Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [201]
12. Just a few years ago, the Serbian slavophile, Vasily Belov, captured the sense of historical resentment perfectly: “The so-called UN sanctions in Yugoslavia—these are sanctions of the Vatican and a Germany united by Gorbachev.” Serge Schmemann, “From Russia to Serbia,” The New York Times, January 31, 1993, p. E 18.
Popular Serb actor Nikolai Burlyaev wrote not too long ago in the Belgrade daily Den: “Today Serbia is alone. The whole world seems to have ganged up on it. The current Russian Government has betrayed it. It betrayed a people of the same blood and faith as the Orthodox Russian nation, it betrayed its own—Slavs, so similar to Russians …” Schmemann, ibid. Russia did finally give up on its Serbian friends after the Bosnian Serb legislature rejected a major power compromise that would have left the Serbs with much of the territory it conquered in Bosnia. Yeltsin had his own sentiments about the treason of the Serbs against its sponsors in Moscow.
13. Misha Glenny, “Ukraine’s Great Divide,” The New York Times, Op-Ed, July 14, 1994, p. A 23.
14. Russia has offered to cancel over $2.5 billion in debt. Meanwhile, the West voted to give $4 billion in aid (including $200 million to shut down and clean up Chernobyl). Unfortunately for Kravchuk, the vote came the day before he was ousted from office, and it is his successor Kuchman who will reap the political rewards of the prize.
15. Cited by Misha Glenny, ibid.
16. Steve Erlanger, “Ukraine Questions Price Tag of Independence,” The New York Times, September 8, 1993, p. A 8.
17. In another of those special advertising supplements designed to seduce Western capitalists untutored in the history of Middle Europe to sink millions of dollars into the region; see “Romania: Rebuilding the Nation,” 1994.
18. The accord was engineered in the spring of 1992 by a team from Princeton’s Project on Ethnic Relations, following decades of repression under Communist dictator Ceausescu. Hungary reciprocates the bloody sentiments, still calling the 1920 Treaty of Trianon that tore the Transylvanian Carpathians with its 600,000 Hungarians from it “bloody Trianon” and toying with scenarios that return the region to its sovereignty. Caryl Churchill’s documentary play Mad Forest captures many of the tensions in Romania just before the fall of Ceausescu, but it mostly overlooks ethnic rivalry and antigypsy bigotry.
19. Toby F. Sonneman, “Old Hatreds and the New Europe: Roma after the Revolutions,” Tikkun, Vol. 7, No. I, January 1992, pp. 49–52.
20. Gypsies arrived from India in the thirteenth century dispersing in two diaspora, the first in the Balkans, Moldavia, and Wallachia (Romania today) where from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century they were enslaved; the other dispersed as wanderers throughout Europe. Their Indian-based caste system kept them wholly insulated from their host countries, which in Germany, Finland, and Great Britain actually made it a capital offense to be born a gypsy. Nazi pogroms destroyed 70 to 80 percent of all gypsies, somewhere between a half million and a million (there was no gypsy census against which to measure the genocide).
21. Antonescu was a syphilitic cavalry officer who ousted despotic King Carol II in 1940 dubbing himself “conducator,” and modeling himself after “Der Führer.” Antonescu was seen as a national savior and some associate his name with that of Iliescu’s party, the National Salvation Front.
22. For details see Robert D. Kaplan, “Bloody Romania,” The New Republic, July 30 and August 6, 1990, p. 12, and Sonneman, “Old Hatreds.”
23. Kaplan, “Bloody Romania.” Kaplan describes his own journey through Romania this way: “I encountered a surrealistic hell of rowdy alcoholism, with gangs of factory laborers living in dormitories away from their families and bereft of all pride, drinking medicinal alcohol and watching kung fu