Serbs Storm U.S. Embassy in Belgrade
Serbs are a heroic nation proud of their glorious exploits. We have seen the latest such achievement in the arson attack on the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, along with similar violence against embassies representing other countries that recognized the independence of Kosovo.
Embassies symbolize international mutual respect and civility. But Serbs, who revel in their bravery when it comes to murdering children and old people – 1,200 children were deliberately killed by Serb snipers in the siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1995 – interpret diplomacy as aggression and attempted genocide.
In Belgrade, the stars and stripes has been torn down. What will now be said by the isolationists, Albanophobes, and sellouts to Serbian and Russian influence, inside the Beltway, who spent the last few weeks agitating against Kosovo independence? Will they be happy to see our flag burned? Our flag was torched because we were slow to assist the Kosovar Albanians in really securing their freedom against Serbian fascism, and, being generous, kept giving the Serbs more chances to change their ways. But Serbs do not change.
Of course, there are plenty of people inside America – supporters of the Ron Paul element in national politics – who will try to justify Serb violence against our embassy and flag, as they tried to deny the reality of Serbian mass murder at Srebrenica in Bosnia-Hercegovina, and at Racak in Kosovo.
In Washington and New York, we also have to bear with the “experts” at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), who boasted about their supposed victory in Belgrade in 2000, when the frowning fascist Slobodan Milosevic was replaced by the grinning fascist Vojislav Kostunica, now Serbian prime minister. The NED still brags about their “success” in backing the phony Otpor reform movement in Serbia. Some admirers of Otpor have the nerve to suggest a similar tactic be applied to support change in Iran. Thanks for that – by all means, let’s see Ahmadinejad replaced by a pseudo-alternative. The same NED hacks tell us that “dialogue” is possible with peaceful Islamists. Maybe it’s time for the people at NED to get real, honest work.
But I digress. Serbs are indomitable fighters. They were tough and courageous when they sold out the Jews, making Belgrade the first officially “judenrein” city in Europe. They were hardy and principled when their bogus patriots, the Mihailovic Chetniks of World War II, collaborated with the Italian and German occupiers. They claimed the Chetnik terrorists fought the Nazis and were betrayed when the Allies supported Tito’s Partisans. Serbs did not join the Partisans until it was clear the Nazis were losing. The Chetniks were too busy cutting the throats of elderly Bosnian Muslim women. The Partisans – mainly Slovenes, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians – fought for our side.
The Serb lobby in the U.S. told us for decades how they saved U.S. Army Air Force pilots whose planes were shot down during World War II. They demanded special recognition, monuments, and medals, as if all the heroism was on the side of Serbian troglodytes and our pilots were mere technicians.
Serbs hate Muslims because Muslims wash before praying. As a Serbian Orthodox “theologian” put it, Serbs are unafraid of dirt, because, according to them, their souls are pure. Serbian “saint” Nikolaj Velimirovic Zicka was locked up in Dachau for three months in 1944. He blamed his imprisonment, and the war, on… the Jews! And the phony humanitarian Artemije Radosavljevic, a Kosovo Serb cleric who has toured the U.S. portraying Albanians as savages, was among the biggest promoters of the sainthood of this Jew-baiting Serb Christian “thinker.”
Serbs told the world for two centuries that they had defended the freedom of Europe against the Ottomans, when in reality they sold out to the Ottomans for the privilege of collecting taxes (the much-criticized Islamic cizye) from Christians under Islamic rule, and turned against the Ottomans only when Turkish power diminished and the Serbs feared the loss their status as tax farmers.
And lest we be fooled by Serbian propaganda, there would have been no Yugoslav wars in the 1990s but for the unwillingness of Serbia to surrender the tax and financial control it exercised, from Belgrade, over the rest of the peoples in former Yugoslavia.
That’s Serbian heroism. A lot like “Serbian truth” – a term used by Serbs themselves to refer to lying.
Serbian apologists in America like Lawrence Eagleburger appeared surprised by the embassy attacks. But everybody who has been in Kosovo, Bosnia-Hercegovina, and Croatia in the past six months knew the Serbs would attempt to answer the independence declaration of the Kosovars with “Serbian statesmanship” – rioting, arson, desecration of our flag, attacks on the UN border posts in Kosovo.
The U.S. must be prepared for worse adventurism from Serbia. Airhead commentators on the news channels also acted shocked by an outcome they should have known was coming. Some of them recycled Serbian myths about Kosovo being the alleged “heartland” of their so-called “culture.” In fact, the Serbian heartland was in Raska, north of Kosovo. And Serbian “culture” and “civilization” have been displayed to the world once again, as they were when the Serbs in 1991 bombed and shelled the historic Croatian city of Dubrovnik – a city that protected Jews during World War II; when the Serbs raped 60,000 women and girls in Bosnia-Hercegovina, and when the Serbs tried to expel two million Albanians from their homes in Kosovo.
The whole world knows who the aggressors were in ex-Yugoslavia. But who stands behind crimes like the attack on our embassy? Such an action could not have taken place without the complicity of Kostunica, whose photograph was displayed waving a Kalashnikov when he ran for the Serbian presidency in 2000.
And behind the Belgrade political mafia stands the proud “former” KGB agent Vladimir Putin, who is using Kosovo to revive Russian meddling in Europe and restart the cold war. Putin is willing to provoke a repetition of that grand chapter in Serbian history, the Sarajevo assassination of 1914, which touched off the first world war.
America’s embassy in Belgrade is burning. Our flag has been torn down and set afire by the fearless Serbs. Americans should mute the repulsive gabble of the TV talking heads and just watch the spectacle, which speaks for itself. At least this is real history, not Serbian disinformation.
Let Serbs dance in the ashes of their undeserved reputation for honor and glory. They will be the black hole of Europe for a hundred years. Albanians kiss our flag and express their gratitude and love for us. Let us not forget who have been our honorable and truthful friends.
Stephen Schwartz is author of %%AMAZON=1898855560 Kosovo: Background to a War%%, with a preface by Christopher Hitchens, published in 2000.
Dear Mr. Stephen (or should I say Suleiman) Schwartz….You background is on the political left, but now you describe youself as a neoconservative…on top of that you are a Muslim …my first impression is that you are not being very objective considering that there are always two sides of the coin.
I’m surprised that Pajamas Media features this hateful screed so prominently.
The US never ever should have gotten involved in the Balkans.
The Bush Administration should not be involved in establishing little jihad bases in Europe.
The huge chip on Mr Schwartz’s shoulder tends to make me even more sympathetic with the Serbs.
We never should have bombed them.
please at the very least provide citations for your article, which in its present form represents an emotional twist to the truth doing quite an injustice not only to the people of the Balkans, but also the very history itself. May I ask where you obtained your education if any?
Sir need I remind you before defining Serbia as fascist, that this country fought against Hitler’s NAZIs while all of the surrounding Balkan countries joined him.
This is the most incredibly honest essay I’ve ever read as it pertains to the Serbs.
Stephen: You also should have made mention of how the Serbs historical fondness for self-aggrandizing delusions etc led them to grotesquely propagandize about Dubrovnik’s historical ties with Serbia (at the turn of the 20th century–when the yoke of the Ottomans started to recede.)
I’m just disgusted by it all. And I can certainly speak for the majority of Europeans as well.
VM,
You are correct to bring that up. Mr Schwartz omits the Muslim Nazi SS division known as the Handzar Division (the 13th SS Division – all Muslim).
Another name to Google is Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini.
This article is so biased that any decent editor would have it thrown out for being so biased that it qualifies as propaganda.
An “outstanding” piece of vicious and hateful propaganda. A “New” history, we used to say in the good old communist Poland: one never knows what is going to happen yesterday. Goebbels and Stalin would love this despicable piece of rubbish. Congratulation to both: the “author” and the publisher.
The USA helps amputate a large section of Serbian territory in violation of international law after sham negotiations.
The USA kills thousands of Serbs during its 1999 bombing campaign because the serbs were too tough at fighting terrorism.
The USA assists Croatia in Operation Storm ethnically cleansing the Serb population.
The USA spends most of the decade winking at the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Kosovo.
A couple of hundred Serbs get angry and attack the US Embassy.
Fascist America-hating Nazi Serbs! Who the hell do they think they are attacking poor innocent America?
Listen dum dum, let me reeducate your audience. Tito’s partisans were the enemy, Draza’s Chetniks were USA’s allies. Draza not Tito rescued 500 American airmen and returned them home. Those charges that Draza helped out Hitler were later proven to be false and the US govt. apologized for letting Draza’s execution happen. As an American Serb, there is written evidence from Tito himself and his henchmen from 1954 that he had plannned to spread communism in America. Yet Communism is DEAD, so is Tito and Draza’s Democratic dream is one that lives here in the USA and is taking shape back in Serbia. Get real it’s documented that Partisans were and always have been the enemy.
The first commentator is right: this is an astonishingly hateful piece. I would like every pro-Western/Israel Serb to read this pack of lies to show them how deluded they were in thinking that if they kissed up to the Americans, EU. and Israel their concerns would be taken under consideration. A lesson learned.
When I was deployed to Kosovo in 1999 our original mission was to protect the Albanians from the Serbs. Within a month it was protecting Serbs from the Albanians. The Albanians regularly executed Serbs, mostly with a single shot to the base of the skull. They regularly fired mortars into Serbian towns. Killed Serbian community leaders who I know were working for peace in their areas. They also had a fondness for blowing up churches.
Please explain that in your view of “Serbs bad, Albanians good.” The story of Kosovo is a lot more complex then your article leads one to believe.
Have to say it doesn’t surprise me. Never mind what the above Slavophiles say – on purely practical grounds we should have stayed out of this. Not one penny of aid, not one drop of blood from America. Serbs and Kosovars are grown-ups – let them solve their own problems.
It seems you celebrate that the serbs will be the black hole of europe for the future.
Starting from this point , someone can only understand that you make just propaganda and/or you just read the american side of the story.
What a pity.
And for sure you need to read some history of the past. Serbs I believe have paid enough of their crimes before 10-15 years .
But nobody can put their whole history in the grave.
Biggest problem for the whole world is that unfortunately the big guys in US, share similar ideas like yours for whole nations and they punish them accordingly.
bravo. shame on you.
It seems you celebrate that the serbs will be the black hole of europe for the future.
Starting from this point , someone can only understand that you make just propaganda and/or you just read the american side of the story.
What a pity.
And for sure you need to read some history of the past. Serbs I believe have paid enough of their crimes before 10-15 years .
But nobody can put their whole history in the grave.
Biggest problem for the whole world is that unfortunately the big guys in US, share similar ideas like yours for whole nations and they punish them accordingly.
bravo. shame on you.
This shows that Balkans are the same. Albanians, serbs and croats the same sh.. Look at serbs now burning US flags like palestinians in middle east (they claim to be Christians right). Two world wars were initiated in Balkans. I lived there 25 years. Don’t be foolish to find the good and the bad in this mess. They are all the same. Unbelivers (no matter what they say). There are no real Christians, muslims etc in Balkans. They are all liars. They kill their neigbours without any problem. The rest is just propaganda.
Nothing but bunch of lies in this text. To all visitors: Go read news on some other website. This one is crap.
This is what people should be doing to every U.S. embassy (read: CIA nest) in every capital in the world.
Burn baby burn! Disco inferno!
Burn baby burn! Burn that mother down!
copy/paste “Balkans expert Stephen Schwartz”
Bwahahaha. I didn’t laugh this much, well i don’t know, maybe weeks ago. So much BS on one place, i mean, great imagination. You could probably be a good screenplay writer.
RE: TOM
No, actually only one world war started on Balkans. Second started when Gemany atacked Poland in 1939. so….
This so called Balkan expert is just another Serb hater in a row…nothing new…and tom…we are really sorry for burning down those flags,wer just litle pissed cuz u ( also christian state ) give independence to a new muslim country that will sooner or later,send more suicide bombers to NY and US…u have no right to call us faithless while ur supporting something like this…dumbass…if u want to argue with me about something u got my mail…id really like to see the opinion of moronic Westerners who forgot their brothers in arms from both world wars…
What about the 100,000 Serbs who peacefully marched in support of their homeland, which has just been stolen from them? They are the real heroes!
Don’t forget about the thousands of Serbs murdered by the Croatian and Albanian fascists during WWII. According the the Wikipedia 32,000 Jews, 40,000 Roma and maybe 700,000 Serbs were murdered by the Ustashi. The Nazis created “Greater Albania” with it’s own SS unit called “Skanderbeg”. They did a very good job of cleansing Kosovo of all non-Albanians. But all of this pretty common knowledge.
I’m not supporting what Milosovic did, by the way. He was a monster who led his people down the wrong path.
How is it this Schwartz prostitute is inflicted on us continually, whether here, TechCentralStation, or the Weekly Standard, among others?
The idea that a nation which has had little to live on but its history for almost the entirety of its existence ought to peacably and resignedly swallow the loss of its Jerusalem – and that loss being to the historical enemy, who almost within living memory had been the historical oppressor – is so much bull**** I almost wish an angry mob of Serbs on Schwartz – who is, again, a prostitute. The notion that such a response is evidence of some sort of derangement is not reasonable, it is Decadence. One doesn’t have to be a hardcore Serb slavophile to sympathize with the Serbs here. I’d be pissed off too.
“Here, Mexicans: here, you take Philadelphia, because you are now the majority by a wide margin – it’s only democratic, and therefore only fair. All the rest of you – you are obviously fascist bigots!”
Please, stop publishing this buffoon.
there you go,feel free to send me all kinds of pro western crap fichony@hotmail.com ill be glad to answer u…
QUOTE:But I digress. Serbs are indomitable fighters. They were tough and courageous when they sold out the Jews, making Belgrade the first officially “judenrein” city in Europe. They were hardy and principled when their bogus patriots, the Mihailovic Chetniks of World War II, collaborated with the Italian and German occupiers. They claimed the Chetnik terrorists fought the Nazis and were betrayed when the Allies supported Tito’s Partisans. Serbs did not join the Partisans until it was clear the Nazis were losing. The Chetniks were too busy cutting the throats of elderly Bosnian Muslim women. The Partisans – mainly Slovenes, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians – fought for our side.
well mr. Schwartz, you got it all wrong considering serbian role during the WWII. First, miss. Condoleezza Rice said yeastrday that Serbs were american alies in WWI and WW2. I think she knows it better than you. second, general Dragoljub Mihajlovic and his chetnics were decorated by american president Trooman in 1948 for saving more than 500 american pilots during the WW2.. third, percentage of serbs in partisan units were 95% in the winter of 1943. And your loving croats and muslims took part in 260 000 ustasha (croatian nazzi units) who pratcited genocide on serbian civilian population in so called INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA as well as fighting red army around Stalingrad. Your loving Albanians took part in SS unit Skender Beg practicing killing Serbs in Kosovo and metohija. Muslims too had their own SS (nazzi) Handzar (the sword) division, fighting partisan, Serbian chetniks and killing Serbian civililan population in bosnia. So you should check once more your history books. You missed something..
I don’t understand what the big deal is. I just talked to Archduke Ferdinand and he said there is no reason to worry about violent outbursts in Belgrade.
Nothing to worry about.
“‘Heroic’ Serbs”
What is so heroic about getting DRUNK, breaking into building on foreign land and setting fires?
oh, and not to mention someone dying in the process.
This article and those who wrote it are a joke.
I’ve really enjoyed reading Pajamas Media for several months now. Its refreshing to get a different viewpoint on current events from people who are 1)not MSM, and 2) often having some personal familiarity with the issue.
This article though, regardless of the veracity of its claims was very difficult for me to read because of its vitriol. This does not represent what Pajamas Media stands for, and reads more like something you might find on Daily Kos or some place like that.
I am saddened by your article, Mr Schwartz. I was raised by my parents, who legally emigrated to the US from Serbia in the 1950s, that Americans are our friends. Your article sounds mean spirited with intentions to hurt Serbian people. I don’t intend to ever come back to this website or read your articles.
I agree with most of the comments on this one-sided piece of vitriol. It’s certainly hard to tell the good guys from the bad in this mess, but a little research shows that during the Bosnia war the muslim gangsters running the government, led by Alija Izetbegovic, conned the world into believing they were peaceful souls while they were simultaneously inviting every islamic terrorist organization on the planet to set up shop while gangs set out to murder anyone who didn’t go along with the program. They also permitted atrocities like Srebrenica to occur (read “Unholy Terror” by John Schindler) because slaughtered muslims had propoganda value. Now Bosnia, offically an islamic state, is a “blackhole” of crime, corruption, arms trafficing, money laundering, and Arab-Wahabbist infiltration with cells feverishly preparing for the next wave of jihad. With a newly minted islamic state next door, Bosnians must be pleased with this development. Together, they can garner even more sympathy and money from a befuddled West to use against us and spread the chaos they so love. God help us.
Here’s a quote I found about Stephen Schwartz on http://www.antiwar.com. Sounds like he’s a looney bird without a life (now I really am going to go back to my life):
From the May 6, 1987 story in the San Francisco Examiner:
“When ‘New Age Rightist’ Stephen Schwartz discovered graffiti calling him ‘the philosophical whore of North Beach,’ the former Trotskyite turned red with rage. He uncapped his felt-tipped pen and was printing a reply to the scurrilous scribblings when he was busted by Mayor Feinstein’s anti-graffiti police squad on a charge of malicious mischief, defacing the wall of a Vallejo Street construction site.
“Schwartz…has demanded a trial to exonerate his exercise of free speech.
“‘I was just going to answer that I was not the philosophical whore of North Beach,’ said Schwartz, 37.”
The attack on the American embassy was obviously a mistake. The Serbs must have used outdated maps in planning their protest.
Wow, thank you so much Mr. Schwartz for that hateful screed! I feel so much more informed now than I did a few blissful moments before reading an emotional, and badly-written diatribe tarring an entire ethnic group with the same brush. Shame on you! It’s bad enough that it’s unreasonable and factually inaccurate, but worse that you don’t even have a sense of style.
I’m not sure of Michael Totten’s motives for linking this from Instapundit, but I know that next time I see your name, I won’t exactly have high expectations of the content. Please, for your own dignity, and once you’ve come down from your righteous indignation against Serbs, delete this post, and hope that only a few people have seen this offensive, and ridiculous piece of vile verbiage.
Uhh, Timmy….that was Sarajevo (as in islamic Bosnia), not Belgrade. Idiot.
I hold no affection for the Serbs, but it was foolish of the USA to recognize another Moslem state. Give them five years and they’ll be calling us the Great Satan and plotting jihad like all the rest. Gratitude toward the infidel is against the Mohammedan religion, and so we shouldn’t expect anything but a stab in the back from Kosovars.
I have to say that this article is a typical example of western bias towards the serbian people. This whole article is an insult to serbian culture, heritage and its people. The wording of the author clearly state that he hates the serbian nation and supports the american propaganda into manipulating the whole world into hating the serbian people. What the author stated of serbs killing childern and old people is completely incorrect. What actually happened is that serbs were slaughtered in places like Jasenovac(im pretty sure that the author hasnt even heard of this place)and in places all ardoung ex-yugoslavia for beeing serbian. Again the author displays american bias towards the serbian nation. Mr.Schwartz you should be ashamed for revealing your hate on the serbian people
I hate to say it, being the uninformed, isolationist crude American that I am, but people with a whole lot of weird vowels in their names should realize nobody cares. Nobody cares what happened to your granddaddy back in the old country. Nobody cares anymore what weird foreign policy canards were thrown out by the Clintons to take the Lewinsky stuff off the front pages, etc. Those convoluted, weird rationales used by folks in the Balkans to justify their hatreds and killings are just unconceivable to us.
This article is, in a word, crap. Where did PJM find Abu-Steve, anyway?
Listen, I’m happy for the Albanian Kosovars and angry with the Serbian reaction. But this article is nothing more than ethnic hatred.
Dear Pajamas Media
I have to say that Mr.Stephen Schwartz is laying and twisting a history. He commits a hate crime against Serbian nation saying:
“But I digress. Serbs are indomitable fighters. They were tough and courageous when they sold out the Jews, making Belgrade the first officially “judenrein” city in Europe.”
His twist of history is obvious. Just take a look:
http://www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu/country/serbia/serbia1.htm
JEWISH HERITAGE EUROPE
An Online Resource Centre
SERBIA 1
Jewish Heritage in Serbia – General
[...]
When the new nation of Yugoslavia was created following the First World War, Serbian Jews found themselves in a federation of previously separate states, each with its own Jewish populations, organisations and customs. With their mixed heritage and prosperous communities, Serbian Jews took a leadership role in the state. Destruction of the Jews of this twenty-three year-old nation commenced with the German invasion and occupation of Serbia in April 1941. This period of persecution and murder had three phases: from late April to August 1941, when the German administration began a legal campaign restricting Jews’ freedoms; from August to December 1941, when the uprising of the Serbs against the Germans led to brutal crackdowns against all Serbs, including Jews, and many were imprisoned or murdered; and from December 1941 to May 1942, when the Germans decided to concentrate surviving Jews (between 7,500 and 8,000 people) in the Sajmište concentration camp. Here, from March to May of 1942, all Jewish inmates were killed, mostly using poison gas. In August, a German report stated that ‘the problem of Jews and Gypsies has been solved; Serbia is the only country where this problem no longer exists’. Belgrade was the first city in Europe officially declared Judenrein – that is, officially ‘free’ of Jews. A number of Yugoslav Jews who managed to evade the round-ups and camps subsequently distinguished themselves in the partisan struggle against the Nazis.
I thought the bosnian muslins faugth with Hitler!!!The hantchar division commanded by mufti Hussein…but we know that certain americans are just serbiaphobes.
Did you payed attention to the way the author of this piece of propaganda described the serbs? Are we talking about people or monsters? Imagine if I start saying the americans this, the americans that!!!
Please, This site is great but is so “touchy” when it envolves serbia. No one likes to see their embassies burned but what about your country bombed and destroyed by american bombs?
This is nothing but but a HATE filled rant written by someone with an axe to grind.
Fact 1. the Americans forcibly annexed Kosovo from Serbia which had been part of Serbia for thousands of years.
How would you feel if your own country was carved up in such a way
and this little gem:
“Serbs hate Muslims because Muslims wash before praying.”
