THE WAR IN KOSOVO : Pacifism & ethnic cleansing.

The long line of the newly homeless, the men, women, and children brutally thrust from their homes in Kosovo, Yugoslavia, face us in the press and fill television screens. Harrowing scenes fasten on the heart, the agony of a weary old woman being trundled in a wheelbarrow or that of a young woman giving her breast to her baby while continuing the march. An answering agony springs up in the viewer.

The ethnic Albanians, almost all Muslims, are being systematically expelled from Kosovo in an ethnic cleansing devised by the regime of Slobodan Milosevic and carried out by the army of Serbia. Now almost 1 million refugees are begging for entry into the poor places of Europe- Albania and Macedonia. They tell of rapes, executions, and massacres by the soldiers. The Serbs, fiercely loyal to the Orthodox church, see in their Muslim neighbors a reminder of the Serb defeat by Muslim armies six hundred years ago and their long travail in subjection to the Ottoman Empire. The holy places of the Serbs, and the place from which they take their identity, are in Kosovo.

My mind travels back to an earlier ethnic cleansing. I refer to the mass expulsion from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II more than 12 million people of German ethnic origin. They were herded into a destroyed and truncated West Germany. The sufferings and uncounted deaths of the expellees were given minimal attention in the press. Their fate had been decided, along with the redrawing of borders, at the Yalta Conference. As a member of a voluntary agency, Catholic Relief Services, I was present in West Germany in those years, and I heard accounts of the horrors inflicted on these people, and the immeasurable sufferings they endured.

The situation of the uprooted in 1999 is mightily different. The compassion of millions around the world has been aroused by seeing at first hand what some human beings are forced to undergo when torn from their homes.

This time a remedy was at hand to stop the depredations of the Serb armies. Following sessions which were presumed to be negotiations, the NATO alliance decided to launch its first war. On March 24, with Americans flying most of the aircraft and firing most of the missiles, air strikes began against Yugoslavia. Many American citizens, as well as the citizens of such nations as England, Germany, and France, asked the question: Do not justice and a common humanity call for support of so just a cause? Are not nations justified in employing military means in a moral response to the evil of unchecked ethnic cleansing?

The answer, which may seem heartless, but which I give from the bottom of my conscience, is "No." On the pragmatic level, the air strikes initially increased the number of Kosovars made shelterless by army actions. The inacurracy of air and missile strikes soon became news. Errant bombs and missiles terrified the inhabitants of Kosovo as they landed on homes, markets, bridges, a hospital, and refugee convoys. One bomb strayed over the border into Bulgaria, another struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

My refusal to accept the response of violence arises from my conviction, that of a pacifist, and by the grace of God, a Catholic pacifist. I am aware that the term pacifist is poorly accepted (and poorly understood) among Catholics. To many it denotes passivity, a refusal to struggle for God's kingdom and his justice along with the generality of citizens, in wartime, for example. In my vision, pacifism consists of the daily acceptance of the struggle for God's kingdom and his justice by nonviolent means. My response to a personal attack, or to a call for participation at any stage of the social organization known as war, would be the same: gospel nonviolence. What was problematic in the just-war tradition, which the church taught for fifteen hundred years following the nonviolent teaching of the first few hundred years of the church's existence, is that, regrettably, it was captured by the nations, as every war was declared just by the warring party, which was then empowered to draft its people to maim and kill in good conscience.

More and more Catholics in the nuclear age are proclaiming themselves pacifists. The former secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference's Department of Social Development and World Peace, J. Bryan Hehir, pointed out that after John XXIII, Catholic teaching on peace has been in a state of movement. "The principal development," he asserted, "has been the legitimization of a pacifist perspective as a method for evaluating modern warfare." The Second Vatican Council was a prime source of this movement, particularly by validating conscientious objection to military service and the witness of nonviolence.

What vision brings me to a rejection of NATO air strikes to remedy the Kosovo crisis, and in fact, to the rejection of violence in Vietnam, the Gulf War, Grenada, and Panama?

First of all, the undergirding of my vision is seeing every human person, enemy or friend, as a child of God, a repository of the divine. Each one is a sacrosanct being, imaging in a unique way the Creator. To live by pacifism, we try to love our neighbors, near and far, friendly or unfriendly, as persons for whom a Person died. When Jesus commanded us to love one another as he has loved us, he was calling for an imitation of his sacrificial, redeeming love. We know that it is by his blood that we have been redeemed "from every tribe or tongue, from every nation and people." Paul reminds us that as followers of Jesus we become "new creatures," putting aside the concerns and desires of the "old creature." We would place among the marks of the old creature an undue love and attachment to tribe and nation. The honor due God was wrongly given to the nation.

