History always repeats itself

Mr. Gwynne Dyer's article 'Ethnic cleansing worm at the core of Israel (April 17)' was as good as most of his "Viewpoints" usually are. It reminded me how often history repeats itself and how people still fail to learn anything from it. Only, unlike Mr. Dyer, I feel that the fall of 19th and early 20th century European multinational empires and the creation of a series of nations like Germany, Italy and later Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece and so on, was a step in the right direction at the time, since the empires themselves were ethnically founded.

Later on, especially after World War II, many of these nation- states moved, more or less, from this ethnic background to a civil one. Constitutional rights have shifted from ethnicity to individualism. For instance, I do not enjoy my civil rights because I'm ethnically a Serb, but because I am a citizen of Serbia and Yugoslavia. This is a universal trend and this trend alone is enough (in my view) to question if the creation of any purely ethnically based state nowadays is justified.

The question of an explicitly Jewish state in an ethnically and religiously diversified land proved to create more problems than it solved. This, however, hasn't stopped "political engineers" from trying the same formula 50 years later, in a different location, instead of insisting that multinational former Yugoslavia be democratically reformed from an ethnic to civil-based society.

Just as in Israel's case, this time round the result of the formula was: war, ethnic cleansing on all sides, a blood bath on all sides and lots of problems that are going to outlive all "engineers" (local, but also "imported" mediators, counselors and mentors). And, as if this was not enough of a lesson, only two years from the finish of the last (Bosnian) class, we have pressures from the big and mighty to try the formula one more time, this time in Kosovo. It didn't work once, it didn't work a second time (has it ever worked?), but it is going to work this time, they assure us. So, the creation of an ethnic Albanian state in the Serb province of Kosovo is a must, or otherwise Serbia will face sanctions, isolation and more poverty for all. (This is on the agenda of the Contact Group's meeting scheduled for April 29).

What the high and mighty don't tell us is the price that has to be paid for this repeated failure of an experiment, and I take the liberty to sketch it for your readers.

Based on available history, it's going to be: war, ethnic cleansing, blood baths and lots of problems that are going to outlive us all. If European powers and the U.S. persist with pressing for an Albanian ethnic state in Kosovo instead of insisting that Kosovo's problems are negotiated peacefully, after the war that's going to follow, we are going to face a divided Kosovo with tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees all over the region. Of course, it is going to be very simple to find a scapegoat afterward and pin the responsibility for the ugly consequences and horror pictures that war always brings about, on this side or that side in the conflict. But what good will that do to all the victims? You do not need take my word for this. Just see what history has to teach us.

BRANIMIR SALEVIC

Jakarta