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Reply-To: Conference "zamir.chat" 
From: Ivo Skoric 
Subject: DAYTON AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
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From: Ivo Skoric 

Last Friday I had an appointment with the lawyer at HIAS (Hebrew

Immigration Aid Society) - my next shot at trying to get a pro
bono

representation in my immigration case. He told me how they had

a hellish week because of the government shut-down. Asylum

office in Newark has closed down. Deportations were halted.

Sending illegal dishwashers back to Mexico is definitely the

epitome of a non-essential government expense. And it is also a

nice way how Clinton returned the favor to Gingrich. Since Newt

forced his government to the brink of bankruptcy, Bill decided to

cut where it would hurt Republican polls the most. I am of course

very pleased with the overall outcome at the time. At least until

November next year, as I expect this political game would last,
the

non-essential government services are likely to be dysfunctional,

possibly paralyzed.

Which is in stark opposition to great INS plans to expedite its

service. When I started my pilgrimages to Federal Plaza three or

four years ago, hearings were held on 13th floor. Ominous,

knowing that a lot of New York high rises do not even have that

floor. Today the hearings are held on 10th, 11th and 13th floor.

The number of judges increased and there were still more benches

in the hallways waiting to be unpacked, when I was there last

month. Republicans must have been pleased. Then they shut it all

down.

Yet, now with doves, olive branches in their beaks, flying all
over

Dayton Peace Agreement web page (http://www.access-dayton.com/)
and elsewhere over the war vary Balkans, the U.S.

might want us get back help them put that agreement to work.

Germany already adopted  a policy of returning Bosnians to

Bosnia.  Well, Germans sometimes do take things too literally, as

we know.

Did anybody else notice that the longest armistice in
Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian war was in place while their leaders were
locked

up in a foreign military base?  How that nobody got that idea

earlier?  Instead of courting them in Geneva, London, Paris, New

York five stars hotels and letting them wonder around free

whenever one of them has one of his tantrums...
...Wright-Patterson air-base in Dayton, Ohio seemed to be a
perfect setting.

Maybe Americans should have kept them there.

Will this peace agreement hold?  Parts of the agreement that

regulate Bosnian-Croatian and Croatian-Serbian relations were

actually agreed upon earlier.  Dayton just confirmed their

commitment to do so.  It was the Bosnian-Serbian agreement

that's new.  Both Izetbegovic and Milosevic shivered when Rabin

was shot, because it was essentially the same land-for-peace deal

they were about to sign.  Would their extremists ever forgive

them?  Milosevic gave up Eastern Slavonia, further conquest of

Bosnia, Gorazde in particular, but Alija gave up Banja Luka

region, Srebrenica and Zepa, Brcko corridor (which is actually

widened for Milosevic).

For many years Yugoslavia was proud as of its multiethnic

character, of its ability to remain independent - it was even one
of

the key countries that started non-alignment movement.  Its new

nationalist leaders successfully destroyed both:  ethnic
grievances

destructed possibility of multi-ethnic living for many years to

come, and in those years fragile truce of what was once
Yugoslavia

will be kept by 60,000 foreign soldiers, coming from 60
countries.

So far, Bosnia is cheering: Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Croats -

everybody seems to feel great relief that Americans are finally

coming to take their little nasty war over from them.  It is
unlikely,

I believe, that anybody would actually shoot Americans. Everybody

likes Americans there, even Serbs.  Americans are Levi's, John

Wayne, Coca Cola, Led Zeppelin and Sylvester Stallone.  Their

P.R. machinery managed to get away with Vietnam better than

Brits are getting away with Belfast or French with their stupid

stubborn nuclear tests, or Russians and Germans with their

horrible totalitarian past.

Behind NATO's back we may expect that they'll all try to arm

themselves to their teeth while the truce lasts.  Americans said

they'll provide weapons and training for Bosnian Muslims.  That's

sure not going to float well with Serbs, or maybe even worse with

Croats.  But Croats already got that, didn't they?  Former

Pentagon officers trained them before the Krajina offensive.
We'll

probably have a new-world-order old-cold-war adapted scheme

where now friends Americans arm Bosnian-Croat federation, and

Russians arm Serbs.  This is great for business.  I bet that both

countries military-industrial complexes are looking forward for

deals to come and save them from timely extinction.