No how about they hate them because the Muslims would steal their children to be in incorporate into the Janised army or just sold as slaves for profit
who the hell is the Stephen Schwartz and shame on PM for letting such rubbish slip through
Apparently the Serbs are no better than the Iranians when it comes to respecting foreign embassies. Sad.
Your story is quite onesided and would have appreciated if you had this story co-authored with a Christian Orthodox Serb. The Christian orthodox serbians, their genocide during second world war, by pro-Nazi Croats and muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo, was not acknowledged by US. Serbian churches and monestaries have been destroyed under NATO,US, UN watch , by muslim Kosovo. The recognition of Kosovo, give legitimacy on the racist attack and discrimination of Christian Serbs. A documentary titled: “Days made of Fear”‘ shows frightening Serbian civilians and religious struggling to survive in Kosovo.
Schwartz hits the nail on the head writing about Serbian mythology, “heroism,” and their history of lying. Leading greater-Serbian ideologue Dobrica Cosic once wrote that lying “saved the Serbs.” Every nation in the Balkans has been victimized to some extent in history, but none has lied to the world about victimization, war crimes, and “heroism,” while simultaneously perpetrating some of the worst crimes ever recorded in human history. Most Serbs will, for example, at any given moment, recite the script of mass-exterminations committed by Croatian ustashe against Serbs in WW2. They will go on and on about inflated numbers that have, incidentally, already been provided on this forum. Every reliable and credible source will tell you that at most, 50,000-100,000 Serbs were slaughtered by the Croatian ustashe. From the US Holocaust Museum, to influential Jewish sources in Zagreb, Croatia. Does that phase the Serbs? Nuh-uh. They keep going and going, lying to the world about an astounding 700,000- 1,000,000 Serbs murdered during WW2. All the while they will attempt to conceal that, just like Scwartz mentioned, Belgrade had its very own NAZI-quisling regime; that it exterminated Jews (more Jews were killed in Serbia than Croatia, by the way), that Serbian royalist-cetniks committed heinous crimes against Croats and Bosnian muslims alike. The Serbs never answered for any of their WW2 crimes, while, quite interestingly, Croatian “guilt” was systematically perpetuated throughout the world during the reign of communist butcher, Josip Broz Tito. All supported and sponspored by Belgrade’s Yugoslav communist regime. When Schwartz writes that the Serbs joined Tito’s partisans at the end of the war, that is absolutely true. His recruits were freshly-shaved Serbian cetniks. They, by the way, committed the brunt of crimes against Croatian ustashe, regular army and civilians that had surrendered to the British in ’45. More crimes that Serbs took part in and yet never took responsibility for. Remember, the Serbian wars of aggression in the 90s were launched based on the myth of Jasenovac and mythical Serbian “suffering.” The reality is, they dominated Yugoslavia and they wanted to dominate forever. When communism fell, and freedom swept across Eastern Europe, everyone wanted to peacefully go their separate ways. Who prevented all that? You guessed it. THE SERBS. With control of the Yugoslav National Army, they committed wars of aggressions against Slovenia, Croatia and BiH, and made damn sure that everyone’s freedom would be paid for in blood.
Stephen Schwartz is a Sufi Muslim. Anytime you read anything at all by him, remember that.
I get a feeling that there are a lot of Belgrade IPs above me. Glad their internet cafes are all up and running.
This is such pathetic bullshit. Read here for some background and truth: http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/006.shtml
This is such pathetic bullshit. Read here for background and truth:
http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/006.shtml
The Serbs have shown themselves to be our enemies. We should treat them as such.
Uhh, Annony… Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by Bosnian Serbs in the pay of Belgrade, as most of the world’s schoolchildren know. “Islamic Bosnia” had nothing to do with it. Calling people “idiots” because they happen to know more than you do is neither civilised nor intelligent.
As to the article: it is certainly vitriolic, and rather one-sided on some of the historical detail. On the other hand, at least it explodes some of the myths which, judging by the outraged reactions in the commentaries, are still considered absolute truth by many people. I don’t know why that should be – is it in the nature of humans to become so fond of pieces of “knowledge” they pick up somewhere along the way that the very idea they might be complete rubbish is offensive? Beats me. The notion that Serbs were the only people in the former Yugoslavia who stood up to Hitler, while everyone else supposedly joined him, is a particularly insidious piece of trash – there wasn’t even a single partisan on Serbian soil from late 1941 until the Red Army’s advance into Serbia in 1944. I know the history and politics of the Balkans are complicated, and you don’t have to know any of this stuff – but please don’t pretend you do. Propaganda about something that happened in 1943 can result in innocent people getting killed in 2008, and already resulted in innocent people getting killed in 1991-1995.
Yugoslovia fell apart due to state sponsored terrorism from the US. It is seen as a vital importance to the US’s foreign policy to establish a puppet state and permanent military bases in Southeast Europe. It is also seen as very important to de-stabilize the region by Washington to prevent Russia and Serbia from ever having a strong relationship that can be beneficial to Russia having an influence in the region. And vice versa goes for Russia.
You also have to realize that although there were problems arising in the 80′s over this, they were exacerbated by people in power here, and by in the west. The Balkans are the pawns in the world chess board, they continue to be to this day.
Saying anything anyone here has said about the Bosnian, Serbian, Albanian, Kosovan, Croatian people is unjust and unfair. They are just people. People being used to play a game they don’t want to play. It comes to a point where they realize t his, and they break and lose it, unlike people in the west. Hate then grows. They are trained and taught to hate each other, and it is amazing that today in 2008 most of them honestly do not.
The people are starting to realize this, and they unified in Belgrade today against America, the EU, and the west. It is going to get very, very ugly here – that is a fact. But the west is too blame for it all, and certain people in power in different places here are to blame for it all also – but not the people, and never the people.
Yes serbs killed and murdered people – not any of the serbs i know in belgrade, and I’ve lived here for 3 years. Yes albanians did, kosovans, they all did – but not the ones I know in any of those countries.
Hate and fear is a powerful weapon, and it is not that expensive to create, and we in the west have perfected creating that weapon and deploying it, and it is currently being deployed here.
If we start blaming people impaticular and don’t look at who benefits and why they benefit from people acting a certain way, we will all be doing exactly what world leaders hope we do – take a side, and stand hard by it, and develop our own hate as this man just proved to it.
Thank you for speaking such truth to power!!
Schwatrz is at it again. Why does anyone have anything to do with him anymore. He has shown is true colors over and over again.
I have never seen such an artless, ham-handed and bigoted article on Pajamasmedia before. True to over-wrought form, Schwartz sees the world in black and white. Those he loves are always hued in a rosy or golden glow. Those he hates are pure evil.
He has taken an entire group of people here and painted them wholesale in the worst possible colors and he tries to get us to buy into it by playing on our patriotism. Disgusting.
I have had at least one run in with this guy and he is as petulant and childish as anyone I have ever had the displeasure of debating. He even went back to our debate long after I thought it was done and added another post to make it look like he had the last word! If I hadn’t been looking back at the thread to jog my memory about something, I would have never found out.
In his mind, Schwartz is a heroic, and honorable guy, a well respected and knowledgeable expert. The reality couldnt be farther from the truth. What can his opinion on anything really be worth when he proves that he is not capable of even a shred of objectivity or fairness???
Please do not let this man post here anymore.
–Anglican Peggy
Ideologies often put forth great people to prominence, often mask the devils. This author is a devil, he would have been a good officer in hitler’s machine.
What a hate article, this article ripts through current and 600 years, denies the serbs better than anybody ever denied the frozen arctics.
The author fails to mention that serbians are ethnically cleansed from Kosovo – by the brave American Bombs, instigation by dirts like this author and the dirty thugs of Nato – Why ? Well, if these dirts of journalism have a few things to hide… they cover that by relishing the suffering of destruction of old habitats.
Let us not forget what the Kosovo Albanians, our “honorable friends”, do while they’re not kissing the US flag: http://tinyurl.com/2t86rj
By the way – I’m sure the rioters in Belgrade just had an old map. I mean, you know, it can happen to anyone: http://tinyurl.com/ywdela
i come from the region so i’m introduced with it’s history. first, they were a satellite nazi country before which, they decieved their neighbours into their kingdom (1918-1941). they ruled with shovinism and arrogance. that’s why you have a nazi slovenia and croatia/bosnia, the people just wanted their own country, they weren’t about politics at all, but individuals took their chances. the same reason why there was a communist yugoslavia, people just wanting to get out of terror.
the yugoslavia was formally a socialistic federal republic. at the end of the 80′s, milosevic tried to turn it into their never forgotten dream of great serbia. they attacked slovenia, croatia and bosnia. montenegro, as well as kosovo, and the
above mentioned countries wouldn’t want to leave if everything was so great and nice. serbian politicians continuosly lie to their people, that’s why you have the burned embassies. they say kosovo is serbia, although they won it by force 40 years after they got independent. nevertheless the serbs make only 5-10% (and decreasing) percent of the kosovo population
Lots of IP Addresses from Belgrade, indeed.
Sorry guys. After the arsonist mob on our embassy yesterday and, especially, due to your chronic outbursts of genocide, “balance” is the last thing you deserve.
Hitler didn’t get equal time in our press, and neither will you.
This article is one-sided, indeed, but the truth is, that both Serbs and Albanians are chauvinistic people, who cannot merely tolarate each other, and have heavily mitologised viewpoint on their own history. Period.
I am glad, that someone from KFOR had commented here. I wish, that here would be more comments like this.
BTW: Does the “Serb truth” sounds familiar? It is like “tarqiya” and “kitman” in Islam. Russians also have a long tradition for using a lie for political purposes. It does not surprise me, because these two nations had been occpied by Muslim empires for some time, and assimilitated this tactics (partly as defence against Islam).
P.S. I am against Kosovo independence, but on different basis, that “historical right” of Serbs to this land.
I cannot believe my eyes that the Pajamas Media have really published this torrent of ethnic hatred.
The very fact that this has been written by an American is stunning. This level of ethnic bashing is, in Europe, an exclusive domain of the most fringe groups similar to the American KKK, consumed by hatred to their neighbors. I thought that the Americans have made some progress in combatting destructive nationalism – and now I see an article that basically states that one Euro nation is a bunch of evil subhumans who do not have a culture, but only so-called “culture”, and hate other people because the other people wash themselves. Incredible. Worthy of Der Sturmer. Full of outright lies regarding the second world war history. Quite a lot of Czechoslovak fighters and pilots took the way from occupied Czech lands thru Hungary and Yugoslavia to Britain, and the history of the Balkan war theatre is quite known here in Czechia.
Did the American press publish similar articles about the Iranian people when the jihadi fanatics took the Tehran embassy? Really? Did the American press publish similar articles about the Iraqi people when the lowlife mob hanged the contractors from the Fallujah bridge? Hallo, Michael Totten! You seem to like the Fallujah people quite a lot. How would you react on an article like THAT about them? You know, the creepy Fallujans who know nothing better than kill old ladies and have no culture and do not wash themselves.
I have no illusions about the Balkans. The Serbian fighters have a lot of evil on their hands, but the Balkan wars were far from black-and-white fight of Good and Evil, and cruelty lives in that region in hearts of many men. However, to equate Serbs with Hitler because uncontrollable lowlife mob burned an embassy is, sorry for that word, idiotic. What about the L.A. mob that burnt quite a part of the L.A. during the Watts Riots? I did not notice that Los Angeles was a Hitlerian city.
And as for shelling Dubrovnik – my God – did America never shell a city with civilians inside? Dresden, anyone? Or France? Algeria war, anyone? Or Britain? Hamburg, anyone? War is cruel and cruel people bombard cities. But if they win, well, the history gets polished.
Michael J. Totten
People always deserve a fair hearing, Mr. Totten. I’ll keep your attitude in mind when I happen upon your next article.
There are no halos and angel wings in the Balkans – just a lot of unresolved bitter history that the United States has no business getting involved with, let alone picking sides and establishing Islamic states.
This is an amazing article.
Felicitations to the author.
It was about time the world saw what the Serbs are really like.
All the nations in their neighbourhood know this, for the Serbs have tried in the 1990ies to take over their territories, kill their people and create a ”Greater Serbia”.
What the Serbs intended for others, happened to them! They lost Kosovo. Biblical, isn’t it?
That’s what I call justice.
It is reachable, after all.
I think John Bolton has a better accessment of the current situation than the ‘blog press’; sometimes I wonder if this isn’t just another progressive Leftist way of creating a type of Palestinian victimhoodville in Europe and the ‘oppressed’ are Muslim.
Islamic Jihadists have been taking territory and burning churches for some time now; Serbia has the right to exist just as does Israel.
RE: I definitely agree with you that any engagement in the Balkans is disastrous.
Currently, the Czech policemen try to separate the enraged Serbs and enraged Kosovars at the problematic border crossings. Brave people, and doing ungrateful work. Why ungrateful? Because they will earn hatred of both sides – such are the wages of engagement in the Balkans.
The Balkan peninsula contains a toxic mixture of ethnic and religious hatreds, some of which date back to the times of the Byzantian empire. America has yet tasted first bitter drops of that poison. I am not happy with that; I sincerely wish that the Americans avoided the regional hell entirely. They chose to dive in…
Every single superpower that ever engaged in Balkans got its fingers burnt and made no lasting allies. The Habsburg attempt to extend control over Bosnia resulted in death of the 400-year-old empire in 4 years. Italians lost one war there. The British engagement in the Greek civil war was nasty, costy and no, Greece was not a reliable ally of Britain after, though it was saved from the Reds (partly) by British effort and blood.
Even the warmongering Soviets under Stalin avoided direct confrontation with Tito in the 1950s, because the prize was not simply worth the risk.
For Michael Totten: imagine that the USA took openly one side in the Lebanese civil war of the 80s. Would you consider this a wise political move? In fact, the Lebanese terrorists killed 240 Americans in Beirut in 1983; yet you seem to like the Lebanese better than the Serbs, who, so far, have done smaller damage.
One correction to my last sentence of the previous post. It should read:
“so far, have done smaller damage to American property and lives.”
I do not want to judge all the damage overall.
Marian Kechlibar
For too many people today, history only consists what transpired over the course of their brief lifetimes.
And even then, their attitudes are based upon what they feel about it – not what they know (which is next to nothing). The schools are not teaching history anymore.
And wisdom? What’s that? John Bolton seems to be the only one left with a bit of it.
There is good reason fear the short term future.
I knew Pajamas Media was a joke-site of knee-jerk racist, reactionary clap-trap (I get an especial belly laugh from that fatuous ass Rosembaum), but I had previously considered Michael Totten to be a journalist of the highest quality.
This article is typical PJ-hot air — just out for sensationalism, no journalism to be found here. Mr Totten’s endorsement of it has definitely lessened my estimation of him.
How unique. A cartoonish description of the conflict with one side presented as utterly evil and the other as completely good.
What a great way to understand the Balkans!
I have been lucky enough to spend time in Serbia as a minor representative of the US, and you will be amazed to hear that the Serbs are…human beings. They are smart and industrious and the vast majority have a positive view of America.
From the front of the US Embassy in Belgrade you can see the shattered ruins of several large buildings destroyed by our bombs less than ten years ago. It’s no surprise that Serbs are not ready to kiss our rings like your angelic Kosavars.
This article reveals you to be of the same ilk as the rabble at the US embassy. Just another hate-monger.
krl
Fascinating…
50 years ago Kosovo had less than 10% Albanian Mulsims, now 90%. Most of the Albanian (what is that name, sounds familiar, doesn’t sound like Serbian or Kosovan though) Albanian Muslims were illegal immigrants to Kosovo. What? From where? Albania?
Is that like the Latin American illegal immigrants in Phoenix declaring independence from the US?
Is this a harbinger of what is to happen all over Europe by Muslim non-integrated peoples (in some countries as high as 15-20% now, in some towns/suburbs 90% are Muslim.
Is this a harbinger of what is to come in the US Southwest, where in some locales the illegal and legal Latin American immigrants form over 50% of the population? L.A. proper is an example.
Wow! What a precedent. The West is truly suicidal. We think nothing of it that peoples will become independent in an illegal invasion of our own countries, just because they do not wish to integrate, and we do not try to have them integrate with our countries in the West but accomodate, and accomodate, and accomodate.
Better start considering whether you will become devout Muslim in Europe or devout Catholic in the US Southwest. Make sure to become multicultural and learn to speak Arabic or Spanish exclusively. I hope you like the latest fashion Chadors and TexMex.
For Europeans my suggestion is: Read the Koran and memorize all of it. That is what you will be learning in the schools and re-education camps of the near future. Unless you take option 3 of the Muslims when they ask you – slavery, conversion or death?
Forget everything you know about European culture, religion, law, politics, society, fashion, all of those subjects are regulated by interpretations of the Koran, and nothing else, remember it is God’s word and cannot be amended.
The Koran has no religious freedom, no democratic thinking, no socialist thinking, all is God’s word and must be followed to the letter. Theocracy, that is all that is allowed in the Koran, God says so. Anything else is heretical – not God’s word.
No wonder the Russians and Serbs are angry, Kosovo which once was Slavic is now Albanian Muslim. And we (America – Clinton, and Europe) forced them to become so.
Not to worry, the Muslims will only nicely ask the remaining Slavic Christian minority to go away. Right? Well, they can become slaves, pay the Dhimmi tax, or if they protest be beheaded as it says in the Koran. How nicely Multi-cultural and all that. Once the last minorities leave, vouluntarily of course in hearses or by walking across the border (property belongs only to true Mulsims in a Muslim state -the Koran again), they will be an ethnically diverse Albanian Muslim society ruled by the Koran.
So, which country is next? How about parts of Paris becoming Muslim independent Paris? or Muslim independent Berlin? or Muslim independent London? Surely, I am joking? Right? Oh right, who cares what happens 5 years from now or 10 years, I am secure in my happy socialist, multi-cultural, European country, today. Right?
Things that would never have been considered possible just 30 years ago have changed forever.
Stephen Schwartz,
Everything what did you write is full of hate against the Serbian people. So many lies on such small space. Why?
When a country goes to war with every neighbor it has, it becomes clear that there’s something wrong with THEM!
The sooner serbs realize that Kosovo is not theirs and move on with life, the better it’s going to be for them. If they continue with this violence, I personally think Kosovo will be joining the EU a lot earlier then Serbia!
Isn’t a US embassy considered our soil? And don’t we have Marines guarding them? And don’t Marines have guns and know how to use them?
If a mob tried to burn the Capitol or the White House, would we not resist?
A few hundred well-placed bullets would have solved this mob action fast.
Serbians are the perfect example for what propaganda can do to human nature!
“50 years ago Kosovo had less than 10% Albanian Mulsims, now 90%.”
This is the biggest
“Kosovo which once was Slavic is now Albanian Muslim”
Dear Ollie, please read a non-serbian history book that is not full of wishful facts!
1. Kosovar Albanians were always a majority in Kosovo…
2. Kosovans don’t care whether they happen to be born muslim or catholic, their religion is “being albanian”… when it comes to religion serbians are the extremist ones!
3. Kosovo was a part of Illyria called Dardania, and illyrians were the predecessors of albanians (a fact that only serbians deny). serbians came from the Carpat Mountains way later! So Kosovo was indeed occupied by slavs, but was and will never itself be slavic!!!
RE: Chester White
Well, Kosovo and Metohija is part of Serbia even after the war in 1999. with UN resolution 1244. The problem is that you engaged assault on Serbia without confirmation of UN, basically stole our land and now want us to behave with international laws and justice. Hmmm, double standards bro. If you only recognize brutal force as argument, then please take it to the chin. It’s only a couple of windows and a flag, you stole from us 15% of teritory. If you like to give presents you can give Albanians Montana, Ohio or whatever state of US and it will be just fine with me
RE: SERBIAN TRUTH
Well, you can spin the facts of WW2 in Balkans, but you cannot deny this facts: Serbia was a enemy of Nazi Germany, Croatia was in alliance with Hitler. In 1941. Nazi massacred Belgrade with bombing, with 5000 civilian casualties, In Zagreb they marched like in parade, with hundreds of thrilled citizens waving with flags and chanting. Royalists-chetniks was an anti-fascist army, they saved 500 US pilots brought down by germans and for that president Truman gave the honor to Draza Mihajlovic, the lider of chetniks. Even Hollywood made a movie during the war, called “Chetniks”, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035729/,
i don’t know any country in the world that made a film during the war about their enemies. For that killing of Croats and Muslims, well Indepedent state of Croatia was a fascist country and Muslims was so called “croatian flowers”, what did chetniks gonna do with enemy in war but to kill them, i mean it was practicaly a civil war. Draza was sold out after the meeting in Jalta, where Stalin, Cherchill and Rousevelt decide to support Tito instead of Draza, basically because they devided Europe into zones and Yugoslavia meant to be a russian zone of influence and Tito was a communist. And for saying about Jews killed in Serbia, well they were killed by germans and because of their “small” number, very quick they practicaly kill everyone. Just for the record German command in Serbia brought a law in 1941. that, for every wounded German they will kill 50 Serbs, and for every dead, 100 Serbs. And they did, on twice occasions, In Kragujevac and Kraljevo, they killed about 5000 people. Well you could present us where Nazi’s killed so many Croatians, Muslims or Albanians. That’s why there wasn’t much of a fighting in Serbia first 2 yaers of WW2. Germans was brutal.
For whoever is back here today and wants some rationality, read:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=E17DC7F7-9723-4D24-BDE8-576309200B96
Michael Totten:Sorry guys. After the arsonist mob on our embassy yesterday and, especially, due to your chronic outbursts of genocide, “balance” is the last thing you deserve.
Spoken like a pig ignorant Yank. The Trotskyite USA destroys a country that never harmed it and when the put upon country strikes back they are Nazis!!! It’s just like after 9/11: why do they hate us? Gee, do you think it might have something to do with your penchant destroying countries that never even considered harming you?
Four years ago I was pro-American. But one can only ignore American arrogance for so long. Your country is the enemy of the West and the cancer of humanity. Next 9/11 most of the world will be cheering, including the citizens of ‘allied’ (ie. colonised) countries like Britain and Canada. It is not just your arrogant disdain for the sovereignty of other nations; it is your unashamed ignorance of the places you like bombing for sport.
BTW no Belgrade IP here!
