These days are unbearable for those who understand what is happening to the Serbs in Kosovo. They are being driven from their own land with the approval and participation of those NATO countries that bombed them under false pretenses in 1999. In 1989, BEFORE the wars in Yugoslavia began, the New York Times wrote about it and even then the dispossession had been going on for decades. Anybody who really cares can learn about it but today most prefer to think that the Serbs are evil and don’t deserve their land. Anybody who doubts their moral and historical rights can just look up the name ‘Kosovo.’ It is a Serbian name meaning ‘field of blackbirds.’ The land of Kosovo is filled with great mediaeval churches and monasteries that survived even 500 years of Ottoman rule and, since the international forces moved in to “protect” the peace and promote “multiculturalism” in 1999 more than 150 of those holy irreplaceable treasures have been blown up and desecrated. Now, after all this devastation and while the non Albanian population of Kosovo lives in ghettos and must be accompanied by military guard even to visit a cemetery or buy groceries, the “international community” is in the process of rewarding the ethnic Albanian inhabitants for their destruction! Look it up. The Serbs have been told that they’d better toe the line and give up their land or else.
With this on my mind I happened to pick up a book by Howard Zinn and opened it to the chapter on Indian Removal in the U.S. The despair of a righteous people driven from their land is so painfully resonant of what is happening now to the Serbs of Kosovo.
In the 1830s Andrew Jackson ordered that the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek and Seminole Indians, known as “The Five Civilized Tribes” be driven from their territory in the south to the Western United States. Sixteen thousand men, women and children were driven on a long march and four thousand of them died along the way. The Indians call this march the “Trail of Tears.” Here is what the Cherokee Tribe said to the government of the United States.
We are aware that some persons suppose it will be for our advantage to remove beyond the Mississippi. We think otherwise. Our people universally think otherwise . . . . We wish to remain on the land of our fathers. We have a perfect and original right to remain without interruption or molestation. The treaties with us, and laws of the United States made in pursuance of treaties, guarantee our residence and our privileges and secure us against intruders. Our only request is that these treaties may be fulfilled, and these laws executed.
We entreat those to whom the foregoing paragraphs are addressed, to remember the great law of love: “Do to others as ye would that others would do to you.” We pray them to remember that, for the sake of principle, their forefathers were compelled to leave, therefore driven from the old world and that the winds of persecution wafted them over the great waters and landed them on the shores of the new world, when the Indian was the sole lord and proprietor of these extensive domains. Let them remember in what way they were received by the savage of America, when power was in his hand . . .
We were all made by the same Great Father, and are all alike His Children. We all come from the same Mother, and were suckled at the same breast. Therefore we are brothers, and as brothers, should treat together in an amicable way.
(From “The People Speak” by Howard Zinn)
nikole@idirect.ca