The Right Side

by Gene Shelburne

As I write these words, NATO has been bombing Yugoslavia for over a month, and two streams of e-mail messages provide me up-close reports on the war.

From Belgrade came the first desperate posts, right after the first night or two of falling bombs. A missionary in the Serbian capital, supported there in part by funds from American Christians, confesses his dismay that the people who sent him to Serbia with the gospel are now trying to kill him and his neighbors.

“How can this be?” he cries out. “Why are you causing a people who have loved Americans to hate them?” His messages provide a tally of the mounting damage and the nightly terror. After each Lord’s day he tells which members of his church have lost homes or businesses to the not-always-smart bombs.

It is obvious to most of us who read these anguished pleas that the writer sees the situation only through the eyes of Serbian controlled media. He knows nothing of the savage abuse his nation’s troops are inflicting on ethnic Albanians a few miles south in Kosovo.

Just days after that first outcry from the preacher in Belgrade, I began receiving equally distressed e-mail posts from a missionary in Albania. In them he catalogues incredible tales of rape and murder and torture told by refugees driven into his country out of Kosovo.

Through this minister’s eyes we see the other side of the equation. War is so much simpler when you can only see one side.

For those of us who are Christians the conflict in Yugoslavia poses Gordian issues. When we see “Christian” Serbia brutalizing predominantly Muslim Kosovans, we wonder how “we” got on the wrong side. Since when do Christians rape and rob and butcher helpless neighbors? How do we tell the world that we’re not them?

In Albania, many of the Muslim refugees who have suffered such hideous abuse by “Christians” are being fed and housed and doctored by compassionate Christians. They’ve got to be as confused as we are.

Over half a century ago millions of Jews were slaughtered by Hitler and “Christian” Germany. Eventually Christians united to end Nazi tyranny, but in some eyes Christians will always get credit for the Holocaust.

Whether you’re Christian or not, which side of the mess in Yugoslavia would you like credit for?