The American media barely mentioned Kosovo’s ‘independence’ until their embassy was attacked. (Uh…Where’s Ko-sovo dude? I’s can’t find it on ma map, man) Now they are playing the victim. Poor lil ‘Mercains! Scaredy-cat US diplomats are now leaving the country because it’s just too dangerous on the ground. Americans don’t like being on the ground. They prefer fighting when they are thousands of feet in the sky dropping bombs on defenceless civilians. “Yeee-hawwww! Look at ‘em hospitals burn. Don’t mess with the U.S of A.”
Mr Schwartz has been royally debunked:
http://www.limbicnutrition.com/blog/open-serb-hatred-must-be-answered/
For those who need a quick introduction to the facts about Kosovo and the background to this mess, here are two short primers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0_iUYErVv0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMO4rzpbv_4
Michael Savage who has millions of conservative voter listeners on his Savage Nation talk radio show disagrees with Schwartz’s opinion above. Many more people listen to Savage than they do to Schwartz. That’s a fact. Savage is fighting CAIR in court while Schwartz has left Judaism for Islam. Go figure.
RE: People always deserve a fair hearing, Mr. Totten. I’ll keep your attitude in mind when I happen upon your next article.
I’d give a fair hearing to Serbs who live in Kosovo as a minority. They deserve (and get) a defense from NATO troops on the ground as a threatened minority.
I’d give a fair hearing to Serbs in Belgrade who think they should keep Kosovo.
I’d give a more than fair hearing to Serbs who lost friends and family in the war, no matter who killed them or why.
But I will not give a fair hearing to Serbs who burn down our embassy and who think genocide is the appropriate way to resolve the Albanian question.
This article is like the Goebbels of Nazi Germany wrote it. Author is a extremist with a lack of knowledge in history and serious need for pills and psychotherapy.
Mr. Totten:
You will give Serbia a fair hearing? Thank you. Like all Americans, you are so kind and beneficent. Thank you for bestowing your all-knowing justice upon Serbia. I just don’t know what Serbia would do without American justice and brilliance.
Totten has the typical American god complex and self-congratulatory attitude. The Americans built their empire by butchering American Indians, and now they tell the rest of the world how saintly America is. And I’m sure there are plenty of Muslims in Nangarhar and Haditha don’t mind the US embassy burning.
And what percentage of the Serbian population might that be?
What does Serbian propaganda read and sound like today?
While Serbia was committing aggression (among other things) against its neighbors in the 1990s, it portrayed all of its victims as Nazis and fascists as justification for barbarism and, ironically, crimes not seen in Europe since WWII. It was “ok” to murder Croats and Bosnian muslims in the 90s because, according to (un)official Serbian propaganda, they had a “nazi past” and they were the “descendants of Nazis.” Remember not to lose sight of the fact that Serbs continually conceal their own collaboration and crimes. They also attempt to conceal their century-old agenda and plan for a greater-Serbia.
The Serbs behaved like the Nazis in the 1990s, not their victims! The Serbs occupied 1/3 of Croatia, 70% of Bosnia & Hercegovina. They layed siege to towns and cities, rounded civilians into concentration camps and committed wanton slaughter.
Nowadays, Serbs are manipulating the US “War on Terror” paradigm and are portraying all of their victims and enemies as Al Qaeda supporters and disciples of Bin laden (This time around, Kosovo’s Albanians).
Sadly, many on the US Right are fooled and tricked by this sneaky ploy, and fall into the propaganda-trap the Serbs have set for them.
Many are well aware of this ploy, but choose to ignore it for their own political agendas.
In the past, the Serbs tricked many a Jew by portraying everyone else in the Balkans as Jew-haters, murderers and Nazi-reincarnates. All the while they, I cannot reiterate this enough, conceal(ed) their very own shady history involving Jews and others.
The point is, The Serbs are NOT the only victims in the Balkans. And they haven’t been for decades (the many wars and crimes they committed in the 90s are testament to that!). They are, in fact, the last people in the Balkans that should be playing the “victim” card.
They, of course, are not the only criminals in the Balkans. But not one people continues to perpetuate lies about others in an attempt to systematically fool the world into believing their, more often than not, twisted and sinister version of history.
Kosovo’s independence is in fact Biblical, and a form of cosmic justice. For what they attempted to do in other countries, by demanding autonomy and Serbian states anywhere and everywhere, they denied to Kosovo’s Albanians.
All that remains now is the destruction of the “Republic of Srpska” in Bosnia and Hercegovina, a quasi-state founded on aggression, genocide and mass-murder.
The US needs to destroy the Dayton Agreement, erase “Republic of Srpska,” and grant justice to Serbia’s victims in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Only and when that occurs, will there be a chance for a lasting peace in the Balkans.
Written by Ollie>>>”50 years ago Kosovo had less than 10% Albanian Mulsims, now 90%. Most of the Albanian (what is that name, sounds familiar, doesn’t sound like Serbian or Kosovan though) Albanian Muslims were illegal immigrants to Kosovo. What? From where? Albania?”
Do you know why there were less Albanians living in Kosovo at that time, than there are today?
BECAUSE the chauvinistic regime of Serbia forced the Albanians out of their homes. Just like Milosevich did back in ’98. “The Expulsion of the Albanians: Memorandum 1937″ written by Vaso Cubrilovic,
should tell you something!!
Link (The Expulsion of the Albanians); http://www.aacl.com/expulsion23.html
And last but not least, Kosovar Albanians did NOT immigrate from Albania. That is Serbian Propaganda.
Kosovo has always been populated by Albanians, Serbo slavs came to the region from the east many centuries later, i.e from the Carpat Mountains. And as far as religion goes, the serbs need to take a closer look at themselves in the mirror. They are abusing and misusing God’s name! They are the reasons why Balkans have looked the way it has the past decade.
Isn’t Serbia supposed to be a so called ” democratic state”?! It’s appaling to see that the Serbian Government is doing nothing to protect these embassies! And Russia isn’t making the situation better either.
When is enough enough?!
The KLA moved in and killed Serbians and claimed false atrocitites until Clinton nad europe could be persuaded to attack a soverign country and partition its six hundred year old borders.
If you think the Muslim Kosovars have any honor, let alone love for you, then I am sorry for your diminisned capacity for reason.
They will just start killing westward to sprreaad Islam and when they get to you, they won’t be kissing your flag.
Beautifully written, I have visited Kosovo several times now and I have to say what I witnessed there was outrageous, all caused by the “heroics” Serbs. Everything that was written here is a fact, very well done for putting this through. I have to point out one thing, a thing that is also very well pointed out in this article, which is the way Serbia has tried and is still trying to label everyone they dislike as “terrorists” even though they have acted worst than terrorists through out their history. We had the “great” Milosevic declaring on TV to murder all Albanians, we have Serb orthodox priests calling for war and standing by their “soldiers” where they went and murdered many innocent people, children, women and old men. Disgusting country, a country that has tried to come out as civilized and prove that is better than everyone, but we have seen their true colours and still can see them.
Finally, someone who calls a spade a spade. Read history and see how Serbia has infiltrated other’s borders and grown their own so that they can have control of land and sea. This is the first time I see that someone has held Serbia accountable for their actions. Somehow, everybody has forgotten about the mass genocide perpetrated by the Serbian Government and typically doesn’t have a clue about the politics of the former “so called” Yugoslavia.
Dear “John”, who thinks this hate screed is “Beautifully Written”, I would like you to tell me where exactly you have been in Kosovo and when. You see, I am wondering how you missed the Serbian enclaves, the places where 1000 year old monasteries were not just burned down, but the the foundation stones ripped out to symbolise total removal. How did you miss the daily attack on Serbs huddled in their NATO guarded enclaves? How did you miss the abductions, the arms deals in the cafes, the trafficked women? So tell us “John”, where exactly were you? You see I think you are lying through your teeth because I have never met anyone who has been to Kosovo who has not returned horrified by the plight of non-Albanian minorities there. Additionally I have never met anyone who has visited Serbia and not had their anti-Serb prejudices blown away by the charm, kindness and beauty of the people. I declare you have never been anywhere near Kosovo or Serbia. I invite you to prove me wrong.
Dear Sirs.
Being a half slovenian-half croat living in Slovenia, I, according to your rasistic insult to common sense called article, have all the reasons to hate serbs.
But I don’t.
You see, I was here when things happened. I have bosnian, croat, albanian, serb friends. They are all amazing people.
I see ordinary serbs as warm, welcoming and intelligent bunch of people. Sadly, truth is also that they just don’t have lucky hand when picking their leaders. Only quality their leaders possessed was incredible power to manipulate. But it happened before and elsewhere, too.
Of course, their history has many black spots. But all the balkan nations have them. You see, we are just peons on a chessboard in a game of chess played by big powers. Always played against each other.
Burning your embassy was extremely stupid thing to do. It was done by a handful of idiots with absolutely no right to represent a nation in whole. Ask any ordinary serb about it – they might be even angrier as you are. Because as far as i can remember, they were always pro-western. They turned to russia because there was no one else left for them to turn to.
As for the facts you represented, well, that is beyond any criticism.
You are perfectly entitled to be pro-independence, but don’t disqualify whole nation in attempt to justify your stance.
How about we try this on for size. Schwartz’s last column here was for the United States to recognize Kosovo. Needless to say, a number of the commentators (of which I was one) did not go along with that.
So, this is simply a temper tantrum just waiting to be unleashed.
Which leaves the effect of seriously downgrading the amout of respect to be accorded the writings (or scribblings) yet to come from Stephen Schwartz.
Yes, Serbs are brave indeed. This is how brave they are:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23300651/
And this is how the Serbian patriots are destroying the Western imperialism one pair of stolen adidas at a time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VWZoKWBYXE
Instead of “Kosovo je Srbije” now it should be “Adidas je Srbije”!!!!!!
Thank you Stephen for finally shedding some light into the thick fog of lies and propaganda with which Serbs have blanketed the western media.
As for the Serbs role in the WWII, here are some hard facts for the pro-Serbs:
During WWII, Serbia was governed by the “Vlada Nacionalnog Spasa” (Government of National Salvation), headed by Milan Nedic. General Nedic was a former CHIEF OF STAFF of the Royal Yugoslav Army. Under his direct command were the Serbian SS Volunteer Corps, the Serbian Gestapo, the Serbian State Guard, and the Department of General Police, Also allied with the Germans were two chetnik groups, the chetniks of Kosta Pecanac and those of Draza Mihailovic. Mihailovic, btw is still wildly popular in Serbia.
Serbian SS Volunteer Corps (Srpski Dobrovoljacki Korpus) – Formed on 15 September 1941, by Dimitrije Ljotic from Chetniks and his Zbor Movement activists. In January 1943, it had five 500 man battalions – four volunteer and one Chetnik Assault battalion, an armored car battalion, cavalry squadron and 6 aircraft – at strength of around 3,000 men. The formation was fully equipped by the Germans who where impressed by its performance.
In 1944, it had five 1200-man regiments with 500-man artillery battalion, under German tactical command but reporting to General Nedic. On 21 June another regiment was formed – 2nd Iron Regiment (2. gvozdeni puk), total strength has risen to around 9,000 men. The strength of the SS Volunteer Corps in August 1944 was 9.886 men, according to Bundesarchiv (RH 19 XI/31)
Serbian Gestapo – On 1 April 1942, the German Gestapo started the formation of ’1st Belgrade Special Combat detachment’. Members of that unit called themselves ‘Serbian Gestapo’. Recruitment of personnel was carried out by commander Strahinja Janjic and his deputy Svetozar Necak. Recruits were found amongst Gendarmerie, Ljotic men’s and individuals of Nazi believes. Acceptance was done by members of Belgrade Gestapo central, in front of whom candidates would write their autobiography and take an oath. At the end of 1942, the detachment was largest and had 147 men.
The Serbian State Guard (SDS) – Armed formation created on 3 March 1942, as addition to the civil police to keep order and lighten the burden on the German forces. Mostly created by expansion of former Yugoslav Drina and Danube Gendarmes Regiments and police detachments, which were already serving German authorities, with some active officers and NCO’s of former Royal Yugoslav Army. In January 1943, it had a total number of 36,716 men including support services and armed village militia. First commander was Colonel Jovan Trishic replaced by Major General Borivoje Jonic. Recruitment was done by mobilization, also from ranks of chetniks of Kosta Pecanac and later from Chetniks of Draza Mihailovic which by 1944 completely merged into SDS.
SDS also had, amongst other, an intelligence section, and was divided into:
- Municipal State Guard (Police) serving in Belgrade and other major cities of Serbia,
- Rural State Guard (Gendarmerie) which carried out duties across entire territory with exceptions of cities covered by Municipal State Guard, and typically reinforced by some 20 armed village militia.
- Border State Guard which carried out border duties.
On 6 October 1944, 5,000 members of SDS, under Lieutenant-General Stefan Radanovic joined command of Draza Mihailovic as 1st Serbian Assault Corps (Prvi Srpski Udarni Korpus – SUK), later joined by 2nd Assault division and 3rd Frontier Guard Division.
Department of General police – Carried out duties of political police and territorial counter-intelligence service. Form middle of 1941 it was renamed into Department of Special Police. It was mostly engaged in combat against Communist Party of Yugoslavia in which its members showed brutality against arrested communists and later activists People’s Liberation Movement (NOP). Special Police had 30 investigators and 150 agents also under its requests at disposal were further 52 officers and 1550 members of Municipal Guard. Special Police operated its own prison, Glavnyatcha in Belgrade.
Serbian antisemitism
In August 1942, Dr. Harald Turner (the chief of the German civil administration in Serbia) announced that Serbia was the only country in which the ‘Jewish question’ was solved and that Belgrade was the ‘first city of a New Europe to be Judenfrei.’ Turner himself attributed this success to Serbian help.
The fight against the Jewish influence had started six months before the German invasion when the government of Serbia issued legislation restricting Jewish participation in the economy and university enrolment. Fully six months before the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, Serbia had issued legislation restricting Jewish participation in the economy and university enrolment. One year later on 22 October 1941, the rabidly antisemitic ‘Grand Anti-Masonic Exhibit’ opened in occupied Belgrade, funded by the city of Belgrade. The central theme was an alleged Jewish-Communist-Masonic plot for world domination. Newspapers such as Obnova (Renewal) and Nasa Borba (Our Struggle) praised this exhibit, proclaiming that Jews were the ancient enemies of the Serbian people and that Serbs should not wait for the Germans to begin the extermination of the Jews. A few months later, Serbian authorities issued postage stamps commemorating the opening of this popular exhibit. These stamps, which juxtaposed Jewish and Serbian symbols, portrayed Judaism as the source of world evil and advocated the humiliation and violent subjugation of Jews.
The involvement of the Serbian Orthodox Church as a whole is well documented. The Serbian Orthodox Church openly collaborated with the Nazis, and many priests publicly defended the persecution of the Jews. On 13 August 1941, approximately 500 distinguished Serbs signed ‘An Appeal to the Serbian Nation’, which called for loyalty to the occupying Nazis. The first three signers were bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church. On 30 January 1942, Metropolitan Josif, the acting head of the Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church, officially prohibited conversions of Jews to Serbian Orthodoxy, thereby blocking a means of saving Jewish lives. At a public rally, after the government Minister Olcan ‘thanked God that the enormously powerful fist of Germany had not come down upon the head of the Serbian nation’ but instead ‘upon the heads of the Jews in our midst’, the speaker of these words was then blessed by a high-ranking Serbian Orthodox priest.
A most striking example of Serbian antisemitism combined with historical revisionism is the case of Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic, revered as one of the most influential church leaders and ideologists after Saint Sava, founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church. To Serbs, Bishop Velimirovic was a martyr who survived torture in the Dachau concentration camp. In truth he was brought to Dachau (as were other prominent European clergy), because the Nazis believed he could be useful for propaganda. There he spent approximately two months as an ‘Ehrenhaftling’ (honour prisoner) in a special section, dining on the same food as the German officers, living in private quarters, and making excursions into town under German escort.
i cannot believe what you wrote here. i am Serb,and i can tell you,we were with you in both world wars. Chetnicks
saved lives of 500 American airmen in ww2,and you say Serbs are Nazis?
man, you are uneducated. Probably Albanians paid you well,you forgot that Albanians were fascists?
and srebrenica wouldn’t have happened if Bosnian Muslims hadn’t destroyed Kravica village and villagers, so it was retaliation.
This is the Balkans. These conflicts did not start in 1999, or 1941, or 1389. They have been going on since time immemorial. I think the best solution what the one put forth by Col. David Hackworth. Build a wall around the place and toss in all the armaments they want. After a year put up a ladder and look to see if they are still fighting. If so, take the ladder down and check back in another year. Continue until they quit fighting.
The left likes to point out that there is no military solution in Iraq. There has to be a political one.
It is the same in the Balkans. As long as the people, not limited to Serbians, are willing to kill their neighbors and burn their houses over some dispute whose origins are lost in the past, there will be no solutions.
So let them fight until they’re either too tired, or dead.
I have read this article and now that I have stopped laughing, I can now respond. Let me start by saying that I have been in Kosovo for 5 years now and am an American citizen. Mr. Schwartz spent 18 months in the Balkans and knows nothing of the region or culture in the current aspect. He says several times of how the Albanians are such peace loving people and how much they love Americans, that is the biggest farce I have ever read. The Albanians are uneducated, minipulating theives and would sell their own mother for a euro. They destroy their own communities by polluting the rivers and streams and dumping their trash anywhere they wish. You can travel miles along streams and not go more then 1 foot without finding trash or plastic bottles converging in piles along the rocks and creek beds. They burn plastics and tires as though it was wood and pollute the air so devistatingly bad, that there is a constant haze floating around the country almost year round. As far as loving Americans, they love our money and nothing else. I have been overcharged for everything I have purchased in the past five years. They will give Russian and Serbian citizens a much lower price on an item because they feel they are not “rich” like Americans and I have proven this theory numerous times throughout every shopping market in Kosovo.They speak so much of how they love Americans to your face, but as soon as you walk away, they spit on the ground as to get the nice things they just said out of their mouths. As far as Muslim, that is the biggest joke. The Albanians are as much muslim as I am. No one ever attends mosque or prays and when the hoja cries out from the mosque tower, they turn their radios up as to drown out the sound. They only claim to be muslim as one more way to manipulate western countries into feeling sorry for them. Ask any of them of the March 2004 atrocities as where several hundred Serbian churches and homes were burnt to the ground by Albanians and none seem to remember that occurence, but ask about 98-99 and they can tell you of all the horrible things the Serbian army did to “their” people. The Albanians will and have lied about anything as to make them look like poor little helpless people, but don’t be fooled, the UCK, hailed in Kosovo as the Albanian freedom fighters, killed more Albanian people then the actual Serbian army did. Anyone the UCK thought to be collaberators or friends of Serbia or even just people they didn’t like, where killed and buried in shallow graves to say that the Serbians did this. Fatmir Ahmeti, an ex-UCK member has written a book about the UCK murders, but for some crazy reason, noone wishes to publish it with all of the western world backing the so called poor Albanians. One Albanian man even told to me, ” I have six sons and my Serbian neighbor has two, I will gladly sacrifice two of my sons to kill his just so they do not breed more Serbs. That is how you win a war, you out populate the enemy and take over.” That is the peaceful mentality of the Albanians in Kosovo. So Mr. Schwartz, spend more time actually on the ground doing more research, then just travelling around for a year and half and feel you know all of the story. Maybe in my next response I will talk about the drug problem and human trafficking that is going on in Kosovo. If you feel that in just 5 years of records that, 1,500 kilos of heroine, 11,000 kilos of cocaine and 15,000 kilos of Marijuana is a petty amount, then I say to you, denial is not only a river in egypt.
“It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own faults. One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one’s own fau;ts as a cunning gambler conceals his dice” – Buddha, Dhammapada, verse 252.
I see that Mr Schwartz’s article is acting as a poultice and drawing out the emboldened Serb-hating loons that usually only live in the deeper depths of Usenet, Neo-nazi forums and other domains of the hateful and insane.
One such creature who has revealed himself is one Artan Boletini, an Albanian commentator. I would like to take a few minutes to help Mr Boletini at least re-orientate himself back in the direction of honesty, fairness and reason even if his handicap means that he will never limp the whole way there.
Now Artan, you are falling vicrtim to the same fallacy that all the others on this page who denounce “Serbs” for the action of a tiny unrepresentative minority, except you have taken it one step further, you are now denouncing all Serbs for the actions of tiny unrepresentative minority 60 years ago! I have seen esteemed and widely respected journalists like Michael Trotten fall into the trap on this topic, so you are at least in good company.
If we pay minute attention to the record of any peoples, we will reveal shameful episodes and the ranting of madman, bigots, xenophobes, racists and extremists. You are dredging history and presenting distorted half truths in an attempt to slander the people of Serbia, exactly as Mr Schwartz has tried and failed to do here.
Now I could simply fall victim to the Tu Quoque fallacy myself and say “So what if there was a single Serbian collaborationist organisation. Every single country occupied country has collaborators and quislings.” I could go on to talk about the Albanian Skenderbey SS Division or the Bosnian 13th Waffen Hanjar (or Handschar) SS Division. I could point out that Serbia never has anything like an SS division, at worst they had an Anti-Partisan unit – Serbian Volunteer Corps – which was NOT an SS division at all. It was not even part of the German army, it was unit of the short lived Serbian collaborationist government. Its very existence is a testament to the fierceness of the Partisans and German desperation at their inability to suppress the Partisans.
The ONLY SS volunteer corps in the Balkans were Bosnian, Albanian, Croatian, Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian. The Serbs were the only people NOT to capitulate to the Nazis and volunteer to fight in the German Army itself.
You go on to mention the so called “Serbian Gestapo”. This is another attept to imply that the Serbs were raving nazi’s with their own mini version of the nazi apparatus. The truth – and you Serb haters shudder every time it is mentioned – is much more prosaic.
It is truth that members of the German Gestapo turned up in Belgrade in 1942 to set up a Serbian Gestapo. They failed miserably. The unit – formed by common criminals – was inaugurated on 1st April 1942 (April’s Fools day) and called the 1st Belgrade Special Combat detachment. It was disbanded within a year by the Germans. They were a joke compared to the Hrvatski (Croatian) Gestapo formed from True Believers in December 1942. Now those guys were pros, they helped round up hundreds of thousands of Jews and Serbs for the death caps at Jasenovac and elsewhere. Even the Kosovo Albanian Gendarmerie unit formed in 1941 by the Gestapo were more effective at catching and killing Serbs, Jews and Roma.