Once the Americans (and others) leave, will Bosnians, Croats and

Serbs revert to war, or will the power equilibrium hold them at

bay?  This is difficult to say now.  It will definitively be
interesting

to see how Americans intend to do away (or do they?)  with the

obvious Bosnian vassalage to Croatia.  It is also easy to see
both

Croatia and Serbia remaining highly militarized authoritarian

societies, a far cry from "civil society" that pro-democracy
groups

in Yugoslavia in eighties hoped for.  Democracy has been

successfully cheated by the war.

How long will the American commitment last anyway?  Who

knows?  The history of America's relentless attempts to impose
its

particular concept of order and stability throughout much of the

world, i.e. "to lead", is full of similar examples: Americans in
this

century repeatedly tried to establish international organizations

which would put an end to warfare through legal proceedings like

arbitration - yet, then, due to opposition at home (suspicious

Congress, isolationist crowd...), they were reluctant to join the

efforts they initiated.  American foreign policy is constantly in

pains between its moral ideals and the insatiable appetite for

leadership.

At the beginning of the century president W.H.Taft aimed to

prevent wars through arbitration of international disputes, yet

then Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman H.C.Lodge

(who disliked even the notion of creating a body that "might

consist of foreigners". e.g. like the U.N. today) managed to
amend

the arbitration pacts, that Taft signed, to death before passage.


Between the world wars in Paris 62 countries agreed to "renounce

war" and settle disputes by "pacific means", adopting the
Kellog-Briand Pact outlawing war, drafted by no less a peacenik
than a U.S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg.  The Senate
immediately

added reservations to U.S. ratification: no one had to act in
case

of a treaty violation - making the treaty worthless.  Long before

Vietnam, Americans were worried with the "military-industrial

complex".  A correct, though Marxist, idea that the WW I was

partially caused by a conspiracy among greedy capitalists,

weapons manufacturers - "merchants of death", lead to full-blown

Senate hearings: the Nye probe - where likes of J.P.Morgan and

Du Pont brothers were called to testify.  The Nye probe lead to

passage of Neutrality Acts, that made it illegal to lend money or

export arms to belligerents - which included victims of
aggression,

like the Spanish Republic.

So, arms embargoed Bosnia is just another deja-vu for American

war and peace politics.  And proclaiming the moral commitment

while withholding the ground troops is nothing new either: as
late

as autumn 1941, polls (those ever-present ubiquitous polls)

reflected  a similar kind of national schizophrenia: Gallup
surveys

showed that 70 percent of Americans felt that it was "more

important" to defeat Germany than to stay out of war; but 83

percent opposed a congressional declaration of a state of war.
The

later failure of both the policy and the implementation of that

policy in the case of Vietnam, made American foreign commitment

just even more difficult.  In a way I think that we should be
glad

that it is that way.  They'd be less likely to do anything
stupid.

Clinton just might have won the next years election on a foreign

policy victories.  He made peace in the Middle East, he made

peace in the Balkans, he closed old wounds with Vietnam, he is

almost on the way to do the same with Cuba, he bought North

Koreans out of developing nuclear weapons... ...but his mandate

was to be a domestic policy president, if I am not mistaken, am I?


Judging the following health care example, he failed at that.  A

week ago I was trying to get an x-ray of my injured leg. I went
to

the Emergency Room at the Metropolitan Hospital (that's closest

to where I live). ER implies 'emergency', meaning rapid response

and things like that. Instead I was given a bracelet and was
shown

to a seat in the waiting room. During next four hours, before I

finally gave up, I observed how the waiting room was actually
used

as a sort of living room by the smartest among local homeless

population. Room is heated, it has a water fountain, bathrooms,

pay-phones, and a TV set. All announcements are bilingual. I

don't even know why they bothered to write the English part.

Noticeably, me and my friend were the only "Caucasians" for the

first hour and a half. After three hours I started whining, but
right

at that moment two young women came by. One was shaking. Her

mother was just brought in in cardiac arrest. There was only one

(1) single doctor to treat her and all of the rest. Which is
probably

even worse than in Emergency Rooms in former Yugoslavia. Third

daughter and a son came by. After an hour mother died, and they

were all crying and sobbing there in a mixture of Spanish and

English talking on the phone to their father, etc. We left then.

Conclusion: ER is nice if you are homeless and in need of a
decent

daytime shelter, but it is awkward if you really urgently need

medical attention. This, I somehow suspect, will not benefit in
any

way from the government shutdown. On the contrary. Long time

ago I realized that the U.S. were designed for healthy people.
Sick

people should stay in Europe or go to Canada.

