A Call to Arms: Children Are Dying

If I wanted your eyes to glaze over, I’d tell you this is a column about a very complicated civil war in a faraway country.

But if I wanted you to keep reading, I’d say it’s about the slaughter of children by an evil man. I’d tell you he’s trying to rid his land of ethnically “undesirable” people by shipping them to their deaths at Nazi-like prison camps.

I’d tell you his snipers killed two toddlers who were escaping the violence in a bus full of children and that at a funeral for one of the slain babies, mourners were wounded by his mortar fire.

If I told you all that, you’d keep reading, wouldn’t you?

The civil war in Yugoslavia has been a staple of the front page for months, but the issue is only now reaching a critical mass in the consciousness of this country.

This week, for the first time, we have stories and photographs that are too compelling to ignore: the slaughter of the children, the atrocities of the death camps, the graveside attacks. And finally, too, we have the requisite villain: Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, characterized in press accounts as a “power-hungry zealot.” Suddenly, Yugoslavia is coming into focus for us.

Some months ago, trying to follow the unfolding war, I muddled through the news accounts and gleaned that for Yugoslavia, the Communist system had provided just enough glue to keep its ethnically diverse pieces together. Then Communism collapsed. And all George Bush’s ballyhooed “New World Order” meant for this part of the Balkans was a resurgence of ethnic nationalism and certain disaster.

The two main ethnic groups of the stitched-together nation--Serbs and Croats--were battling for control of certain parts of the country. A third major ethnic group, Muslims, seemed caught in the middle. Traditional peacekeepers--the United Nations, the Red Cross--were unable to enforce any kind of peace or humanity.

The violence, it seemed, was especially brutal because Serbs were exacting some kind of revenge for atrocities committed against them by Croatians during World War II. But everyone was guilty of something, certainly of disrespecting countless cease-fires as soon as they were announced, and it was all very muddled.

Who were the good guys? Who were the bad guys? I gave up. It was too hard to figure out.

And my sense is that most people without any previous knowledge of the region or affinity for its peoples probably have felt the same kind of confusion. How many dinner tables are dominated by conversations about events in one of the most war-torn of the Yugoslav republics, Bosnia-Herzegovina?

This is not because we are heartless.

This is because we are human.

The war in Yugoslavia--or more accurately, in what used to be Yugoslavia--is a perfect example of compassion’s greatest enemy: complexity.

It has been easy for most Americans to ignore the conflict, or to fail to demand that our elected officials take some kind of leadership role in resolving it, because it is simply too hard to understand. There are too many players, too many issues. A story that is hard to tell is usually hard to read, hard to fathom. We like our conflicts simple.

But things are different now. A certain clarity is beginning to replace the fog. It is simplistic but finally, for better or worse, we have some villains to hang our emotions on--the Serbs. The Serbs, of course, reject this characterization and, to be sure, neutral observers claim that all parties to the conflict have blood on their hands. But the Serbs have been singled out by our own government and by the United Nations for their relentless “ethnic cleansing” campaign.

Maybe now the American public will start to demand that we not just sit on our hands, that we actually do something. After all, if we can galvanize the international community to intervene in Kuwait, why not in Yugoslavia?

Dying children. Death camps. Ambushed funerals. Images like those make our choices seem simple. And reducing the complex issues of this civil war to ones that are easily grasped is necessary to help stem the bloodshed that threatens to spatter all of Europe.

It is probably the only way we will swallow the idea of involving ourselves in yet another foreign conflict. And this is one we can no longer ignore. If we can’t summon our compassion and do something for the children of Yugoslavia, what kind of nation are we?