Note to Readers: Recently we were privileged to have HRH Crown Prince Alexander and HRH Crown Princess Katherine of Serbia in our home in Evergreen, Colorado. They have become such dear friends of our family over the years:
“Dear Jim and Anna Marie: Our visit to your home will remain in our memories and when Jim dedicated Psalm 91st it brought tears to my eyes. I have been reading over and over again since that day! I was so moved! You have such big hearts and your faith to God can be seen in your eyes. Your books must continue! You are an example in life and God has Blessed you with a son who is following on your footsteps. You were born to save the world and you started and now it is continuing very successfully by Douglas. I understand Doug’s devotion to his mission to support hospitals and doctors and save as many lives as possible.
Thanks to Project C.U.R.E. and their containers we will significantly help the healthcare system in Serbia, to the benefit of both patients and medical professionals. Project C.U.R.E. has brought to Serbia life saving equipment and supplies to our hospitals and Doctor Jackson has made numerous trips to Serbia supporting our hospitals that are desperate for help. . .”
For the next few blog installments, I want to share the actual daily entries of my Travel Journals from one of my trips to Belgrade, Yugoslavia (Serbia). This trip took place right in the heat of Serbia trying to eradicate the terrible communist regime of Slobodan Milosevic. I will also be introducing another friend of mine, Jim Peters, throughout these next blogs. (JWJ)
Belgrade, Yugoslavia: Sunday July 16, 2000: Somewhere in my travels, I stumbled across an interesting saying: “Do not keep away from the measure which has no limit, or from the task which has no end.”
I don’t believe Project C.U.R.E. has ever shied away from challenges or assignments just because the assignments seemed difficult or because we didn’t possess all the answers before we started. Most organizations wouldn’t have tried to tackle the precarious assignment to deliver medical aid to North Korea a full ten years before it was popular to even think about going there. But the investment has paid great dividends.
Most organizations wouldn’t have trekked the hill country of Colombia, South America or taken medical supplies and doctors to Bolivia. Those countries are fraught with dangers from clandestine warlords and drug cartels. But the disadvantaged people there needed Project C.U.R.E.’s help. Bloodletting battles between the Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi didn’t dissuade Project C.U.R.E. from going there to deliver desperately needed help.
Whether it has been Pakistan, India, Zambia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Albania, Kosovo, Cuba, Nigeria, or any other of the world’s flash points of political incorrectness, Project C.U.R.E. has tried to weigh in on the side of taking help and hope to needy people in those areas. It always seems like desperate situations produce desperate need. But today I rejoice in knowing that with God’s help and direction, thousands of lives have been saved in Iraq as a result of Project C.U.R.E.’s willingness to be vulnerable and get personally involved in delivering medical supplies to meet that country’s need. Likewise, only heaven will reveal how many lives have been changed and even saved in northern China, Bolivia, Tanzania, and Senegal, West Africa, where teams of Project C.U.R.E. doctors as well as medical supplies have been sent in to help.
God seems to continually encourage us not to worry if those we help are Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists or just rotten, mean sinners. At Project C.U.R.E., we have tried to understand that God’s love extends to every womb-child he ever designed to be conceived, regardless of how their heads have gotten screwed up during their lives. Our piece of the puzzle is to make ourselves available so that God’s love can be made manifest through us in the lives of the needy, no matter where they are living.
I watched with interest as the conflict in the Balkans played out during the 1990s and into the early part of the new century. In my opinion, the Balkans has historically been synonymous with “trouble.” World wars have been ignited in that tinderbox, affecting millions of lives elsewhere. The folks in that part of the world just never seem to get it together. And during my lifetime, I watched Marshal Tito, the hedonist, Communist power-monger, fearlessly fan the flames of ethnic dissension within his own domain and then throw his efforts into helping organize a group of renegade leaders like Muammar Gadhafi, Kim Il-Sung, and others into the organization now known as the “nonaligned Communist countries.” Today no one even takes the time to pass by Tito’s burial plot outside Belgrade at the “flower farm.”
When the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina erupted in the early 1990s, our American newspapers and television reporters explained to us that just as republics like Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan had declared their independence from the defunct Soviet Union, so Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and finally Kosovo were bravely and heroically breaking away from Yugoslavia in their quest for rightful independence. The Clinton administration then explained to us that extremist Serbian nationalists were opposing the efforts of the freedom fighters with ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Hardly anyone in American households understood what was going on in Yugoslavia. But when we saw pictures on TV of burning houses and farms and streams of pitiful refugees hunkered down in farm wagons pulled by horses or antique tractors on their way to refugee camps with no water, food, or shelter, and with freezing weather setting in, we were moved to do something!
