We treat him as if he does not exist. He is the devil."

Milosevic used the discrimination by ethnic Albanians in Kosovo against the Serb minority a decade ago as kindling to build the virulent nationalist movement that brought him to power. He became the Serbian leader, then president of Yugoslavia, of which Serbia and Montenegro are the two remaining republics.

The state-run news organizations, often apparently fabricating accounts of rape and murder to inflame Serbian passions, turned to men like Krasniqi to repeat the official line. Many times over the years, he has denounced separatists on Belgrade television and allowed two of his daughters to marry Serbs, an act that alone would have caused him to be shunned by the community.

Retaliation has taken many forms, he said, standing in his yard with a pistol in a brown leather case on his belt. A decade ago, he said, "I had a job in a brick factory. My hands were badly injured. I went to a hospital in Belgrade and was promised a pension. The local Albanian authorities, however, destroyed my documents. I never got my pension."

He said that the drinking water on the farm was contaminated when a dead cat was tossed into the well. The family cow and dog were shot and killed. None of his 11 children were able to finish school, he said, because of the hostility of their classmates.

His four school-age grandchildren, both girls and boys, have been beaten, taunted as being "Milosevic's children" and repeatedly thrown by classmates into the creek at the bottom of the hill until they no longer dared to go to class at the local primary school.

A couple of years ago, a local ballad singer, Halit Gashi, wrote the "Song of the Traitors," played on the traditional quiftelija, a bench-shaped two string instrument, that ridiculed by name those ethnic Albanians who backed the Serbian government.

"He is not Albanian," the refrain goes about Krasniqi, who played a cassette of the song. "He is not even human. He was bought with Serbian money and Serbian women. The traitor Krasniqi is paid to steal our freedom."

The children, who are sent each night to the dirt-floored cellar to sleep, are dressed in rags and barefoot. There is little food in the house. Krasniqi's wife, Habibe, 55, apologized because there was not enough sugar to mix in the cups of thick Turkish coffee. "My 8-year-old daughter, Elvedina, walked into town to buy a kilo of sugar and the other children threw her in the creek," said Naim Krasniqi, 32, one of the Krasniqi sons, who has three young children. "They dumped the bag of sugar in the water. She came home in tears and said she was never going to town again."

The father and five sons, the only loyalists here, are now largely cut off from the Serbs and are gearing for further attacks. The Serbian police, fearing ambushes, have not driven into the village of 260 homes for weeks. Krasniqi and his relatives worry that if the rebels get past the trenches and sandbags, the family will join the list of some three dozen ethnic Albanians executed by the rebels this year for collaboration with the Serbs.

As the men got out the weapons for the night, Krasniqi pointed out the white stucco houses dotting the dun-colored fields and grassy meadows that belonged to Serbian families when he was a child, but that are now all in the hands of ethnic Albanians. "The Serbian families were slowly driven out," he said. "The terrorists tell my neighbors we will all be killed, that my head will be delivered to the local rebel commander, but we have fought them off so far."

"My wife was out collecting wood the other afternoon and she saw two of them in the woods," he continued. "She dropped the wood and ran. They began to shoot. We shot back for an hour. I saw one fall. My sons wanted to go capture him but I did not let them. The terrorists took his body away."

Aferdita Krasniqi, the 20-year-old wife of Bekim Krasniqi, 20, another one of the sons, suffered a miscarriage during the attack. "She is trying to recover," her husband said. "We don't have money to put her in a hospital. Besides, it's not safe to leave the farm."

Sunday, August 2, 1998 Copyright 1998 The New York Times

This from the BBC:

Sunday, August 2, 1998 Published at 01:01 GMT 02:01 UK BBC: World: Europe

Seventy-six members of an ancient ethnic minority group have fled the Kosovo conflict and arrived in southern Russia. The Adygs, better known as Circassians, flew in from the Kosovo region of Yugoslavia to their historic homeland in southern Russia on Saturday.

Forty-two families whose ancestors settled in Kosovo during the 19th century, when it was part of the Ottoman Empire, had been living in two villages outside the Kosovar capital, Pristina. Ethnic Albanians who are in the majority in Kosovo consider the Circassians, although fellow Muslims, too supportive of the Serbs.

The ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which is fighting for independence from Yugoslavia, is thought to have threatened the Adygs.

The Adygs say they have been "sitting on their suitcases" since the Kosovo conflict began in 1997.

A second group of Adygs is due to arrive in Russia later this month having travelled through Bulgaria and across the Black Sea.

Aslan Karashev, a minister in the tiny Adyg republic in the north Caucasus, says: "Adygeya is ready to receive its compatriots from Kosovo."

The Adygs are being brought over by Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations and will be housed in a former kindergarten. Mr Karashev said they would eventually be given land to cultivate.

Circassians hail from the north Caucasus, but during the 19th century they were displaced by Russia's imperial conquests and were scattered around Europe and the Middle East.

