Section: PERSPECTIVE
Page: B5

Sunday, April 18, 1999

FINDING A PERSON-TO-PERSON PATH TO PEACE

 

 

HARRY ROSENFELD

 

The toasts and speeches that attended the recent reception of the Albany-Tula Alliance for two visiting Soviet cosmonauts framed the dilemma facing the American people and their government as the air war against Serbian brutality in Kosovo is pressed.

The event, a week ago Saturday at the Albany International Museum at the airport, was distinguished for more than the first-ever visit to Albany of cosmonauts Alexei Yeliseye and Evgenij Khrunov, a capstone for the Albany-Tula Alliance.

For seven years the alliance has fostered a many-tiered relationship between the American state capital and the Russian provincial capital, 120 miles south of Moscow, by establishing them as sister cities.

The festive evening also was noteworthy for thoughts that were left unspoken about a matter crucial to the future relationship of the United States and Russia.

No one on the roster of Americans participating in the speechmaking so much as alluded to the war in Yugoslavia. As considerate hosts, they undoubtedly avoided the subject on which Russians and Americans are profoundly divided. Similarly among the Russians, there was no direct word uttered on the fighting.

There was, however, the obligatory comment by one of the Russians about the overriding necessity of maintaining world peace collaboratively. The strong applause this most ordinary of comments elicited seemed to reflect that the audience clearly appreciated the poignancy of the real and present danger of not doing so.

Left hanging were the clashing understandings between most of the Americans and the Russians of what collaboration implied and what constituted peace.

While the Russian visitors refrained from speaking publicly about the NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, in private their anger was made known to certain people. They viewed the United States and its NATO allies as making a reckless imperialistic power-grab, inflicting suffering upon the Serbs, who don't deserve it.

Overwhelmingly, to most Americans, the NATO intervention is humanitarian, undertaken to halt the killings, rapes and atrocities visited by the Serbs upon the ethnic Albanians living in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. That viewpoint has to acknowledge that the intervention itself accelerated the brutalizations and destruction rather than ending them. But standing powerlessly by as Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic carried out his ethnic cleansing was not an acceptable alternative.

The clash of the Russian and American viewpoints about what is at stake in Kosovo plays out in a larger arena than what should or should not be done there.

In Russia, the American-led NATO action has given new life to long-embedded resentment of America. Once again, as during the decades of the Cold War, the United States increasingly is seen by Russians as an ambitious enemy. The expansion of NATO eastward to include the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland was deemed a threat. That perception was intensified by the feeling among Russians that the United States is out to humiliate their country, no longer the superpower it once was.

Much of the ground that has been gained in Russian-American relations since the Communists were overthrown and the Soviet Union fell apart stands at risk. Even in defeat, Communists retained a large chunk of power in Russia, controlling the national legislature. From that vantage, they are trying to impede Russia's establishment of democratic institutions and the concomitant liberalization of the economy.

Now the Communists have a potent new weapon in their fight, for Russians across the board are as supportive of their government's opposition to NATO's intervention as Americans are supportive of it.

Cosmic issues as vast as Russian-American relations appear beyond the capacity of ordinary citizens to influence. Where, then, does that leave the work of the Albany-Tula Alliance? Beginning in late 1991, the Alliance has fostered people-to-people exchanges that have brought many Russians to Albany to study and survey everything from health to economy to business practices. For their part, many Albanians have visited Tula to share their expertise and knowledge in different fields.

As a result, both sides of the equation have been provided with an insight into the other's rich culture. From this, each has come to see the other in personal and direct human terms and to appreciate their mutual and their distinct qualities.

It would be too much to expect that this continuing, direct contact can deflect affairs of state that have been rubbed raw. But they do remind us, in a time of enormous stress and division, that there are other dimensions in place in the country-to- country relationship.

The existence of the Albany-Tula Alliance not only keeps us in touch at a time of stress. It also points to its inherent potential as a way to build up Russian-American contacts, so that we may retain the chance to advance to a point of greater mutual understanding. Harry Rosenfeld is editor-at-large of the Times Union.