Project C.U.R.E. sent a container load of winter coats to Bosnia at the outset of winter in 1991. Later we sent hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of medical aid to Macedonia, Albania, and Kosovo, where the refugee situation worsened by the day. I personally had the privilege of being invited to the palace of Albania’s president to talk with him for an hour and a half about the needs of Albania and the people of the surrounding areas.
All we were told in Washington was that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was struggling for its existence, and the Serbs, who were fully responsible for the conflict, were going to have to be taught a lesson. Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, essentially declared that if the Serbs were the cause of the breakdown, the United States was determined to move forward with the NATO decision to carry out air strikes.
The ethnic Albanians signed the NATO proposal, since it basically gave them pretty much what they wanted. The Serbs continued to reject the ethnic Albanians’ idea that Kosovo could declare independence from Yugoslavia when such a large portion of the Kosovo republic consisted of Serbs who wanted to remain united with Serbia and Montenegro in the Yugoslavian Federation.
Yugoslavia most adamantly opposed this article of the proposal:
NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, maneuver, billet, and utilization of any areas or facilities as required for support, training, and operations.
When the Yugoslavian Federation refused to inscribe their signatures on the proposed accord, Secretary of State Albright and NATO made good on their threat of air strikes. US aircraft began bombing Serbia on March 24, 1999, and continued through June 10, 1999. I have heard that during those seventy-eight days of continual air strikes over the Serb republic of Yugoslavia, 1,100 aircraft dropped more than 25,500 tons of explosives on Serbian territory over the course of 25,200 sorties or missions.
The total force of the destructive explosives was more than ten times greater than the force of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Many innocent civilians were killed, as well as military personnel, as a consequence of the bombings, tens of thousands of people were injured, and billions of dollars’ worth of property was destroyed. The estimated cost of destroyed factories, businesses, and manufacturing plants totaled over $100 billion in just seventy-eight days of air strikes. Highways, all communications installations, railways, airports, and bus and railway stations were destroyed, as well as seventy federal bridges. Never had there been such collateral damage inflicted in such a short time without war ever being declared on a sovereign nation or the US Congress even approving of the action. It was strictly a unilateral decision by the Clinton administration.
At home our TVs and newspapers assured us that the NATO action was for moral purposes, not based on narrow national interests. The New York Times published an op-ed that declared, “This was the first military conflict since the end of the Cold War fought primarily for humanitarian purposes.”
Mort Zuckerman, the chief editor of U.S. News and World Report, said, “We fought not for territory, but for values and moral principles.” Even President Clinton went on television and explained how great a victory we had just achieved against a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing.
In March of 1999, the United States closed its embassy in Belgrade and withdrew all diplomatic support personnel. Travel restrictions and warnings were issued to the public. Within the year, the International War Crimes Tribunal charged Slobodan Milošević, along with thirty other Serbian military leaders, with crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva convention, and violations of the laws or customs of war.
A huge wave of anti-NATO and especially anti-American feeling swept over Yugoslavia and neighboring countries. People on the streets of Belgrade were asking whether any sovereign state would be safe from an American political administration attacking and killing innocent civilians and targeting nonmilitary installations and hospitals without ever first declaring war or ever receiving congressional approval. The Americans arrogantly carried out the bombing, but they couldn’t fix what they destroyed or replace the limbs or human lives lost or restore the quality of life of those innocent bystanders in the city of Belgrade alone. And they did it with such smug hypocrisy and claims of morality.
That’s the setting in which Project C.U.R.E. has been asked to perform needs assessments. I’ve been asked to travel directly into the smoking ruins of Belgrade and evaluate the possibility of supplying medical goods to hospitals and clinics that have, because of the extent of the conflict, depleted their resources.
Project C.U.R.E. has never claimed to be a disaster-relief agency; we usually leave that up to other organizations. But we have become known all over the world as being extremely effective in coming alongside medical institutions and partnering with them during their time of need. However, in the face of extreme risk, when is it wise and when is it foolish to walk up to a smoking gun? And where does our earlier admonition fit in -- “Do not keep away from the measure which has no limit, or from the task which has no end”?
Next Week: The Jim Peters Connection