You see when we look at how people in the nazi occupied territories behaved, we ALWAYS find traitors and collaborators. But in the case of the Serbs we find LESS COLLABORATION and MORE RESISTANCE than everyone else in the Balkans.
You then go on to plagiarise Philip J. Cohen’s article “Holocaust History Misappropriated” from the November 1992 edition of Midsteam magazine. Your plagiarism repeats Cohen’s slanders, which, like so much anti-Serbian propaganda, relies of highlighting Serbian wrongs completely out of context and without any comparisons. One cannot assess Serbian anti-Semitism without considering and comparing it to the rampant anti-Semitism throughout Europe at the time Cohen, Schwartz and you all use the same propaganda trick: List Serbian wrongs, out of context and without comparisons. It is one of the and without comparisons. It is one of the oldest tricks in the fat and very old book of slander tricks. It is the crude club of Propagandist weaponry and Serbs know it well. This is a classic example of “Framing”, where this time the frame is only around Serbian malfeasance to the exclusion of all others.
Since you are Albanian, and concerned with Anti-Semitism, Kosovo and history – you may want to pay more attention to the wrongdoing your own people instead of pointing fingers at Serbs: http://www.islam-watch.org/Serbianna/Albanian_role_holocaust.htm
Mr Schwartz and Mr Boletini have between then used either deliberately deployed or through stupidity and ignorance, simply fallen victim to so many propaganda and coercive persuasion techniques that their words here might for the perfect example text for an undergraduate course on Critical Thinking. In their few works have detected everything from Suppressing Evidence (Framing), Observational Selection, Reversal Of Reality, Unsupported Claims, Inverted The Glittering Generality, Exaggeration, Slander, Non Sequiturs, Guilt Induction, Appeal to Emotion, Ad Hominem (Personal Attacks), Name Calling, Labelling, Claim That There Is A Panmalefic (Serbs are the Panmalefic)…..I really could go on.
You two a are a brace hypocrites, accusing the Serbs of being hateful and ignoble whilst lying, exaggerating and distorting in a desperate effort to support your bigotry.
Thankfully after nearly 20 years of relentless anti-Serb propaganda and slander, the truth is emerging. Maybe it is the increasing numbers of visitors to Serbia, maybe it is the power of the internet, maybe the Iraq was has made people question received wisdom and reject the media’s Manichean anti-Serb narrative. But I can assure you of one thing Mr Boletini and Mr Schwartz: There are plenty more where I came from. The ranks of Pro-Serbian westerners like me swelling fast. It is going to get harder, and eventually impossible for people like you to write filth like Mr Schwartz’s article without being righted and outed as bigots by us.
Your time is over Serb-haters, the truth is coming out, and it is against you.
I have to laugh at some of these comments, as much as they say this article is based and fail to witness the facts. They do the same by being biased towards the serbs, and calling Albanians names. Very rich, I find it hard to believe that most of you posting comments are really “Americans”, try so hard, but the world knows. My God, serbs can’t you see the world doesn’t like you. You are bunch of murders, no good for nothing.
I appeal to everybody who support Serbia to sign both petitions shown below
http://www.obronserbie.lpr.pl/?i=3200
To see a “tolerance” of Kosovar Albanians just watch this video. It show destruction of church of Santa Andrew Apostle in 2004 under watchful eyes of NATO
http://www.media.srbija.sr.gov.yu/medsrp/filmovi/podujevo180304_lan.ram
Mr. Totten:
This particular IP address is from Ohio, and from a native born American of German descent. You are wrong.
I don’t condone torching embassies, but I sure as hell understand it. The ethnic cleansing in Kosovo is Albanian on Serb and has been from the beginning. We bombed for two reasons: to distract from Billy-Jeff’s wandering trouser snake problems and to stick it to a down-trodden Russia. Serbian military action within their own country, which is what Kosovo is, was to defend the Serbs being slaughtered by the muslims. Since then, churches and monasteries have been burnt to the ground by the Wahabist and heroin funded KLA, and most of the Serbs have fled, refugees within their own land.
America may have recognized Kosovo, but you can bet your ass that most Americans won’t. Why the stripey-pants set believe that our national interest is served by an islamist narco-state in Europe is beyond me.
John :
… but the world knows. My God, serbs can’t you see the world doesn’t like you. You are bunch of murders, no good for nothing.
WOW, RACISM, finally…
freedomhouse report
John you say of the Serbs that “world doesn’t like [them]. [They] are bunch of murders, no good for nothing.”
It is true that the Serbs are suffering from the consequences of relentelss anti-Serb propganda.
Most people in their ignorance believe that the Serbs are the bad guys. The need need needs bad guys you see, our culture reqires simple goodies and baddies and the Serbs are just that: The nominated baddies.
Claim is not reality and even a cursory understanding of history, both recent and ancient, will instantly lead to a increased sympathy for these bullied and long oppressed Europeans.
Exposure to Serbs and Serbia tends to destroy the prejudices of 20 years in a single weekend. They are lovely people. They hve been grossly mistreated by the West and they are rightly furious at the way in which they have been treated.
A read of this page will show you the how openly people profess Serb hatred with impunity.
Thew wiser, cooler heeds, those with a modicum of education and critical thinking are able to see the niances and complixities of the situation. They know that there is ALWAYS another side to the story.
The US rushed in to Iraq to find WMDs and found nothing. They rushed into Kosovo after the bombing to find massacres, and found virtaully nothing. In both cases they were dead wrong and in neither case have they admitted their wrongdoings.
The Serbs are waiting patiently for justice. For niow it lookms like the bully boy US and EU will succeed in getting theirt little narco- client state its independence in full violation of international law and the conventions of Sovreign Equality and Inviolable Borders. They can still, forthe time being, trade on the widespread Serbophobia and bigotry cultured by the last 15 years of bogey man making.
Russia and China are not adversaries to be mocked, neither are the Serbs. Justice will be done, perhaps when a Russian aircraft carrier provides air support to a secessionist Texas joining Mexico, or an Independent Basque region, or the Islamic Republic of North Yorkshire. How will you feel when La Raza dance in the streets of Mexico celebrating the re-conquest of the Southern United States. You think it cannot happen? Kosovo was Serbia for 1000 years….
This article is fiction. The ’60,000 women raped’ is pure fiction, and the rest does not ‘jive’ with the pre-1990 historical texts and articles I’ve read.
I’ve read about Mihailovic and the Chetniks in Time magazine, from the early 1940s, and it does not agree with Shwartz’s revisionist history.
Whatever the bizarre and syncretistic Sulieman Schwartz, former Jew, former radical communist, current Islamic obscurantist has to say on the matter, the fact remains that Muslims, because of their Muslimness, have stolen another piece of land from so called “infidels” in their ongoing Jihad.
This is what Muslims do everywhere. Anyone else doing this would be accused of being a modern day colonist stealing looting and raping their way to power and land grabs — but the Muslims are doing this in the Philippines, in Indian Kashmir, in Chechnya, in Lebanon, in Israel, in Sudan and Ethiopia, in Kenya, basically anywhere and everywhere they raise the hideous flag of Islam.
Today, with the connivance of the U.S. both Democratic and Republican leadership, under the auspices of NATO and the EU, the Muslims have stolen another piece of land for Dar ul Islam.
It is a high crime — an atrocity — and the Serbs, after centuries of victimhood, are fully within their rights to fight, brutally if necessary, to repel this Jihad. Kosovo is part of the internationally recognized borders of a non-Muslim state known as “Serbia”. Just because Muslims have been successful in making life so difficult and dangerous for non-Muslims that they have been forced to flee does not and should never mean that the Muslims are then be rewarded.
But that is what has been done today in recognizing the freshly minted Islamic Nation of Kosovo. Most Western observers would be amazed to learn that this is simply another manifestation of Islam’s ongoing murderous campaign to rule the world — many would consider this preposterous.
But what will the answer be when Muslims, in a manner exactly similar to the genocidal way they’ve conducted themselves in Kosovo, demand and establish new Muslim nations in Lebanon, Philippines, Thailand, Chechnya, Paris, London, and Berlin? What will the answer then be from the insane and bankrupt Westerners who’ve allowed their minds and the interest of their nations to be so thoroughly corrupted by Arab and Saudi billions?
The world will rue the day we didn’t stop the Muslims dead in their tracks in the Balkans. This is only part of the long prologue of the ongoing Jihad to rule the world, one region, one neighborhood at a time. It is all Jihad.
“Schwartz was born in Columbus, Ohio. His father, Horace, was Jewish and his mother Protestant, but the family was not religious.[citation needed] Instead his mother was a member of the Communist Party, and his father he described as a “fellow traveler”. Schwartz was thus initially a Communist and supporter of the Soviet Union; later he would call himself a “red diaper baby”.”
Let’s call you Mr. Ex. With the past like the above you must have a few psychological issues. Is it psyche or maybe it is a monetary issue? Pay me and I will spin shi* kind of approach Mr. ex-supporter of the Soviet Union.
Man, I think you need your (Schwartz)head examined. You have some serious issues. Your hate (yes, I use a strong word like that) for the Serbian people IS SCARY!! Also, you’ve speculated most of your report without any credible sources. Especially, you part refereeing to:
“Serbs told the world for two centuries that they had defended the freedom of Europe against the Ottomans, when in reality they sold out to the Ottomans for the privilege of collecting taxes (the much-criticized Islamic cizye) from Christians under Islamic rule, and turned against the Ottomans only when Turkish power diminished and the Serbs feared the loss their status as tax farmers.”
What a crock! For staters, it wasn’t 2 centuries it was 5 and they never stoped fighting them. Christians converted yes, but that included Catholics and Christian Orthodox so they could live as first class citizens compared to non-converters who subdued to living in the villages, who weren’t aloud to be educated and paid heavy taxes to the Sherriff’s of the region – you know, a feudal system?? Of these conversions the Albanians were the heaviest. Tell me then, why do Serbs Christians still exist while the Christian Albanians are few and far between?? You’re not smart at all MATE?!!
You talk fascism; you obviously have a deep hatred for Slavs in genral through your writing! You are both one disgusting and despicable individual! This may come back to haunt you one day!
Seems like that Serbian bully in the first grade made a lasting impression on you there Marky. Whatever your little biggotry issues are please keep them to yourself. We do not need your silly little impressions of history. Try writing about something else ok? Serbia is NOT your subject.
“We do not need your silly little impressions of history. Try writing about something else ok? Serbia is NOT your subject”.
Whoaa, what a come back?? Who’s the biggot? Not the author of the article and yourself? No!!LMAO!!
Who ever wrote this article is quite simply completely ignorant to international politics and relations or has a seriously hate filled heart being directed solely towards the Serbs. This article is a total and utter joke which should never have made publication. It is journalists like you that ruin the integrity of intelligent, truth seeking journalists. This piece will honestly further make me sympathetic towards the Serbian cause.
Take it from someone trained to be a historian, you can’t just press stop on the historical process and point fingers. The lamentable fact is that both the Muslims and the Orthodox Christians have been fighting each other in the Balkans for hundreds of years. They have BOTH committed atrocities against one another and, if you ask anyone from either group, they would give you a good reason to hate their rivals–a reason that any reasonable person would agree with.
Thus, Mr. Schwartz, you are part of the problem. Historical and political amateurs like yourself jump in on one side or the other, agree with the Hatfields or the McCoys, and the rest of us are left wondering when it will ever end. True change will occur when the world demands that both the Muslims and the Orthodox Serbs bury their differences and negotiate a lasting peace. Until then, we can only ask you to stop causing further damage or, at the very least, cease writing articles that so obviously betray your religious background.
historian, the goal you state, “the Muslims and the Orthodox Serbs bury their differences and negotiate a lasting peace.” sounds honourable, but is as achievable of rolling a boulder up a hill to aid the sun rise.
Familiarize yourself with “Culture and Conflict in the Middle East” by McGill Professor Philip Carl Salzman.
The template for Islam is described, and it does not respect national borders.
David W. Lincoln:
Yes, I am sure this book is very worthwhile but I don’t need a book to tell me that Islam does not respect national borders. For that matter, Evangelical Christians do not respect the borders of Russia, which has traditionally been an Orthodox Christian nation. Religion is, and has always been, a transnational phenomenon.
My point is that those nations that have progressed beyond Medieval ideas of conversion by the sword should not give up on the idea of peace. The West has a unique opportunity to be in a leadership role here and the ball has been dropped by blaming the Serbs at every turn, instead of pointing the finger at both parties and enforcing the peace on equal terms.
Of course, I am in good company when I suggest that we continue to roll the boulder up the hill. The alternative to negotiation with an intransigent foe in yours and Salzman’s world is war–a Balkan style world war. Thus, I like Albert Camus suggest that we do not give up by allowing the boulder to roll over us and perhaps, during our fool’s errand, this growing portion of the world’s population will catch up to us philosophically.
Finally, someone who sees the facts and uncovers communism at its best. Spread propaganda, kill innocent people, rape women and glorify your actions as you commit atrocities. Then, at the end of the day, blame everyone else for what you have done.
Great article.
Well done Schwartz!! FINALLY SOMEONE WHO SPEAKS THE TRUTH RATHER THAN GOING ALONG WITH PRO SERBIAN PROPAGANDA WHICH BY THE WAY CHANGES EVERY SO OFTEN WITH EACH RETELLING!! It just goes to show no matter how much they try to conceal and manipulate the truth it will always come out.
They claim to be people of God but do not see the killing, rape and torture of Bosnians, Croatians, Albanians and other ethnic groups as genocide. They also have the nerve to paint others as Nazis through the constant spread of propaganda when Serbs themselves collaborated with the Nazis on many occassions such as in WWII when they carried out the first experiments in mass executions of camp inmates by poison gas and was the first city in europe to proudly declare itself ‘Juden frei’(Jewish free) as mentioned which is a well know fact!! Not to mention the pact they signed to proclaim their loyalty to the Nazis:
‘On 13 August 1941, approximately 500 distinguished Serbs signed ‘An Appeal to the Serbian Nation’, which called for loyalty to the occupying Nazis. The first three signers were bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church.’
Another piece of sick Serbian propaganda:
Serbian nationalist newspaper ‘Glas Javnosti’- known by its extreme radical rhetoric and publishings of Srebrenica genocide denial material – went one step further in its fascist propaganda by misusing photos of Bosniak Srebrenica genocide mass graves and portraying them as mass graves of Serb victims of the so called ‘Muslim-Croat terror’.
Sadly enough, this type of Serbian propaganda is widespread and unfortuantely is nothing new as Serbian Nationalists regularly praise Serbian war criminals such as Arkan, Mladic, Karadzic and Seselj as heroes, while Srebrenica Genocide is increasingly being awarded status of a big proud ‘military victory’ over the ‘Turks’ (derogatory name for Bosniaks Muslims) as well as other massacres against Croats in Vukovar, Lovas, Bacin, Skabrnja, Vocin, Borovo Selo,etc.
Serbia and Serbia alone since 1813 has constantly expanded in pursuit of the dream of a ‘Greater Serbia’ stretching from Bulgaria to the Adriatic Sea. It is a dream that has cost the lives of millions over the past century and one-half and brought the worst fighting to Europe since World War II.
How many more will have to die for Serbia’s dreams of empire remains to be seen???
OK so you call us killers.
3 000 dead Serbs in Srebrenica.
500 000 expelled Serbs from the Krajina region (CROATIA) in 48 HOURS.
1 000 dead Serbs in Kosovo in 1999.
You call us an ethnic cleanser:
1.Tell me the number of Serbs living in the Croatian cities of Vukovar, Knin and Osijek before and after the ’90′s conflict??
2. Tell me the number of Serbs living in present-day Sarajevo compared to pre-war Sarajevo..
3. Tell me the number of Serbs that live in Kosovo now compared to before 1999..
Please tell me what KOSOVO means in the Albanian language. In Serbian it means ‘Land of the Blackbird’. Albanians use a deformed version of the word which they say is Kosova…what does Kosova mean in albanian??NOTHING. If the name of the region is Serbian, if the Albanians call the region by a Serbian name, how can the region ever be theirs?
Is that the reason that they keep burning down ancient Serbian Orthodox Monasteries?? Dont believe me?? Go on youtube.com and you will see for yourselves.
You seem to think we hate Jews, BUT how many Jews died in the Croatian Ustasha Camp in Jasenovac?? Quite over 500 000 SERBS, JEWS and GYPSIES. That’s right our people got slaughtered together with the Jews.
You say the Chetniks supported the Nazis. Wrong again. They only made an agreement to stop fighting due to the fact that every German that was killed would result in 100 Serbs being killed. The Chetniks actually rescued over 500 Allied soldiers during WWII.
And while we are on this topic, please tell me the Jewish population in Sarajevo today compared to before the Balkan Wars..
You claim we expelled 2 million Albanians in 1999 from Kosovo, what was the population of Kosovo back then? 1.5 MILLION.
Judging by your article i think that you really need to take a new look on world affairs and maybe enrol in some further education on journalism. Biased views are never appreciated and especially if most of the “facts” that you provided have been proven to be fictious.
Stephen, you do need to realise that you sound like a pathetic propagandist. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have been paid to write this article by an Albanian group, or maybe your wife is of Croatian origin. But then again you seem to have Jewish heritage, surely your parents wouldnt have allowed a Croatian to marry into the family (due to Jasenovac).
Clean up your own yard before you think of cleaning somebody elses.
Serbia’s True Colours, Do you deny that Bosnians and Croatians also committed atrocities, massacres and rapes during the Bosnian war?
Do you deny Albanians have Murdered Serbs, ethnically cleansed minorities and attacked the property and churches of Serbs?
You repeat Schwartz’s slander that Serbs were somehow Nazi collaborators yet they were the biggest victims of Nazi genocide and its biggest enemy in the Balkans. Croatians, Bosnians, Albanians, Bulgarians and Romanians ALL had their own SS divisions, ONLY SERBS DID NOT.
If the Serbs were so guilty of anti-Semitism, then why were Serbs awarded the “The Righteous Among the Nations” title last year. It is the highest honor the state of Israel awards non-Jews, for helping save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. The Israeli Ambassador to Serbia, Arthur Koll, made the award. You might also wonder why Israel is such a massive investor in Serbia? It is because they Israelis know full well who did what in WW2 and the Serbs are acknowledged paragons anti-fascist virtue. It is the Albanians, Croats and Bosnians who have the shame of Jew hatred in on their hands.
Finally, you talk about Greater Serbia when just about every Albanian concedes in private that Kosovo may very well be the start of a Greater Albanian project. First Kosovo, then FYMR Macedonia, Montenegro…
You what is the biggest irony. It is thanks to Albanians in Kosovo that Greater Serbia might become an reality. Thanks to the Kosovo precedent, Northern Kosovo will join Serbia, as will the Republika Srpska and any regions of Montenegro that are majority Serb. It could be the 90s all over again, except this time the nationalist actually win thanks to Kosovo.
How does that sound to Serb-hater?
Schwar(t)z, that truly explains that tiny soul you have. Black. As a descendant from the family that most of the members during WWII parished in the flames of Jasenovac and Auschwitz death camps or fight all kinds of fascists, I can tell you one thing. Maybe some living will forgive you, but those who are dead will not.
Serb and Proud (all these Nazi Collabs)
Serbian Volunteer Corps
Chetniks
Serbian State Guards
ZBOR (Yugoslav National Movement “Zbor”)
Kosta Pećanac
How many Jews survived Serbia?
I agree with some points on this article, and I agree that is too one sided. The wars in the Balkans have been going on for eions. No one is squeaky clean as no none is an angel. Serbs, Croats, Albanians etc. have committed attrocities on each other. But in these lately wars Serbia has been the main perpetrator. They always had been expanding in other’s lands since they came and settled to the Byzantine lands by being allowed from the Byzantine Emperors to escape the Avars. Thats why Serbia’s “old” history is heavily influenzed by the Byzantine empire. Thats why they’re Orthodox. But they moved in lands that were inhabited by Albanians. No Serbian can explain that those lands were inhabitated by some other people. They claim that it was theirs to begin with. Its like the area was devoid with people. Yes Tsar Lazar’s Serbian Kingdom was extented further in Byzantine’s expense to Kosovo, Albanian, Bulgarian And Greek lands, but they invaded it and settled for a short time. Do the Serbian people want the return of the Zenith of the Serbian Empire conquests? If so then the Greeks can claim the whole Alexander the Great’s Empire, Albanians the whole Illyria, Britain, Spain and France to claim their World colonies, Scandianvians to claim Ukraine (as Kievan Rus were Viking tribes) etc. etc. Do not twist history to help the nationalistic ideas.
As for Kosovo attrocities, there have been killings on both sides. But I don’t think Serbian people were shown what Serbs have done to Albanians In Kosovo. They were denied the right to use their language, to go to schools, practice their religion freely, their autonomy granted to them in 1974 was stripped. I have Kosovar friends that told me that their Albanian friends and them were expelled from school simply for being Albanain and to quote on what the Serbian police told them: “This school is for Serbians only, not for Siptar dogs”. They had to be home schooled. Also they were aways regarded as 2nd class citizens since they were not slavs. Coluld Serbs live like that if it was bestowed to them? I went to Albania, Greece and Macedonia in 99 and saw the refugees living in tents and telling what happened to them by the Serb military. People need their rights to exist in order to coexist with their neighbors. Now not all Serbs are evil and radicals as they are portrayed in the media. I am Albanian I have Serbian friends and we always got along great. In high school I went to homecoming with a Bosnian Serb girl. They are very nationalistic people like most in the world. Granted that Serbia has moved forward into more moderate leadership and removed Milosevic from power, the Kosovars could not take the chance of having Serbian misrule again. The rule of the Radical Party is just as close as another vote. But previous governments have mismanaged and oppressed the Albanians to a point that there isn’t an easy coexistence between the Serbs And Albanians. Thus Kosovar Albanians cannot trust to being ruled as they were before. Can the Serbians revoke their right to remove the autonomy as they did before. What guarantee the Albanians have that the “new 95% autonomy” will not be revoked. Screw me once shame on you, screw me twice shame on me.
An outstanding display of ignorance the piece is both mean spirited, inaccurate and draws the wrong conclusions.
Congratulation on a fine hatchet job.
