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Date: 22 Aug 1995 17:06:07
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From: eagro@bronze.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Two stories
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>Originator: sage@d31rz0.stanford.edu
>Students Against GEnocide (Project Bosnia)

			    SAGE Digest 365

>Date: Tue, 22 Aug 1995 09:54:46 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Kathleen A Young 

Dear Sage, the posts about ordinary people who act to protect victims of
war/genocide inspired these thoughts about 2 people I read about when the
war in Bosnia first started: one who acted and one who did not . . . 
     The Woman-Child: In May, 1992, according to John Burns in the New
York Times, Serb soldiers were slaughtering their way through the town of
Zvornik, when a 17 year old Serb girl approached, pleading with them, "not
to do anything to the Muslims." The soldiers slashed her throat, killing
her, silencing her. 
     What made her so brave at 17? Did she consciously approach the
soldiers, Serb to Serb? Was she trying to save them, save the Serb nation,
from what they were about to do? Did her Holocaust studies teach her that
silence in the face of genocide is a kind of collaboration? Did she
deliberately decide not to collaborate? 
     Maybe she just acted without thinking. How could she possibly believe
what she saw around her? How could her countrymen be collectively infected
with the homocidal virus, the war that came to ravage Zvornik? If she
could speak now, from the legions of the dead, could she explain herself?
     The Border Guard: In July 1992 a train carrying 2,000 Bosnians was 
stopped at the border into Slovenia. Slovenia, Italy, and Austria had already
refused entry to the refugees. Croatia was supporting one refugee for
about every six Croats and refused them entry until food and shelter could
be guaranteed. Like prisoners on the boxcars of a former era, they baked
in the sun, awaiting any dismal destination.
     The journalist Stephen Kinzer reported in the New York Times, "After
48 hours of bickering, during which a child aboard the train died of heat
exhaustion, Austria agreed to take the trainload of refugees." The child's
mother must have screamed in frustration at the border guards as her child
slowly died. 
     Why was there no Oscar Schindler with his watering hose, showering a
few necessary hours of wet reprieve on the sweltering bus? The guards were
good people, no doubt. None of them would have individually willfully
killed a child. But they did. Do they see it that way? Maybe what they saw
around them did not match their life experience, perhaps they had no
cognitive means to understand the circumstance. Like the woman-child in
Zvornik, perhaps they could not believe their eyes, or maybe they were 
"just following orders" . . . 

Kathleen Young

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End of SAGE Digest 365
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