Experts speak at Kosovo teach-in in Finney

About 200 people gathered in Finney Chapel on Sunday to hear first hand about the crisis in Yugoslavia. College President Nancy Dye invited three speakers, two of whom were from the region, to teach Oberlin about the history and politics of the war.

Dye began the teach-in, describing her concerns with the lack of student outcry, about the war, saying that students had expressed feelings of powerlessness in the face of the situation. Drawing parallels to Vietnam protests, Dye said, "College students have always been influential and instrumental in changing government policy. But we have a responsibility to learn as much as we can."

The first speaker was Assistant Professor of Sociology Veljko Vujacic, who is a native Montenegran. Vujacic' speech was dense, but his message was clear: the U.S. and NATO actions against Serbia will only create more instability in the region - a no-win situation for all those involved.

Vujacic opened by giving a brief history lesson. Kosovo, he said, is land that has been contested for centuries, and since the early part of the century, its ethnic mix has been vacillating between primarily Albanian and primarily Serbian ethnic majorities. When Kosovo was granted autonomy in 1974, Albanians flooded in, setting the stage for the crisis today.

"Every ethnodemographic change is interpreted as a conspiracy," Vujacic said. "But it's not." He cited steep birth-rates of Kosovar Albanians as one of the reasons for an increase in Albanian prevalence in the region.

The gap left by a failed Communist regime allowed Slobodan Milosevic to come to power in an election in which the Albanian Kosovars did not participate, though they make up 90 percent of the Kosovo population.

When the Kosovo Liberation Army began to make terrorist stikes against Serbians in the Kosovo region, Serbia retaliated disproportionately, killing Albanians in Kosovo and further entrenching the region in conflict.

According to Vujacic, the U.S. and NATO made their fatal flaw by not including the Kosovo issue in the Dayton Peace Accords of 1996. The turning point in Kosovo was the Dayton agreement because it created a Serbian entity, saying to Kosovar Albanians: you will have to fight for independence. "We should have addressed the Albanian problem simultaneously," Vujacic said.

The results of this war are what Vujacic sees as the real disaster.

"People rally around the flag at times of war, no matter who is at the helm. The result is greater instability in Greece, Macedonia and Russia," he said. "How can you bomb a country and say it's not directed against the people? There needs to be reconciliation in the region, and we're not paving the way."

Elez Biberaj, chief of the Albanian Service for Voice of America, spoke next. His perspective as an Albaninan was decidedly less defensive of Serbian intentions. "I like the sign," he said referring to a banner in the back of Finney calling for an end to bombing. "But I also wish there was one against ethnic cleansing."

Biberaj spoke from the perspective of an Albanian and a journalist, saying that this has been an interesting story to cover. Before the bombing started, Biberaj covered the story by listening to the limited number of Albanian radio stations and relied on some key sources. "Overnight after the bombing started all the sources had died out. It is very difficult to cover what is going on over there," he said.

Biberaj concurred that this is a complicated situation with wide rifts between ethnicities. He said one of the biggest problems is the perception of Kosovo as belonging to the Serbs. "Kosovo was not the birthplace or cradle of the Serbian nation. Kosovo was conquered rather than liberated by Serbians. Serbs would say that Albanians pushed them out. But it's hard to prove," he said.

He summed up the war succinctly: "This is a conflict about territory. And people see it as 'either I rule or the other side rules.' When Yugoslavia began to disintegrate, Kosovo got on the bandwagon for independence."

Biberaj was also a critic of the Dayton Peace process, but he said Kosovo could not have been on the bargaining table at that point. "Kosovo would have destroyed any hope for Milosevic signing the agreement. Dayton sent the wrong message to the Albanians: unless you're going to fight for it, you're not going to get anything."

Even with this antagonism remaining, Biberaj does not see NATO's actions as positive. "Air strikes will not break Milosevic's will," he said. "At Rambouillet, NATO had a moral obligation to protect the Albanians, but it failed and it failed miserably."

The only way Biberaj sees a positive end would be to send in ground troops along with the air strikes. NATO must strike a deal to reverse ethnic cleansing and grant Kosovo independence, he said.

"There is no way to get these people to live under the Serbs again," he said.

Greg Coleridge, OC '81, was the final speaker, and his message was from that of an activist approach. He presented ideas for students on how they should go about protesting the actions.

Listing the three legs of personal responsibility in activism: action, education and reflection, he said, "Action without learning and reflecting is simply busy work."

He said reading the foreign press and listening to short-wave radio was one way to go beyond the U.S. influenced headlines. He also suggested building alliances with students around the country over the summer.

He said, "U.S. actions are being done in our names, with our money, perverting our values and risking our brothers and sisters. How do you build a bridge to the 21st Century when you are bombing it?"