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BACK TO : The Kosovo conflict 1999
Witness to the Tragedy of War by Jamie Dettmer 
Witness to the Tragedy of War.(war correspondent on NATO-Yugoslavia conflict)(Brief Article) Insight on the News, May 10, 1999, by Jamie Dettmer Hell hath no fury like a noncombatant," British author Charles Montague wrote at the end of the last century. There have been times when I've lived those words deeply and have felt the fury. There have been times when I have been tempted to ditch my observer status as a newsman and join in the fray by using words as weapons in a propaganda war. And there have been extreme moments in the past when it would have seemed natural to have picked up a gun to blast away at the wicked, at those who have murdered innocents, in some cases friends of mine. Reporting on wars or the flight of terrified refugees is agonizing. There is a bleak feeling of hopelessness, a sense of spiritual desolation, an emptiness that cries out to be filled by the simplest, most basic human gesture of tenderness. And, yes, there is the rage and the angry impulse to do something. The wars I covered in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent remain a searing part of me. The haunting television pictures now of ethnic-Albanian refugees -- of distraught toddlers, bereaved wives and mothers mourning their menfolk -- weave their way into a noisy montage of remembered horrors. Each stricken face has a tragedy to tell, as was the case in times past. My anger boils. I am back in the heart of darkness of Liberia and the refugee camps along the border with the Ivory Coast filled with living ghosts. The voices of besieged villagers in Africa plead for an assistance I can't give. And then the mad music of pain is full of sounds from another part of the world, of the high-pitched wailing of Shiite Muslim women trying to come to terms with what befell them and theirs in south Iraq at the hands of Saddam Hussein's goons as our helicopters flew overhead -- so far away, yet so very near. Northern Irish faces crowd in -- the face of the wife who stands as sentinel by the side of the bed of a dear husband who has not moved or talked since a terrorist bomb blew his soul away. And there is the scene, still fresh, when a Palestinian friend of mine was bundled just yards away into a car by Kuwaiti security men -- and his corpse was never found, not even in a pile of dumped, tortured Palestinian bodies. "The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living." And as the woe increases in the Balkans, who can be indifferent in the face of such overwhelming suffering? We have immense military might, we can stop this, surely? We can make it right again, can't we? But the dead won't walk again. The clock can never be turned back. The orphan will remain an orphan. The raped girl can never wash from her memory the act of invasion. British Prime Minister Tony Blair's threats of retribution and of punishment delivered in the House of Commons during the second week of the war in Yugoslavia were understandable. However, fury isn't a productive strategy for a politician, and purely emotional coverage by a reporter isn't responsible journalism. The politician's fury and the journalist's emotionalism, of course, feed off each other, as we have seen in the last few weeks. The 24-hour coverage of the refugees' plight makes us feel impotent and encourages the cry of "Do something; stop this!" And the politicians react, add more warplanes and drop more bombs. To make sense of the calamity and to buttress support for deepening military intervention, politicians demonize the easily demonized and reporters become the choristers and echo the comparisons with Adolf Hitler, even if those comparisons don't nearly fit in terms of scale or territorial ambitions. And unless we are careful we become part of the history that drives on the violence, as our forefathers did when they decided godlike after the Great War to redraw the map of the Balkans to fit their geopolitical plans. We create by our intervention new trajectories, and unless we are very careful, we sow tares for future wars. Should we then do nothing? Should we just satisfy ourselves with bearing witness? Behind each conflict is a tangled story that has to be understood, particularly so if resolution is ever to be possible or if we are to avoid doing more harm. Today's victim becomes tomorrow's aggressor. In the first waves of media coverage the past hardly got a look at -- it was drowned out by the pictures of the refugees. "That's history," MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell yelled at me during an Equal Time show when I sought to explain a little about the Balkans and about the Serbs and their losses and grievances. "What about now?" But the past and present are one -- they are inextricably linked, as the future is to what we do now. "History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors" wrote Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot. Before our fury drives us further, we need to understand the near and far past, refrain from impulsiveness and make up for the last few years of our Balkans inattentiveness. Vague goals won't do, nor will an emotionalism which allows us to forget the 400,000 Serbs driven out of the Krajina region by the Croat ethnic-cleanser Franjo Tudjman just three years ago. What good does it do if by our actions we unravel the Balkans at even greater human cost? COPYRIGHT 1999 News World Communications, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group |