ZAP / ARK
GAJEVA 55
10 000 ZAGREB
CROATIA
zap_zg@geocities.com
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/3707/
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e!
we're fine.
there's electicity and water and food.
a couple of thousands of Belgraders hang paper targets on their chest during
night and then stand on the bridges while holding hands.
there are concerts every day.
belgrade is full of Russians.
it doesn't seem like everything's gonna be fine.
we love you.
m.
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SERBIA THREATENED WITH ECOLOGICAL DISASTER
NATO intervention in Yugoslavia is increasingly gaining a dimension of
retaliation. The number of civilian casualties rises every day. The
destruction of economic sites has long term dramatic consequences for
civilian population and puts cities, country and the entire region under
serious danger.
The bombing of the chemical plant in Pancevo, near Belgrade, has already
caused severe ecological damage and seriously threatens to turn into an
ecological disaster. In the last fire that broke out in the refinery and
factory producing artificial fertilizers, only the favorable direction
of
the wind prevented the whole city and all its inhabitants from suffering
much more serious ecological and health problems.
In the last few days, chemical plants in Novi Sad and Belgrade have been
bombed. Their destruction could lead to the tragedy exceeding the one in
Bhopal, India.
Stop the brutal and senseless bombing.
Those who are making the decisions must be aware of the effects of their
actions. No subsequent apologies, or calling upon "collateral damage" could
justify this action, the consequences of which could lead to the
permanent destruction of civilian population and their natural environment.
In the name of the people and in the name of Nature we demand that the
use
of force stops immediately and a solution is found to use negotiations
for
solving the difficult crisis facing Europe and the world.
Association of Citizens for Democracy, Social Justice and Support to Trade
Unions
Belgrade Circle
European Movement in Serbia
Civic Initiatives
Center for Transition to Democracy-ToD
Center for Democracy and Free Elections
Distrikt 0230 (Kikinda)
Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia
Women in Black
Students Union of Serbia
VIN-Weekly Video News
Group 484
Yu Lawyers Committee for Human Rights
Foundation for Peace and Crisis Management
Urban Inn (Novi Pazar)
Union for Truth about Antifascist Resistance
Forum for Ethnic Relations
United Branch Trade Unions NEZAVISNOST
Sombor's Peace Group
Councile for Human Rights Leskovac
In Belgrade, April 19, 1999
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Belgrade, year 2009
My dear
I hope you saw the Subject line so you know which year is now. We are well,
during the day it's almost normal, but they strike through the night.
Yesterday we celebrated a small jubilee: they've hit the command for the
50th time. That glass we have over the enterance door fell off again. Daddy
said that he'll repair it one more time and that next time we'll put bricks
instead. Everything's much easier now, compared to 1999, when they still
had
planes and missiles. Then they really used to strike us badly. But after
they had to switch to throwing dynamite out of planes (we stroke back with
stone throwers) and finally today they strike with axes and jewelins (of
high quality production). We have enough water, we colect some in a small
barrel every time it rains. Regarding food, it's spring now so we have
some
daphodils. Yesterday we had a nice home made carbon soup, boiled garden
weed
with cat file. We also drank a very nice vine (of undefined origin) and
for
the end we had a small treat with daphodil and mud cake...
I walked through the city this morning. Knez Mihajlo's trench was full
of
people, there were also some happenings at Terazije holl. I just hate to
get
wet every time i go to the city, as I have to swimm over the river Sava.
They have placed some stands in crater at Slavija, so it looks much nicer
now. It is great it needs no special lighting, as it still shines from
that
3rd atomic bomb. It's a pitty they dropped that 4th one in France. Now
there
's no France anymore, and we'd have more light during the night.
Tommorow, they'll pay off second part of pensions for November 2004. Mother
said that she'll give whole 2 marks for food. She saw beautifull cat's
halfs.
