Balkans

Western political leaders who seem to be opting for a political solution to the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina by dividing it among contending Croats, Serbs and Muslims shouldn't be accused of cowardice. They are simply yielding to Realpolitik. More than a century ago, Germany's "Iron Chancellor," Otto von Bismarck, a leader who was quite willing to wage war for political benefit, frequently warned Austria-Hungary against pressing its territorial claims in the region and studiously avoided German entanglement in the region.

The regime, not the dictator, created the nightmare in Serbia. Therefore, it is not enough to arrest only Slobodan Milosevic and to allow the corrupt regime's ringleaders, who for 10 years created the horror in Serbia and throughout the Balkans, to remain at large. The willpower of the Serbian people will be an important factor in creating peace in the region only if justice can be served. The real goal, therefore, is not to expel Milosevic but to judge both him and his ringleaders in such a way as to help bring democracy to Serbia and to establish Serbs' relations with the rest of the world.

Balkan soldiers slaughter civilians "so their dirty race may not spring up again. " Ethnic groups, enraged "by old hatreds and resentments," take up arms with the goal of "complete extermination of an alien population. " "This," the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded about wars in the Balkans, "is why they produce so great a loss in men and end in the annihilation of the population and the ruin of whole regions. " The date of the report: 1913. Eight decades later, little seems to have changed in the Balkans from the last time Serbs fought Albanians, when a shocked United States looked with disbelief at the Balkan people's capacity to brutalize each other, in the name of ancestry, ethnicity and religion.

Some say NATO will now be stuck in the Balkans for decades. I say fine. NATO has finally found its new mission. What use are NATO troops sitting around in Germany? Does anyone think the broken Russian army, whose 200 soldiers are begging the British for water at the Pristina airport, is still a threat to Western Europe? Puhleeze! U.S. and European forces in Kosovo will now be doing something useful. Their presence, along with European development aid, will help reintegrate the last, lost Balkan frontiers of the continent into its wealthier, democratic mainstream.

It will prove a lot harder for President-elect Bill Clinton to bring U.S. troops home from Somalia than it was for George Bush to send them there. But that doesn't mean the lame-duck president lauched Operation Restore Hope just to subvert his successor's pledge to give domestic needs priority over foreign problems. If Bush had wanted to do that, he could have left Clinton with a stickier military commitment in the Balkans. Even now, there are some critics of the purely humanitarian operation in Somalia who complain that it would have made more sense strategically to send a military rescue mission to beleaguered Bosnia.

A single corpse disfigures a deceptively tranquil countryside. Children with ravaged eyes stare out from behind barbed wire. Mothers and daughters reflect on the trauma of gang rape. Skeletal men, their ribs visible, lie on prison beds waiting to die. Through a pane of cracked glass, like a spider's web, we glimpse the ruins of Sarajevo. These are images of ethnic warfare and its aftermath in the Balkans, captured by a distinguished international group of photojournalists.

Bill Clinton knows what he wants to do on domestic policy. On foreign policy he does not. He knows only that he wants to do good. It is a dangerous impulse. It is particularly dangerous in the Balkans, a swamp of historical grievances, a place that produces more history than it can consume. Bill Clinton came upon the Balkans and decided that he wished to do better than Cyrus Vance and David Owen who, after five months of negotiations, finally produced a peace plan. On Feb. 1, Vance and Owen brought their plan to the United Nations, hoping the Great Powers would endorse and impose it. Clinton did not bite.

The 20th century is ending as it began, with war in the Balkans. Spurred by nationalism, a vitriolic force that sometimes hibernates but never dissipates, the animosities of the region have survived Turkish rule, Nazi invasion and Soviet control. The destructive passions flourished in two world wars, thrived with the end of the Cold War, survived peacemaking efforts of the League of Nations and the United Nations, and they will no doubt survive NATO bombing. Unreasoning hatred and undying vengeance have been responsible for some of the most savage acts people have committed against each other.

There has been a great deal of attention devoted to the crimes against women in the Balkans in the past few years. But let's take a look at what has happened to the men. While women and children have suffered and died in the ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia, most of the bodies are male. It is the men who are missing from the Bosnian villages. A few years ago, an Amnesty International report on Serb atrocities stressed that Muslim men were so fearful that many "slept away from their homes in places such as orchards.

After taking the military lead in NATO's 11-week air war over Kosovo, American officials are vowing that the United States will not shoulder the burden of rebuilding Yugoslavia and the region. "I would expect that most of the money would come through Europe because most of the costs of this campaign, the air campaign, have been borne by the United States," President Clinton said Thursday. "I don't quarrel with that; we had the capacity, and we did what we should have done. " "But I don't want us to get into a haggling situation either," he said.

