No peace blossoms from a gun barrel

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat

Two days for Serbians and secessionist Albanians to settle their blood grudge in a brokered peace in France. Two days for both sides to decide on an agreement which, in part has been decided on by nations with no ancestral bloodright in the process but a blood-backed insistence that 30,000 of their troops be allowed into Kosovo to police whatever agreement is reached.

International mediators headed by the United States have succeeded in bringing leaders of the warring peoples in the Serbian province of Kosovo to the negotiating table in an effort to halt the undeniable horrors accompanying the conflict. That is a triumph and national grace of which we ought be proud. We citizens may smile quietly and think we are justified in believing the United States the hero, the answer to the silent screams in the dark.

But the United States is also the first proponent of the provision that the two parties accept foreign troops as police in their land, and the provision that if this conditioned peace is not accepted by Saturday, air strikes against the Serbs will begin.

Here the pride should falter and we should begin to question.

There is no problem with the threat of violence, the threat of justified intervention. But the U.S. would insist the Serbs bow to foreign troops occupying Serb land as part of any peace agreement reached. This means the warring parties accept a Reconstruction administered by foreigners. Imagine how we would feel, even at this distant point in time, if the post-Civil War Reconstruction was administered by the Japanese, or Russia, or Germany, or all three. Hell no, as any proud - and that's key - American would say.

This wrong is further aggravated by the threat of force if such an unhappy peace is not reached. Peace at the barrel of a gun, to paraphrase Mao. Only Mao was wrong - no peace blossoms from the barrel of a gun - only continued crude repression enforced by might. He was right about one thing though - power is tempting the industrialized nations of the world into imperialistic intrusion, circumventing the growth of other peoples and nations.

Wealth now, comfort now, relatively happy race relations now makes no nation the global god. There is no formula for the enlightenment that America has certainly achieved more rapidly than the nations now engaged in bloody ethnic conflict, except a slow internal struggle toward realization untainted, uncircumvented by outside agents.

Throughout the history of the "powderkeg" Balkans, the people there have been denied just this chance, overshadowed as they are by powers jostling for position.

Indeed it can be argued the Powderkeg is more a grenade and the foreign powers are historically the ones to hurl it.

Or pull the pin.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosovic yesterday rejected the proposal that foreign troops enforce any accord, amplifying the chances of a NATO intervention.

Click, the gun is cocked. All that talk of individual autonomy, of peoplehood. All that libertarian talk of self-realization, of knowing the difference between righting wrongs of majority-perpetuated violence and perpetuating it. All that so characterizes the United States, that makes even the apathetic young like myself proud of this nation. All trembling at the point of a gun.

Mary Fan is a political science and journalism senior and can be reached at Mary.Fan@wildcat.arizona.edu