There's nothing new in school. It's much easier to work with classes of
7-9
students. It looks like the radioation has done it's part, so the kids
are
nicer as well. Olgica should take her graduate class to an excursion, so
they'll probably go to Karaburma to see the biggest crater in the Balcans.
I
am sad to see that Russians and Americans started that conflict, so we
somehow fell out of perspective. And i guess that see is a bit higher ever
since America sunk....
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Kosovo Polje 16.IV - 99
My dear people, you won't believe it...it is 21.00 sharp and we have
electricity, and that is not all, this is the second day. We got back our
sight in this darkness. I did not want to let you know and be happy about
it, you know what they say, not to "cast a spell". But jokes aside, there
isn't really much to be happy about. But this is something at least. I
am
walking through the town today and lots of people right at the first
encounter say: "did you in Kosovo Polje also have electricity" - of course,
we were the first ones to get it. And what should I tell you, at the very
start there is a better and nicer mood, especially after the first peaceful
night since the war started, no-one could really believe it, lots of people
thought that they've become deaf from all the tremendous blasting.
And really, not one shelling near us, nor has anyone heard the planes this
night...but jinx would not be what they are if we would not get such a
lovely day spoiled. There were at least a 100 shelling today I counted,
over
15 clashes, most of them further from the city and Kosovo Polje. It is
confirmed that Magura, Goles and the Slatina airport were attacked today,
and a few locations southest behind Pristina.But this is nothing to us,
we
have electricity now, and here I am typing on the computer and talking
a
walk around the world. This is something. Orders about the black-out are
inforced, violators will be punished, we do not know what the punishments
are, but we will probably find out once the people relax a little. After
their timetable, we can expect them any moment. We are ready...and you
my
dear ones...
God luck to everyone....Gagi from Kosovo
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Someone asked what our people are doing regarding possible attacks on the
center of town. Believe me they do, I live in the center of Zemun and last
night around 23,50 I saw a flash in the air and heard an explosion, and
a
second after that a cruising missile has flown by my house, about 20-30
metres above the roof. I could not believe that they are flying so low,
then
I found out that the missile was struck down and that it crashed on the
other shore of the Danube river into the woods, which is only about 800-1000
meters away from my house.
Greetings from Zemun
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The official Bastard-statement on the war in Yugoslavia
by Boris Buden (editor in chief, Zagreb/Vienna)
Saving Private Havel
New graffiti is to be seen these days in bombed Belgrade. SLOBO KLINTONE
(Slobo, you Clinton!). This simple but poignant message reveals the abyss
in
which a genuinely democratic stance has fallen since the beginning of
the NATO military campaign against Yugoslavia. It illustrates not only
the
political deadlock of the democratic option: the intrinsic impossibility
of
a choice between the front-lines of two antagonistic sides; or an extremely
dangerous folie a deux, which has developed its own dynamics of escalation
without predictable consequences. The truly witty identification of the
two
leaders of the belligerent sides also indicated to what extent they are
related on a much deeper level. In an open letter addressed to his friends
in Yugoslavia two days after the first bombs fell, the Slovenian publicist
Lev Kreft emphasised the hopeless situation of Serbian democrats "wedged
between Sloba and Bill," by the way he related his vision of Clinton walking
the streets of Pristina and saying to the Albanians: "As long as I am with
you, no one should dare to beat you." People acquainted with the recent
history of the Kosovo crises are familiar with Kreft's allusion. On April
24, 1987 in Kosovo Polje, a Serbian dominated suburb of Pristina, Milosevic
bellowed this phrase to a crowd of Serbs protesting against Albanian
oppression. The police, controlled by Albanian officials used night-sticks
to break up the crowd, but Milosevic, at that time the head of the Serbian
Communist Party, stepped out to protect them. This phrase "enthroned him
as
a tsar", according to M. Solevic, one of the leaders of the Kosovo Serbs.
