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Tuesday, March 30, 1999 By Tony Norman
On the first day of Holy Week, Serb soldiers danced around the burning carcass of one of NATO's bat gods. No longer invisible in the dawn's early light, the American F-117 Nighthawk burned like a Muslim cottage, its high-tech diodes and semiconductors fusing like overcooked pasta under the Yugoslavian sky.
Perhaps equipment failure downed the F-117, not the dreaded surface-to-air missile of Serb lore. While divvying up credit for the disaster, scribes and priests on both sides of the conflict can be counted on to spin whatever mythology fits their national interests best.
Still, the wind wasted no time in carrying the scent of $45 million worth of Western "invulnerability" to homes wired to the front lines.
The jubilation of a people under constant NATO bombardment deeply perplexed those too heavily indebted to the Enlightenment to understand medieval passions.
Back in their respective capitals, Western kings consulted their grand viziers, stunned by the hubris of the Serbs as they danced around the carcass of the downed bat god. The oracles never predicted this. NATO's bombing was supposed to be a limited action designed to force the cagey Serb warlord Slobodan Milosevic back to the bargaining table for peace talks on Kosovo.
But Milosevic would rather shoot down bat gods than negotiate with those he considers the moral equivalent of the Ottoman Turks who ruled Serbia for five centuries. He's determined not to go down in history as the warlord who "lost" Kosovo to the Muslims again.
Like the legendary Prince Lazar who led the Serbs into the disastrous battle of Kosovo in 1389, Milosevic's messianic complex leaves very little room for loving his neighbors or his enemies. In "The Mountain Wreath," a 19th century poetic embellishment of Serb heroism in the wars against the Muslims, we find these lines: "Whoever is a Serb of Serbian blood, whoever shares with me this heritage, and he comes not to fight at Kosovo, may he never have the progeny his heart desires ... let him rust away like dripping iron, until his name be extinguished."
NATO's warlords don't understand the depths of this kind of nationalism if they think a bombing campaign can wipe out hatred cultivated like a keepsake over the centuries. It took Milosevic, who fancies himself a second Prince Lazar, to reinitiate the rituals of blood that once united Serbs to each other and their ancestral land. Ironically, the blood feuds had been kept in check by communism for 40 years. When communism collapsed in the early '90s, the old hatreds began stirring again.
At a rock concert in Belgrade two days ago, thousands of people who opposed Milosevic's regime two years ago rallied behind their hated warlord in his battle against the "Christ-killing" Muslims and their protectors in NATO.
In this sequel to the Crusades, the script is terrifyingly familiar: God have mercy on everyone who isn't for you, your tribe or your god. What an edifying lesson for Holy Week.
Tony Norman's e-mail: tnorman@post-gazette.com
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