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July/August 1999
Work For
The Living Visiting
Edirne, Turkey last August, I was able to experience two moments of Ottoman
history in the Balkans from its pyrrhic beginnings in 1389 to its inglorious
end in 1913. Buried in a forgotten room of a Qur'an school-turned-museum attached to Edirne's masterpiece, the Mosque of Sultan Selim, lay the red Ottoman imperial banner that Sultan Murad's troops had marched under at the myth-heavy 1389 Battle of Kosovo Polje. Sultan Murad didn't make it back alive from Kosova: he was martyred. Luckily for the Ottomans, they had defeated the hodgepodge opposing army led by the Serb Prince Lazar. A cross-section of the medieval Balkan feudal order, the forces Sultan Murad's men faced on the Field of Blackbirds included Serbs and Albanians. After 1389, the Ottoman sultans imposed five centuries of peace in the Balkans, broken only with the rise of secular nationalisms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From Edirne, modern Turkey's furthest European outpost, I could survey miles of hazy distant hills in Bulgaria and Greece. Beyond those hills lay Kosova, Macedonia, and Serbia. Just outside the city, the paltry war memorial for the 1912-1913 Balkan War vets (who fought Bulgarians, Serbs, Montenegrins, and Greeks) still serves as a sobering reminder of the human toll of conflict in the region. Reading the thousands of names of Ottoman martyrs who perished - most no older than I was at twenty-four years, and some with my own name - I couldn't help but feel an overwhelming sense of nausea. Over 300,000 young Ottomans died trying pathetically to hold onto independence-seeking Serbia and Bulgaria, both still Ottoman provinces. Leon Trotsky (the Bolshevik) traveled through Kosova in 1913, and was stunned at the atrocities visited upon the Kosovar Albanians by the Serbs. I am sure Serb historians have their own numbers and stories to recount. The best I could do on that blisteringly hot day was to pray for all their souls, offering two cycles on an open-air concrete prayer platform that is part of the war memorial with its tacky little indicator for the direction of Makkah. I toasted my forehead, palms, knees, and soles on the sun-scorched concrete platform, but I thought of the sacrifice and suffering the site commemorated and felt ashamed. The best most of us can do now in the current Balkan War is to work for the living and to pray for the dead. We can support relief and repatriation efforts for the Kosovar refugees, and we can ask God that their suffering not be in vain. But God knows best, for He is the best of planners. What I cannot do is to support the clueless and blundering lack of tact and strategy on the part of my President and our NATO partners. Our government's lack of support - even disregard - of the nonviolent struggle and initiatives by the Kosovar Albanians over the past ten years has been outrageous and morally indefensible. We should all ask our President what he told Kosovar President Ibrahim Rugova, known as the Balkan Gandhi, when Rugova came pleading to Washington in 1993 for international mediation. We should all ask our President why an honorable peace was granted to Slobodan Milosevic in 1995 at Dayton, when in fact he was an architect of the bloody Bosnian genocide. We should all ask our President why Arkan, the Serb gangster/war criminal deeply implicated in Bosnian war crimes from 1992 to 1995, has been able to repeat his thuggery and cruelty in Kosova in 1999. Our government's decision to force a peace at Rambouillet and then to cowardly and wantonly bomb rump Yugoslavia has achieved exactly what Milosevic wanted: the pretext to kick the Kosovars out and kill the balance, and to lick his own budding democratic opposition in one fell swoop. This whole war game makes me sick. The only thing that makes me sicker is the likely prospect of a cynical endgame that involves partition of Kosova and legitimization of the genocide. As an American Muslim who has opposed my country's bombing of the people of Iraq, I cannot with conscience support the indiscriminate bombing of the people of Yugoslavia. While the nonviolent options in the current context have been all but exhausted, I call upon all of us to maintain some decorum and sanity in the face of this ugly, insane, and terrible mess, and to repudiate the heinous myth-making and pokerface propaganda that surrounds it. Let us find solutions that don't multiply and compound suffering, but - instead - offer hope for a real peace that is enduring and just. I know that there are Serbs who seek such a peace. I know that there are Albanians who seek such a peace. I know that there are Americans, Europeans, and people in the Muslim world who seek such a peace. Our common problem is that the leaders and players involved - Clinton, Blair, Milosevic, the KLA - are either incapable of seeking or refuse to seek such a peace. The best the rest of us can do for now is to help the living and remember the dead. I fear we will have to do a lot of the latter. Balkan wars in the twentieth century have a nasty habit of consuming lives in the six digits. May our children forgive us. Born in South Africa, raised in Seattle and Oklahoma City, Mas'ood Cajee is now a dental student at the University of Oklahoma, where he serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the American Student Dental Association's quarterly journal. Mas'ood is a member of the Muslim Peace Fellowship and the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and can be contacted at mcajee@hotmail.com. |