Looking back, this phrase changed the course of events that have culminated
in the NATO attack on Yugoslavia. But how can we understand what really
happened there? During his famous speech in Kosovo Polje Milosevic called
the Kosovo Serbs: "You should stay here. This is your land. These are your
houses. Your meadows and gardens. Your memories. You shouldn't abandon
your
land ... " He appealed neither to some kind of communist ideology nor to
national values, but rather invoked universal human rights. The famous
switch from communism to nationalism did not occur directly. There was
a
"humanitarian mediator". Milosevic offered to protect the rights of a
minority oppressed by a majority, and under the auspices of the given
constitutional framework of Albanian autonomy, the majority had the state
on
its side. For Milosevic the system was too narrow to cope with the problem,
and therefore he stepped outside of it. His solution was to be found "either
through the existing institutions or not. On the streets or inside, by
populist or elite methods." This was the start of Milosevic's
so-called "anti-bureaucratic revolution": encouraging the solution of a
political problem by ignoring the bureaucratic obstacles" inherent
in a
given institutional system. The analogy between the way Milosevic and
Clinton treat similar political problems is obvious. Was it not the
humanitarian argument - instead of a clear political objective -
that has
been used by NATO to justify its military intervention in Yugoslavia? Have
the interventionists not ignored the legal, institutional framework of
the
UN Security Council, the UN Charter and consequently international
law?
Both Milosevic and Clinton have done the same: they identified some
fundamental human right, hegemonized it, bypassed an "obsolete"
institutional framework and acted. In this respect, one could say that
Milosevic already has won the war. He lured NATO into playing his dirty
game. The breakdown of former Yugoslavia showed us all how dangerous this
kind of game can be. It was Milosevic who started to ignore the Yugoslav
institutions in 1987, to undermine their authority, and ultimately to
demolish them. What are the dangers of a world-wide "anti-bureaucratic
revolution" today, set into motion by NATO? This remains to be seen.
Forward into the better past
At this point we should perhaps recall the famous aphorism (attributed
to
Winston Churchill) about democracy: the worst of all possible systems,
but
there is no other which would be better. Certainly an attempt to act
politically or militarily to protect or promote human rights in a sovereign
country where they are being violated by the state itself could be always
blocked in the Security Council, due to the "conflict of interests" among
its members. In other words, there is always some kind of antagonism which
cannot be completely resolved, and this makes the Security Council the
worse
of all possible security councils. But do we have a better one? NATO has
treated UN institutions in the manner which Bolsheviks treated the
democratic institution of parliament - as a bourgeois club where genuine
rights have no chance of being recognised and will be blocked by some
particular class interest. Therefore, the
Bolsheviks eliminated the parliament, and the consequences thereof are
today
usually summed up under the concept of totalitarianism. They did it in
the
name of some common good, of course, in the same manner in which NATO is
demolishing the institutions of international law today. However, NATO
is
acting as much in the favour of the so-called common good as the Bolsheviks
did, and it represents an instance of universal human rights, just as the
Serbian Communist Party leader Milosevic did 12 years ago in Kosovo Polje.
This fact should be obvious to the world public. After all, how can one
claim to be a protector of minority rights after having provided extensive
military and political support for severe oppression of some other minority,
like the Kurds? Even if the use of force has to be recognised as a justified
means of achieving democratic goals, how can one bomb Belgrade without
bombing Ankara? Why not bomb Moscow because of Chechnya, or Peking because
of Tibet? "Why can't we do to our Albanians, what Turks have done to their
Kurds?" may seem to be a peculiar justification, but as long as the
opponent's position is untouched by the universality of justice as well,
there does not appear to be an appropriate answer to this cynical question.
