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02 April 2003: "Twin Towers and Blackbirds"
Browsing further through COINTELPRO Tool, I ran across a link to an almost two month-old column in the Independent. Written by Joan Smith, it is titled "It's about time the US got over 9/11"
The title—and, for that matter, most of the article—is inane drivel, as befits a columnist of the Indepedent. (I'm old enough to remember that paper had such promise when it was launched; where did it go wrong?) But hidden in the dross is a small nugget that is a valid, reasonable point.
On June 28th, 1389, a force of about 100,000 men under the Serbian Knez ("prince") Lazar met an Ottoman army under the command of Sultan Murad I at Kosovo Polje (the "Field of Blackbirds"), near present-day Pristina. Despite the murder of the Sultan by a Serbian noble named Miloš Obilić, who pretended to desert, but once introduced into the presence of the Sultan drew a hidden dagger and struck, command passed immediately to Murad's heir Bajazid ("the Thunderer") who completed the defeat of the Serb-led force.
Despite the fact that it took another sixty years for the Ottomans to establish their conquest of Serbia (and more than a hundred before they captured Belgrade), the Battle of Kosovo Polje is, in the words of Misha Glenny (in his book The Balkans, "presented as the end of the Serb medieval empire, its army vainly defending Christendom."
Kosovo Polje forms a cornerstone of the cult of victimhood underlying Serb nationalism. Every wrong ever done to the Serbs can be traced back to that day on the Field of Blackbirds; the Turk arrested the development of the Serbian culture ("We would have been even greater than the Italians, were it not for the Turks."), and the rest of Christendom abandoned them to their fate (the presence of Hungarian, Moldovian and Wallachian contingents in Lazar's army notwithstanding, nor the fact that seven years later on 1396, the Serbs fought on the Ottoman side against the Hungarians in the Battle of Nicopolis).
By the time of the resurgence of Serb nationalism after Tito's death, the cult of victimhood had metamorphosised into a cult of entitlement. Anything the Serbs did against "the Turk" (i.e. Bosnian muslims or Kosovar Albanians) was justified, because "the Turk" had robbed the Serbs of their glorious destiny; the West should shut up, because they had left the Serbs—sole defenders of Christendom—to their fate six centuries before. The ethnic cleansing, the concentration camps in the Bosnian Krajina, the rape camps in Foča, the mass murders following the fall of Srebrenica, all were justified because the Serbs had been victims, and the world owed them as result.
In certain quarters of American political life, the 9/11 attacks appear to have taken on a similar status; the United States was the victim, and anything the United States government does can be justified, or at least equivocated, with the invocation of 9/11. Of course, we won't be seeing US forces committing anything like the atrocities visited upon the Bosniaks and the Kosovars, but there is a mounting list of incidences which is, to say the least, disturbing. - Sloppiness in observing international law (or as Bush put it, "legalisms") regarding the detainees at Guantanamo Bay? Well, look at what they did to us on 9/11.
- Reports of "Stress and Duress" interrogation methods in Afghanistan (Washington Post of 26-Dec-2002)? Well, look at what they did to us on 9/11.
- "Extraordinary Renditions" of uncooperative captives to countries known to not be too fussy about using torture (see aforementioned WP article)? Well, look at what they did to us on 9/11.
"Stress and duress" isn't quite in violation of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, but it comes dangerously close. The "Extraordinary Renditions" policy most certainly violates the spirit of Article 3 of the Convention, which reads:1. No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.
2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights. Countries like Jordan and Morocco have been recipients of "Extraordinary Renditions," despite the fact that the US State Department's 2001 human rights report had some highly unflattering things to say about these countries' use of torture. But that was before 9/11, of course.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but the term "Extraordinary Rendition" seems to have been coined for the express purpose of ducking the letter of the Convention while trampling the spirit; for any MAD Magazine reader familiar with the Al Jaffee fold-ins on the inside back cover, try this one:Extraordinary Rendition Or to quote the Washington Post article I linked to:According to one official who has been directly involved in rendering captives into foreign hands, the understanding is, "We don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them." I'd say that's pretty clear; it's subcontracting out your human rights violations.
My wife Carolyn (at the time still my girlfriend) and I were still in the Netherlands on 9/11, and even though I knew someone who worked in Building 7 of the WTC (she got out physically unharmed), Carolyn was visibly more affected by the attacks than I was. I would like to think I understand that 9/11 inflicted a massive trauma on all Americans, and one that perhaps Europeans like me can't quite appreciate. For Europeans my age, terrorism was never far away, but it's never been on quite such a scale.
Yes, America has been wronged, and it is entitled to its shock, its grief, and the gamut of other emotions which an event like 9/11 causes. And yes, America is entitled to seek redress for the wrong that has been done to it. But America is not entitled to act like the rules and customs of civilised international behaviour no longer apply to it because it's been wronged. Because then, 9/11 risks becoming the American Kosovo Polje.
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