Verses for the Left Hand

I

II

III

• Report from the Yugoslav Sociological Association,
  Saturday, 29 May 1999 20:36:44
1. IV
2. We were quicksilver
3. sliding on the blue
4. water of thought,
5. unmindful, almost, that
6. on the gleaming wings
7. of the death machine
8. hung the terrible paradox
9. of peace.
• Poem by United States Secretary of Defense, William S. Cohen,
  written about flying in an F-15 aircraft
1. V
2. It was a spectacle at once pathetic and horrifying: Hundreds of thousands – perhaps a half-million or more – terrified civilians driven from a land their people had lived in for centuries. Those not fortunate enough to flee fell prey to the depredations of merciless paramilitary death squads, who committed hideous acts of plunder, rape, and mass murder. Thousands of civilians perished, and the human tidal wave generated by this triumph of “ethnic cleansing” was described by some observers as the largest human population displacement Europe had seen since World War II.
3. Are these snapshots of Kosovo, April 1999? No – these are scenes from Krajina, August 1995. The victims were not ethnic Albanians driven from Kosovo by the security forces of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, but rather ethnic Serbs driven from Croatia by troops under the command of Croatian dictator Franjo Tudjman.
4. As Croat forces began their attack, U.S. aircraft under NATO command destroyed Serbian radar and anti-aircraft defences in the region. American EA-6B electronic warfare aircraft patrolled the skies in support of the unfolding offensive, jamming communications between Serb units. Croatia admitted to suffering only 118 dead or wounded, as compared to an estimated 14,000 civilian casualties among the Serbs. An AP dispatch filed during the offensive reported that Croat forces shelled and strafed columns of Serb refugees.
5. Canadian General Alain Forand, who was assigned to UN “peacekeeping” duty in Krajina during Operation Storm, has testified: “There is no doubt in my mind that the Croats knew they were shelling civilian targets” in the city of Knin, which was where the Krajina Serb parliament was located. Colonel Andrew Leslie, another Canadian “peacekeeper,” estimated that of the more than 3,000 shells fired at the city, no more than 250 hit military targets; accordingly, he concluded, “the fire was deliberately directed against civilian buildings.” Leslie has also described seeing bodies of the dead at Knin Hospital “stacked in the corridors … in piles.”
• William Norman Grigg, writing in  The New American
1. VI
2. Some of the targets that were hit last night here around 1:40 in the morning, most of which I saw from my window. It's quite easy to count the explosions. They're loud and heavy. And in the mornings I simply go out and look to see what is left. Those that were hit last night included a graveyard, a children's basketball court outside an apartment complex, and the main bus station.
3. The cemetery is one that was hit. It's the second time it's been hit with large craters where there used to be graves.  Those two detonations, the first one on April 7^th and this one in the early hours this morning, are maybe 100 yards at most from fuel storage tanks. The children's basketball court I am still trying to figure out. There is no sign of tire marks or track marks from armoured vehicles or anything to suggest that there was a military target in the sort of something that might have been hidden in among apartment buildings.
4. The very centre of the city is devastated. The government buildings have been hit. The main special police or ministry of interior police headquarters has been hit. A residential area, the oldest street, in fact, in Pristina which was ethically mixed. In years past it had Jewish residents next to Serbian residents, next to ethnic Albanians, next to ethnic Turks. That took a direct hit. The post office was hit.
5. I join pretty regularly every day like anyone else food lineups. And I can hear Serbs talking on one side and ethnic Albanians talking on another. I from time to time have lunch or chat with more liberal Serbs in the city and they tell me about friends who they deliver food to each day who are ethnic Albanians.
• Extracts from a radio interview with Paul Watson,
  a Canadian journalist with the Los Angeles Times,
  reporting from  Pristina, Kosovo
1. VII
2. BUCHAREST, May 27, 1999 -- (Reuters) NATO's two-month-old bombing campaign against Yugoslavia has caused acid rains in Romania and its authorities are concerned over the possible long-term impact of pollution on the Danube and the Black Sea.
3. Acid rains in May in areas on the Yugoslav border were “the direct consequence of air pollution caused by fires following bombings” against targets in Yugoslavia, the Environment Ministry said in a report.  Environment Minister Romica Tomescu said the authorities were trying to beat cash shortages and lack of equipment in order to monitor what the conflict was doing to the environment.
4. “It will take at least two years to size up the full impact, especially on the Danube and the Black Sea fauna and flora. We fear there may be long-term effects,” Tomescu told a news conference on Wednesday.  The ministry's report says water and air pollution is generally still within permissible levels and the impact on the environment was not major so far, but that ecological damage on the flora and fauna of the Danube and Black Sea could not be ruled out.
5. The strikes had caused acid rains and increased water and air pollution levels, especially in southwest areas on the Danube and land border with Yugoslavia.
6. Local officials report higher concentrations of heavy metals in the Danube–which forms Romania's southern border with Yugoslavia and Bulgaria over 670 miles (1,075 kilometers), then forks into a delta before flowing into the Black Sea.
7. A ministry study of Danube water pollution showed copper, lead, chromium and cadmium concentrations rose to double the admissible levels during three consecutive days in April.
8. The study also showed zinc concentrations between 20 and 55 times permissible levels during that interval.
9. VIII
10. THE fishermen of Chioggia, a port on an island at the southern end of the Venetian lagoon, are furious. At a meeting on May 15, they decided they would stop paying their taxes because they have been forced to stop work and therefore have no income.
11. They say it is all Nato's fault: when its aircraft return from their missions over Serbia, they drop their unused bombs into the Adriatic–where they find their way into the nets of local fishermen.  On May 10, one such bomb exploded, injuring three sailors on the Profeta, one of them seriously.
12. The bombs fished out of the sea with shellfish are almost all of the same type: small yellow cylinders measuring 20cm by 6cm, hundreds of which are released by the notorious cluster bombs just before they hit the ground.
• Report in  Le Monde

