When I was in Rome studying, in 1999, I got Mono. I was supposed to travel to Spain (alone, and I was SO excited about this trip) during the second part of our two-week spring break. Mono scuttled that, because I got Mono bad (ask my brother what I sounded like then, and he'll laugh and say "the teacher from Charlie Brown"; my family came to Italy during the first half of that break), and my parents were already uncomfortable with me traveling alone, and then sick? No way, Jose. Literally.
So my parents sprang for a room in the hotel I was living in (which kicked us out during the spring/Easter break), and I had a friend who had her plans abruptly canceled as well, so we stayed together in Rome, alone. (This is the notorious break during which I acquired the nose piercing.) One day, we heard quite a commotion in the streets, and looked out our street-facing window to see a huge mass of humanity pouring down the very main street we lived on. (Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, if you know Rome, right near the Cat Sanctuary.) It was a parade! Our first Roman parade! We squeezed out onto our teensy little stone balcony to watch and take pictures. And then we realized it wasn't a parade. In fact, it wasn't a joyful celebration at all. It was an angry, crazy protest against America. And more specifically, about the NATO bombing in Kosovo. Or rather, what the protesters were definitely calling the American bombing of Kosovo.
I wasn't unaware of the situation in Kosovo; it was nearly impossible to be, considering the proximity of the region to Italy. And also, one of my high-school friends was from that region. Born in Yugoslavia. Had family in Kosovo, but I don't think they were Albanian, if that means anything to you. Which it might not, because honestly, I had no idea what the actual conflict roiling in that area was actually about. I had no idea that the Serbs were massacring and forcibly removing Albanians from the territory. I didn't know that it was probably genocide. We actually didn't get all that much hard news in our isolated enclave. Only what our families and friends told us (Don't go to Trieste! Say you're Canadian!), and that was only whatever they had gleaned from the news back home.
So Moca and I are watching this protest, and we're shocked. We're quiet, and we're kind of...contemplative about the whole thing. I don't know that I'd considered what America was doing was wrong. I don't know that I'd thought anything of it. And I know that when the rest of our peers started pouring back into Rome, and we talked about that protest and the bombing, and what was happening, I was pragmatic about the thing--if bombing can paradoxically save lives, it might be an okay way to go. My friends didn't much agree with me, being staunch pacifists. And I'm essentially a pacifist, and I think there is one area in which I am not, and that would be when it involves genocide. But I didn't know that word then, or that it applied to Kosovo, and so I wavered. I wavered and waffled, and I never defended very heartily what was happening.
I've been thinking of this because I've just finished reading Samantha Power's A Problem From Hell. It took me over two years, but I'm finally done with it. Reading about Iraq, Rwanda and the Balkans now, over 15 years later, was interesting. Especially as my own brief Kosovo experience came back to my mind. And if I knew then what I know now, after reading the book (which is horrifying and shocking and saddening all at once, but it's the Rwanda chapter that really, really kills. Our behavior in the situation in Rwanda was pathetic. As our behavior towards Darfur is now. We really cannot figure this humanitarian "Never again." thing out. As Power quotes, "Never again in Germany involving the Jews in 1941." Anyway, tangent.), I'm not sure I would have waffled as much. Look, collateral damage is AWFUL, and we have to hope it doesn't happen. But you know what's worse? 800,000 Tutsis dead in Rwanda. Thousands of Muslim men wiped off the face of the Earth in Bosnia. The Kurds systematically destroyed in Iraq. The use of rape as a way to practice genocide against a group of women. That is worse. Not acting is worse. And though Power isn't as harsh as she might be, I don't think you can read this book and not wish we were better. We can't be the world's policeman, but goddamn, we should do something! anything! to stop genocide.
And I think that you can really draw that conclusion from the book. You should probably be able to draw that conclusion without it, too. But this makes it more real. More heart-breaking. More important.
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