Yesterday I met Anisa. She is from Sarajevo and she studies at

St.Lawrence University, NY, as a benefactor of Soros's Open

Society Fund Supplementary Grant Program for Students from

Former Yugoslavia, which was denied to me in cold blood by

Soros's Empire Yugoslav overseer and hench-woman Beka Vuco,

simply because I came to the States seven months too early to fit

in their sacrosanct guidelines. She wouldn't want to hear that I

might be dead now if I waited those seven months. So, I was kind

of maliciously pleased with the obvious failure of the program:
as

the "Three from Dayton" initially wouldn't meet or talk to each

other, groups of students from Zagreb and Belgrade, sponsored by

Soros to study in the U.S., were put together in a Philadelphia

classy hotel for "proximity talks", but refused to socialize at
all.

Maybe Soros should opt for a boot camp somewhere in Idaho in

the future.  Meanwhile, I still have no problems socializing with

other youth from anywhere in former Yugoslavia.

Last Friday, for example, I was at the party mostly with people

from Montenegro and Serbia.  Although they don't really seem to

see themselves that way.  They do not like being associated with

Milosevic's war-waging Serbia, or Yugoslavia of today.  They live

in the past and like a mantra sing karaoke to old Yugoslav rock

ballads from Bajaga, Djordje Balasevic, Bijelo Dugme and Azra

long into night.  As, for the past 50 or so years of existence of


Yugoslavia, Croat and Serb immigrants in the States lived in
their

insular nationalist past ridden with rich tradition of
military-styled folk songs, not recognizing Yugoslavia as their
country, now

we have the same phenomenon happening with the new

generations of immigrants from Yugoslavia: the generations born

after the war (WW II), the generations brought up to "brotherhood

and unity" of early open-air rock concerts of Bijelo Dugme, too

young to remember, yet already too old to be taught "thousand

years of hatred" lesson by their new leaders: the lost

thirtysomethings of former Yugoslavia. In Croatia, on its way to

economic prosperity, with the war won and with the international

acceptance secured, they almost seamlessly slip into their new

role as Croats.  But in isolated, "marked" as evil Serbia, they

simply go numb when outside world call them "those Serbs".

When the night gets more ripe and the strong Italian red wine
digs

deeper in the soul, a time comes for "sevdah", a specific kind of

"soul" music developed by subjects of Ottoman rule in Bosnia and

Serbia (much like "soul" music was developed in America by black

slaves), very different in spirit and content from nationalist

marches and so-called "newly composed" folk music, or its latest

offspring: turbo-folk.

Oh, and I should add what I learned from Anisa - it might be an

interesting idea for future of former Yugoslavia struggling

entrepreneurs.  Levi's 501 that I bought in New York for twenty

bucks would go in Zagreb for 100 DM or more ($60).  Actually

anywhere in Europe Jeans are incredibly expensive.  I guess with

the presence of American troops in the Balkans, bustling new

businesses might get ideas.  They successfully smuggled weapons

and fuel all this time, so clothes should present no problem.
Also,

all units of UNPROFOR proved bribable.  There is no reason to

believe that NATO troops should be any different, is there?

BTW - there is a new zine in Zagreb: Zaginflatch, published by

Zagreb's Anarcho-Pacifists (zap-zg@zamir-zg.ztn.apc.org).  Guys

maintained communication with anarcho-pacifists (mainly hard-core
punks) on "other" sides throughout the war with no American

military persuasion (but with a little help from Soros, who gives

money to alternative media in the Balkans), mostly through e-mail

(Zamir Transnational Net), and exchanging things through third

countries. Zaginflatch, therefore, brings some totally amusing

news not available in the mainstream press.  In this summer's

issue for example there is a brief report about racially biased
Nazi

skinheads attack on American basketball players in, of all
places,

Ljubljana, Slovenia (which is known as the most democratic and

tolerant part of former Yugoslavia): "American basketball players

were in town playing against Slovene teams.  While walking

through Ljubljana's main square the basketball players were

confronted by boneheads shouting racist abuse.  One player was

hit in the head by a skin during the confrontation.  When the

police intervened the boneheads were checked for identification

and released without hassles.  The American team broke off their

tour of Slovenia." Should we expect the same to happen with the

American team in Bosnia, once the first of them "get a hit on his

head"?

Ivo Skoric