Intervention in Kosovo

* In “A Shaken Alliance Reassesses Some of Its Objectives” (April 25), Tyler Marshall indicates that NATO has gotten itself into a mess in the Balkans and is looking to Russia as the key to a diplomatic solution. Why not a cease-fire until this is explored?

SOL LONDE

Northridge

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Thank you for your powerful picture and articles about families brutally driven from the pastoral Kosovo village of Belanica (April 25). It is painful to see the personal face of genocide. Yet I do want to know when villages are being destroyed, even though I am not sure what to do about it.

There were no cameras to shock people of conscience in 1838 when American soldiers brutally tore Cherokee families from their farms and villages in the southeast and marched them through the winter snows to Oklahoma. So no one tried to stop that genocide. Perhaps the difficulty about seeing genocide up close is that we feel we must do something about it.

RONALD SODERQUIST

Thousand Oaks

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Now that the Clinton-NATO partnership has gotten us into this Yugoslavia quagmire, we find that current popular opinion is that we should send in ground troops to try and clean up the whole mess, which is now worse than when we started the bombing. If that happens we will be in that area for decades, either waging war or supporting and rebuilding what we have destroyed! Not a pretty picture we leave for our future taxpaying American young, who will bear the brunt (in loss of life and accumulation of debt) because of the lack of planning and decision-making by this administration.

MARY J. MONK

San Clemente

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“Kosovo Bombing Is ‘Just,’ Mahony Says” (April 17) quotes Cardinal Roger Mahony’s statement regarding the Kosovo conflict, “There just seemed to be no other way to halt that continuing assault upon innocent people and that does nudge the conflict into the just war category.”

The teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ regarding the kingdom of God exclude all ideas and practice of wars among nations. The Serbian Orthodox Church continues to pray “that God will show mercy toward us, to protect us from hatred and all evil deeds, and give us his unselfish love, by which we will be known as his disciples.” If we seek opportunities precisely to not “return evil for evil” and not “hatred for hatred,” then we become agents for reconciliation and bring about peaceful solutions.

THE RT. REV. BISHOP JOVAN

Serbian Orthodox Bishop of

Western America, Alhambra