Bill Turns To Stone

Last winter thousands of ethnic Albanians braved low temperatures and a cold wind in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, to welcome former US president Bill Clinton as he attended the unveiling of an 11-foot statue of himself on a key boulevard that also bears his name.

Clinton is celebrated as a hero by Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority for launching NATO’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 that stopped the brutal Serb forces’ crackdown on independence-seeking ethnic Albanians. This is Clinton’s first visit to Kosovo since it declared independence from Serbia last year.

Many waved American, Albanian and Kosovo flags and chanted “USA!” as the former president climbed on top of a podium with his poster in the background that read ‘Kosovo honours a hero’. The statue stood on top of a white-tiled base in the tiny square surrounded by communist-era buildings.

Nations raise statues of great men who are sometimes later blamed for the destruction and plunder of the same lands; the disgusted people then happily spit or beat with shoes the images of the heroes of their past. In recent history, we have witnessed such delightful spectacles in Russia and Iraq.

To name boulevards after sinful Bill is one thing but to erect statues in his tarnished name is paying undeserved homage to Oval Office erections. There was one flaw with the piece of public art: White House intern Monica Lewinsky’s marble lips were not shown attached to a readily excitable part of old Bill’s anatomy.

Even if the sculptures were to be condemned as un-Islamic in Pakistan, we need statues of our semi literate semi great men in public squares because the public needs to vent out its anger on powerless stone demigods.