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From notes@igc.apc.org Sun Aug 13 09:24:53 1995 Received: from cdp.igc.apc.org (192.82.108.1) by MediaFilter.org with SMTP (MailShare 1.0b10); Sun, 13 Aug 1995 09:24:54 -0500 Received: (from notes) by cdp.igc.apc.org (8.6.12/Revision: 1.203 ) id DAA06936 for "conf-zamir.chat"; Sun, 13 Aug 1995 03:45:19 -0700 Date: 13 Aug 1995 02:46:18 Reply-To: Conference "zamir.chat"From: jbennett@eikon.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de Subject: Mild-Mannered Men To: Recipients of zamir-chat-l Message-ID: X-Gateway: conf2mail@igc.apc.org Errors-To: owner-zamir-chat-l@igc.apc.org Precedence: bulk Lines: 68 From: Robert John Bennett Dear President Clinton: At lunch yesterday, I was talking to a promising young Viennese law student visiting Munich this summer. "Isn't it fantastic?" I said. "Anthony Lake traveling all around Europe this weekend and meeting with Andrei Kozyrev on Sunday - something's bound to happen this time. Finally, something'll be done about the Balkans and Bosnia." She looked at me the way only a European from an old family, with generations of breeding, can look at an American, the way we might look at an idiot child: with deep sympathy, knowing he will never have any understanding of life. "Anthony Lake," she said patiently, "seems to be a terribly nice man, but he's no match for Kozyrev. She paused and added, "And Kozyrev wants what the Serbs want." We were sitting on a terrace just above a large lagoon in the English Garden. She looked out over the water. "Beneath Kozyrev's mild-mannered exterior," she went on, "is a mind like a steel trap. Beneath Anthony Lake's mild-mannered exterior is a mild-mannered interior." I was deflated. "So what do you think is going to happen?" I said. She looked at me with that compassionate expression again, but I thought I also saw a deep, fleeting sadness in her eyes. "Happen?" she said, with a solemn smile. "That's just it. Nothing's going to happen. We've seen all this before. The Serbs are attacked, they back down - sometimes they back down a lot - there's a flurry of meetings, and afterwards nobody does anything. Nobody has the courage to really do anything that will settle the situation once and for all." A faint steely anger glittered in her blue eyes now. "What I don't understand is why everybody keeps going through the same motions, over and over again," she said with a new intensity. "There's a convulsion in the Balkans, the diplomats talk, and everybody waits and waits and thinks that THIS time they'll come up with an answer. But they never do. Then we all forget about the Balkans for a few weeks or a few months, until something ELSE happens, something worse than before." She paused and seemed to be studying a swan gliding over the surface of the water. She went on, "And after that the whole cycle starts again, and nobody remembers that it's happened five or ten times before and that it's been happening for almost four YEARS now." She glanced back at me and this time I thought I saw tears in her eyes. "But what's the matter?" I said. "Why should it matter so much to you?" When she looked directly at me, I could see there really were tears. "Because," she said, her soft, accented voice modulating between sorrow and anger, "the day they showed the pictures of the mass graves of the men and boys the Serbs murdered at Srebrenica - on that same day, my eighteen year-old brother Stefan, the idealist among us, was killed fighting as a volunteer for the Moslems in central Bosnia." Sincerely yours, Robert J. Bennett Munich