Hatred

Re: Futema Jafri

You said: ``This hatred first reared its ugly head in Bosnia and now resurfaces in Kosovo.``

That would be a historical revisionism! :)

Bosnia was not the first place where this hatred reared it image. Ever heard of a Croatian city of Split or Vukovar? Heard anything on what the Croats did to the Krajinan Serbs or what the Serbs did to the Croats or the Slovenes before the mortar shells fell on a Sarajevo market place and the world was horrified?

Bosnia and Sarajevo were much later and this maddness never went underground, but it was always simmering on the surface; it has been simmering since the Battle of the Black Birds, in 1389, when the Serbian Knights lost to the Ottoman Turkish armies on the field of Kosovo Polje and the dream of a Greater Serbia was born. It was simmering through the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 to the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and germanated in 1912 when the Ottoman Turks left the Balkans. It was simmering all through the Treat of Versailles, in 1919, and the creation of Yugoslavia, which was to be the logical portal to a Greater Serbia. It was simmering all through the post-Second World War Europe under Izoif Tito`s autocratic rule.

Sorry to say this, but this maddness did not first appear in Bosnia! It was always simmering, but the world and Europe, at large, was too busy playing osterich and just did not care to do anything then.

Well, now the chickens have come home to roost....

Re: Ferozk (Reply #1)

Thanks for the history lesson...:) I think my statement should be revised to exclude the word ``first``. No doubt...the Balkans have always been a hotspot...or should I say powder keg.

All the best.

True words written to educate all who will pay
heed.
Reminded me to try and find and read Tehmina`s work on Sattar Edhi ``Mirror to the Blind``????

Ras

Too idealistic. Sometimes you need to fight. Hitler was stopped by bullets and bombs, not some reawakening of the German people`s humanity.

Re: Ras (Reply #3)

I would love to read the work you mention. Just the title intrigues me. Please let me know if the article is published on the Web...and where.

Re: Kidwai (Reply #4)

I don`t think that we are all necessarily ``animals``. But all of us do carry our hidden prejudices which only surface when tested. The challenge is to deal with these inner feelings.

Re: Faraz (Reply #5)

Yes, you are right. The article is too idealistic. But the idealists and the cynics have to balance each other in society...:)

The argument in the article is not how to stop a Hitler or a Milosevic. Rather, the question is how to stop one from being effective and successful. Don`t you think that the answer lies in the individual as a collective?

Excellent piece, Futema.

Unfortunately, hatred and intolerance are default pathways for humans and need to be consciously overcome by intelligence and affluence. The combination of intelligence and affluence appears to have reached its apogee in modern-day United States, resulting in what is effectively the remarkable spectacle of Christians bombing Christians on Easter Sunday to ensure a foothold for Islam in Central Europe, in the interest of justice.

Whatever the underlying motives for this fact (Clinton`s hunger for legacy, Holbrooke`s contentious personality, US geo-political interests, etc.), the fact remains that Bill Clinton stepped in to stop injustice. He deserves the sincere gratitude of every thinking person with any sense of fairness.

Saad

Re Ras:

Could you please give me some more info on the book you mentioned? Eg. is it on the net? And who is the author? Tahmina Who?

Thanks,

Sadaf

Just a few more comments on the topic. Hatred, as a human emotion, is as old as time itself and in a political sense hatred is a potent weapon, because it has a singular ability to unify people.

In the case of Slobodan Milosevic, everyone appreciates the fact that ethnic hatred and animosity has been fueling the Balkan crisis since the late 1980s. To delineate and identify hatred, as a source of all that ails a society, is a relativily simple task, but to question the forces which sustain such hate, the raison d`etat, towards others is a harder proposition. The ethnic disparity has always been a part and parcel of the Balkan reality; it existed under the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later in Yugoslavia, under Tito, till 1990s.

The question which urgently needs to be answered is not what propelled the ethnic hatred into the open, but rather what is the underlying reason behind its fury, as it is presently personified and manifested in the crisis of Kosovo. In one word, the roots of this crisis, though cloaked within the slogans of nationalism, in reality are based in the economics of the region.

Under Tito`s rule, the economic infrastructure of the Yugoslavia was distributed evenly and no one province enjoyed a preponderance of economic benefits. By allowing each province to share equally in the commonwealth of Yugoslavia, Tito was hoping to dilute the ethnic tensions by giving each ethnic group a fair and equal opportunity to contribute economically. Tito`s rationale in favoring this approach was not alturistic, but was highly self-motivated. Tito wanted to rule Yugoslavia with an iron fist and he wanted to use the status of Yugoslavia, as a non-aligned nation, to leverage political influence in the Cold War which was ideologically dominating the relations between East and West.

Tito understood the reality, having seen the situation in the Soviet bloc nations, that Yugoslav solidarity rested on his ability to quell the ethnic tensions by giving the Yugoslavs an economical autonomy in their lives. This would keep the Yugoslavs busy and in the process, as long as they were economically content, they would be willing to trade in their lack of political rights for a sense of economic fulfillment.

Two events altered the perception of this reality. One was the end of the Cold War and other was the independence of Croatia and Slovenia, provinces of Yugoslavia, from Belgrade in 1990-91. In wake of the collapse of the Cold War, Milosevic changed from an ardent communist to a rabid nationalist to maintain his grasp on power and he used nationalism to resist the breakup of Croatia and Slovenia. Unfortunately for him, once the forces of nationalism were unleashed, they could not be controlled.