The gospel of Jesus is often lost in the adulation of the nation and its power. Such weapons of the spirit as prayer, fasting, and peaceful resistance are puny things indeed in contrast to the strength and might of armies. Yet the weapons of the spirit are all that the pacifist has. A leading pacifist of our century, Dorothy Day, asserted the power of the spirit of Jesus at the opening of World War II. "Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount," she announced in the Catholic Worker. "We will continue our pacifist stand."

In the Sermon on the Mount we find the core of Jesus' teaching and the basis for a pacifist perspective on war. In the Beatitudes we are told that the merciful are blessed and will themselves be shown mercy. War is about mercilessness; soldiers in uniform must obey orders to maim and kill the enemy, to destroy his home, to prevent food from reaching him. Modern warfare, in contradistinction to earlier wars which interrupted the performance of the works of mercy, now reverses them, a betrayal of the relationship between human beings that was taught by Jesus. In order to keep mercy before our eyes, Jesus told us he is the hungry one, the thirsty one, the shelterless one, the one who is suffering, the one in captivity. Jesus is the suffering enemy in every war.

For the Catholic pacifist, the ultimate basis for refusing to participate in violence against human beings is the Eucharist. Jesus' legacy to his followers is the Table of the Lord where they can partake of his body and blood, thus becoming one with the Lord and closer to each other than to their own mothers. How could the followers of Jesus partake of his body and blood and then proceed to destroy the bodies and shed the blood of any of God's children?

Dorothy Day went to the Table of the Lord daily. To her, many of us owe our persistence in pacifism, our insistence that pacifism was a tenable position for the Catholic, long before it was accepted by church authorities. Day reminded us that it was the just-war concepts of a great Roman, Cicero, that helped Saints Ambrose and Augustine fashion their conditions for just war. It was Day who stayed with the words of Jesus, above all in the Sermon on the Mount, and led us from the teachings of Cicero to the teachings that came from the lips of the Messiah.

Eileen Egan's most recent book is Peace Be with You: Justified War or the Way of Nonviolence (Orbis).

Patrick Jordan

These are the notes of a quasi-pacifist, that is, of one who is not sure he is one.

Over the past fifteen years, as a member of the Commonweal staff, I have found myself at odds with editorial policy on nuclear deterrence, the Gulf War, continued sanctions against Iraq, and the present bombardment of Serbia. Yet I remain at the magazine. Is it out of moral lassitude (I do need a job, I tell myself), or principle? (One's life as a pacifist, after all, means losing a lot of arguments.)

But stay I do because Commonweal provides an unusual forum for the reasoned discussion of such issues. And while I do not always agree with the journal's positions, I admire its openness and my colleagues' integrity. I am quite aware of their struggles with these issues. For it seems to me the just-war theory, which they generally hold, fails finally to provide much defense for its adherents, let alone an incontrovertible authority. The theory's elements always seem to be flopping out there like disparate pieces of medieval armor, their bearers like unsteady knights trying to hold them all together. Think of the varying and changing parts: the requirements of just cause, proper authority, last option, cost of probable victory, proportionality, civilian immunity, sufficient means, changing goals, not to mention human entropy. Then there is the matter of choosing between Christ and Cicero. Even the most carefully crafted conditional acceptance of violence authorized by the just-war criteria leaves one some leagues from Nazareth. Finally, there are all the unintended consequences: not only of the particular war, but of the theory itself which historically has provided justification to prepare for the next war.

The pacifist, whose act of faith starts at a different pole, finds himself/herself nonetheless with a similar moral and intellectual dilemma. One may have concluded that the cross teaches a radically different manner of dealing with violence than Augustine, but that does not resolve the concrete problem of what to do about Milosevic. Further, the pacifist respects the courage and the moral probity of those who resist tyranny, particularly those ready to shed their own blood in the service of honor and the defense of others.

But despite granting these points, the pacifist maintains the belief that there is an inherent contradiction in trying to make peace through violence; that there is an intricate, unimpeachable connection between ends and means; and that there is no substitute for example when it comes to creating an alternative model to violent conflict resolution.

Even so, the pacifist also remains in moral free fall. For despite all the staunch axioms, the pacifist recognizes their practical tenuousness: If the logic of pacifism is to act so as to become what you want the other fellow to be, it seldom happens that either side of that equation is achieved.

From this follows the pacifist's greatest conundrum: How in the face of a Milosevic-and before the eyes of a million refugees-does one continue to adhere to a belief in nonviolence? The only final answer, if it is an answer, is to throw yourself and the world about you into the bleeding arms of Christ. His mercy, his endurance, his faith, his cross. That cross means resisting evil with good: By writing, protesting, welcoming the displaced, questioning the war makers, and resisting the crimes (and criminals) that unleash war.

