An Internet Peace Initiative
First draft
By now it is apparent that the NATO bombing campaign, while wreaking destruction on the Serbs is in no way making things better for the supposed beneficiaries, the Kosovo Albanians. The bankruptcy of state-supported violence is evident to all. To all currrent appearances, despite the damage already done, all ideas seem poised to continue fighting in the same manner for the foreseeable future, leading only to further death and destruction. Diplomacy has also failed, quite clearly. But there is another failure as well: that of the new power of the Internet.
The Internet has been touted as an international commmunity, global in reach, and one that in many ways invalidates and outmodes state power. Not so, as yet, in Kosovo - though much reporting of the war has travelled through the Net, no independent, influential peace intitiatives have emerged or even been offered. I am not convinced it had to be that way. Even now it is not too late for the pro-peace community that has access to the Inteernet to play a decisive role. Success obviously still eludes conventional forces of all kinds, so the opportunity as well as the challenge is real.
I begin this call with the thought that the use of force as a means towards power is rarely simply that. You can completely control a person by force only if you either kill them outright or so overpower them that you can move their limbs like those of a marionette. To a lesser extent you can control someone by physically confining them, say putting them in jail. But most of the time force of whatever strength works not directly but through the attention, imaginative powers and fears of its victims and potential victims. Some times, the display of force operates through the admiration of its would-be emulators or of those who believe they somehow benefit from it. The Holocaust was one of the rare true uses of pure force to gain an end, useless as that end was in practical terms even to those who organized it. Close to this absolute use of force are such actions as the Serb militants' atrocities in Srebrenica and apparently in Kosovo, where they chiefly kill potenial oppositoon soldiers.
By contrast even the German bombing of London in WWII or destruction of Hiroshima by US atomic bomb in that same war and the current NATO bombing campaign functioned (or are intended to function) largely through their effects on the witnesses, not directly on the victims. They are metaphors for a still larger destruction. Thus, when it is said of Milosevic (possibly falsely) that he only understands force, it becomes clear that force is used as a kind of demonstration, a metonomy in which the actual destruction stands for potential further destruction and is intended not to kill Milosevic or eliminate his govenrment but rather to convince him to change course.
Even the Serb murders in Srebrenica and elsewhere are partially intended as messages of a similar naturre. They are to mean "don't resist us" to the victims' compatriots, while, at least weakly, they also signal the Serb leaders' determination not to give ground,which itself is a means for rallying the nationalist senitiments in the Serb population.
(I am not commenting here on the relative morality of these different actions, just on how they are supposed to work. To me, killing for whatever reason is morally repulsive, whether it is to make a statement or just because you want to eliminate the victims. I suppose one might argue over the relative badness of killings for some good end, but even such an argument qucickly becomes pretty disgusting. My hope in writing this is of course to contribute to ending mayhem of both kinds.)
Why go through this gruesome calculus of the effects of force? Only to emphasize that force is usually not simply destructive but also, largely rhetorical, and as such it must take its place as only one form of persuasion among many, and generally not the most persuasive. The faces of the victims, for instance, can be a more powerful message than the weapons that made them victims in the first place. Thus, those of us who oppose force must not see ourselves as therefore powerless. We must find the most effective ways to use the power we have. In the case of Kosovo, I am ashamed to say, we have not done so.
Non-deadly persuasion plays a further role in relation to force. Even the Holocaust, or any other organized desrtructive effort must after all depend on something other than pure force to lead the "willing executioners" to be willing enough to proceed. Soldiers in battle require such persuasion at least as much. In the current world, they cannot be said to be isolated from all but their commanders, and in turn the commanders are not captive of the political leaders who command them. Finally, whatever their power, the politcal leaders themselves are subject to public opinion, which they may try to control, often successfully, but that they don't automatically own.
As I discussed in a previous piece a large reason for the war and the precise form it I has taken is the very fear of NATO leaders that their own televised images will be juxtaposed with unacceptable, and personalized images of suffering, and at the same time Miliosevic's own astute sense of the kind of figure he must appear to be to hold onto power in the rump Yugoslavia, and perhaps in the entire Eastern Orthodox Christian world.
All of this implies that the world pro-peace community, and specifically the internet pro-peace community has failed up to this point to use its real powers effectively to transform the debate, to capture public attention, and to come up with peaceful alternative plans that would have provided pressure on leaders of all sides not to take up the gun. It is not too late for us all to use our creative and communicative abilities to make a difference, to reframe the debate, to formulate a workable peace, and to help bring it about in reality.