Mark Pinson, 72, a graduate of Central High School who taught at Harvard University and other institutions before retiring in Philadelphia in the 1990s, died of complications of diabetes at Atria Center City, a facility for seniors. Mr. Pinson grew up in the city's Feltonville section. He was awarded a four-year Mayor's Scholarship to attend the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating, Mr. Pinson did graduate studies at Princeton University and Harvard University, where he earned a doctorate in Balkan history in 1970.

JEROME J. SHESTACK was a prominent Philadelphia lawyer, a former president of the American Bar Association, a mover and shaker in law, politics and culture. But he might like to be remembered chiefly for his record on human rights. Shestack, who died yesterday at age 86, was appalled by the violence that people heap upon each other in the world, sometimes seeing it with his own eyes, and ached to do something about it. As chairman of the International League for Human Rights and the U.S. representative on the United Nations Human Rights Council, Shestack often gave voice to his feelings.

SOFIA, Bulgaria - Gays and lesbians marched in several Eastern European capitals Saturday protected by hundreds of riot police after some extremist groups urged members to stop the gay-pride rallies. Nearly 1,000 people joined the fourth Gay Pride rally in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, organizers said. Twice as many paraded through the Croatian capital of Zagreb under rainbow arches of balloons and banners for that city's 10th Gay Pride March. Hungarian gay-rights activists also took to the streets in Budapest, flanked by police in full riot gear.

By Ken Follett Dutton. 1,008 pp. $36 Reviewed by Desmond Ryan Two decades ago, Ken Follett made an abrupt transition from thrillers to sprawling historical epics with Pillars of the Earth , which owed much of its popularity to its absorbing subject - the building of a medieval cathedral - and its setting in the relatively unmined 12th century. Pillars of the Earth , which flamboyantly revived the old-fashioned miniseries when it was adapted for the small screen by Showtime last summer, and its 14th-century follow-up, World Without End , commanded a large and loyal following and expanded Follett's audience.

By Alan Furst Random House. 288 pp. $26 Reviewed by Tim Rutten The English-language espionage novel has long been a favorite of first-rate writers who wanted to engage serious questions in an entertaining way. Graham Greene, John le Carre, and Eric Ambler, for example, made masterful use of the moral ambiguities arising out of the spy's dark struggle. American writer Alan Furst has spent the last two decades breathing a fresh vitality and relevance into the espionage novel by fusing it with impeccable historical fiction.

"Acoustic, Romantic music, chanson kind of stuff," is how Zach Condon describes what Beirut does. It's as good as any description for a young band with an oddly sprawling pedigree. Beirut's debut, 2006's Gulag Orkestar, demonstrated Condon's love of Balkan parade-band music in acoustic songs built around trumpet and accordion - not what one might expect from a New Mexican teenager who records nearly everything himself. The album became an indie-rock blog sensation, especially because of "Postcards From Italy," a charming, catchy bit of crooning that suggested that Condon was also a fan of the Magnetic Fields.

For years, Saudi Arabia flatly denied it had provided money and logistical support for Islamist militant groups that attacked Western targets. But that assertion is disputed by a former al-Qaeda commander who testified in a United Nations war-crimes trial that his unit was funded by the Saudi High Commission for Relief of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ali Ahmed Ali Hamad, the former al-Qaeda fighter, gave the same account to The Inquirer in an interview in this struggling city in the central Balkans.

The members of Slavic Soul Party! are not Slavs - they bear surnames such as Carlson and Caswell, Toriyama and Noriega. They have deep roots in New York's downtown scene, where jazz and ethnic music have commingled for years. Their rhythmic and improvising chops are well-developed, which is a requirement when playing riotous Balkan music in an all-acoustic lineup of horns, drums and accordion. Clad in jeans and matching black T-shirts, the band launched a CD-release tour at International House on Wednesday night.

Balkan Beat Box is a group that sounds like its name, although the Balkan component is essentially lowercase - it's more about fragmented ethnicity than the ethnicity itself. Led by the Israeli-born New Yorkers Tamir Muskat (drums) and Ori Kaplan (alto sax), the band is touring through August in support of its second JDub release, Nu Med. At World Cafe Live on Sunday night, they meshed pan-Mediterranean influences with ultramodern dance beats and displayed flawless instincts for keeping a crowd on its feet.