There is always a particular political goal which should be considered
beyond all the humanitarian rhetoric. What is then the political objective
of the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia? As far as we know, this ought to
be
a political autonomy for the Albanians within the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia: something they already had under the Tito Constitution of 1974
and which was taken away from them by Milosevic in 1989. NATO wants to
give
this institutional framework back to them. As a political project, this
endeavour is a historical scandal: nineteen of the most advanced
liberal-democratic states of the world bombing an ex-communist one to
reinstate a communist political status quo ante. NATO is bombing its
political way into a better past. How can this desperate political
eclecticism be understood? Why has NATO turned communist or
"Yugo-nostalgic," now that it is really too late? The pre-1990 Yugoslav
Federation (which actually was a confederation) in which Serbs accounted
for
no more the 37 % of the entire population was the only realistic
institutional and political framework for the political autonomy of Kosovo.
Under democratic conditions in that Yugoslavia, a politician such as
Milosevic never would have had a chance to win an election with a Serbian
nationalist program.
A dwarf, not a giant
This political nonsense of the NATO military engagement in Yugoslavia
reveals its very sense. Bombs are not falling to enforce some political
solution. They ARE this political solution. After only a week of bombing
president Clinton stated explicitly what the objective of this bombing
was:
victory. Whatever this means politically. There is no political strategy
behind NATO. Its members have never made a choice between two contradictory
principles:
state sovereignty or national self-determination, both they have chosen
to
recognise and violate at the same time. NATO is without a global democratic
solution for this dilemma: one that can claim universal validity, challenge
the existing world order, and insist upon its radical reform. This
circumstance explains best why NATO cites "humanitarian causes" as a motive
for military intervention and not the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
For the "humanitarian cause" is the highest possible level of
universalisation, that the USA and its NATO-allies can afford, not
merely a
rhetorical excuse for the promotion of some dirty power interests, as so
many leftists claim today. There is no so-called hidden agenda of the NATO
military action in Yugoslavia: an alleged plan to control the Central Asian
oil over Kosovo-crossroad or even to seize the gold which, as is rumoured,
has recently been
found there. The old-fashioned materialistic fantasy about politics as
a
superstructure of some basic economic interests doesn't help us to
understand the true motive of the NATO intervention. Rather it suppresses
its real political meaning in the same way as the humanitarian rhetoric
does. For what is hidden behind the both is not an insatiable imperialist
giant, but a poor, frustrated and confused political dwarf. Nothing
expresses this fact better then the ever-larger waves of moral scandalising
over the tragical fate of the innocent victims of war and genocide. The
real
scandal today, at the end of 20th century is not the fact that people are
being expelled from their homes, raped and killed before the eyes of a
helpless democratic audience, (in view of our own historical experience
made
in this century, this is rather trivial) but the truth that this democratic
audience and its political representatives still don't have any political
answer to this challenge. The ideological purpose of the humanitarian
approach is then to represent war as some kind of natural catastrophe.
It
naturalises social and political phenomena and in a way that blocks any
kind
of rational political engagement. It leaves only two actors on the stage
of
history: an anonymous mass of innocent victims and a couple of pathological
monsters. To help the one, means to exterminate the other. Concrete
political antagonisms, the whole battlefield of political concepts and
their
protagonists no longer appear on the scene. This distorted picture of a
particular historical situation is completely at odds with reality, but
of
course not with needs of those who have produced it. As a genuine
ideological fantasy it serves its purpose even if it is extremely
contrafactual. That what everybody could perceive as a simple lie - "We
bomb
Milosevic. Not Serbian people"- proves to be a very useful lie for both:
for
those who are bombed as well as for those who bomb. For it makes Serbian
people retroactively innocent, i.e. not responsible for all the atrocities
either committed by war criminals living undisturbed among them or induced
by the politicians freely elected by those same people. On the other hand,
it buttresses the illusion that people in a democratic system never make
a
false choice. And if they make one, it is always due to a "lack of objective
information". If Serbs in Belgrade would know what their soldiers and
policemen are up to now in Kosovo, i. e. brutal ethnic cleansing, they
wouldn't allow this to happen. Unfortunately, the evil dictator has robbed
them of free media, and has thus turned them into innocent victims of
manipulation. Of course, it is the western democratic audience who gives
much more credence to this naive illusion then the Serbs themselves. It
helps them to suppress perhaps the severest trauma of democracy - the fact
that there is no hundred percent reliable fuse which can completely protect
democracy from its regression into some kind of totalitarianism. In the
whole ideological edifice "free media" play only the role of the so-called
subjective factor. If the system works is thanks to them. If it doesn't,
there is its failure to be blamed.
