Year of the Dead

The end of the year is drawing near.  It's time, my countrymen, to draw up balances and see what we achieved.  Where have those statisticians who measure productivity all gone?  Do we have enough people assigned to counting the dead, to separating them into theirs and ours, into the innocent and the guilty, or would it simply be easier to tally up the living?  This was yet another very successful year for our domestic industry of death, which has been registering the best results in Europe for some time already now.
Perhaps someone might say that what we are dealing with here has more to do with agriculture, with sowing and reaping, where results are measured in annual yields, or even with a sports discipline, where speed, ease of execution and overall artistic impression are valued.  Be that as it may, we can only improve on and exceed our records.  And we have a great chance of finishing this year with substantial slaughters, and to hope that the coming year will be even more productive.  The slaughter which occurred at the cafe in Pec looks to me like a sign of the war having ended, with the massacres just beginning.  If a cafe is the front-line, then from now on all residents of Kosovo, young and old, male and female, have become potential killers and victims.  In any case, cafes can also be found outside of Kosovo, and there are other places where people congregate and where, with one go, an even bigger slaughter could be achieved.

Why do I believe that things could take such a turn and continue in such a direction?  I have checked things out. I asked myself what I would have done had my child been among the dead, whether I would have gone out and started shooting at every Albanian, or even at anything that moves, and I could not give a definite negative answer.  This, my good countrymen, means that our chances are only growing with regard to becoming a band of murderers.  Not because we were born as such, but because we were caught unawares in this Alibaba's Cave which we call our state.

We can think about other things, we can talk about the university and the media, about laws, rights and freedoms, but all that hardly makes any sense in a country in which there is so much killing and dying going on.  It is most likely that because of this all the civilian protests and revolts, so impatiently expected, have not yet happened.  People in Belgrade are feeling the proximity of death and blood in Kosovo, although they have still not yet managed to collect themselves and to recuperate from the blood of Bosnia.  In this atmosphere, under such a shadow, who can expect that people will protest about pensions, air pollution, or the stifling of the press?  Are they supposed to demand a better quality of life, when the mere fact that they are alive is an accomplishment in itself?  Full credit for this accomplishment should be given to our government, for that is the cornerstone of our government's authority.  The crazed madmen who killed the youths in the Pec cafe might have been revenging the Albanians who died, trying to cross the border.  That previous slaughter was greater, but under different circumstances.  Namely, a distinction should be made between crossing the border with firearms and sipping grapefruit juice in a cafe.  This distinction is called terrorism, and that is something from which the KLA will never be able to wash its hands.  Now the only question is whether there is someone who can prevent the natural development of events toward a catastrophe.  What, in any case, are those international verifiers doing down there?  Why don't they go to China?  This mission of unarmed observers appears only to be serving as bait, in order that it be attacked, that some of its members get killed, for NATO to jump to their aid.  But what will NATO do there anyway?  They would have to offer support to someone: but the Americans have already proclaimed Milosevic to be superfluous, while Albanians are turning ever more and more toward terrorism.

NATO is probably not asking the meaning behind all this, given that this biggest international company finds all meaning within itself.  It is satisfied with being able to demonstrate that it can safeguard peace and order, but for this shooting has to happen somewhere.  We have fulfilled this last condition, and if we don't quite measure up, more will come.  And later, something like a Dayton of Kosovo will probably happen, and that, in a best case scenario, for Dayton merely managed to tie up Bosnia into a dead knot.
That then is the most we can expect from the international community.  Whoever thinks that something better stands behind that company, imagining that it is some kind of Santa Claus for small, depraved and crazed peoples, need only look at and listen to the world's leaders.  The Washington teenager nearly managed to lose his job, the Moscow patient is holding on for dear life, while Europe is spawning some lukewarm softies who only know how to put on their ties and jackets, and do not dare even think about the blood and mood of Kosovo, lest they should faint.

Even if they were much better, they could still not be expected to devote themselves to such a small, dirty and impossibly complicated problem.  No one there has any secret agenda, no strategy, nor solution.  No one will save either the Serbs or the Albanians.  The only thing that, in all likelihood, they won*t permit is for those two nations to annihilate each other; and as to how those nations will live - well, that will be a matter for them to decide for themselves.