MikeL,that was sheer fantasy. First of all, the United States Establishment had been encouraging ethnic Albanian secessionist forces since the mid-1980s. For example, when U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, staged a commercial fair in Kosovo in 1990, the only leaders he met with were the secessionists – he publicly snubbed officials of the Serbian government. For a diplomat, this was like taking out a full page advertisement: “We Are Backing the Secessionists!”
And indeed the U.S. did support secessionists such as the so-called moderate, Ibrahim Rugova, who coercively organized Albanians to boycott culturally autonomous institutions (schools, hospitals) precisely in order to be able to tell the world the lie that “the Serbs” were not allowing ethnic Albanians to have culturally autonomous institutions. This is fully documented. When Washington decided it was time to launch an all-out terrorist attack on Kosovo, it simply created a more ‘extreme’ proxy force, the gangster-terrorist KLA.
If one were to compare Kosovo to the American south during the period of segregation, then it was the Serbs and ‘Gypsies’ who were in a position similar to that of black people; that is, they were victims of racism. The secessionists, whether ‘moderate’ or terrorist, were tied to the U.S. and Germany. They had the goal of breaking up Serbia. Their appeal was rooted in a) notions of ‘Greater Albania’ which had been especially fostered during World War II when their political forebears ruled Kosovo under German Nazi patronage and b) hatred of Serbs and ‘Gypsies’ which had also been fostered by the Nazis.
Sources quoted here are American scholars: Bernd Fischer, Julie Mertus (from her book: Kosovo: how Truths and Myths started a War) and Kosovar Riza Sapunxhiu: the highest ranking Yugoslav Albanian, ex-president of the SFRJ rotating presidency and ex-president of SFRJ’s economy, as well as US and UK newspaper & magazine articles, Serbia Telekom’s telephone directory and other secondary sources. In addition to the book, Albanian Identities: Myth and History, Mertus’ book, Kosovo: how Myths and Truths started a War.
The position taken here is that Communist Yugoslavia was a Croat/Slovene group-strategy that enlisted the help of Albanian and Bosnian Muslims as well as disloyal and opportunistic Serbs, from its founding in 1945 until the Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution of 1989 that saw Milosevic purge the League of Communists of Serbia and Montenegro of such members. In this section, we will address the ludicrous claims by Albanian nationalists that Communist Yugoslavia ever oppressed Albanians, either during Tito’s lifetime or any time afterwards.
I jump to post-1960 Kosovo and consult American scholar Julie Mertus:
…while the number of Serbs in Kosovo with jobs (26% of the total employed) was 12% higher than their share of the population. On the other hand, because more Serbs were seeking jobs, the Serbs share of the UNEMPLOYED in Kosovo was consistently higher relative to their share of he population. In sum, the economic situation in Kosovo was bad for everyone.
Julie Mertus
Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War
Page: 27
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/7681/faqe_mertus_27.jpg
One of the major complaints of Kosovo Albanians is that they were economically ‘oppressed’ within the Yugoslav economic system, while the Serbs allegedly had all the power. While one would expect that such claims by Albanian nationalists would awaken them to how badly Albanians had treated Serbs within the Ottoman power structure – it does not. The Albanian historical memory is deliberately conditioned by Albanian Muslim elites to be selective (see: Perpjekja 3). The evidence cited will show that Albanians were not only NOT oppressed within the Yugoslav Communist system – they were the oppressors.
It is necessary to consult Albanian experts in order to understand how the Kosovo economy really functioned and who really suffered from whatever forces shaped it and what those forces were:
The highest-ranking Kosovar economist, Riza Sapunxhiu, who in 1981 was vice-president of the economy, contends that any criticism of the state economy in 1981 was unwarranted. “We were doing everything we could” he says. “People were impatient.”
Julie Mertus
Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War
Page: 27
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/7681/faqe_mertus_27.jpg
Not only is Mr. Sapunxhiu a Kosovo Albanian and president of the SFRJ economy: he was also president of SFRJ for a year when he served on Yugoslavia’s rotating presidency in the 1980s. Sapunxhiu’s colleague, Dragomir Vojnic elaborates:
Vojnic attributes much of the developmental difficulties between the regions to a historical inheritance that could not easily disappear. The people who lived in Kosovo looked for a target for their frustrations.
Julie Mertus
Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War
Page: 27
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/7681/faqe_mertus_27.jpg
In other words, Kosovo was poorer than any part of Yugoslavia because it was the longest under Ottoman rule. This is something that the Muslim Kosovo Albanians were directly responsible for because of their complicity and support of the Ottoman system and their earlier resistance to secular Serbian education (see: section 1 above). Kosovo remained poor in spite of earlier Serb efforts to modernize the backward Albanian population.
Albanian bureaucrats who took control of Kosovo in 1968 caused most of the problems, after Tito gave the province near republic status, after Rankovic was accused of corruption on trumped up charges.
…many Serbs pointed to the waste, inefficiency and incompetence of the Albanian bureaucrats who took over in the 1970s, as well as the large Albanian family structure that greatly taxed social resources.
Julie Mertus
Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War
Page: 27
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/7681/faqe_mertus_27.jpg
After Tito removed Rankovic as Serbian president under trumped up charges, a policy of ‘affirmative action’ was instituted in Kosovo. As is usual with such policies that mask discrimination under the smokescreen of a petty euphemism: inefficiency resulted. Unqualified Albanians were promoted to posts held by qualified Serbs. This failed and worsened Kosovo’s economy because the Muslim Albanians had consistently shunned secular education during the inter-war period. Few Albanians were educated. The new Albanian leadership was responsible for the problems in Kosovo from 1968 to 1989.
Julie Mertus gives insight into how the situation was viewed by both sides:
Commentators on both sides said the situation was made worse by the exodus of experts from Kosovo, mainly Serbs and Montenegrins…
Serbs… contend that the experts had been forced out due to the discriminatory policies of Kosovo Albanians.
Albanians contend that the emigration resulted from “the loss of privileges they had enjoyed and their reluctance to accept equality with Albanians”
Julie Mertus
Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War
Page: 27
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/7681/faqe_mertus_27.jpg
Let us examine the Albanian POV:
“Albanians contend that the emigration (of Serbs from Kosovo) resulted from ‘the loss of privileges they had enjoyed and their reluctance to accept equality with Albanians’”
The only privileges Serbs enjoyed in Rankovic-era Kosovo was nominal equality with an Albanian population that had just collaborated with Adolph Hitler (see: Perpjekja 5) and had expelled 200 000 Serbs from Kosovo which Tito did not allow to return (see: Miranda Vickers: Between Serb and Albanian), participated in a 400 year oppression of Serb and other Balkan Christians, including Albanians, during the Ottoman era and shunned attempts by Serbia at multi-cultural, secular education in the interwar period (see: section 1 above).
As far as Serbs contending that “the Serbian experts had been forced out due to the discriminatory policies of Kosovo Albanians,” we have 30+ newspaper and magazine articles from such sources as: New York Times, The Herald-Tribune, the Sun-Times and other American and UK media pieces from the 1980s, that chronicle the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of 150 000 Serbs from Kosovo under the Kosovo Albanian leadership:
http://www.geocities.com/aia_skenderbeg/…...
Finally, regarding Kosovo’s economy: in reality Kosovo and Slovenia experienced the highest PROPORTIONAL growth compared to any republic in Yugoslavia:
http://www.photius.com...
As to allegations that Serbs will not accept equality with Albanians, one only need to examine Serbia Telekom’s telephone directory and search for common Albanian last names in bigger cities like Belgrade, Novi Sad, Nis in order to see that Albanians live so freely within Serbia that they are not afraid to list their names, address and telephone numbers:
http://www.telekom.yu...
Kosovo’s economy was mismanaged by unqualified Albanian authorities (installed by Tito after ’68) and that these authorities pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing against the Serb population that had survived Albanian oppression in Ottoman Times and WWII. Albanian claims of “oppression” in the Yugoslav communist system and under the Serbian monarchy are baseless and are nothing more than a smokescreen for the Muslim Albanian nationalist elites to promote Serbophobia, instability and separatism in order to maintain their grip on power (also see: Perpjekja 1 & 3).
Now, to address this a very one sided article drawn from very limited personal experience and worthless scholarship on Serbian-Albanian history, not to mention Schwartz’s failure to acknowledge in his many diatribes that he is a convert to the religion of Muhamad is obviously mendacious.
I am shocked to see respectable PajamasMedia allowing this self-loathing Jew-for Allah-spewing his hate .You lost a great deal of credibility in my eyes. Equally disgraceful, the PajamasMedia grants little to no access to your pages to any Serbian historian or journalists to give opposing views. This is hardly freedom of the press, the press is being used in this case to bludgeon Serbia’s cultural aspirations. And the attempt to turn Schwartz, a.k.a. Suleyman Ahmad, into an author and expert of Balkan matters will come to haunt all those helping him in his latest self-invention.
Schwartz uses his Jewish name in a cheap bid for instant credibility: if a Jew defends Muslims, surely he must have a point…? But even if his identity was not so murky, his arguments would still be rubbish; his history is simply wrong, and his conclusions are vacuous nonsense.
Schwartz or shall I call you by your Muslim name ‘Suleyman Ahmad’, you justify the theft of 15% of somebody else’s territory and then blame those robbed for revolting.We have in Serbia a situation in which the U.S. has forced an action –the proclamation of independence by the Kosovo Albanians — that is in clear violation of the most fundamental principles of international law after World War II!Borders cannot be changed by force and without consent .
What’s particularly gratifying in watching the Serbs protest and burn is that it shows the Serbs haven’t been completely coapted and turned into harmless little bootlickers. They have international law on their side, and they have history on their side, but the real question is whether or not they still have their souls. The protests , and the burning of the embassy, show that they do.
And what do America and their lapdogs get for all this? Johnny, let’s show the West their prize: Lovely Kosovo, a pre-fab failed Islamic state ruled by narcomafia thugs who successfully ethnically cleansed not only Christian Serbs but also the Roma (gypsies) and even fellow Muslims in the minority Gorani and Bosniak communities, for the simple reason that they speak Serbian rather than Albanian.
But wait, there’s more! If America and the West order this special Failed Islamic Kosovo State now, they’ll also get this special bonus offer: a total unraveling of the post-WW2 geopolitical order, with all sorts of enclaves demanding independence based on the “Kosovo Precedent,” from Cyprus, Israel and Georgia to Thailand and Sri Lanka, and all points in between! Isn’t that just swell! Because you know, America and the West really suffered awfully in those post-WW2 years with the way things were. Why not just fuck it all up and see how it turns up! Roll the dice, baby! You’re a gambler, aren’tcha? Why leave the table when you’re a million bucks ahead, when you can turn that million into 10 million, or 100 million!
Every shit-head who conned America into these humanitarian wars, from the David Rieffs and Thomas Friedmans to the Bill Kristols and Richard Perles, there’s a message for you in the flames rising from Belgrade’s US Embassy, a message from someone named “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.” It says here: “Thanks, dumbfucks–oops, I mean thanks, guys! Couldn’t have destroyed American power better myself if I tried. And believe me, I’ve tried! Drinks are on me–and heck, I don’t even drink! Ha-ha! Yours, The Mahmster.
After almost a decade of tacit support for Albanian separatists in the Serbian province of Kosovo, in 1998 the U.S. and some European capitals backed a terrorist movement that sought to achieve Kosovo’s separation by force – the KLA. An orchestrated diplomatic and media campaign of demonization described Serbia’s anti-terrorism campaign as “genocidal” and resulted in a blatantly illegal NATO invasion in 1999. The subsequent occupation of Kosovo, technically by the UN but in practice by NATO, has seen systematic violence against the lives, property, and culture of non-Albanians, Serbs in particular. Despite being in complete control of the province, neither NATO nor the UN have shown any inclination to stop, condemn, or reverse the consequences of this violence, the result of which is a 90-percent-plus Albanian majority that “democratically” demands independence and treats the remaining Serbs like the kaffirs of apartheid South Africa. Furthermore, Washington and Brussels have also backed armed Albanian groups in Macedonia and inner Serbia (Presevo valley), despite their terrorist tactics.
Evidence clearly shows that the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and afterwards was not a consequence of some imaginary “Serbian aggression,” but a pattern of aggression seeking to “balkanize” the region through the creation of compliant mini-states.
Any people, anywhere in the world, facing this set of circumstances would be hostile to the USA several times over. In fact, there are nations that ferociously hate the United States over far less. The Serbs do not, however – not yet, anyway.
If “the West” doesn’t care about Serb approval, why would it need Serb cooperation?! And if such cooperation was really needed, why did the West support the separation of Kosovo, knowing what sort of reaction it would produce in Serbia? Why has it continued to browbeat Serbia on every occasion, demanding ever more and offering absolutely nothing? why the continued flogging of Serbia, if it’s bound to bring the Radicals to power? And the only logical answer is that to the west it makes absolutely no difference whether the government in Belgrade is “tyrannical” or “democratic,” “ultranationalist” or “pro-Western.” To those who desire to “solve the Serbian question” by crushing Serbia, both sycophancy and defiance will be treated with equal hatred and contempt.
Once the people of Serbia understand they have nothing to gain by crawling , and nothing to lose by resisting its dictates, they will see the clarity of the choice facing them.
But why Kosovo, neutral observers might ask? Not surprising to me,Kosovo, province of Serbia is at the crossroads of highways, railways, riverways, oil and gas pipelines, and in that context the issue of Kosovo – though threatening and incendiary – becomes only part of a geopolitical jigsaw. Which is why I always emphasize the following: you cannot satisfy the extremely particular interests and 19th-century ideological demands of 1.7 million Albanians in Kosovo, while permanently frustrating eight million Serbs, who are the key to the long-term stability of Western Balkans.
Unbelievable biased article! Those Inconvenient Serbs, huh Mr. Schwartz? You know what I am talking about, if you do not let me refresh your memory.
No modern people have proven a greater inconvenience than the Serbs. They threw off two foreign yokes unaided – the Ottomans during the 19th century, and the Germans during the World War II. Out of pride and pig-headedness, Serbia refused to give up the Muslim-majority province of Bosnia to Austria, and the murder of the Austrian Crown Prince Ferdinand by extremists supported by Serbian intelligence sparked World War I.
After initial reverses, Serbia marched its army and a large part of its population over the mountains in mid-winter and regrouped, eventually throwing out the Austrian and German armies, at the cost of 28% of its total population and 58% of its men.
I do not wish to glorify Serbia’s history. John Keegan in his History of the First World War argues that if Austria had crushed Serbia immediately after the murder of the heir to its throne, world war might not have been the outcome. The broader interests of humanity might have been served by smacking down the Serbs on other occasions. This is not one of them.
Serbia has had a brutal history which has made its leaders brutal, as the world observed during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. But Serbian demands in the case of Kosovo today are limited and reasonable, namely a partition that serves the interests of the small Christian minority. I do not think Russia will let Washington make a horrible example of them in order to create an example of “US-Muslim partnership”.
If Washington does not modify its support for independence, the aftermath could be quite messy, namely a small shooting war between Christians and Muslims on European soil. “Soft Islamification,” in the words of Father Neuhaus’ French archbishop, may turn out to be no option at all.
It would be foolish to try to guess the outcome. After all, no one expected the inconvenient Serbs to become the casus belli of 1914. No one wanted the war; the generation of leaders that guided Europe in 1914 had spent a whole generation avoiding a general European war. No-one, least of all Russia, wants an open conflict with Muslims. But there are limits to what the Orthodox Christian world will tolerate, and they may have been reached in Kosovo.
If Serbia and Russia draw a line in the sand over the independence of Kosovo, we may observe the second occasion in history when a Muslim advance on Europe halted on Serbian soil. The first occurred in 1456, three years after the fall of Constantinople, when Sultan Mehmed II was thrown back from the walls of Belgrade, ‘The White City,’ by Hungarian and Serb defenders. The Siege of Belgrade ‘decided the fate of Christendom,’ wrote the then Pope Calixtus III. Not for nothing did J.R.R Tolkien name his fictional stronghold of Minas Tirith ‘The White City’…
Clinton, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke deluded themselves that they could cash in the chips earned in Kosovo at the negotiating table in the Middle East. The neo-conservatives cheered the Clinton bombing campaign, believing perhaps that any American show of force was better than no show of force.
Kosovo Albanians were also in the news last year, and for the reason many U.S. politicians would rather forget. On May 7, six Kosovo Albanian nationals (euphemistically said to be from “the Former Yugoslavia” by most American media outlets) were arrested in New Jersey in connection with a plot to penetrate Fort Dix and kill as many American soldiers as possible. Just as hypocritically, most of the media failed to mention the reason for which Fort Dix was chosen. It was there, at Fort Dix, that most of the Kosovo Albanian refugees were brought in during the campaign of the 1999. The Clinton administration (indeed, Hillary Clinton herself) on several occasion bragged about “generous American hand” helping poor Kosovars, oppressed by the Serbian savages. Some of the “Fort Dix Six” plotters were once those very same refugees. At least one of them was a fighter in the KLAthe ethnic Albanian guerilla army, firt considered a terrorist organization by the US State Department right up to the eve of the Kosovo war.
This wasn’t the first time in recent American history that gratitude was repaid in such a manner. Osama bin Laden was to a large extent the CIA invention for the purpose of fighting Russians in Afghanistan. This pattern persists: again and again the American establishment sought the support of various Islamist factions against Russians or Serbs, their fellow Orthodox Christians. There isn’t a single case of the Western establishment ever supporting the Russian point of view in disputes with other post-Soviet nations, and during the Yugoslav wars of the 90sexceedingly brutal on all sidesonly Serbs were vilified.
And yet neither Russians nor Serbs have attacked America. There was never a case of “Slavic terrorism” in the U.S., either in the Soviet or the post-Soviet times. Hollywood produces innumerable action flicks about “Russian Mafia” with nuclear bombs, as well as a crazy Serb in the Peacemaker, but it in reality nothing like this ever happened.
Now Western governments proclaimed independence for Kosovo, and are pushing Russia not to veto Kosovo’s independence in the UN Security Council. There is absolutely no reason why Russia should give in to these demands. The U.S. and EU want to appease the “Muslim street” (in light of their own misadventures in the Middle East) at the expense of the Orthodox Christians like Serbians and Russians? Thanks, but no thanks; what’s in it for us? It is up to Russia to explain to them in no uncertain terms that this won’t fly.
Full statehood for Kosovo will be clearly the justification of the further violence and ethnic cleansing. The European and American media want you to believe that somehow, if Albanians won’t get immediate independence, then the “hopes of the poor long-suffering Kosovo Albanians will be betrayed,” and the whole region will again explode in violence, which they obviously view as somewhat justified at least. These are the same people who have a shit-fit over Russia’s support for separatists in Abkhazia or Transdniester, as well as several other similar territories which also are demanding independence. The hypocrisy is staggering. Only those peoples sympathetic to Russia don’t deserve independence and are considered dangerous separatists, despite the fact that there has been relative peace in their statelets for years now.
Today more than a hundred thousand ethnic Albanians live inside Serbia proper, for the most part peacefully and without being brutally harassed. The same goes for Transdniester, where many ethnic Moldavians live. Despite a short nasty war in early 90s relations today are fairly amicable: there is a lot of intermarriage between Moldovans and Russians or Ukrainians, and economic contacts and trade between Transdniester and Moldova are growing. Transdniester in fact agreed to downgrade their independence demands to accepting broad autonomy within the Moldovan state, according to a plan brokered by Russia in 2003. Eventually the Moldovan government rejected even that, under pressure from the EU. In contrast, Kosovo Albanians petulantly reject anything short of total independence, yet somehow the Western governments are in complete sympathy with them.
Occasionally Kosovo explodes into renewed violence, such as in March 2004, when almost 40 people were killed. Albanians attacked several dwindling Serb settlements, burned ancient churches, looted stores and supplies provided by the NATO-led peacekeeping force. If not for the presence of these peacekeepers, the number of victims would have been much higher.
In contrast to that, for example, ethnic Russians living in the Baltic republics were incomparably more peaceful in spite of suffering serious discrimination. The first large-scale disturbances in post-Soviet times occurred in Tallinn two weeks ago, and only after the police broke up a peaceful demonstration of Russians defending the memorial to the war time dead, which the Estonian government viewed as a “symbol of occupation.” And that was enough for the Western media like the Economist, to squeal about a “Kremlin-orchestrated plot” that needs to be decisively defeated.
There is no point in Russia legitimizing this nonsense. Relations with the U.S. and Europe are clearly deteriorating, as the West has no clue how to deal with a stronger Russia that can stand up for itself and say “No! And the Western governments have only themselves to blame for that.
In 1998, I wrote to my Senators Bradly and Lautenberg to beg them not to support bombing/invading Serbia/Kosovo as this was a civil war which was, by most accounts, being handled more humanely than any other Balken conflict had been. (Turks used genocide to rid themselves of ethnic Armainians in 1912 in Turkey-3 Million dead.) Serbia said to ethnic Albanians housing the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army)”obey our laws or leave”. Then Serbs told the 1 million ethnic Albanians to leave and commited “ethnic cleansing” and started marching them to the border. Please note that the population was fairly evenly split at the time between Christian Serbs and ethnic Albanian Muslims. Today after ten years of involvment (with a promise of ONLY ONE YEAR) we have a Kosovo which has 90% ethnic Albanians with reports that the KLA is still launching attacks across the Serbian border with Kosovo. ( Will ethnic Serbian Kosovoians be given the “RIGHT TO RETURN” to their property in Kosovo like so many think is necessary in Isreal for Palestinians?) As recently as a few months ago, President Clinton stated that he had stopped genocide in Kosovo. I have researched this accusation and have yet to find any evidence of genocide in Kosovo. Some would say that more Serbs are dead because of this conflict than ethnic Albanians. Were are the bodies President Clinton??
I find it amazing that the left in this country continually rail against getting involved in an Iraq civil war but fails to see the same in Kosovo. How many troops do we have in Kosovo? How many have died in Kosovo? When will we get out of Kosovo, Bosnia, Hertsagovina,etc.?
Those of you that think that the EU and Russia will easily settle this are woefully uninformed. Kosovo is a mythological cradle of the Serbian culture dating back to the battle of the Field of Blackbirds against the Muslim Turks in the late 1300s. Malosevich, when campaigning for president of Serbia actually dug up the 600 year old blackened corpse of the Serbian general who lost the battle on the Field of Blackbirds in Kosovo, placed it in a glass coffin, and visited all the remote villages and cities in Serbia and it’s provinces and finnaly appeared on the 600th anniversary of the Battle on the Field of Blackbirds in Kosovo with the coffin to a throng of 2 million cheering Serbs. So I ask you, DO YOU THINK THAT TURNING OVER KOSOVO TO ETHNIC ALBANIAN MUSLIMS will promote peace in the area?? If you do you must be related to Madeline Notsobright! And how come the Muslims still hate us??
