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Volume 115, Number 163 - Tuesday, April 6, 1999
Easter lessons in Kosovo, Tibet and Middletown
by John Friedlander
I've used an Easter thread to stitch together a story about the Holocaust, Yugoslavia, China, Tibet and the North End of Middletown. It's not a story of happy bunnies in love, nor is there any chocolate involved, but perhaps the holiday will feel a bit more immediate by the end of this column.
The clash in Kosovo is goring me on the horns of a brutish dilemma: should we stay out of foreign countries' internal conflicts, or should we act to protect the lives of defenseless victims wherever they may be? We are now steering a middle course that achieves neither of these aims.
We are apparently unwilling to stand completely aside while Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic inflicts terror upon ethnic Albanians fleeing Kosovo. We are also unwilling to commit the ground troops that are the only tool most witnesses believe would be effective against Milosevic's barbarous onslaught. We are left attempting to damage an aggressor's forces from a distance, keeping our troops off the dangerous ground of the region, and failing to protect those we are hoping to assist.
We appear to be having our cake and eating it too -- but it is a bitter confection indeed.
We can now claim that we are acting to defend a moral proscription against genocide, at the same time safeguarding the lives of most of our troops. Yet the departure of the international monitoring forces in advance of NATO's bombardment has given Milosevic all the room he needs to savagely scour ethnic Albanians from the Kosovo region. Our rain of bombs is doing virtually nothing to stop the tragedy we had hoped to prevent.
As a nation, we claim to understand the lessons of the Holocaust -- to never again tolerate the ignorant hatred that breeds monstrous crimes against humanity. We also have learned the hard way not to expect a warm welcome when we attempt to enforce our moral code in a foreign place where a different code applies. With these lessons both firmly in mind, we are waging a war against an in-progress atrocity in Kosovo.
But to avoid the kind of loss the victims of the war are suffering, we are fighting in a way that will not achieve our goal. We will not resurrect liberty for Albanians in Kosovo this way. We will not redeem our mantle as righteous defenders of freedom by taking safely distant potshots at an out of control bully who is using Hitlerian tactics against defenseless civilians. We have assumed considerable moral responsibility for the lives and hopes of the refugees we wish to save, and we've given Milosevic a virtually unrestricted opportunity to get rid of them.
In Yugoslavia, the Serbs under Milosevic seem intent on cleansing the Kosovo province of the Albanian culture they object to. Three thousand miles or so further east, China seems dead-set on erasing the culture and religion of Tibet, the country it invaded in 1950. In both cases, politics' "gain" is culture's loss.
Here at home, the Chinese suppression of Tibetan culture has produced a fortunate result.
Bhumba La owns and operates Little Tibet, a five-month old store in the Kabatznick Building on the corner of Main Street and Rapallo Avenue. He sells handmade Tibetan and Nepalese rugs, jewelry, clothing and crafts in the space formerly occupied by Books and Beyond and the It's Only Natural food cooperative. Born in Tibet 28 years ago, Bhumba travels frequently to visit family and buy merchandise in his homeland, which is now in its 49th year of enduring suffocating Chinese rule.
America got its face ground in the mud of Viet Nam partly because we understood very little of the culture of Southeast Asia. Tibet seems destined to be ground to Himalayan dust because its native peaceful Buddhism seems ill-equipped to deal with the ruthless, crushing power of the Chinese military and political machines.
Here in Middletown, we are blessed to have Bhumba's peaceful and positive energy gracing the challenging business district of the North End. His high quality merchandise is beautiful, and not easily available anywhere else in the state.
But Bhumba's existence here must sometimes seem to be no more secure than it might be across the globe. The Kabatznick Building is in foreclosure. The owner, who lives in Trumbull and only seems to appear in Middletown when the rent is due, apparently isn't making his payments. Neither is he maintaining the building, nor addressing tenant problems. While America is unwilling to get mired in overseas complications on behalf of defenseless civilians, this guy appears unwilling to fulfill his responsibilities to his tenants only an hour's drive from home.
Bhumba would like to open a Tibetan restaurant in the space available next to his shop. He also has dreams of a Tibetan cultural study center and comfortable residential space filling the renovated and responsibly-maintained building. I'd love to see another nation represented in Middletown's admirably diverse Restaurant Row, and I'd love to see this building improved the way Bhumba dreams of doing it.
But Bhumba will need help to make this happen. Four months away from achieving U.S. citizenship, and hoping to finance a challenging building in a transitional neighborhood, he isn't likely to be a bank's first choice for funding, even if his work ethic and business creativity are second to none.
Resurrecting the North End is going to come one building at a time. Demolishing the boarded-up property on Ferry Street will get rid of a dangerous eyesore, but it won't be a strong positive move for the area. Assembling a team of local investors to help Bhumba improve the Kabatznick building would be a big step toward visible progress in the neighborhood.
Little Tibet on Main Street in Middletown seems several worlds away from the anguish of the pathetic flight of Kosovar Albanians into the unsheltered hilly border fields of Macedonia. But each situation shares common threads:
- A seemingly futile resistance against an overpowering force.
- The need to make a new home in sometimes unwelcoming fields.
- A search for the resurrection of the customs and values we hold most dear.
- The question of how to forgive those who may never understand what terrible mistakes they've made.
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