Hence, the present levels of hatred are being sustained, in Yugoslavia, for a lack of a viable economic base. Milosevic and his cohorts fully realize that Serbia will not be economically self-sufficient till it re-unites all the provinces together and he is using the present crisis to get rid of all the other ethnic minorities, because in the end, the Serbs will be the most influential and powerful minority economically and thus, they would in a position to politically dominate the Yugoslav confederation in what will be called as Greater Serbia.

Milosevic and his Serb nationalists undertand that in order for a nationalistic state of Greater Serbia to exist, it must have the economic resources to prosper. Therefore, this war is about gaining access to the economic resources and denying the other ethnic minorities an opportunity to share those resources.

This rationale has been the justification of the genocide taking place and the reason why most refugees, leaving Yugoslavia, are being asked to surrunder their documentation to the Serbs. The Serbs do not want these people to have any legal ownership rights which could be translated into political rights later on and to deny them any basis for contesting Serb economical or political domination in Yugoslavia.

Ethnic cleansing or genocide is merely an auxillary symptom of this crisis. The real reason for the Balkan Crisis of 1989-99 is who finally gets to economically and politically dominate the resources of the former Yugoslavic Republic.

Futema and Sadaf,

The name of the author is Tehmina Durrani (formerly Khar) of ``My Feaudal Lord`` fame.

The name of the work that I was referring to is:
``Edhi: A Mirror to the Blind``
I would like very much to get a hold of this Biography here in the USA.

For further details please see:

http://www.madeinpakistan.com/books/newbooks.html

Maybe the Edhi Foundation in New York can be reached for this book and other subjects at:

718-639-5120

Ras

Excellent article. The only thing we should hate is hate itself. If, for example, one feels hatred towards the Serbs for what they did think this: 25 years ago something very similar to Kosovo happened in what was then East Pakistan (this may be hard to believe for many of my fellow Pakistanis, I know). And as Ms. Jafri very correctly indicates, the same can happen again and again until we learn to be more tolerant of one another and of our differences. Let us pray for the poor Albanians in the meantime.

``Hatred is not inborn``? I`d like to read the psychological study that has concluded that.

Hatred, as Feroz correctly points out, is as old as man himself. What we saw in Hitler`s Germany, and now in Serbia, is the institutionalization of hatred. Common man is directed by the government policies. In the US, both the government and the media taught the common white--the majority--folks about tolerance. If the American government encouraged hatred towards other non-white people through its policies and the American media turned a blind eye, the US would be the most racist country on earth today, perhaps unlivable for those not descended from white Europe. The credit goes to its government and the media for making the US the most tolerant of all countries on earth. It is naivete to expect a common man to understand for himself what hatred is.

How very true. And what is it that breeds this hatred? Unfortunately many human lives have been destroyed all in the name of religion. How ignorant is man - does he not understand that the banner of religion that he fights under is not the religion of God but rather only a cult of man.

Greetings! - Glad to hear there is no such gene for hatred - phew! However, Sigmund Freud stated that human beings are born bad and then decide to be good or bad. Alfred Adler, his contemporary, stated that we are born good and then pick a path to follow. Nature vs nurture debates have been going on for ages! So, how about some positive action and less talk people? Futema, appreciated your thoughts, thanks! How about saying... your objective is to promote good will among ``humankind`` rather than ``mankind`` ? Pardon my picky attitude! :-)

mariam ispahani

I would take issue with the characterization in the article of all Pakistanis as hate-mongers. It is neither historically correct nor is there any empirical evidence of such broad over statements that every one hates every one in Pakistan.

I believe what you have in Pakistan is a clasic case of a breaking down society as described by Toynbee.There may be a loss of harmony in the different segments of society, a feeling of dis-satisfaction with the existing societal distribution of influence as well as leadership and a disenchantment with the ideas presented by the elite but it certainly doesnt mean there is hatred all around. On the contrary I have found Pakistanis to be generally to be loving, caring people. Such general characterizations dont go too far in promoting the goodwill in mankind.

Hatred:

Ms. CPA I read not only the article, but the replies also HAPPY!!!

I might be wrong cause I am commenting on `your` work but anyways here are my two cents.

The hatred that generated a war in Bosnia was a hatred developed from a great love gone terribly wrong. The hatred in Kosovo, however, germinated out of centuries of mutual suspicion and violence. Where Bosnian Serbs,

Muslims and Croats can still speak today of their former friends with nostalgia, the Serbs and Albanians of Kosovo never knew that experience. Their ``friendship`` was an artifice, the kind enforced by the doctrinal needs of Tito`s

uniquely Balkan communist regime.

As for Pakistan, I will not list ``Hate`` as a reason for various ethnic groups not getting along. There are no doubt differences, large and small but ``Hate`` I don`t think so, borderline ``Aversion`` maybe.

A Nawaz Sharif or a Slobodan Milovesic are nothing more then the reflection of their respective societies. Scary isn`t it?

So where do we start, start with the easiest investment, highest return, with lowest risk of loosing and there is only one corner of universe where we can be certain of reducing hatred in such a manner and that is ourselves.

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