Students rally to support NATO strikes

As the United States and NATO continue the airstrikes in Yugoslavia to end the genocide of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, University students are getting involved in the protest against ethnic cleansing.

Members of the Muslim Students Association rallied in the Diag yesterday, brandishing signs reading "Milosevic is a war criminal" and "Kosova (sic) is slipping through our fingers" and handed out pamphlets with information on how to contact politicians.

"We're trying to urge all University students to contact their senators" and United Nations representatives, said Medical second-year student Asif Harsolia.

Rally participants support the military airstrikes, Harsolia said, but they also want ground troops to be dispatched and hope for independence for Kosovo. Independence is a necessity because if Kosovo were its own country, its citizens wouldn't be oppressed, Harsolia said.

LSA sophomore Edisa Tokovic, who moved to Michigan from Serbia three years ago, said Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic has a huge amount of power over the surrounding states because all the military forces for Yugoslavia are concentrated in Belgrade.

Milosevic "wants power and control over the territories of Kosovo, which belongs to the Albanian people who live there," Tokovic said. "Basically he wants to clean his country of everyone else but Serbs.

"It's not about politics anymore. It's about ethnic cleansing and extermination," she added.

Tokovic said her family members, who still lives in Serbia, are afraid of Serbian rebels who want to kill more people because of the NATO bombings.

As a dictator, she said, Milosevic doesn't care about his people because he has said he is willing to sacrifice them.

"There are people who support him, but they are not happy that their country is being destroyed" for Milosevic's gains in power, Tokovic said, adding that just two days ago, he deployed 40,000 more troops to Kosovo for a "final ethnic cleansing."

The ethnic cleansing involves Serbians killing ethnic Albanians - the majority of whom are Muslim - or kicking them out of Yugoslavia "for no reason," said LSA first-year student Mohsen Nasir. "Something's not right" if people are only being killed because of race, he said, adding that both groups have lived in the same country for a long time.

"We're trying to keep another Bosnia from happening," Nasir said. "Is there a scale where so many people have to die before we do something?"

Harsolia said, "Milosevic's planned and systemized way to ethnically cleanse ... is analogous to Hitler's extermination of Jews. Milosevic is not a new phenomenon."

Milosevic wants to form a "Greater Serbia" in which he controls the surrounding states and wipes out anyone who is not Serbian, Harsolia said, which includes the Croats and the primarily Muslim ethnic Albanians.

Milosevic's act of war "wasn't sporadic" - his troops go into villages where they kill men, imprison women and even use children as shields for tanks, Harsolia explained.

Although he said he supports NATO's airstrikes, he said the slow response was not able to save the 2,000 people who died between February and March, nor the one-third of the ethnic population who are now refugees.

"I think it would be a very sad situation if it was no longer 'national interest' to stop the genocide," Harsolia said.

Tokovic said the rally supports the bombing, "but the whole idea is to stop the ethnic cleansing," which could be accomplished by arming the Albanians and sending in ground troops to protect Kosovo.

04-01-99