By Franz Schurmann

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Prediction for Tuesday, March 30th,1999

The world will know within the next seven days whether or not it will be setting off on a road leading to world peace or another leading to world war.

• Introduction:
  

  "The war in Kosovo --- it's a war in Europe, and maybe, something more." These were words spoken by Boris Yeltsin in a press conference. The journalists admonished him: "Boris Nikolayevich, stop speaking in half sentences, tell us what you mean." But he said nothing more.

  In the US the media ask different questions : "will American ground combat forces be sent in to fight?" "how can the ethnic cleansing be halted?" "Is Milosevic a Hitler who has to be destroyed?" But in the rest of the world the main question is: "Could this war spread beyond Kosovo, beyond Yugoslavia, maybe even beyond Europe?"

  Nobody is thinking about World War III breaking out in a few weeks. But a lot of people are again worried that Kosovo could be the first step in a longer journey leading to WW III. That the Russian politicians are aware of the power of the WW III specter is their repeated talk about re-deploying nuclear-tipped missiles to independent Belarus. Along with Clinton's Theater Missile Defense (TMD) project such a move would scuttle what's left of global nuclear disarmament.

  There is no consensus as to what WW III would look like. Some see it as smaller wars bunching up into bigger ones. Others see it as some kind of star wars. Others still see it as chaos spreading until it engulfs the globe.

  But the Armageddon-evoking image that most people think of when WW III is mentioned is the mushroom-shaped atomic cloud rising over Hiroshima. The city Hiroshima quickly revived. But the image is a reminder that it could easily have gone the other way --- Hiroshima the first of a series of dead cities all over the world.

  Nuclear weapons --- to be or not to be --- are still the key to world war or world peace.

• Prediction:
  The world will know within the next seven days whether or not it will be setting off on a road leading to world peace or another leading to world war.

  My rational mind says the odds are for peace. But I see a big headline in bold face type spread over the front page of the Moscow paper Izvestia: "Russian politicians whipped up by emotions." Then my mind tells me that maybe the more realistic odds are 50/50.

• Outcome:
  I shall report on the outcome in on May 4th, 1999. (Moved from April 6th.)

I believe three men now have the fate of the world in their minds and hands: Bill Clinton, Slobodan Milosevic and Boris Yeltsin.

If we were living in a thoroughly peace-bound world never could a few men make such awesome decisions as these three now. Governments may be good, bad or so-so. But whatever qualities they have they are run by lots of people who are not that different from ordinary humans.

But states --- and their leaders --- are another matter. They perform the usual functions of governments but also do more. A century ago the German political scientist Otto Hintze wrote that whenever governments get deeply involved in foreign affairs a mystique begins to envelop them. In my writings I say peoples and governments both live in the realm of the seen. But states exist in the realm of the unseen. (I have taken the seen-and-unseen notion from the three great God-religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.)

I do not regard people as capable of evil, though people can do horrifying things as they can do amazingly good things. States too can do good. And because they do it on a large scale many people can benefit from that. But they also can do evil and when they do so the scale can be enormous. Good means bringing about peace, harmony and symmetry in the world. Evil means only one thing: creating chaos. It's hard for sinful humans to create chaos. It's not that hard for sinful states.

The meaning of the mushroom cloud is chaos. So is the Serbian ethnic cleansing ordered by Milosevic. So is the NATO bombing ordered by Clinton. And so are Yeltsin's hints of even greater evil to come. It is this image of evil-in-chaos and chaos-in-evil that helps explain why the world survived the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962.

I was in Paris at the time and there were very long lines before the airline offices. Many French were buying tickets on TAP, the French airline to the South Pacific. They, like so many others all over the world, believed we were close to a Soviet-American nuclear war.

The crisis was averted because two leaders --- Kennedy and Khruschev --- realized how fine was the dividing line between good and evil. A few telephonic contacts between the two --- which were then quickly made into the first "hot line" --- sufficed to end the crisis. (Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963 and Khrushchev fell from power on October 16, 1964 not many hours after China detonated its first atomic device. Were both done away with as revenge for not having opted for chaos in October 1962?).

Russian premier Evgeny Primakov is now in Belgrade. The scene is being set for a Serbian-American-Russian face-off. Serb forces are killing more. Nato is bombing more. More talk in Russia about sending in Russian military "volunteers" to help the Serbs. What's really spreading is chaos and its partner evil. There's not much time left. We're at the crossroads.