Albright Book: How We Stop the War in Kosovo

“powerful and powerful” That's how she calls her book with <x2... reflections about America, God and world events”, Madeleine Albright, one of the most powerful women in the world, former US Secretary of State.

A book that comes into Albanian thanks to an English translation of the Troubled Angels and the Publishing House “Fan Noli”, with an introduction by former American President Bill Clinton. Type “panorama”. Two very important figures for Albanians, and especially for Kosovo's.

Over the past few years, the United States has had to face the issue of the right “war” in Afghanistan and Iraq. As Secretary of State, I have faced a similar challenge in the Balkans. In the early 1990s, Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic had launched three unsuccessful wars: against Slovenia, against Croatia and against Bosnia. In 1999, he directed his hostility against the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo, the province of Serbia.

During one year, I studied every possible way to ensure a diplomatic solution to be respected by both sides. Albanians finally accepted our proposal; Milosevic rejected it, disrupting its security forces against the civilian population. His interest was to expel Albanians from Kosovo, killing their leaders, burning their villages and spreading terror. His goal was to solve Kosovo's “problem once and for all. Since the province was part of Serbia, Milosevic's crimes could not be characterised as international aggression. No NATO member was under attack, so the Alliance could not claim to use its right to defend itself.

Serbia had not threatened to invade another country, so there was no reason for a preventative blow. However, we had the task “to protect the vulnerable other”. The UN Security Council adopted a resolution, which called for the withdrawal of Serbian plastic-Kitse troops, but Russian diplomats, historically on the side of their Slav brothers, promised to veto any measures authorising the use of force for Serb detention. This put Clinton and NATO administration ahead of a difficult choice. Either allow Russia to use the veto with which it threatened us, by not allowing us to act, or by using force to save the people of Kosovo without the UN's expressed permission. I worked hard and succeeded in using the second option.

My reasons were partly strategic: Europe would never be completely at peace, as long as the Balkans were untable and the Balkans would not be stabilised as long as Milosevic was in power. However, my main motive was moral: I didn't want to see innocent people killed. NATO's presence in Europe gave us the means to stop ethnic cleansing on that continent, while I hoped that doing so would help prevent such crimes from taking place.

This was really one of those times when, to echo the words of New Martin Luther King, our stand would be based, not on what was certain, but on what was right. Since we did not have a special mandate of the United Nations for military action, we especially tried hard to prove the justice of our cause. First, the Clinton administration secured NATO's unanimous support.

Second, I kept in constant contact with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who publicly agreed with us that the actions of Serbs were morally unacceptable.

Third, NATO's goals during the war were controlled by military lawyers, who compared each to standards set by the Geneva Convention. In any case, an assessment is made to see whether the value of the target was greater than potential risks to civilians. As the war progressed, we intensified military pressure on Belgrade, but in the meantime we were careful to minimize the number of human victims and their unnecessary injuries.

Three civilian targets (Tinan Embassy, a passenger train, and a refugee convoy) were accidentally hit. The estimates for the number of civilians killed by the bombings show they were between 500 and 2000. While Serbs, before we could stop them, killed about 10,000 Kosovo Albanians and expelled hundreds of thousands more from their homes. Throughout the war, we continued diplomatic efforts to establish peace. These efforts were finally crowned successfully. Milosevic surrendered; Serbs withdrew security forces from Kosovo; refugees were allowed to return; a NATO-led peacekeeping force was established in the country, and the United Nations managed to contribute to the reconstruction of the country, which has since organised several rounds of democratic elections.

The seeds of conflict in Kosovo, as well as the long-standing wars that had resulted from the breakup of Yugoslavia, had been sown in the religious history of the region. Defending Serbia's cause, Milosevic would tell me that his people had defended the Christian <x0-European” for centuries. Serbia's epic national history is a revival of the Kosovo battle, held against Ottoman Turks at the Cullen Field in 1389. According to legend, Prince Lazar of Serbia had appeared to the prophet Elijah on the fateful day.

Elijah had offered the prince a choice between victory in battle (and an empire on earth) and defeat (compensed to a place in paradise). The prince chose eternal victory in heaven. It is an inspiring story, a story that has played a role in the bold decision of Serbs to resist the Nazis during World War II. The problem is that some Serbs continue to be determined to retaliate for the defeat suffered in Kosovo more than 600 years ago, motivated by a vicious sense of nationalism and the belief that they have a special relationship with God. As the war continued in Kosovo, Václav Havel would characterize it with these words: If you can say that a war is ethical or that it is being fought for ethical reasons, then that is one of those wars.

Kosovo (other than Kuwait) has no oil wells to covet; neither of the Alliance's member nations has any territorial claim against it; Milosevic does not threaten the territorial integrity of any of the Alliance's members. Yet, the Alliance entered the war. She fights because she's worried about the fate of others. She's fighting because no good man can stand and maintain the systematic killing of other peoples under government...

This war places human rights on state rights. Most of us would agree that morality, while often difficult to establish, is essential to getting along with each other. We would feel more secure in a world where our conscience would serve as the principal guide of the actions of the nations and individuals. What about religion? Religion is perhaps the only greater influence on the formation of human conscience, yet it is also a source of conflict and hatred. After what we saw happen in the Balkans and other regions destroyed by religious conflicts, can we say that religion is something to be more abundant?

