Yet another day of Morning in Serbia and Montenegro

[de_ira]

15.08.2003. Day of mourning in Serbia and Montenegro

It seems that people of Serbia and Montenegro can't last for more than three months without mourning for someone. Three months after the tragic death of Serbia's Prime Minister, Zoran Djindjic, yet another tragedy befalls this fragile country. This time the deaths are far more tragic, far more mind-stunning than the death of Djindjic. This time there were children...

Gorazdevac is the one of the precious few villages in Kosovo out of which Serbs didn't evacuate in 1999. It's under UNMIC protection. There is a little river north to the village. It's not much, but during the summertime it provides for an escape from the harsh reality of being a Serb in Kosovo, if not for just a little while. Unparticular, for the children. This was the case on Wednesday, the 13th. Some children from Gorazdevac, under the protection of UNMIC, went to this river to play, and to swim and try to have some fun in a place where a laugh is a preciously rare commodity. At two o'clock PM, local time, the sound of children playing and laughing has been abruptly interrupted by gunfire which killed two and injured six children.

I guess one shouldn't be too surprised, right? I mean, that's the first rule of warfare and genocide. Kill the children. I mean, kill a soldier and that's just one kill. Killing a child means that you killed a future soldier before he got the chance to do any damage, and before he got a chance to breed some more future soldiers. That's at least two effective kills, and let's face it; it's much easier to kill a child than to kill an armed man. We did it in Kosovo; we did it Bosnia and Croatia. Why should we be surprised that it's happening to us?

This wasn't a moment of insanity, there's nothing insane about it. The men who did it knew exactly what they were doing, and the fact that this is just one in a series of attacks on Serbs and Serbia in the past week just proves that this attack is a part of a coordinated, planned attack which has only one goal. To drive Serbs out of Kosovo, once and for all.

This moment of inhumanity set back Serb-Albanian relations way back, and the trust of Serbs in UNMIC even further. How can anybody be expected to go back to Kosovo, when neither UNMIC nor anybody else can protect them. We gave them our most precious treasure to safeguard and they failed miserably. The Albanian community knows who did this. Not the ordinary people, but the politicians. The ones which are running Kosovo right now know very well who did this. When you run a country you have to know what's going on, it's your job. And somebody had to authorize this, somebody at the top. And those persons know who did this, and will not turn those persons in. Some Kosovo politician is crying crocodile tears right now, knowing who did it and perhaps authorizing it, but going on TV and expressing their "deepest sympathies and condolences...” And you can bet that the killers won’t be found.

The Kosovo Albanians won’t start talks with Belgrade before the Serbian people officially apologize for the heinous crimes the perpetrated on the Albanian people of Kosovo. The Serbs responsible are facing trial or on the run for the rest of their lives, the responsible Kosovo Albanians are in power in Kosovo.

Well at least one good thing came out of this. We found out one thing for certain. At least now we know that we live in an insane world, at crazy times, and that we aren't the only genocidal nut-jobs (as we have been characterized by the west a long time ago) around here. How else do you call a time and place where children are killed while playing for a reason as trivial as the language they speak, and how else do you call the men who did this, and the men who are protecting them?