Transparency of evil
Certainly Serbs in Belgrade know enough about ethnic cleansing of Albanians
in Kosovo, at least, no less then they knew about what happened to Vukovar
or later in Sarajevo. In that sense they don't differ from Croats who are
well-aware of the fact that 400 000 Serbs were forced to leave Croatia
over
the last ten years and of their 24 000 burned homes; who know by name their
own war criminals with whom they live in peaceful coexistence without ever
thinking of prosecuting them. Croats - with some exceptions, albeit ones
without any real significance for the political situation - have never
asked
their Serb compatriots to return back, nor, for all that matter, would
Serbs
ask the expelled Albanians. If there is some lesson to be learned from
the
Yugoslav disaster, then it is about the full transparency of evil. Nothing
has happened in these to date ten years of war what hadn't been "entirely
predictable", and what hadn't been even announced in advance. Why then
such
common outcry over the genocide in Kosovo now after the same practices
have
been closely followed all over former Yugoslavia for almost a decade? Why
hadn't here been an outcry before the war ever has started, when
today's
President of Croatia Tudjman published his book with the idea that
a
genocide could have entirely positive consequences because it "leads to
an
ethnical homogenisation of a given nation and therefore ... to more harmony
..."? A politician endorsing such idea was financially, politically and
later militarily backed by the countries now most engaged in the NATO war
campaign in Yugoslavia. Both Tudjman and Milosevic had outlined the later
ethnic cleansing in Bosnia even before the war in Slovenia (1991) have
ever
got underway, and this, too, is a well-known fact. Those who for instance
ask why it is that today's Pol Pot of the Balkans, Slobodan Milosevic,
still
yesterday was accepted everywhere as a reliable negotiator, we could reply
by asking a more cynical question: What is actually wrong with Pol Pot
since
it was the United States which protested against the Vietnamese military
intervention in the Red Khmer's Kampuchea.
We'll bomb you into stone-innocence
"Only a stone is completely innocent," Hegel once wrote. If this makes
any
sense then in politics. Neither the Serbs in Belgrade are innocent, nor
is
the western democratic audience. The alleged innocence of both is
only a
retroactive effect of a common depolitization taking place within a
humanitarian framework. In any case, humanitarianism today is not only
a new
opium for people which makes them blind to the political meaning of
historical events. Its ideological use is of much greater importance. The
best example of this is the attempt to find some juristically plausible
justification for the military intervention in Yugoslavia, which according
to international law is illegal. Here the notion of "humanitarian
intervention" is used to argue that it is a matter of "custom and practice".
To be sure, "customs and practices" are never universal. They vary according
to different cultural identities. "Serbian genocide of Albanians" is a
crime
against humanity only because it doesn't fit European cultural standards
-
thus military intervention is called for. By the same token, a "Turkish
genocide of Kurds" is a peculiar Turkish custom which depending on our
interests we either support or sadly regret. Not only democracy and justice
are particular customs, war is one as well. Instead of understanding its
political logic, the West has throughout only seen "people who have been
fighting each other for centuries" in the Balkans. War has been a part
of
their cultural identity and there was no reason to intervene in it. One
could recall the words of Marion Graefin Doenhoff, who in September 1991
wrote on the front page of "Die Zeit": "It would be crazy to intervene
militarily in this Balkan chaos of one's own free will. It would be pure
madness. (...) But if they are determined to vent to their Serbo-Croatian
hatred, then one should leave them to it." Far from being simply an excuse
to further the cause of a military intervention, humanitarianism even
hinders it. That is why it always seems
that military interventions in former Yugoslavia come too late. They were
late because they were following a humanitarian logic, instead of a
political one. Thus, they don't prevent humanitarian catastrophes. They
actually produce them by making humanitarian sense of their political
nonsense. Kosovo today is the best example of this. Humanitarianism is
the
last one conceptual framework of the practical universalism and in that
sense, it is only a symptom of the politics which has renounced all its
universal claims. The western democratic world, now represented by NATO,
is
not capable of coping with the deepest crises of the world political order.
