HUMANITY IS NOBLE, BUT WE ARE STILL WORKING ON PEOPLE:

Europe's messy backyard (Emanuele Ottolenghi, Jerusalem Post, 08/05/04)

The script was familiar. Chased by a mob, two boys (rumors said it was three) had jumped into the river of an ethnically mixed town. One drowned. The incident triggered a week of ethnic riots.

Scores were killed. Places of worship and houses were burned. Panicked civilians, running for their lives, abandoned their property to looters and found temporary refuge in UN compounds, schools and hospitals, guarded by those same peacekeepers who had failed to protect their villages for want of an order to use lethal force against rioters. Few of them are likely to return home.

As in the 1990s, a few more thousand members of an ethnic minority became refugees overnight under the watchful eye of powerless international forces. As the familiar script dictates, European voices of reason explained the incident as the work of extremists, offered more economic aid as a solution and wisely suggested it would take time to heal the wounds of that foreign land.

The place was Kosovo. The setting was the Balkans. But these events did not happen a decade ago, just weeks ago, on March 16. And this time there was a new twist to the script.

The ethnic communities involved were, proverbially, Serb Orthodox and Muslims. But this time it was not Serbs chasing Bosnian or Albanian Muslims, burning their mosques, and looting their homes. It was mostly Muslims chasing Serbs. It was churches, some of them Orthodox monasteries from the 14th century, that were going up in smoke.

Someone, inadvertently, had changed the script, reversing roles and trading places. The "bad guys" had become victims; the "good guys," ruthless perpetrators.

This was unsettling: Europe's public had been told all along that Serbs were bad, Muslims were good: Serbs were engaged in ethnic cleansing, Albanians were victims of ethnic cleansing. Who authorized the swap? [...]

The March riots in Kosovo look like a bad movie sequel that nobody wants to go see. These are sometimes the ways of the world. Too complicated, too unpredictable to stick to the script, too brutally untamed not to heed the call of nature, too frightening for multicultural simpletons to be manageable under the banner of the "oh, if we could all get along" ideology.

Wishful thinking is neither a political argument nor a recipe for state-building. Europeans are busy lecturing America on its failure to grasp the intractable realities of Iraq's ethnic and religious mosaic. But Iraq is far and away; Kosovo is in Europe. They should look at their backyard instead, and see the mess they got themselves into.

What horror and havoc have been inflicted on the world by Western progressives taking up causes in the name human rights, that noxious concept that undergirds modern totalitarian impulses.