How Religious Faith Is Used for Personal Power

By William J. Clinton

During the time that Madeleine Albright was Secretary of State, the world learned what I already knew: she is not afraid to take on difficult issues or say what she thinks. In the book “Powerful and Almighty”, it writes with an unusual sincerity and sound logic for the international role of America, for religion, ethics, and the current state of division and confusion of the world.

In my knowledge, no former Secretary of State has written anything similar to it. It is a surprising book written among the counsel of concerned friends that such topics cannot be discussed without causing pain. In my experience, the only way to avoid pain is to sit back.

Madeleine Albright is the incarnation of moving forward. After our first conversation about this project, I called Madeleine to discuss it further, not knowing where she was at the moment. It turned out to be in Gdansk, Poland, celebrating the twenty-fiveth anniversary of Solidarity, the democracy movement that ended the Cold War and brought freedom to Central and Eastern Europe. When I dialed her, Madeleine was in the middle of a crowd that included former Czech president Vaclav Havel and current presidents of Ukraine and Poland.

She crossed the phone to them, so I had an unexpected but welcome opportunity to talk to some old friends. Meanwhile, Madeleine placed a bouquet of flowers in memory of Solidarity and participated in an open mass celebrating freedom that lasted three hours. I had him at a moment and in a place where God and democracy were next to each other, in the spotlight.

One of the topics in this book and a source of ongoing controversy in public life has to do with the relationship between them. The religious element is the foundation of democracy”, would write Walt Whitman, “All religions, old and new, are there”.

I believe we all had to meet people who would be willing to embrace Whitman's first sentence and ignore the second, thus making both sentences meaningless. In their best interests - both religion and democracy - respect the equality and value of every human being - where we are all images of the Creator, each being endowed with certain rights. These doctrines stand side by side. They are equal and inclusive.

Problems arise when our interpretation attempts to put him before Whitman, arguing that those who have the same idea as we are about the universe are more valuable than others. To have a religion is to believe in absolute truth. But saying that human beings, as they are imperfect, can completely possess that truth or that our political ideology is completely true and allows us to penalise, print, or abuse those who have different beliefs from us, is quite another matter.

The Constitution of the United States created something truly new - a system of government in which greater trust is not granted to high officials whose power is limited by a master control and balance system, but to the people as a whole. Among the restrictions our fathers imposed on those in power is the inability to establish a State State religion or to limit everyone's right to be free in choosing faith. The founding fathers understood from history that the concentration of political and religious authority on the same hands could be poisonous.

Of course, we know that often the power of religion is exploited by those who seek to strengthen their personal power at the expense of others. In the Balkans, Slobodan Milosevic talked a lot about the protection of Christian Europe, but his real interest was to use religion and extreme divisions to strengthen his power.

Osama bin Laden is deemed a defender of Islam, but his willingness to kill innocent people, including other Muslims, is not a fair interpretation of the Koran and is not loyal to that belief. In the wrong hands, religion is transformed into a lever used to alienate one group of people against another group, not because of some deep spiritual faith, but because it can help anyone seeking to arouse hostility.

Does this mean that policymakers should try to keep religion separate from public life? As Madeline Albright argues, the answer to this question is a “no” ringing. We should not only not do this, but even if we tried to do it, we would not succeed. Religious beliefs, when they are obedient, cannot be worn and stripped as if they were a Galllian pair.

We carry them with us wherever we go, skeptical and atheistic, alongside believers. A president or a secretary of state must make decisions in view of his religious beliefs and the influence these decisions have on people of different faiths. However, like Madeleine Albright points out, the assessment of this influence is not an easy task.

During my visit to India in 2000, some angry radicals will vent their rage, killing thirty - eight sheiks in calm. If I hadn't taken that trip, the victims would probably still be alive. If I hadn't made that trip out of fear of what extremists could do, I wouldn't have carried out my duty as president of the United States.

The nature of America is such that many people define themselves either in terms of it or pro or against. This thing is part of reality, in which we as leaders have to act. When radical imams try to destroy the thinking of some of the disgruntled, dissatisfied young people, among whom not all are poor and uneducated, by offering these faithful a so-called immediate trip to heaven, in exchange for their willingness to kill civilians and simultaneously to blow up themselves, how should we react?

We could try to catch them or kill them, but anyway, we couldn't all get caught. We could try to convince them to give up violence, but when our arguments have nothing to do with their experiences, we could not succeed. The best chance we have is to work together with those people in the Muslim world who try to capture the minds of the same people as the Radicals, preaching a more complete Islam and not a distorted, broken Islam.

I truly believe that such a thing can be done, not by weakening spiritual beliefs, but by getting into the depths of these beliefs. Abraham's three beliefs have more similarities than differences, each calling for honor, generosity, modesty, and love. None of them are fully known to us. The challenge of our leaders is to use what we have in common as a basis for overcoming the more extreme elements and removing the support of terrorism.

When people accept their common humanity, it becomes harder to demonize and destroy each other. It is much easier to find principled compromises with one of the “ne”, than with one of the “ata”. Religious faith can help us to remove the old line of separation as long as the time. There is no more important task, but as the book of Madeleine Albright makes clear, it is a task that four and a half years after 9/11 we almost never even took it by hand.