It lacks a global vision within which it would be possible to shape the
politics of human rights in keeping with its projected universal validity.
Thus the bombs on Yugoslavia are merely an ersatz for this ideological
and
political failure. They are dropped not to save universal human rights
but
to protect particular western customs, and what they damage most is the
already existing world order, granted rather imperfect one, - but the only
one we have. It obviously has to be changed, if not revolutionised. However,
feeble political NATO-mind is least able to do this.
A collateral gain
If the face of the inevitable victory of democracy in the wake of
communism's fall was ever visible, then it was the face of Vaclav Havel.
Ten
years ago, he stood for all of the universal values of democratic
civilisation from Magna Carta to Frank Zappa. At that time he opened up
the
perspective of a world-wide reinvention of democracy, extending much further
than the simple adaptation of the postcommunist countries to the liberal
capitalism of the West. In his Presidential Address given two years ago
in
Washington under the title "The Charms of Nato" Havel was enthusiastic
about
an America which assumes its responsibility for the whole world. It should
do it in the way which, as he said, "should embody those premises that
have
a chance of saving our global civilisations ... values that should be
adopted today by all cultures, all nations, as a condition of their
survival." And he welcomed of course the decision to include three Eastern
European nations in NATO. These three countries, Poland, Hungary and Czech
Republic finally became members of the Western military alliance, shortly
before the first bombs fell on Belgrade. As a consequence, the greatest
personification of democracy in the recent history was also drafted. Today
when the bombs are falling on Belgrade the brave soldier Havel obsequiously
joins in. Do these bombs really represent what he expected "to save our
global civilisation"? Should they, as a an appropriate means of solving
our
political problems, really "be adopted today by all cultures, all nations,
as a condition of their survival"? Can they really save the hope for
democracy, once personified by Vaclav Havel - the last vivid symbol of
a
moral and political liaison between the western world and the universal
idea
of democracy? It seems that democracy has again lost its face. This in
itself is not so bad. Moreover, this could be the only "collateral gain"
from the damage done to democracy by the NATO military intervention in
Yugoslavia. "Slobo, you Clinton!", marks not only the radical impossibility
of a genuine democratic stance. Democracy's only chance lies in the fact
that it has no more its fixed place within the existing political framework,
nor a recognizable personification. Its meaning is freely floating again
and
can be caught only by our imagination. It is up to us to reinvent its futur
perspective. And make use of that freedom here and now.
http://www.arkzin.com/bb
http://www.arkzin.com/bastard/new
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Dear friends,
Info about Zaginflatch is available on request.
Basically, with this newsletter we want to inform the international
community (this is you) on how antiauthoritarians in Yugoslavia and
ex-Yugoslavia feel in these moments. Also, as people who have experienced
air raids and general alerts, we want to support our friends in Yugoslavia
who are experiencing this today. We don't want to prejudice any political
solutions to Kosovo and other ex-yu problems, we just want to help our
friends, and support them in this way. All opinions published in
Zaginflatch will be just personal ones. There is no joint platform.
Zaginflatch will bring you hardly any news in the way mainstream media
does
it. For this kind of info we suggest you try cnn, bbc or some other
services. They are available to you anyway.. This is meant to come from
inside... Also, if you're into alternative news sources, we suggest you
try
at www.b92.net ...
Zagreb Anarchist Movement (ZAP)
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