BELGRADE, June 8, 1999 -- It seems that peace has finally come to Yugoslavia! It will be quite a while before we all know what exactly has been signed and what all this means. The politicians of all sides now have to wag their tongues and prove to us, their electorate, that this was a triumph of their great leadership. The truth is that the politicians of each and every country involved have caused this bloodshed, and destruction. If we are kind, we will say that they were not up to the task, that they lacked vision, or were just plain stupid. If we are shortsighted we'll say that our politicians were good, while their politicians were bad. If we are more astute, we will come to the conclusion that they've all gained by this -- some money, some power, some notoriety. But it is only ordinary people that have paid the price of death and destruction; it is only ordinary people that will continue to pay the price of the rebuilding that is to come. However, politicians are not important. What is important is that the trumpets of war have subsided, and that peace now has a chance. So world, I plead with you, don't turn the channel seeking to tune in to the next calamity! Please don't forget us here in the Balkans -- look at us in peace, as you have done in war. In the past, the ancient peoples that live here have given much to the world -- given half a chance, they will do so again. I promise quite an interesting show. For a short while, violence, when viewed from the safety of one's living room, can be captivating in a morbid sense. It can be good for ratings. In the long term, however, we always turn away from violence, from bloodshed and hate and destruction, and turn to peace. This is such a time. The time has come to build the bridges between people, not to blow them up. The direct effects of any war are devastating, however, the long-term effects can be quite unpredictable, both in the good and the bad that wars bring. Today something new has happened -- the future in front of this world of ours is still difficult to predict. I don't want to talk of the here and now, there will be time for that in the days that follow. At this point allow me a brief trip back in time, to another war and its aftermath. The great city of Jerusalem was sacked almost exactly 900 years ago, on July 15, 1099. This was year four of the first of the Crusades, a sequence of eight bloody wars nominally fought against the Muslims and in the name of God, that lasted until the middle of the 15th century. In the eyes of the believers, the Crusades had a deep religious, noble, and humane Christian meaning. From our temporal distance of precisely nine centuries, we see these wars and the sickening scenes of burned and destroyed cities and their massacred and plundered citizens, in a different light. The proclaimed reasons for launching the Crusades by Pope Urban II were the liberation of the Holy lands from the "infidels," and the achievement of Christian unity between the east and west churches. What were the political results of these centuries of war? The Christian unity that was sought was not achieved, in fact one of the main results of the Crusades was the destruction of the Byzantine empire and its civilization. The instability that was created reverberates to this day. Another result was the military triumph of Islam -- a triumph not by the Arabs, against whom the wars were fought, who were tolerant of the Christians and Jews they conquered, and whose culture at the time far surpassed that of Western Europe, but by the militant, and religiously far less tolerant Ottoman Turks. Western Christianity survived, but it was stained by intolerance. With the first Crusade came the persecution of the Jews as well as of Muslims and Orthodox Christians. On the economic side, the Crusades had a much more positive effect, as they led to a great increase in trade between East and West. The greatest effect, however, was in the intermingling of cultures. The transfer of Arabic scholarly knowledge through Spain and Sicily, brought Europe in contact with the capital works of Classical Greece. The close contact of the cultures of Jews, Arabs and Christians in Spain, in those intolerant years, enabled Europe to jump out of the Dark Ages straight into the Renaissance. The Crusades, and their aftermath, are a great moral lesson to us all. It often seems that we forget the lessons of the past, that we repeat our mistakes, but that is not really true. If, like me, you see certain parallels between the Crusades and what has been going on in the Balkans at the end of this century, we shouldn't forget the many dissimilarities. Maybe the most important one is the shorter time, and smaller number of casualties of this latest war. If we, as a world culture, are still not quite mature enough it is at least heartening to know (or to hope) that the times of insanity are becoming progressively shorter. At the end, let us not forget the unforeseen consequences of war. Dare we hope that the conflict that has just subsided will, in the fullness of time, bring forth a flowering not unlike the Renaissance? I believe there is a possibility that this can happen. I believe that the seed has already been sown; that it is represented by the vast intellectual diaspora that has issued forth from Serbia and the surrounding countries as a consequence of economic and political upheaval and a series of wars marking the undoing of former Yugoslavia. Only good will come from this diaspora, both for the world, as well as the lands from where they came from. We must all help in nurturing this flower.
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