Pacifists-but certainly not pacifists alone-must work to establish a competent authority to resolve international conflicts and to prevent acts of genocide. That will happen only after careful preparation on all levels. It will require a proliferation of groups-small as well as large- working to create alternatives to war. For starters, I look to grassroots bodies like the Sant' Egidio community, the Bruderhof, the Catholic Workers, Amnesty International. I hope for a renewed, strengthened United Nations. And I look to an Eileen Egan and a Jim Douglass, who worked behind the scenes at Vatican II to facilitate a change in the church's teaching on conscientious objection and to clarifying the church's stand against nuclear war. Such developments were mighty acts of the Holy Spirit. We need many more. Patrick Jordan is Commonweal's managing editor.

James W. Douglass

In March 1994, I stood in Republic Square in Belgrade in support of a courageous group of Serbian peacemakers, Women in Black. The women were holding their weekly vigil in resistance to Slobodan Milosevic's policies of ethnic cleansing, then decimating Bosnia and Croatia and increasingly threatening Kosovo.

Dressed in black for the victims of war, the Serbian women were regularly attacked by their fellow citizens. Yet every Wednesday afternoon they publicly stood their ground with smiles and banners. They then organized for peace the rest of the week out of an unidentified office that was often moved for security reasons. But even such limited spaces for peacemaking in Belgrade have now been politically demolished by our bombs.

Stasha Zajovic, one of those Women in Black, sums up in a recent e-mail letter the plight of current Serb and Kosovar peacemakers: "This conspiracy of militarism-global and local-dangerously reduces our space. Soon there won't be this space. With the horror the people of Kosovo are experiencing in this NATO intervention, they are paying a price even greater than before: NATO in the sky; Milosevic on the ground."

Veran Maric, leader of Radio B92, another dissident Belgrade group I visited in 1994, writes that the grassroots movement which struggled against Milosevic for years feels betrayed by the NATO bombs: "These people now feel compelled to take up arms and join their sons serving in the army. With bombs falling all around, nobody can persuade them-though some have tried-that this is only an attack on their government and not on their country."

Kosovo's own massive nonviolent resistance to Milosevic was driven into political oblivion by the West even before our planes started bombing. For most of the 1990s, the Albanian Kosovars waged a remarkable nonviolent struggle against Serbian oppression with strikes, marches, widespread noncooperation, and even their own parallel government, schools, and medical clinics. For a while Milosevic seemed stymied by the Kosovar popular movement. But it received little support from the Western governments and was demoralized by the Dayton peace agreement.

With the November 1995 Dayton accords, the United States made a deal with Milosevic on Bosnia that failed to secure autonomy for Kosovo, yet recognized Bosnian borders created by ethnic cleansing. Dayton's lesson was that violence pays. It encouraged Milosevic to intensify the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, while spurring the rise of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The KLA then provided a convenient military rationale for Milosevic's razing all of Kosovo.

But what alternative international response might there have been to the policies of Milosevic? How could the struggling peace movements of Serbia and Kosovo have been effectively supported by the West, rather than ignored, driven to violence, and now bombed into oblivion?

Let us consider the following proposal for a nonviolent intervention in Kosovo, issued in late March by Nashville peace activists Karl Meyer, Pam Beziar, and Angela Schindler:

* As the conflict began to develop, the United Nations Security Council would define the principles for UN intervention and a just settlement.

* The secretary general would begin to assemble a "nonviolent army" to be led by influential world figures such as (a) religious leaders including bishops delegated by the pope, Orthodox patriarchs, Islamic, and Jewish leaders; (b) Nobel Peace Prize winners, such as former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, the Dalai Lama, Mairead Corrigan Maguire of Northern Ireland, President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa; (c) retired world leaders such as Jimmy Carter and Mikhail Gorbachev; (d) diplomats from Russia and all the other European neighbors of Yugoslavia; (e) experienced activists trained in nonviolent tactics, such as veterans of the civil rights movement and Christian peacemaker teams that have worked in the West Bank and Haiti.

* In the case of Kosovo, this nonviolent brigade would have been divided into two units. One would have gone to Serbia to engage in dialogue with all sectors of civil society; the other would have gone to Kosovo to interpose itself between Serbian forces and the KLA and to begin dialogue and mediation between them.

The realistic assumption behind the Nashville proposal was that the power of a government is dependent on the support and cooperation of its people. For that reason nonviolent resistance based on truth and supported by the world community can dislodge any unjust government's popular support. Milosevic's hold on power was in fact shaky before the Dayton agreement and the NATO bombing. The Serbian and Kosovar nonviolent movements were threatening his power.

Is the primary obstacle to nonviolent alternatives in Kosovo and elsewhere our own attitude that only violence can respond to violence?

James W. Douglass is the author of The Nonviolent Coming of God (Orbis).