IX

(“the voice of one crying in the wilderness”, Matthew 3:3)

These words of the Holy Gospel, gentlemen, were uttered by the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, when He reproached the world and compared it with foolish children. But these words also reflect the present situation in which I am found, as the Bishop of Raska and Prizren and the representative of the Serbian Orthodox Church together with Mr. Momcilo Trajkovic (the leader of the Serbian Democratic Movement in Kosovo). For years we have been travelling around the world bearing witness on the growing difficulties in Kosovo and Metohija province, its origins and immediate causes. We made constructive proposals and explained the ways how these problems could be resolved and the impending tragic catastrophe prevented in due time.

I would not like to repeat what I have already said before and which is well known to many in the world. I would not even take this opportunity to reiterate my appeal to the mighty of this world to stop their horrendous air raids. I would only leave them alone before their own conscience and the just judgement of the Lord, no matter whether they believe in Him or not. We remain firm in our faith and hope in Gods mercy and justice. We also believe that God will show way out of this impasse, not only for our country and our people but also for the whole world and all the nations in the world, because there is, alas, too much evil and injustice everywhere.

XI

Discounting the “several dozen” children, with their whole lives in front of them, bombed to death on a train at Grdelica gorge on the 12^th April the list of child deaths grows daily.

XII

On April 6, 1941, German General Alexander Leer commanded the Luftwaffe attack upon  Belgrade. Flying in relays from airfields in Austria and Romania, 150 bombers and dive-bombers protected by a heavy fighter escort participated in the attack. The initial raid was carried out at fifteen-minute intervals in three distinct waves, each lasting for approximately twenty minutes. Thus, the city was subjected to a rain of bombs for almost one and a half hours.

In 1945, General Leer was sentenced to death by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in 1945-6 and hanged after his defence of “obeying superior orders” was dismissed. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the head of the American prosecution staff, asserted “that certain acts . . . are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”

On May 19, 1999, more than 100 civilians, most of them ethnic Albanians, were killed on the road to Prizren in the village of Korisa by NATO cluster bombs. Major-General Walter Jertz of the Luftwaffe, reported that the day's operations “went very well. It was another very effective day of operations.” There had been 679 Nato missions over Yugoslavia in 24 hours, with attacks on oil refineries, electricity stations, and the Batajnica airfield.