National Guard: Peacekeepers Fight Centuries of Hatred

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Peacekeepers Fight Centuries of Hatred

Prawdzik, Christopher

How do forces ... transform a region that showed few signs of peace in the 20th century?

The Turks conquered Serbia on june 28, 1389. That same date in 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie as they traveled the streets of Sarajevo. World War I quickly followed.

In his book The First World War, author John Keegan notes that this was an "ill-chosen" date for the heir to the Austrian throne to travel through Bosnia, considering it was the date the Serbs mark the beginning of "their long history of suffering at the hands of foreign oppressors."

It's an event illustrative of the entire Balkan region-a region plagued by deep ethnic, political and religious division that spans hundreds of years.

Included in this melting pot is Kosovo, the southernmost Serbian province and current outpost for the Pennsylvania Guard's 28th Infantry Division-command element of the U.S. sector of Kosovo Force (KFOR).

While troops officially hit ground in response to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's attempt to "cleanse" the Kosovo population of Albanian Muslims and to prevent Muslim retaliation that left many Serb homes leveled after the conflict, peacekeepers are dealing with a long-simmering animosity among citizens with extremely long memories.

In reality, troops find themselves addressing local issues that weren't started by-but were exacerbated by-Milosevic.

The ethnic unrest makes outside investors unwilling to take the risk, while crime and corruption fill that void-from wood smuggling to an underground slave trade.

Peacekeepers also find themselves in a region defined by contradictions.

Kosovo is situated on the cusp of western and eastern influences. At the same time, the most receptive groups to U.S. and NATO forces in Kosovo-and Bosnia as well-are Muslim.

How do forces-individuals transplanted for six months at a time-transform a region that showed few signs of peace in the 20th century?

Officially, that's not the job of the peacekeepers, but a ray of hope is still evident when troops take to the streets on patrol.

While the Serb population isn't quite as receptive-although not hostile-to the Americans, the most obvious component ol a street patrol is the children who walk up to American soldiers, shake their hands or give them a thumbs-up.

The children have wide smiles and pose for photos taken by news crews and reporters-perhaps innocent to the divisions that plague the entire region.

The question, however, is how long that innocence lasts? The Serb and Albanian populations don't associate with one another.

In school, the Serb children attend for part of the day and the Albanians attend for the other.

And citizens insist that without the American troops on the ground, hostilities would resume almost immediately.

At the same time, progress is slow and steady. By the end of the 28th's rotation in February, troops stationed at various Serb churches should be a thing of the past-a signal that the violence threat is waning.

But that's only a small step in a big and seemingly never ending conflict.

In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia author Rebecca West documented her Balkan travels during the miclf 93Os and provided an unsettling picture of the region-a picture that survives today.

West wrote if she had the power to ask a peasant if he had known peace in his lifetime, then ask the peasant's father and then ask his grandfather the same question, she would never hear the word "Yes."

She even said if questioned back a thousand years, all she would hear is: "No; there was fear; there were our enemies without, our rulers within; there was prison; there was torture; there was violent death."

While peacekeepers help suppress the violence, it's still difficult to determine success until a generation knows peace on its own.

But if peace does come to the youngest generation-the smiling faces of school children who flock to the troops on the ground-then the troops can know they played a part.