A touch more history or mythology provides the story that all Serbians know that the Serbian General who lost the battle 600+ years ago was visited by a dove who flew in from the direction of Jerusalem, turned into an Angel and asked the General if he wanted a heaven in heaven or a heaven on earth for his people. The Genaeral choose a heaven in heaven and thus did not deploy his troops but rather built monasteries (which are said to still exist in northern Kosovo).
Consider that some years from now (maybe not too long with this precedent and the illegals in the US) the ethnic Mexicans in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona have a slight majority in those states and start rebelling and want to free themselves from Washington DC rule and are in armed rebellion. The European Union tells our Federal Government that we will have to allow autonomy in these states and will have to allow them to vote three years hence on allowing them to realign with what ever government they choose or they will bomb Washington DC. Please consider the Alamo as our Field of Blackbirds. This is what we did to Serbia with the Romboulie (sic) accords. I submit that you would have armed groups traveling to these three states forcing the ethnic mexicans across the border or probably much worse.
The pity is that most Americans, including our elected officials, are woefully lacking in the above knowledge but I guess they are FULL OF HOPE AND DESIRE FOR CHANGE!! Well if Kosovo is any indication the Balkans at least will continue to be a firestorm and our troops will be there a lot longer than in Iraq/Afghanistan.
Shame on us!!!
PS- I have no ethnic interest or connection to the Balkans, I am just an interested citizen who studies issues seeking truth. I provided the above to my Senators in 1998 and left messages for them today.
Since NATO, at American instigation, has taken an interest in Kosovo we Westerners have been assaulted by a steady barrage of propaganda meant to convince us that our intervention in Kosovo is completely justified. The Serbs have been, more or less, portrayed as modern Nazis, vicious ethnic butchers led by their maniacal leader, President Milosevic. At the same time, the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo have been primarily described as hapless victims of Serbian aggression, completely blameless and innocent. The “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA) has been presented as a completely justified organization established to defend the helpless masses of Albanians in Kosovo against the ruthless Serbian onslaught. Of course, in serious publications dealing with international affairs, much of this propaganda has been blatantly debunked, but very little of this has been circulated widely in the mainstream press as the government still has to justify, and maintain public support for, an occupation of undetermined duration.
As has always been true, governments today still rely upon the ignorance of the people to allow it a free hand. Luckily for the governments of the West, especially the United States, ignorance of the Balkans is nearly universal. Very few people not directly connected to the Balkans in one way or another know anything about Yugoslavia and the Serbian people or Kosovo and the Albanian people. This ignorance not only allows the government’s propaganda to work but, more dangerously, allows the propagandists to actually rewrite history as they see fit. Therefore, the propaganda not only generates support for the government’s actions of today, but also vilifies an entire nationality and glorifies another for tomorrow. The problem with this is obvious to anyone familiar with Balkan history and Albanian history in particular. We, in the West, are setting ourselves up for a major disappointment as the likelihood of the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo turning against us as soon as the Serbian threat is under control is very good. As one major KLA leader put it, “If the West pushes the KLA to disappear, I will start to prepare people to work for the withdrawal of NATO.” 1 Or, perhaps more to the point, “The Albanians will not be disarmed by anybody anymore.”2
Now that we in the West have decided to endorse and support the KLA, this author feels that it is a worthy goal to take a deep and penetrating look at it. Where did they come from? What do they believe? What is it that they want to accomplish, especially now that Kosovo is occupied by NATO? How do they view us? What can we expect from them? While this essay isn’t likely to answer any of these questions beyond debate, hopefully it will shed some light upon the organization and help the reader form more informed opinions about our involvement in Kosovo.
General notes about Kosovo and its History
Kosovo, or technically Kosovo-Metohija, is a relatively small (10908 sq. km.) province of the Serbian Republic, which is part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It borders the now independent state of Macedonia on the south and Albania to the southwest, while within Yugoslavia it borders Serbia to the north and east and Montenegro to the northwest. According to the 1986 census, Kosovo had a population of 1.8 million people and more recent estimates place the pre-NATO population at just over two million. Ethnically, the population was broken down in 1981 to 77.4% Albanian, 13.2% Serbian, 3.7% Serbian speaking Muslims, 2.2% Rom (Gypsy) and 1.7% Montenegrin. 3 Current information becomes more difficult to rely upon because of the lack of stability since Kosovo had its autonomy revoked in 1989. According to some sources, generally those sympathetic with the Albanians, after the end of autonomy many Serbs began leaving Kosovo for political reasons resulting in the Albanians constituting a 90% majority by the middle 1990′s. However, according to other sources generally more sympathetic with the Serbs, while the Serbian population did decline in Kosovo between 1989 and 1991/2; this situation was quickly reversed with the arrival of Serbian refugees from the three northern republics (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, & Slovenia). This does actually make a bit more sense because after the revocation of autonomy, Serbs were allowed completely discriminatory advantages over Albanians in Kosovo. Population estimates also tend to support the contention that there was not a massive flight of Serbs resulting in their share of the ethnic percentage going down to around 4%.
The region known today as Kosovo has been a part of Serbia since the establishment of the first Serb state in the ninth century. The region derives the name “Kosovo” from the Serbian word for “blackbird” (i.e. “land of the blackbirds”) and is first noted in historical sources in the twelfth century as the center of the Serbian kingdom. Kosovo is the cradle of Serbian culture and even today is the home of the Serbian Orthodox Patriarchate of Pec which was established in the twelfth century. Most Serbian epic literature revolves around Kosovo, especially because of the famous Battle of Kosovo in 1389, where the Serbs, along with the Albanians, Bosnians, and Wallachians joined forces against the Ottoman Turks. Although the Battle of Kosovo is still remembered as a heroic fight, the Europeans lost and most of the Balkans fell to the Ottoman Sultanate.
Albania did not actually fall to the Ottomans until 1478, but not long after the Albanians nominally converted to Islam4. As Muslims, they were favoured by the Ottoman administration over the Serbs and other Slavic people who held strongly to their Eastern Christianity. Under the Sultanate, the fortunes of the non-Muslim Slavs varied depending upon the level of tolerance held by the reigning sovereign. The year 1690 changed much of this for the Serbs of Kosovo. In that year, the Serbs of Kosovo found themselves between giants during the war between Austria-Poland and the Ottoman Sultanate. As the Austrians swept into the Balkans, the Serbs opted to side with Christian Serbia against the Muslim Ottomans. In 1690, however, the Turks launched a successful counter attack against the Austrians in the Balkans, retaking Bulgaria, Serbia and Transylvania. As the Austrians retreated, most Serbs retreated with them fearing the inevitable reprisals of the Turks. Led by Patriarch Arsenije Carnojevic IV, the Serbs of Kosovo followed the Austrian Army in what became known as the “Great Serbian Exodus” with most of the refugees settling in modern Vojvodina. In the wake of the “Great Serbian Exodus”, the Turks began colonizing Kosovo with Albanians. While some Serbs did return, this is where the original Albanian majority in Kosovo originated.
Everything remained much the same for Kosovo as far as its official international position is concerned until the nineteenth century. Serbia acquired its independence in 1878, with Kosovo as part of it. Kosovo has been an integral part of Serbia proper ever since, except for a brief period when Kosovo as well as Western Macedonia were ceded by the Axis powers to Italian occupied Albania during the Second World War.
Albanian Nationalism and the Ideology of the KLA
Albanian Nationalism
In order to understand the ideology of the modern KLA, a general review of Albanian nationalism is deserved as so few actually understand the unique nature of Albanian nationalism. Unlike the nationalistic ideas of the West, and later most of the East as well, Albanian nationalism did not find its basis in cultural unity or liberal principles but instead was based almost exclusively upon ethnicity. Generally, in the West and elsewhere, ethnicity only came to play a significant role in other nationalisms as an extension of general ethnic bias based upon some further commonality, like shared language among the Pan-Germans and Pan-Slavs or, considerably later, the racial notions advanced throughout Central Europe based upon physical similarities. In Germany for example, the ethno-racial nationalism of the Nazis did not suddenly spring into existence, instead it was the end result of a process that began with Prussian nationalism advanced itself into Pan-Germanism and only much later evolved into racialism. In Albania, this was not the case as Albania’s isolation from the mainstream of European thought as well as its domination by conservative Islamic beys5 largely retarded Albanian national development. For this reason, a brief review of Albanian history is deserved so the reader can see how new Albanian nationalism really is.
Like most nationalities, the Albanians have a national mythology which creates a proud an ancient lineage for their people and their state. In the particular case of Albania, this national mythology is based upon alleged descent from the ancient Illyrians whose kingdom is first believed to have come into existence under the legendary King Hyllus c. 1225 BCE and survived until the reign of King Gentius who was defeated and captured by Rome in 165 BCE. While the unique nature of the Albanian language provides a bit of circumstantial support for this national myth, the origins of this idea do deserve a bit of further investigation.
While it could be true that the modern Albanians descend from the ancient Illyrians, the Albanians themselves appear to have had absolutely no knowledge of this until the later nineteenth century. With the Ottoman Sultanate’s power on the decline in the Balkans, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary began to play a much larger role in the Balkans, seeking to replace the Turks as the leading power broker in the region. While peoples like the Serbs and Croats, with their much further developed national ideas proved to be a constant problem for the Austrians, the Albanians did not. The Albanians that the Austrians encountered were a fractured people living in a hopeless array of pseudo-independent tribes and feudal microstates without even a unified language. The Austrians believed that if it could help mold the Albanians into a nation, this nation would serve as a valuable tool for further Austrian expansion and as faithful allies. Based upon this theory, Austria engaged in a number of activities meant to construct a unified Albanian nation, including creating the national mythology of the Albanians using the racial ethnology so popular in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Central Europe. Hence the Albanians suddenly became the descendents of the ancient Illyrians and Pelazgi, who of course were of “Aryan” racial stock, volksschwarm. This nineteenth century propaganda theory has become a fundamental pillar of Albanian national thought ever since.
Today, the only reason any serious scholars lend any credit whatsoever to the “Illyrian Theory” is because of the unique nature of the Albanian language which does suggest that it is a carryover of original Balkan aboriginal language. Even if we allow for this, there can be no doubt that the barbarian invasions of the fifth through eighth centuries firmly eradicated any links between the natives of Albania and the ancient Illyrians. Between these centuries, the Balkans were invaded by a succession of barbarian hordes- Goths, Huns, Avars, Serbs, Croats, Bulgars, and so on.
It is interesting to note that it was not until the eleventh century, after the barbarian invasions, that the Albanians are mentioned as such in history. The Albanian nationalists claim that the name “Albania” and “Albanians” is based upon the description given by the second century geographer Ptolemy of Alexandria who mentioned a tribe called the “Albanoi”. While this is obviously the origin of the term “Albania” it was neither coined nor used by the Albanians themselves. They refer to their land as “Shaqip” and themselves as “Shaqip’ri” and freely admit that the origin of this word has been lost to history. Aside from this distant mention of the “Albanoi”, the first historical mention of Albanians as such occurred in a report by the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus in 1081 CE. 6 There is nothing particularly odd about a Byzantine Emperor using a classical name to describe the natives of a particular area, especially if no other name was readily apparent.
Albania remained under Roman and Byzantine nominal rule until 1204 CE, however this rule was very nominal and mostly concentrated on the coast. In the interior, the Albanians remained divided into a patchwork of de facto independent tribal groups constantly at odds with one another. In 1204, Albania briefly passed to Venice with the Norman conquest of Constantinople and then quickly became part of independent Greek Despotate of Epirus and later became a Norman Kingdom founded by Charles I of Anjou, where it remained nominally under Naples until the coming of the Turks. In all this, there was no expression of Albanian nationalism whatsoever. The Albanians were relatively free to lead their traditional lives, fragmented into a myriad of tribes and Albanian loyalty was not to their ethnic group or culture but to their particular tribe. However, medieval culture had played a role in Albania and the tribes now also had to compete with patchwork of small independent feudal lordships, which came to somewhat replace the tribe as the focus of Albanian culture in the lowlands and coastal areas.
In 1385, the independent Albanian ruler of Durres, Karl Thopia, made a grave mistake which was to change Albanian history dramatically. He invited the Ottoman Turks into Albania in order to help him defeat his Albanians rivals of the Balsha family. From this introduction to the Balkans, the Ottomans began gradually expanding their foothold slowly conquering Albania one tribe or feudal lordship at a time. By the 1440′s almost all Albanians recognized the threat to their traditional lifestyles and religion posed by the Turks. In 1443 an Albanian general who was trained by and served as an Ottoman officer, Gjerg Kastrioti, managed to unite the various petty lords and tribal chieftains of Albania under his command to resist the Turks. “Skenderbeg” as he became known, led a highly successful resistance to the Turks and created the very first de facto independent Albanian State. Between 1443 and 1468 “Skenderbeg” kept the Turks at bay and became a hero across Christiandom. The famous black two-headed eagle on a red field banner, the national emblem of Albania, was his family’s banner. This brief period represented the first and last expression of anything approximating Albanian nationalism until 1878.
After the collapse of “Skenderbeg’s” Albanian resistance, Albania quickly fell to the Turks. Under the Turks, Albania still maintained a degree of autonomy for a while but this was later ended when the Turks instituted the timar system to Albania. 7 Under this system, notable military commanders from throughout the Sultanate were awarded landed estates in Albania and the retired officer would become a pasha. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also saw a massive campaign on the part of the Turks to convert the Albanians to Islam. While many Albanians converted to Islam voluntarily hoping to win the favour of their Ottoman overlords, many others were forcibly converted by the Turks.
It was during these campaigns to convert the Albanians and the institution of the timar system that the Albanians divided into their two primary groups, the Ghegs and the Tosks. According to the Albanian national mythology this division has existed since ancient times with the Illyrians being the forefathers of the Tosks and the Pelazgi being the forefathers of the Ghegs. In truth however, this division did not exist until the Ottoman period and happened as a direct result of Ottoman activities in Albania. In the face of Ottoman oppression, some Albanians opted to flee into the rugged wilderness of the northern mountains. These Albanians became the Ghegs, living in traditional tribal units and leading a pastoral existence almost completely free from Turkish intervention and administration. Other Albanians, however, opted to remain in the lowlands under the Turks, serving a peasant labour for the Turkish pashas. These became the Tosks and led a considerably more stable lifestyle than the Ghegs. The isolation of the two groups led to the distinct dialects that define Ghegs and Tosks.
Everything remained pretty much the same until 1878, which was the exact year that Albanian nationalism was born. Before looking at the events that led to the creation of the “Albanian League of Prizren”, we should look at the status of the Albanians in latter nineteenth century.
At the time, the Albanian people were all under at least nominal Ottoman control. The lands inhabited by the Albanian people were divided between the four Turkish vilayets (provinces) of Kosova, Shkodra, Monastir, and Janina. Albanian society was divided along both cultural (Gheg and Tosk) lines as well as religious lines (Sunni Muslim, Bektashi Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic). Albanian society was dominated by conservative Islamic religious leaders and landed beys who had a virtual monopoly on education among Albanians. Even the much flouted Albanian language did not in fact constitute a single unified language, being deeply divided by not only a myriad of regional dialects and the lack of an alphabet, but also the fact that the Turks suppressed the Albanian language. 8 All said, there was no basis whatsoever for the creation of an Albanian nation except the abstract ethnic connection. Otto von Bismarck was not mistaken when he claimed in 1878 that there was no such thing as a Albanian nation.
1878 was a year of great importance to the Albanians. With the conclusion of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, the Congress of Berlin decided to cede the Albanian regions of Gusinje and Pllav to the Principality of Montenegro, thereby removing a portion of the Albanian population from the Ottoman Sultanate. This proved to be the spark that led to the birth of Albanian nationalism. A group of about eighty leading Albanian writers and leaders gathered together at Prizren and founded the “Albanian League” as well as issued the “Prizren League Program of 1878″ meant to express the demands of the Albanian people to the Congress of Berlin. The Program demanded that all Albanians be united into one territory (which was the birth of the ‘Greater Albania’ notion), and that this territory be allowed full autonomy within the Ottoman Sultanate. It also demanded a right to the taxes collected, schooling in the Albanian language, and religious freedom. Although the Program had little effect, it did represent the birth of Albanian nationalism and the very first time that the Albanians had tried to state their national aspirations. However, the Albanian League was still dominated by conservative Islamic landowners, hence Albanian nationalism was born on a conservative base and only held together by encouraging ethnic chauvinism as ethnicity was the only basis upon which an Albanian nation could claim to exist.
As the influence of the Ottomans began to wane in the Balkans, Austria-Hungary decided to put forth a comprehensive effort to replace the Sublime Porte as the leading power in the Balkans. As mentioned earlier, the Austrians saw the disunited scattering of Albanians as a valuable potential tool in its desire to expand its influence in the Balkans. Here was, more or less, an non-national ethnic group that could be molded by the Austrians into a nation in order to help Austria-Hungary. As already mentioned, the entire “Illyrian Theory” was created by Austria in order to provide the Albanians with the pre- requisite national mythology needed to create a nation. However, this was only one aspect of the Austrians efforts to form a new cohesive Albanian nation. Vienna launched a series of cultural initiatives directed toward the Albanians. Among these initiatives Vienna began publishing various books perpetuating both the new national mythology but also romanticizing Albanian history. They created the first Albanian coat of arms and encouraged the use of “Skenderbeg’s” family standard as the Albanian national flag. Austria also began publishing various grammars in order to unify the many dialects spoken by Albanians as well as contributed to the adoption of the Latin based alphabet which was formerly adopted in 1909 as Albanian’s first standard alphabet.
The ideology of Albanian nationalism remained almost exclusively based upon ethnology even though by means of Austrian aid, a real Albanian nationality was slowly starting to emerge. This, however, was largely centered in Albania proper and was slower to spread in the Albanian populated areas of Serbia and Macedonia. After Austria’s defeat in the Great War, Albania proper came under the influence of Italy, while the newly formed Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia), took over administration of Kosovo and Macedonia. Considering the ethnic nature of Albanian nationalism, it cannot be surprising that so many Albanians supported first fascist Italy, and with Italy’s defeat, Nazi Germany. After all, armed with their Austrian created national myth, they could claim to be of good “Aryan” stock. The pro-Italian Albanian premier, Mustafa Merlika Kruja, managed to reduce Albanian opposition to the Italians and many Albanians joined Fascist formations, including four legions of Fascist Blackshirts formed for home duty in Albania as well as the Albanian Royal Guard, which was sent to Italy to serve as part of King Vittorio Emmanuele II’s royal body guard.
In 1940/41 many Albanian nationalists began to fully adopt not only Italian fascist organization, but also ideology. After the defeat of the Balkans, Kosovo, for the first time in its history was joined, with other territories, to Albania proper. The only time there has ever been a ‘Greater Albania’ was during this period. Albania at this time had two partisan resistance movements, the Communists led by Enver Hoxha and the Balisti which was a Muslim movement based in northern Albanian and Kosovo. The Balisti, while opposed to the Italians, supported the Germans against the Communists after the German occupation of Albania in 1943. It was these northern Albanian and Kosovo Albanian collaborationists who were later formed into the short lived “21st Albanian-SS Mountain Division “Skenderbeg” and these were the same Albanians who rounded up and exported the entire Jewish community of Kosovo to the German camps in the north. All said, over 32,000 Albanians, especially from the northern mountains, Kosovo, and Macedonia fought for the Axis cause. 9
The fourth and final major influence on modern Albanian nationalism came from the victory of Communism in the East. Kosovo and Macedonia again returned to Yugoslavia which angered many Albanian nationalists, but in the immediate post-war situation, most nationalists had either fled into exile, been executed, or gone underground. In Albania proper, Enver Hoxha established a Stalinistic dictatorship that would last until 1990. In Yugoslavia, however, Tito came to power, and though Communist, he soon had a falling out with the Soviet Union and was expelled from the Comintern. Being the sole non-Soviet satellite East European Communist country, the Soviets encouraged the Hoxha’s Albania to stimulate nationalist sentiments among the Albanians of Kosovo and Macedonia. This Hoxha did, unabated until his death in 1985. In turn, many Yugoslav Albanians, especially post World War II ones, began to look to Hoxha as a role model of unadulterated Communism as opposed to the Yugoslav regime which was viewed as a perversion of Communism.
Looking back, we can see that not only was the Albanian desire to maintain ethnic solidarity the spark the launched Albanian nationalism in 1878, but it is the only continual factor running through the history of Albanian nationalism. The four formative factors of modern Albanian Nationalism-the desire to remain unified under the Ottomans (1878-1881), the Austrian creation of the Albanian nation (1878-1914), the experimentation with Fascism (1920′s-1945), and the adoration of Enver Hoxha (1945-1985)—have all had only one common thread, the desire for the creation of a “Greater Albania”. As we will see, little has changed.
The Ideology of the KLA
Conventional wisdom tends to suggest that the KLA is essentially a Marxist-Leninist group, however, in truth this is not really an accurate statement. While it is certainly true that various Communist ideas have played an important role, at least among KLA political leadership, both their origins and actions tend to suggest that ideology is of considerably lesser importance than the basic ethno- nationalist goal. When trying to describe the KLA ideology, Chris Hedges said it displayed “hints of fascism on one side and whiffs of Communism on the other….”10 In view of the very practical nature of the KLA and its apparent willingness to utilize any ideological angle to further their own goals, this is probably the best one line description of KLA ideology to be found.
Even now, Communists still like to claim that the KLA is a strictly Marxist-Leninist organization, even though as we will see, this is not really true. “The original core [of the KLA] was made up militants who were fascinated by the unadulterated Marxism of Enver Hoxha in nearby Albania. They took part in the student’s protests of Pristina in 1981….”11 This observation is partially true, as certainly of few of the Kosovo Albanian leaders of today were, and are, diehard Marxists who participated in the demonstrations of 1981. One of the Kosovo Albanian representatives to the peace talks in France, Hydajet Hyseni, was one of the leaders of those student protests in 1981. Even though he is not really a member of the KLA, he is a leading member of the United Democratic Movement, the LBD, which has close ties to the KLA’s Political Bureau. However, like so many of the Albanian Nationalists, it should also be remembered that the same Hydajet Hyseni was also once a vice-president of the nationalist Democratic league of Kosovo, the LDK, led by Kosovo’s most famous anti-Communist writer and political leader, Dr. Ibrahim Rugova. 12 This mixing of Communism, anti-Communism, and ideological neutrality seems to be a major aspect of the KLA leadership, strongly suggesting that the KLA has an official policy of wearing whatever face is most likely to be accepted depending upon their audience.
