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NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER
December 22, 2000

Viewpoint

NATO destruction apparant in Belgrade

By MICHAEL SCAHILL

The plane makes its ascent from Belgrade International Airport. It is All
Saints' Day,
one of my favorite days of the liturgical year. I miss the services back at
my parish in
Milwaukee, a parish that has among its members some of the wealthiest and most
influential citizens of Milwaukee. St. Peter's in Belgrade, the local parish
church I
attended while in Belgrade, by contrast, has some of the poorest, most powerless
people. Some make salaries of only $40 a month. Serbs, like Palestinians and
Iraqis,
are perhaps not only among the poorest but also the most demonized people in the
world. Welcome to Serbia, 2000.

The occasion of my visit was to attend the baptism of my granddaughter into the
Serbian Orthodox church. My son is a journalist and lives in Belgrade with
his wife
whom he met while he was covering the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. My
granddaughter's name is Ksenija. It is Serbian and means "woman from a foreign
land." It is actually the root of the noun xenophobic. In my time in Serbia
I would
learn that this a beautiful name, prophetic and ironic as well.

My trip to Belgrade was primarily to celebrate this joyful event with my son
and his
wife. In the course of my visit, I wanted to search out a place to attend
Sunday Mass.
One cannot travel about Belgrade without encountering the devastation and
destruction wrought by NATO bombing. Reminders are everywhere. Belgrade was
the victim of numerous air strikes. During World War II, it was carpet
bombed by the
Nazis in 1941 and by the allies in 1944. Much of that damage has since been
repaired.
But the evidence of the 78-day attack by NATO last year is abundant and at times
startling, given the vast number of civilian "targets" hit. From the
neonatal hospital on
the city's outskirts that remains in rubble to the heating plant in New
Belgrade to
private homes, Belgrade still looks, at times, like a war zone.

In the search for one of the two churches, my walk in Belgrade took me to Radio
Television Serbia, located within a mile of each of the churches. The
station is on the
outskirts of Tasmajdan Park, a few feet from St. Marko's Serbian Orthodox
Church,
within a busy residential neighborhood with many restaurants and schools. On the
morning of April 23, 1999, at 2 a.m., a missile from a NATO plane exploded
inside
the television station killing 16 people. They were camera technicians,
makeup people,
sound technicians and copyeditors. None was military. None was a government
employee tied to either Slobodan Milosovic or the Yugoslavian military. They
were
average citizens of Belgrade simply making a living. The cruise missile that was
intentionally aimed at them that morning changed that forever. A small
monument with
the names of the dead has been erected right next to the television station. The
bombed-out shell of the building remains exactly the way it was that night.

There were many thoughts and images to reflect on at Mass that Sunday. I
thought of
other children, children like my granddaughter, who were exposed to the depleted
uranium dropped on their country but were not as lucky as Ksenija. The
children of
Iraq have fared far worse from what history will undoubtedly cite as one of
the worst
teratogens -- agents that cause fetal malformation -- of the 20th century.
How ironic
that the country with the highest, most sophisticated child care practices
in the world
produced this weapon. It is a crime in the United States to allow a child to
ride in a car
without securing that child in a car seat, and yet we produce a substance so
hazardous
to children that we cannot yet medically identify the birth defects it
causes. (Indeed, if
an Iraqi or Serbian family did wish to buy a car seat it would have to be
done on the
black market, due to economic sanctions.)

I thought of the many students I met around Belgrade who speak English so
well not
because of its beauty and poetry but rather, as one student said, "Yours is the
language of power and wealth. We have no choice." I thought of my
daughter-in-law,
Ivana, who before she could secure a visa to visit us in the United States
had to have
her name run through a security check at The Hague to make sure she had not
committed war crimes. Meanwhile the perpetrators of the attack on Radio
Television
Serbia -- within walking distance of St. Peter's Church and about one
hundred feet
from St. Marko's Serbian Orthodox Church -- not only are free but in all
likelihood
felt this strike to be a success beyond their wildest expectations. In this
technological
murder I never had seen a more dramatic witness to one of Gandhi's seven deadly
sins: Science without humanity.

Richard Holbrooke, a key architect of the war in the Balkans, made the
announcement
of the bombing of Radio Television Serbia at a news awards dinner at the
Hyatt Hotel
in New York City. In attendance at that dinner were some of America's
highest-profile media and television journalists. None of them, aside from two
journalists from Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! (who refused in protest to
accept
their awards that night) confronted or even asked Holbrooke to clarify the
incident,
which resulted in the deaths of 16 of their fellow journalists. Indeed the
only response
from the audience was polite laughter.

My plane makes its descent into Chicago. My thoughts once again turn to the
Feast of
All Saints, and again I feel a little sad at not having attended any
services due to flight
schedules and connections. It makes me ponder even more deeply the meaning
of this
day. I am reminded that among the many saints were also many martyrs. Not unlike
the 16 people whose names appear on the stone monument outside Radio Television
Serbia. They, too, were martyrs and countless others like them, victims of
the most
sophisticated killing machine in history: victims whom the U.S. media tried
to portray
as genocidal murderers but in reality were men and women working the night shift
trying to support a family. It was for them I prayed the Sunday I attended
Mass at St.
Peter's in Belgrade. I asked God's forgiveness for America with its mighty war
machine that trespassed against so many people. Such was my prayer on that
Sunday,
the 29th Sunday in ordinary time, in no ordinary place.

Michael Scahill works as a pediatric nurse practitioner in Milwaukee.

National Catholic Reporter, December 22, 2000