What has already happened has of course to be our starting point. This means the solution to the conflict, whatever form it might ultimately take, will inevitably involve considerable uprooting. Also inevitable by now is that any successful solution will occupy world energies for a long time, which also implies it will not come cheaply. That realization ought to liberate imagination in a way. If the status quo ante cannot be restored, we must come up with something new, and the expense incurred by a new solution should be no barrier because if it works it may still be the least costly option.
The Serb-Kosovar conflict, like many others, gains its energy from conflicting claims for the same "homeland." But the rise of the Internet itself makes evident that the notion of place and home is more complicated than the fight over Kosovo suggests. Via the Internet, we can remain to some degree rooted in our ancestral communites wherever we happen to be on the physical earth, and foreseeable additions to the technology will add to that potential. (As for roots, as a child of German Jewish refugees in America, I know that it is possible to find a new homeland. I am American, not German, certainly not Israeli, not totally at home here to be sure, but as much at home as I could expect to be anywhere.) No existing place is a true and permanent, cozy homeland for anyone, and we ought not forget this.
Further, even Kosovars have already become active members of the international community, whether or not they are on the Internet. They may frown at having been made to live in a Serb lingustic environment, but they have proved at least partially adept at functioning in a world where English predominates, and even had Kosovo remained autonomous in 1989, Kosovars would still have found themselves pulled into the new global, partially net-spread culture. Home would not have been the home the most ardent of nationalists would envision, even had their been no Milosevic.
These thoughts, together with two more, can provide the basis for a set of requirements for an Internet peace plan. The first extra thought is that any peace plan should be so designed as not to encourage but actively to discourage future wars and/or ethnic cleansing, either in the Balkans or elsewhere. The war makers should not be rewarded; the culpable should as much as possible be punished, while the innocent victims should be restored and made whole as fully as possible, consistent with a workable peace.
Finally, a true Internet peace plan cannot rely on the combatants' cooperation for its effectiveness.
In the case of Kosovo, this suggests the following steps, most of which could start as soon as enough people on the Internet agree to support them, or rather the steps that emerge in the discussion I hope these incite:
- 1. Whatever happens in the fighting, the refugees should be assured as good a life as possible, whether in Kosovo or elsewhere. This requires organized calls to open immigration and ensure resettlement in situations at least comparable to what was lost. It also demands a commitment to continued involvement and monitoring. Rather than make this monitoring simply the province of some special agency, each Kosovar could be "adopted" for watching over by a number of a number of unconnected, individual internet users, who would retain a responsibility for making sure the particular adoptee was faring well, and to help with specific problems as they arose. Naturally , these adopters would maintain their own discussion community on the Net. The goodness of the resulting life should be held up in the face of the various perpetrators - "A happy life is the best revenge."
- 2. Albanian and Kosovar culture, but not the desire for revenge or for return by force should be kept alive with maximum aid of the Internet. Refugees should be afforded every opportunity to maintain contacts, to recall and record their history, to preserve their language skills, etc. The Internet community knows how to do most of these things right now. What it will take is simply the will.
- 3. Another requirement is that misdeeds not go unrecorded and unpunished. The Internet community could and should keep a detailed list of possible perpetrators and try to assemble, preserve, publicize and discuss accurate evidence about the various offenses. Like Mary Robinson, head of the UN Human Rights Commission, I believe this must include crimes on all sides, among which are not only Serb ethnic cleansers, Kosovar reprisers, but also possibly instigators and operatives in the NATO strikes, which have only added to the suffering. Names should be named in public, and arguments about guilt or innocence should also take place in public, even if no direct punishment is possible. Stigma is something, though every effort should be made to prevent unjustified smears from being perpetuated.
- 4. The Kosovar community and the rest of the world needs to record and suitably memorialize every victim of murder, rape, etc.
- 5. Innocent Serbs should not be left holding the bag or made to suffer from the war. A campaign for rebuilding when it is over should start now. Reparations to specific victims could be promulgated, liken the treatment of Kosovars I've already proposed. At the same time the Serb public should not be allowed to forget its indirect complicity in the misdeeds of its army and paramilitary units with government support. Neither the slaughter from the ground nor the slaughter from the sky should be forgotten.
- 6. Important as it is to heal the victims, and recall the abuses, Serbs and Albanians should be encouraged to begin a dialogue on what went wrong. Again the net is ideal for helping this process.
- 7. Along with these of course, should come calls to end the fighting, both the bombing and on the ground in Kosovo. And these calls should be coupled with reminders that continuing a pointless war is itself a crime that won't be forgotten.
This is only a start. These details need fleshing out, urgently. The entire call requries rapid discussion, reshaping, endorsement and implementation. I urge readers to pass it on, to debate it, adopt it, and if necessary reformulate it, and make it sound more urgent than I can easily do.
The swifter we move, the more lives might be spared.