Although we will go into it in further detail later, LPK13 was an integral part of what later became the KLA. The LPK was established when a number of illegal Kosovo nationalist/Communist organizations merged together in the wake of the 1981 student demonstrations. At the time of the LPK’s formation it was an exclusively Communist organization which received financial and other backing, inherited from some of its constituent organizations, from Hoxha’s Albania. While we’ll go into this in further detail below, the reason this is mentioned now is because as long as the Kosovo Albanian militant resistance could only secure backing from Communist Albania, it remained Communist. After the collapse of Communism in Albania, the LPK also renounced its Marxist-Leninism as well. As we’ll see later, the KLA has gone so far as to have an active alliance with the nationalist anti-Communist former President of Albania and present Albanian rebel, Sali Berisha.
Anyway, the LPK was, and is, one of the primary sources for what became the KLA. The LPK was established to be a terrorist organization based upon the general example of the Irish Republican Army, and a large percentage of the KLA’s leadership, not only the political leadership, but also the military leadership began as LPK activists. Because so much of the KLA leadership started out in the LPK, it is somewhat fair to say that the KLA had its origins in Communism.
This conclusion, however, completely over looks the very serious contribution of the Democratic League of Kosovo, the LDK. The LDK was formed by a group of scholars led by Dr. Ibrahim Rugova, who is universally recognized as Kosovo’s leading anti-Communist writer. The LDK was established in the wake of the loss of autonomy for Kosovo in 1989 and quickly became the primary political formation of the Albanians in Kosovo as most other political parties among the Albanians joined the “Council of Political Parties” which was also headed by Rugova. While admittedly, few of the KLA’s militants have origins in the LDK (Rugova being noted as strong defender of ‘passive resistance’ techniques), much of its political leadership does.
So KLA has two, relatively opposed, points of origin, one Communist the other anti-Communist. This allows the KLA to present whatever face is more likely to be accepted to outsiders. The question becomes, with such a diverse range of ideological perspectives represented within the KLA, what is it that unites these Albanians into a cohesive force against Yugoslavia?
The answer to this question is the same as it has always been, the ethno-nationalist desire to create a “Greater Albania”. Looking back, this has been the sole unifying factor of Albanian nationalists since 1878 and nothing has really changed. From one of the new leaders of the KLA-spawned PBD14 the former KLA representative to London, Pleurat Sejdiu laments, “We know we can’t achieve independence for Kosova right now, or unite all the Albanian lands. It’s not realistic right now.” 15 Or, as leading KLA spokesman Jakup Krasniqi made crystal clear, “We want more than independence: the reunification of all Albanians on the Balkans.” 16 None of this is particularly new, if one so desired, one could find similar quotes endorsing “Greater Albania” by virtually the entire KLA leadership, both political and military, as well as the vast majority of the voluntary rank and file.
Bear in mind also, that “Greater Albania” does not just include Kosovo and Albania proper. There is at present a map in circulation among KLA supporters, including the Albanian-American Civic League (AACL), which depicts the desired “Greater Albania”. The Albanian nationalists are not just after Kosovo, but slices of Serbia proper, a slice of Montenegro, a huge part of Macedonia, as well as a portion of Greece. 17 More than this, as we’ll see later, not only is this the KLA ideal, but it is one upon which they have already begun working on in neighboring Macedonia as well.
Ultimately, one must conclude that while individual members of the KLA may hold strong ideological beliefs of one persuasion or another, the KLA as a whole does not. The sole unifying factor appears to be the ethno-nationalist desire for “Greater Albania” as has been the case throughout the history of Albanian nationalism.
History of Albanian Nationalist violence and the KLA
The KLA is the end result of a long line of Albanian irredentist terrorist organizations. Violence, on one scale or another has accompanied Albanian nationalism since its inception at Prizren in 1878. In this section we will review the evolution of Albanian militancy and show the KLA’s descent from it.
With the formation of the Albanian League in 1878, the writers and scholars who originally formed the League quickly spread word of its formation among the various Albanian communities within the Balkans as the delegates returned to their homes after the conference. While this idea was only moderately accepted by the more conservative beys, it received a much more enthusiastic welcome from the northern tribal chieftains who formed an alliance which successfully repulsed the Montenegrins from claiming the Albanian populated regions awarded to it by the Congress of Berlin. This early alliance was also endorsed and supported by the Sublime Porte which armed, trained, and otherwise supported the Albanian guerillas. However, in 1880, after the Western powers opted to grant Montenegro Dulcigno instead of the Albanian populated regions of Gusinje and Pllav, the emphasis shifted away from the Albanians. With this shift of emphasis, the Sultan no longer had any use for the Albanian League, and actually began to view it as a threat to the stability of the Ottoman territories within the Balkans. In 1881, Sultan Abdulhamid II lauched a military operation against the League and completely crushed it, or so the Turks had hoped.
The Albanian League, suddenly losing not only its backing from the Sultan, but also being banned and repressed, went underground in reaction. This did not, however, mean that the militants returned to their homes and gave up the struggle, nor did it mean that they had lost their interest in unifying all Albanians into a single entity. This was also the period in which the Austrians were molding the Albanian people into a nation, which only encouraged further Albanian nationalist agitation against the Turks. With the collapse of the Sultanate and the rise of the Young Turks to power in 1908/9, the repression against Albanian nationalism suddenly took on a more enthusiastic guise by the Turkish nationalists. This pushed the Albanian League into action once again. Knowing that the Turks were in disarray, having the tacit approval of the Austrians, and a newly built and repressed nationalism to express, the Albanian League again opted for armed resistance against the Turks. The revolt began with a major Albanian insurrection April through June of 1910 and was quickly and brutally crushed by means of a large Turkish Army. Although the Albanian insurrection mostly collapsed under the weight of Turkish military superiority, resistance continued, mostly terrorist in nature. With the outbreak of the First Balkan War in 1912, the Albanians, still led by the Albanian League again revolted and declared the very first fully independent Albanian state in the history of Albanians. Of course, the new Albanian state was basically created by the intervention of Austria-Hungary who quickly occupied Albania at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.
The end of the Great War saw the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the rise of Italian influence in Albanian proper. The Italians quickly made themselves unwelcome and some resistance began against them. With the help of Yugoslavia, an Albanian chieftain, Ahmed Zogu, became president of the republic of Albania in 1924, and four years later became King Zog I of Albania. At the same time, in Kosovo, nationalist agitation to join Kosovo to Albania found expression in the creation of the fully terrorist “Kosovo Committee”. So while the Serbs were helping establish Ahmad Zogu in Albania to counter Italian influence, the Albanians within Yugoslavia were organizing terrorist groups. With the final departure of the Turks from the Balkans, Serbs again began resettling Kosovo, frustrating Albanian attempts to create a situation in which Yugoslavia would have no choice but to surrender Kosovo to Albania. Albanian terrorism in kosovo began to increase as more Serbs began to return to Kosovo.
With the rise of Mussolini in Italy, the “kosovo.netmittee” found patronage from Italy in order to advance the Italian desire to cause trouble for Yugoslavia. Although most Albanians in Albanian proper resisted the encroachment of Fascist Italy, the Albanians of the “Kosovo Committee” had no such inhibitions, being that they had never lived under Italian domination before. With Italian patronage, the “Kosovo Committee” grew steadily more violent in their efforts to drive the Serbs as well as everyone else of non-Albanian ethnicity, out of Kosovo. At Italian instigation, the “kosovo.netmittee” formed and alliance with the pro-Bulgarian (Axis) VMRO in Macedonia, as well as the pro-Nazi Croat Ustashi, in order to launch joint attacks and share intelligence against Yugoslavia. The ‘kosovo.netmittee” grew even stronger after Italy invaded and annexed Albania proper in 1939. With the German conquest of Yugoslavia in 1941, Kosovo and part of Macedonia were ceded to Italian occupied Albania, creating the first and only “Greater Albania” to ever exist.
The Italians, generally despised by Albanians since the end of the Great War in 1918, presented a major problem for Albanian nationalists. Some nationalists opted to shy away from nationalism, adopting the Communism of Hoxha and the other Communist partisan leaders, converting their ethnic nationalism into Leninist style class nationalism. Among the nationalists who refused to part with the ethnic basis of Albanian nationalism, a division occurred between the pro- and anti- Italian factions. The pro-Italian nationalists ended up serving in the puppet Albanian national Army, the Italian Fascist Blackshirt legions, or the various Italian backed police and anti- partisan formations. The anti-Italian nationalists ended up forming the anti-Communist, anti-Italian Balisti political/partisan movement. This division among the the pro- and anti- Italian nationalists continued until the fall of Italy in 1943. With the collapse of Italy, Germany occupied and assumed control of “Greater Albania”. With the coming of the Germans, both the pro-Italian Albanian Fascists and the anti-Italian Balisti nationalists joined with the Germans to oppose the Hoxha’s Communist partisans. With the collapse of the Axis, many Albanian Fascists escaped the Balkans settling all over the West where many of them set up emigre organizations that survived through the Cold War in one guise or another. Those who didn’t escape continued fighting knowing that they had nothing to expect from either Hoxha or Tito except execution. One fascist band, “Saban Paluza” continued its resistance in Kosovo until 1951.
With the rise of Communism throughout Eastern Europe and the division of the world into the two opposing sides of the Cold War, Albanian nationalists adopted the lingo of Communism and laid low for a few years. However, Tito’s refusal to become a Soviet puppet resulted in Yugoslavia being expelled from the Comintern in 1948 and Yugoslavia opting to build closer relations with Western Europe. In view of this insolence, the Soviets encouraged Hoxha to use the Albanian nationalists of Kosovo as a means of destabilizing Yugoslavia. In accordance with this initiative, Hoxha began seeking out Kosovo Albanians to support against Tito. However, it wasn’t until the 1960′s that this policy really began to start causing Tito problems, with the ‘Revolutionary Committee for the Liberation of Kosovo.” Taking advantage of the turmoil among young students and other dissatisfied people in Kosovo, the 1960′s saw a dramatic growth in not only the number of Kosovo Albanian terrorist groups, but also an escalation in general nationalism. This trend reached major proportions in student led demonstrations throughout Kosovo in 1968.
The granting of autonomy to Kosovo in 1974 quieted down the demonstrations and mass agitation, but also encouraged the serious nationalists to continue their resistance. The 1970′s and early 1980′s saw the rise of a myriad of Communist based, Albanian nationalist groups in Kosovo. Among these were five significant groups, the “National Liberation Movement of Kosovo and Other Parts of Yugoslavia”, “Kosovo Marxist-Leninist Organization”, “Communist Marxist-Leninist party of Albanians in Yugoslavia”, “Red National Front”, and the “Popular Movement for the Republic of Kosovo”. In the wake of the major student demonstrations in Kosovo in 1981, these five groups merged into one new organization, the aforementioned “Popular Movement for Kosovo” or LPK. As noted above, the LPK was one of the primary parents of the KLA.
As for the KLA18 itself, it has been claimed that it was first formed in either 1991 or 1993. However, its first notice in the West occurred in 1996 when it claimed responsibility for a series of minor sabotage bombings in Kosovo. At first, Rugova and the LDK thought that it was a Serbian front serving an agent provocateur role in Kosovo in order to justify further Serbian aggression against the Albanians. Rugova, being a pacifist, flatly rejected the KLA at first. At the time, the LPK was tame, following Rugova’s lead and refraining from violence. However, it would seem that a large number of LPK activists were ready to fight, so they entered into alliance with the original KLA under Adem Jashari and quickly came to dominate the organization with their greater experience and resources.
The KLA inside Kosovo
Being that the KLA is obviously considered a criminal organization to the Yugoslav officials in Kosovo, it cannot be surprising that that there are two distinctive realms of KLA activity, one inside Kosovo and the other outside. The following two subheadings will look at the KLA as it exists inside and outside of Kosovo.
Unlike some of the earlier terrorist organization in Kosovo who were essentially outside creations from Albania, the KLA appears to be an entirely Kosovo Albanian creation. After a decade of Rugova’s passive resistance campaign failing to accomplish much for the Albanians of Kosovo in the face of serious Yugoslav oppression and discrimination, it cannot be surprising that such a group would come into existence there.
The KLA started out as a purely terrorist organization in Kosovo attacking Yugoslav targets by means of bombs and small scale assaults against policemen and village officials. The KLA learned the lesson of earlier Kosovo terrorists that the Serbs could be provoked into over reaction when confronted with particularly outrageous attacks. Examples of this abound, such as September 2, 1987 when an Albanian terrorist, Aziz Keljmendi sneaked into a Yugoslav military barracks and murdered four conscripts in their sleep and wounded several others. The Yugoslavs reacted by launching a series of raids against largely innocent Albanian political activists, agitating the Albanian populace undeservedly. Hence, it has been reported, “For several months, the Kosovar guerrilla has been pushing the Serbs across the fault line by multiplying its attacks against individual police officers. Thus it tries to provoke a massive reaction by the forces of Milosevic. This strategy is classical….”19 In the case of policemen, according to official Yugoslav statistics, between January 1 and August 30, 1998 there were 616 attacks against individual policemen in Kosovo, wherein 74 of them were killed and 282 seriously wounded. 20
The KLA understood, at least prior to the NATO occupation, that although it had evolved by that time into a large and strong guerilla army, it was simply not strong enough to hold its ground against the Yugoslav military. Hence, the KLA intentionally participated in operations meant to provoke the Yugoslavs into a response so that they could show the world how they were the victims. In accordance to this policy, the KLA has intentionally carried out attacks against Serbian civilians in order to generate terror and encourge the Serbs of Kosovo to leave. A fine example of this is the widespread kidnapping of Serbian civilians. While sometimes kidnapped civilians are returned in exchange for the family leaving their home, many times this is not the case, such as the twenty two kidnapped Serbs found in the mass grave near the village of Klecka in 1998. Otherwise, the KLA will often simply round up all the Serbs of a particular village, murder or maim the able bodied males and send them walking through the war zone toward the nearest Yugoslav military position.
As the reader might not be too surprised to learn that the KLA has used atrocity and violence in an attempt to expel the Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo; it might come as more of a surprise to learn that the KLA also actively attacks all other non-Albanian ethnic groups in Kosovo. This policy is in direct accordance with their professed aims turning Kosovo into an entirely Albanian province for later joining to Albania proper without the problem of adding new national minorities to “Greater Albania”. The KLA not only attacks Serbs and Montenegrins, but also Rom (Gypsies), Serbian speaking Moslems, Turks, and especially non-supportive fellow Albanians and Albanian Roman Catholics. Incidents such as the April 14 beating of an Albanian man and the brutal gang rape of his wife in the village of Budrsavci, because the man voted in Yugoslav elections are not uncommon. The KLA has flatly declared that any participation in Yugoslav institutions constitutes a punishable offence.
Regarding the KLA treatment of fellow Albanians, the KLA has, by strength of arms, more or less assumed the right to rule all Albanians within its territory. Many in the West have mistakenly interpreted the massive swelling of the KLA ranks in the last few months as a sign of massive popular support for the KLA. This is not really true as it has been severely under reported in the West that the KLA has instituted a policy of forced conscription. As reported in the April 1st edition of the Chicago Tribune, immediately after NATO started its bombing campaign, the KLA ordered all Albanian men of fighting age (18-55) to “join its ranks within one month or face unspecified consequences”. Many of the Albanian men being evicted by the Yugoslavs were forcibly recruited by KLA press gangs immediately after entering KLA controlled territory. Of course, this is the treatment reserved for Albanian Muslims, Albanian Catholics merely have to fear random beatings and the occasional massacre at the hands of the KLA. A fine example of this being the August 6th massacre at the village of Mece where four Albanian Catholics were dragged into the street and executed.
Using arms and equipment taken from Yugoslav forces as well as imported from Albania, the KLA has evolved into a full fledged guerilla insurgency, but even at that, they are not a match for the well trained and equipped Yugoslav military, or the Serbian paramilitary formations, many of which gained combat experience in the war in Bosnia. Therefore, although the KLA can present the face of a legitimate national liberation movement to the Western reporters, inside Kosovo, many of their actions are still those of simple terrorists.
The KLA outside of Kosovo
The KLA outside of Kosovo can be divided into two major divisions, the network built up to support the fighters in Kosovo and the KLA military assaults against neighboring Macedonia. Not surprisingly, the KLA support network is primarily based in Albania proper, with important sections being based elsewhere in the West.
The KLA has devised an excellent financial network in order to back its operations in Kosovo. This network is based upon the Domovina Zove, foundation established in Switzerland and having branch offices throughout Western Europe as well as the Kosovo “Government- in-exile” based in Bonn, Germany. The Domovina Zove was designed to serve as a fund raising network for the KLA raising money from contributions made by Albanians living and working in Western Europe. This entity uses the Dardania Bank in Tirana to filter in money raised in the West for use by the KLA. The ‘Government-in-exile” based in Germany is not officially part of the KLA, but instead serves as the primary Western financial institution of the “Kosovo Government” under the presidency of Rugova. The official “Government of Kosovo” has imposed a three percent income tax on all Kosovo Albanians living abroad. These funds are handled by the “Government- in-Exile” based in Bonn, and transferred, when needed to Kosovo via Tirana. The “Government of Kosovo” through the “Government-in Exile” has also invested money into enterprises that have proved invaluable to the KLA.
For example, the “Government-in-Exile”, under Dr. Bujar Bukoshi, contributed large amounts of money to the election campaign of Sali Berisha in Albania proper. In exchange for this, Berisha officially recognized the “Government of Kosovo” and allowed Rugova’s government official diplomatic status in Tirana. After Berisha’s fall from power in 1997, accompanied with the complete collapse of Albania into anarchy, Berisha built up his northern family estate into a massive compound and formed his own militia, which is equal in size and strength to the official Albanian military. Berisha refused to recognize the legitimacy of his successors to the government of Albania and became disruptive by launching a series of demonstrations, riots, and actual attacks against the official government based in Tirana.
Although Berisha is still a major factor in Yugoslavia through both his “Democratic Party” as well as his militia, he is also a major player in the aiding the KLA. Berisha is based on his family estate in Prist, near Tropoje however, he has become an almost de facto independent ruler of northern Albania. In so doing he has allowed the KLA to establish major command centers and training camps at Bajram Curi, Tropoja, Krum, Kuks, and Peskopeja. It is also almost certain that Berisha controls the local mafia of northern Albania which is primarily involved in narcotics smuggling into Europe and arms trafficking. Contrary to Yugoslav claims, it appears unlikely that that Berisha actually finances the KLA in any significant way, but he does allow the KLA to use territories under his control and probably sells weapons to the KLA. Although there have been no accounts of Berisha’s private militia joining with KLA bands in raids into Kosovo, there have been many reports of the KLA assisting Berisha’s militia in Northern Albania. It has also been firmly established that while Berisha was in charge of the Albanian government that he provided a large degree of logistical support to the KLA.
When the Berisha government fell in 1997 and the country slipped into virtual anarchy, hundreds of thousands of weapons and other military equipment were looted from Albanian armories across the country, flooding Albania with military style weaponry. While many of these weapons remain in the hands of private citizens and competing mafias, it is believed that a great many of the weapons found their way to Berisha, who in turn sold them to the KLA. Through other agents in Tirana and using Domovina Zove money, the KLA has also purchased other weaponry and equipment from the open market, especially from Bosnia-Hercegovina.
In the same vein as the KLA’s demand that all able bodied men within Kosovo join its ranks, the KLA has also made a similar demand upon Kosovo Albanians living elsewhere. According to the Washington Times (April 20, 1999), the only Albanians that the KLA considers exempt are those who are ill or those who are in a position to significantly aid the KLA financially. According to the same report, the KLA has raised literally thousands of volunteers from the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and other countries. Of course the vast majority of these recruits have absolutely no military training at all, so they are formed into “foreign units” and largely used as either cannon fodder or for propaganda purposes.
To supplement their manpower with trained fighters, the KLA has also relied heavily upon foreign mercenaries and Islamic fundamentalist mujahedin from elsewhere. At the training facilities in northern Albania, mercenaries and other former officers from Albania, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, and elsewhere have been training KLA volunteers, recruits, and conscripts. At the same time many Islamic fundamentalist mujahedin, many of whom are combat experienced fighters (veterans from other jihads in Afghanistan, Sudan, and the Kashmir), have been identified in Albania proper. However, the U.S. as well as INTERPOL has been working with the legitimate government of Albania to keep these mujahedin out of Albania. Thus far, there has only been one confirmed report of mujahedin actually fighting inside of Kosovo, and that was a mixed unit serving in a support role for KLA units in the Drenica region in late 1998. There are exhaustive reports online detailing various stories of the KLA- Mujahedin cooperation in Kosovo, but it is hard to say exactly how far this cooperation actually goes.
Otherwise, the KLA is similar to other national liberation movements, running various publications around the world, maintaining information services and representatives in the major capitals of Western Europe. Now that they have been de facto recognized by NATO, and its peacekeeping force now occupying Kosovo, KFOR; the majority of diplomatic activity with the KLA has dealt with the KLA’s obligation under the terms of the NATO occupation to disarm. A condition that the KLA leadership has flatly rejected. Instead, the KLA wants to be armed, uniformed, and trained by NATO and set up as a “National Guard” in Kosovo.
The other aspect of KLA activity outside of Kosovo deals with its actions in Macedonia. Like Kosovo, most of Macedonia is also part of the projected “Greater Albania”. December 16, 1997 represented the first KLA attack in Macedonia, bombing the courthouse of the town of Gostivar. This was immediately followed by KLA attacks on the police stations in the villages of Kumanovo and Prilep on January 4, 1998.