© Copyright 1998, The British Broadcasting Company

Yesterday, a second Serb prisoner at the Hague War Crimes Tribunal, Dr. Milan Kovacevic, died in his cell through a curious neglect of his known cardio-vascular conditions --he had recently suffered a stroke as well. A month ago, Slavko Dokmanovic, was so carelessly guarded he reportedly was able to exit his cell, find some rope and hang himself from the hinge of his cell door.

Conspiracy theorists are already alarmed. Add to this that James McDougall was harassed into a fatal heart attack in a Federal Prison over a urine sample for a drug test. We recently had a tragic death of a leading Nigerian political opposition leader, which precipitated riots and you have an uncanny defiance of statistical probabilities.

The current War Crimes Tribunal is providing increasing proof why the NGOs and UN's assertion of the need for a powerful and permanent Tribunal are a dangerous laughingstock. Add to this the fact that the Tribunal issues "secret indictments" and kidnaps targeted indictees and we are back to grim days of "Bills of Attainder" and Star Chamber Courts. That the Feminists and others use propaganda as evidence in support of defining new and highly politically defined "war crimes" offenses and you can understand why George Washington, James Madison, Jefferson, et al would be apoplectic.

In a prison setting, it is very easy to harass a person with cardio-vascular problems into a strok or heart attack without drugs or physical violence, as I am sure they knew in Stalin's Gulags and Hilter's early camps --before the Holocaust mechanized slaughter.

The Hague Tribunal's record disqualifies it for serious respect or any sense of trust, even if it can prove it did not create stressful conditions deliberately, and I do not think they were trying to trigger Mr. Kovacevic's fatal heart attack. In Mr. McDougall's case I am not quite so certain.

The case is so extremely weak for Kovacevic's alleged role in purported "death camp" activities around Prijedor that the incarceration lasted over twelve months without bringing the accused to trial. Where does his family go now to get his honor back if he was innocent? This is what Reagan official Raymond Donovan wondered when exonerated after a political smear campaign in 1987.

The US Bill of Rights Article VI guarantees Americans "In all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury·" The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees similar rights --if not more elaborate ones-- to all humanity. Article 9, for instance, states: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile," etc. One would expect the UN's first Court would establish a record to be emulated, not one to be laughed at and suspected.

A couple of SIRIUS' readers promptly forwarded observations qualifying some aspects of Friday's exploratory piece. Friday, I focussed on the New Left's agenda, building toward a wider point about collective security nationally and internationally and also exploring some of the keys to successful civic cohesion. I will defer much of that to a piece after August 12^th.

But for today, let me say that extremists' actions generate extreme reactions and the New Left's antithetical force, the Christian Right, is just as extreme and guilty of unconstitutional behavior in attempting to impose its narrow view of religious morality on a secular body politic. The one advantage here is that there is sufficient Christian and non-Christian diversity --the "factionalism Madison counted on in The Federalist Nr. 10-- in the United States and other Western Countries, that we need not fear all of us becoming subject to some abstruse Southern Pentacostalist regime predicated on an eschatological assumption of an imminent Second Coming. The Republican Conservative movement is increasingly in the hands of southern Christian sects with an eschatological view of imminent apocalypse to the exclusion of mainstream Protestants, Catholics and other more reasoned views of Biblical Prophesy. Leading evangelicals trying to overrun a broad-based party with a narrow theological --and absolutist-- agenda include Gary Bauer and James Dobson, while Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson are only slightly less immoderate in their political views. It is interesting that Ralph Reed has moved from the religious wing's "Christian Coalition" towards a more secular conservative consultancy.

For details on the nature of our ongoing "Fourth Religious Great Awakening" I refer readers back to a special report on Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism published on March 4th. To spare new subscribers and non-subscribers to SIRIUS website a laborious effort, I will E-mail the newsgroup a copy of that report. But a few summary remarks are in order here.

It is the business of good religious leaders to save souls from sin and to help ensure civic cohesion and civility while ministering to their flocks. It is not the proper business of clerics to engage in adventurous social activism --as with the Maryknoll Fathers in Latin America-- or to launch crusades against other religious sects or faiths on a doctrinal dispute. It is a political fact, though that religious affiliation makes for a naturally cohesive poliitical voting bloc and ambitious politicians have eternally exploited such natural affinities, as they do with ethnic identification and other easy niche factors, such as trade union membership, etc. Religious communities are always vulnerable to artful politicians of the Left and Right. The good men at the Decani Monastery in Kosovo are setting a sterling example adhering to the best example of religious leadership.

I do not think, for instance that prayer belongs in the school room --it belongs in Chuch, in the football huddle, and in other voluntary activities. But some ceremonial activity at the beginning of the group day makes for group cohesion, and this is why we used to make our children recite the Pledge of Allegiance facing the flag, followed in many schools by singing a verse of a patriotic song; America the Beautiful, Columbia, Gem of the Ocean, or the Star Spangled Banner were among those which alternated in my Illinois grade school to avoid the appearance of some more militant and uniform nationalism.. This is where the religious right has erred; a group recitation is the ancient and natural way to initiate cohesion in a group setting, but the school should inculcate civic values, and the church, religious values.

© Copyright 1998 Benjamin C. Works-SIRIUS