The KLA has made no secret whatsoever of its desire to annex most of western Macedonia into “Greater Albania” even though this territory has not been part of Yugoslavia for years and the Serbian influence there is minimal. Make no mistake about it, the KLA does seek a “Greater Albania” not merely an end to Yugoslav oppression in Kosovo. Under these circumstances, it must have taken a great deal of pressure on the Macedonian government for them to allow in the influx of Albanian refugees in the wake of the NATO bombing campaign.
It would seem that the Macedonians are already regretting this humanitarian gesture. On April 22, Macedonian Interior Minister, Pavle Trajanov, reported that KLA arms caches totaling about 4.5 tons of firearms, grenades, and ammunition have been discovered in several Macedonian locations. 21 It has also been reported that, although Macedonian officials prevent the operation of KLA press gangs in its territory, that the KLA has still managed to win over almost a thousand recruits from among the Albanian refugees in Macedonia.
Conclusion
Once upon a time, the United States decided to support the Afghan mujahedin as a means of slowing Soviet expansion; in return men with ties to our former allies decided to bomb the World Trade Center in New York. Another time, the United States opted to support Saddam Hussein as a means of slowing Soviet expansion and then as a means of trying to contain Islamic Revolutionary Iran; in return we ended up having to launch the largest U.S. military operation since the Vietnam War to expel our former ally from Kuwait. It seems extremely likely that we are making this same mistake yet again by supporting the Kosovo Liberation Army as a means of attacking Milosevic.
As this paper has tried to show, the KLA is not a national liberation movement in that the only nation concerned is the Albanian one. Nor is the KLA merely a reaction to the very real discrimination and oppression faced by the Albanians of Kosovo since 1989. The KLA isn’t some enlightened political movement seeking to free themselves from tyranny either. Instead, the KLA is an ethnic nationalist group, what we commonly refer to as neo-fascist in the West, that not only seeks to turn Kosovo into part of their desired “Greater Albania” but also most of Macedonia, as well as parts of Greece, Serbia, and Montenegro. The presently existing friendly relations between NATO and the KLA are a temporory arrangement as the KLA needs NATO aid in Kosovo for the time being. However, the KLA leadership has made it clear that it has no intentions of compromising any of its goals for NATO and if NATO gets in the way, then the KLA will turn against it.
The KLA is not, as the Western media likes to portray it, our friend and may one day become a horrible enemy.
My Greek roots aside, it seems a sour precedent to think that mass immigration equals autonomy and independence. The Albanian population explosion in Kosovo seems tantamount to Mexican dominance in East Lost Angeles. Does the fact that there are more Mexican nationals in that area give them an argument for independent rule?
Should a mass influx of Muslims set up shop around the gates of The Vatican, a holy site as is Kosovo to Serbians, would they then have cause to call it their own?
Or, as I see it, has the U.S. just simply made Kosovo and its theft from the historic Serbians a token gesture toward sycophantic Muslims so that their middle eastern policies don’t look completely Judao-centric?
This isn’t meant to indict U.S. efforts on behalf of Israel, rather to illuminate the fact that the odd protection of Albanian Kosovars, who have their own country already, might be to appear balanced?
Is it also likely that the U.S.’s misguided efforts are a direct and predictable response to heavy political donations from Albanian leaders/extremists? By the way, there’s some evidence that Kerry’s choice of financial bedfellows may have cost him a key state(s) and the election.
What’s most tragic about this is that the Serbian people have historically been one of the most supportive nations of the U.S. as far back as one can see. When the Croats joined murderous hands with the Nazi’s, the Serbs harbored American soldiers in the mountains. Google ‘Ustache’ for more.
And today, the birthplace of the Serbian Orthodox church appears likely to be handed over to expanders of the Albanian nation who burn said churches and make the Serbs there a fearful minority.
But history is a long road and I’d wager my last breath that as I take it, Kosovo will be a Serbian land as was and should be.
The more dangerous reality is the precedent. Start your petitions Parisian Muslims or Californian Mexicans. It appears all you need to claim the dirt under your feet as your own is a majority. Burn a few churches too and hire a good P.R. firm, that seems to help.
Dobrica Cosic Former Serbian President “We lie to deceive ourselves, to console others; we lie for mercy, we lie to fight fear, to encourage ourselves, to hide our and somebody else’s misery. We lie for love and honesty. We lie because of freedom. Lying ie is the trait of our patriotism and the proof of our innate smartness. We lie creatively, imaginatively, inventively.”
Six pivotal themes in Serbian propaganda are
1. Victimization, in which Serbs were constructed as collective victims first of the NDH, then of Tito’s Yugoslavia, and more specifically of Croats, Albanians, Bosnians, and other non-Serbs.
2. Dehumanization of designated ‘others’, in which Croats were depicted as ‘genocidal’ and as ‘Ustaše’, Bosnians were portrayed as ‘fanatical fundamentalists’, and Albanians were represented as not fully human. These processes of dehumanization effectively removed these designated ‘others’ from the moral field, sanctifying their murder or expulsion.
3. Belittlement, in which Serbia’s enemies were represented as
beneath contempt.
4. Conspiracy, in which Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, the Vatican,
Germany, Austria, and sometimes also the Bosnians as well as the U.S. and other foreign states, were seen as united in a conspiracy to break up the SFRY and hurt Serbia. In this way, the Belgrade regime’s obstinate disregard for the fundamental standards of international law was dressed up as heroic defiance of an anti-Serb conspiracy.
5. Entitlement, in which the Serbs were constructed as ‘entitled’ to create a Greater
Serbian state to which parts of Croatia and Bosnia would be attached, under the motto,’ All Serbs should live in one state.’
6. Superhuman powers and divine sanction. The Serbs were told that they were, in some sense, “super”. They were the best fighters on the planet, they could stand up to the entire world, and they were sanctioned by God himself, because of Tsar Lazar and the fact that Lazar had chosen the heavenly kingdom. Moreover, since Lazar had chosen the heavenly kingdom, the Serbs, encouraged to view themselves as Lazar’s heirs, were entitled to the earthly kingdom which Lazar had repudiated, as their patrimony.
Serbian society began to stray down the path to war more or less unwittingly.
Already in the years 1981—86, long before the other republics experienced anything
like a ‘national awakening’, Serbia (and here one may include Kosovo too) was
already sliding into a syndrome in which myths, threats, the allure of victory, and
belligerent rhetoric filled the public discourse, giving Serbs a sense of common
destiny but also separating them, psychologically, from the other peoples of socialist
Yugoslavia. That this was an unhealthy state of collective mind is clear from the
prominence of the themes of victimization, conspiracy, national entitlement, and
divine sanction of the Serbian national project, as well as from the insistent campaigns of dehumanization, demonization, and belittlement of Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians, as well as other peoples and states, which began at this time. This syndrome, in an individual, would be considered psychotic; to the extent that it permeated much of Serbian society, perhaps especially in the countryside, one may speak of Serbia having been sucked into a kind of collective psychosis. And to the extent that Serbian war propaganda aimed at reinforcing and stimulating this state of mind, we may say that it aimed at inculcating and reinforcing neurotic and
psychotic syndromes in Serbian society. This psychosis had its cultic saints – portraitsof Miloševiæ and Chetnik leader Draža Mihailoviæ were often displayed alongside those of saints canonized by the Church – had its bards (such as Simonida Stankoviæ and Ceca Ražnjatoviæ), and even had its official music – “turbo-folk”, a pop mixtureof folk-ethnic style with a rhythmic pounding beat. Moreover, this psychosis could even transport those infected to a state of consciousness which they mistook for a better world. Miloševi, for example, arriving dramatically at Kosovo polje in a helicopter on 28 June 1989, told those gathered for the six hundredth anniversary of Serbia’s mythic confrontation with its national destiny, that in that
the – century battle, Serbia had defended not just herself but all of European culture and civilization. Fine oratory might even be called the elixir of national psychosis.
With his recognition of Kosovo’s independence, Bush managed to enter the anals of Serbian history right along with the distinguished Murad II whose rule was marked by the long war he fought against the Christian peoples, says Wikipedia. Then again, Daniel Fried at the State Department says that Serbs are mistaken about their own history.
- Speaking of history, Maryland became the first colony to institutionalize slavery in 1640 – 1640!. “I mean, after all, we’re talking about something from 1389 — 1389! It’s time to move forward,” says Condolezza Rice. Oups! My bad, she was talking about Serbs.
- As for Noel Malcolm’s Is Kosovo Serbia? We ask a historian in the Guardian it is worthy to remember that the stupidest fool is the one that always shouts the loudest mistaking his noise for wisdom.
- On the blowback on US Embassy attack in Belgrade: Attacking fools in Belgrade insipire a fool to attack Melissa Bean.
- Serbia is devotedly accused of violating minority rights for so long until, suddenly, the minority carves out a Serb-free state that the accusers recognize.
- The corollary to the above axiom: Every time Serbia refuses to recognize an ethnically Serb-free state, it is accussed of a return to Milosevic-style hardline nationalism.
- Don’t let anyone fool you, you Serb! Losing your own land in exchange for joining the EU is a great deal. Just wait few years for reasons as those who will tell them to you are being recruited.
What happens when a government loses control of immigration and gives special preference to immigrants for political reasons.
Showing any sympathy for the present plight of Serbia is swimming against the tide of received opinion, which was largely generated by the successful propaganda of the West, particularly concerning Bosnia and Kosovo. The demonization of Serbia was taken to grotesque proportions and, in general, faithfully and uncritically repeated in the mainstream media. So, for many people, their “default setting” is that Serbs were uniquely wicked and brutal to their erstwhile fellow Yugoslavs in pursuit of a “Greater Serbia”.
This narrative is a grossly inadequate basis from which to make an appreciation of Serbia’s present situation. As the weight of repetition of the “demon Serb” theory is so overwhelming, I will be putting the contrary case whilst conscious that no side in the unhappy disintegration of Yugoslavia was guiltless of atrocity.
At this area of the world’s surface, where the tectonic plates Of Islam, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity collide, one could start the story at least as far back as the Fourth Crusade but it is only necessary to go back to the Second World War to form a coherent picture of what has happened in Kosovo. It had always been a heartland of the Serbian Church and national consciousness, containing churches as important as Canterbury, Salisbury and Winchester are in England.
The Axis powers favoured Albanians and arranged for a large part of the Serbian population to be expelled from Kosovo (*1) and replaced by Muslim Albanian immigrants. This was the beginning of the now overwhelming Albanian majority in the province. At the end of the war, Marshal Tito agreed with his communist comrades in Albania that the incomers should remain in new Socialist Yugoslavia and prevented the expelled Serbs from returning.
The communist takeover after the war was bloody in the extreme. Not only were wartime scores settled but there were wholesale massacres of those deemed to be “enemies of the people.” The new masters made as sure as they could that there would be no competition with their leadership from the former elites. The bien-pensant, leftish world came to regard “non-aligned” Yugoslavia as a more moderate version of socialism than the Soviet variety but it was certainly not so at its inception nor for many years thereafter.
Tito’s treatment of the Serbs was conditioned by two considerations – firstly that many Serbs had backed the royalist Resistance (the Chetniks) under General Mihailovic and secondly that Serbia should not dominate the new Yugoslavia, as it had done before the war. The communist partisans’ civil war with the royalist Chetniks had been fought at least as vigorously and dirtily as the war against the German occupiers.
To reduce Serbian influence, he drew the boundaries of the constituent republics, so that large numbers of Serbs would live as minorities in Croatia, Bosnia and elsewhere outside Serbia. Whilst these borders were more or less local government boundaries, it was not such a burning question. Yet these were the boundaries which the Western powers would later recognize as the borders of sovereign states – states furthermore with aspirations to Serb-free, racial and religious purity.
A sort of political correctness was enforced in socialist Yugoslavia in which multiculturalism between and within the constituent republics was officially maintained. The basis of the state was a form of Marxist class outlook which was supposed to predominate over cultural and linguistic differences. The slogan was “unity and brotherhood.” In some ways this appeared to be reasonably successful. Intermarriage between different cultural groups was quite common and the atheist stance of the authorities tended to mask religious differences. Perhaps Gordon Brown’s late conversion to official “Britishness” is a faint echo of this.
As testified by Mitar Balevic at the Hague tribunal, Kosovo was different – subject to Albanian agitation for an ethnically pure state from the 1950s onwards. There were large scale demonstrations on Albanian Flag Day in 1968 and Serbs were persecuted throughout the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. There were murders, expulsions and rapes, as well as desecration of churches, exclusion from public employment and medical discrimination at Pristina Hospital – especially in the maternity department. Between 1961 and 1981, the Albanian population doubled and the Serbs declined from being one quarter to one sixth of the population.
Tito granted local autonomy in 1974 but this only increased the Albanian appetite for driving out the Serbs. The Serbian alphabet was banned and Serbian school text books destroyed. Some 20,000 Serbs fled after the riots of 1981. After the death of Tito in 1980, German foundations and institutes, deniable instruments of government policy (*2), were prominent in supporting the Albanians. Their efforts were increasingly supplemented by the German Secret Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) which fostered the separatist movements in all parts of Yugoslavia.
It was against this background that Slobodan Milosevic went on April 24, 1987 to speak at Kosovo Polje, holy ground in the Serbian national story – the battlefield where the Serbs went down to glorious defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1389 – The Field of the Blackbirds.
This speech has been consistently misrepresented in the West as a sort of declaration of war on the mostly Muslim Kosovo Albanians but that is a total untruth (*3). Milosevic’s words were shot through with the Yugoslav brand of multicultural Political Correctness. “Protect brotherhood and unity”…. “nationalism always means isolation from others, being locked in a closed circle and stopping growth”…
He exhorted people to “emerge from a state of hatred, intolerance and mistrust” whilst making clear that there would be no ethnically cleansed Kosovo, from which all Serbs would be expelled.
That may have been one cause of Albanian outrage. Until then, they had been consistently successful in working towards that aim. The other famous incident on this occasion was an attack by Kosovo-Albanian police on some of the Serbian crowd which provoked Milosevic’s remark “Nobody should beat you”. This was reckoned to be very un- PC in the vocabulary and discourse of “unity and brotherhood”. Apart from that, he appealed for calm. Yet time after time, this speech is represented in the West as the provocative ravings of an extreme nationalist.
A couple of quotations from separatist leaders supported by the West make an interesting comparison.
“Genocide is a natural phenomenon in keeping with the human-social and mythological divine nature. It is not only permitted but even recommended by the Almighty…for the maintenance and spreading of the One True Faith” (*4) FRANJO TUDJMAN – first President of post war Croatia, who also said “Thank God, my wife is nether a Jew nor a Serb”. (Mrs. Thatcher later accepted a decoration from him).
And
“There can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic institutions. The Islamic movement must and can take power as soon as it is morally strong enough, not only to destroy the non-Islamic power but to build a new Islamic one”. (*5) ALIJA IZETBEGOVIC, first President of Bosnia- Hercogovina, eulogized at his funeral by Paddy Ashdown as the father of his people. With Ashdown’s approval, Bosnian war dead were officially classified as “shahid” – martyrs in the Jihad against the Infidel.
So, a clerico-fascist and an Islamic extremist were supported by Western intelligence agencies, governments and armed forces as bearers of “European values” to the benighted Balkans. To do this, the EU member states broke their obligations under the UN charter and the Helsinki Accords by which they had guaranteed to accept existing national borders in Europe. They recognized Slovenia and Croatia diplomatically. This was done principally at Germany’s instigation and the German government regarded this sudden about turn by the other EU states as a triumph. The Foreign Minister was cock-a-hoop “By this, Germany has regained diplomatically everything lost in Eastern Europe as a result of two world wars”. It opened the way for the new “Drang nach Osten”.
The pretext for the later air war on Yugoslavia was based on the accusation that Serbs were committing genocide against the largely Muslim Albanians in Kosovo. It undoubtedly was an unpleasant, dangerous time. Statistics from the period before the war suggest that an Albanian in Kosovo was about as likely to meet a violent death as an ordinary inhabitant of Washington DC at the same period, whereas a Serb was around twelve times more likely to come to an untimely end.
The Kosovo Liberation Army was known to police authorities all over Europe as a major criminal organization, deeply involved in drug smuggling and human trafficking.
Yet both the German and American governments contributed to its training and arming for Kosovo’s “liberation”. Its commander from 1998 (later prime minister of Kosovo in 2006) was one Agim Ceku, a former Yugoslav army captain who first became a general in the HVO (Croatian Army). Assisted by access to all NATO intelligence on Yugoslav forces and with the aid of NATO airpower, he was a very successful commander, responsible for the expulsion of around 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia in “Operation Storm”(1995). He also appears to have had command responsibility at the time of the Medak Pocket massacre where Croatian forces fired on Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. They later discovered the evidence of the massacre for which nobody has been brought to book. An Interpol warrant exists for Ceku’s arrest.
Wartime “information” from NATO told us that at least 100,000 young Albanian men from Kosovo were missing, presumed murdered. Yet the Spanish forensic team, sent to look for mass graves was gravely embarrassed. In late 1999 its leader complained that he and his colleagues had become part of “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machine because we did not find one, not one mass grave”. The Wall Street Journal concluded that NATO stepped up its claims when it saw “a fatigued press corps drifting towards the contrary story – civilians killed by NATO bombs… The war in Kosovo was cruel, bitter, savage. Genocide it wasn’t”.
The Spanish forensic team found 2108 bodies in 1999. The killing did not stop with the end of the war. According to a report in the Sunday Times, based on figures from the UN Mission in Kosovo, 420 Albanians were killed between June 1999 and March 2000, as the KLA dealt with perceived traitors. In the same period 1041 non Albanians (mostly Serbs) were killed. The “protection” offered by KFOR and their KLA allies was distinctly shaky. Serbs have continued to “disappear” or be found dead since, yet nobody has been brought to court, let alone convicted. In the same period (1999-2008) some 154 Orthodox Serbian churches have been destroyed and some 300 mosques have been built with funds from extreme Saudi Arabian Wahabi organizations. Like Bosnia-Hercegovina, where some 1500 foreign Mujahedin have settled as Bosnian citizens, Kosovo has become part of the “green wedge” of Muslim territories pushing closer to the gates of Vienna.
In spite of its experiences at the hands of the West in general and EU powers in particular, there is considerable support for membership of the EU in Serbia. The recent re-election of Boris Tadic as president (with 50.57% of the vote) is an indication of this. Pro EU Serbs think that the EU is “modern” and a safe place to be. Given Serbia’s former demonization, isolation and pariah status, it is easy to see the attraction of this. Then their clinching argument is “It is inevitable”. But the narrowness of Tadic’s victory shows that there is a large body of opinion which is by no means reconciled. Tadic has talked tough for domestic consumption but, if he runs true to form, he will succumb to EU blandishments.
Will the EU dispensation eventually make former Yugoslavia into an area of harmony and cooperation? How stable is the EU/NATO-imposed settlement? Is it a settlement or merely an armistice until some shift in the balance of great powers? In the map which follows, Great Britain, “Britoslavia”, is divided up, approximately as Yugoslavia was. It does not quite match the regionalization plans of John Prescott but would have much the same effect in reducing the independence, defensibility, security and international influence of the inhabitants of these islands.
By Edward Spalton
When seeing this elaborate, detailed fictitious “history” about Serbs being “victims” rather than aggressors, you are bound to come to the same conclusion as when following the Milosevic trial and seeing the incredible slander he could come up with against each and every witness for the accusation, an avalanche of filth which could only have been produced by the Communist Gestapo in Belgrade working at full capacity:
Mendacity is not only a Serb habit; it is, literally, an industry.
Many will support the independence of Kosovo on simple grounds of self-determination: about 90% of Kosovans desire separation from Serbia. But Kosovo is no simple case. Given the recent history of the area, the minority rights of the non-Albanian population must also be a central concern. And the verdict of the Minority Rights Group that “nowhere is there such a level of fear for so many minorities that they will be harassed simply for who they are…nowhere else in Europe is at such a high risk of ethnic cleansing occurring in the near future – or even a risk of genocide” hardly inspires confidence in the future.
Furthermore, it is difficult to see how the creation of another new state in the Balkans will not destabilize the region further. Albanian separatists both in Montenegro and in Macedonia, where military hostilities took place as recently as 2001, will be encouraged.Far from being concerned about this fragmentation, Washington encouraged it.
Had it not intervened in Yugoslav internal affairs 10 years ago, it is likely a peaceful compromise to the Kosovan problem would eventually have been found between the government in Belgrade and the Democratic League. Rugova’s goal was independence for Kosovo from Serbia, but only with the agreement of all parties.
What is certain is that without Western patronage the KLA would never have grown to the force it eventually became.
By championing the most hardline force in Kosovo, the West not only helped precipitate war, but made the issue of Kosovo much harder to solve.
It is ironic that for supporters of liberal intervention, Western actions in Kosovo are still seen to have been a great success. It was at the height of the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 that the then British prime minister, Tony Blair, made his famous speech at Chicago in which he outlined his
doctrine of the international community.
Blair argued that the principle of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign states – long considered an important principle of international order – should be subject to revision. “I say to you: never fall again for the doctrine of isolationism,” Blair pleaded.
But after surveying the global debris of a decade of Western interference, from the Balkans to Afghanistan and Iraq, is it any wonder that isolationism and observing the principle of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign states again seems so appealing?
When I see filth spewed about Serb as people from the mouth of “Sebaneau”, “Schwartz” ( just to name few) and their ilk who claim “force is all the Serbs understand” I realize oh why shouldn’t they. Just take a look at their next door neighbors throughout history,aka Albanians. One learns pretty quickly to become a warrior when surrounded by such characters.
As for article itself,I say,the ugliest form of racism is to demean an ethnic group’s religion, history or culture. This has not stopped Schwartz from revealing his closeted bigotry. He manipulates his access to the media knowing full well that most readers and editors are ignorant of Balkan history. People of Schwartz’s ilk have found it easy to paint Serbs with collective guilt by demeaning them in this alleged “historical” context. What we see at play here is the Goebbles concept of “Tell a lie a hundred times and it becomes the truth.”
Kosovo independence is not about history, it is about equal human rights, and the absurd violation of UN Resolution 1244, the amputation of sovereign territory and in the process the violation of the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, and the Geneva Conventions.
Schwartz ignores the cleansing of 185,000 Serbs in 1690, the 170,000 forced to flee in 1739 or the 150,000 that were forced out of Kosovo after the Congress of Berlin in 1878, when Serbia was internationally recognized as a nation, or the more than 100,000 Serbs forced to flee after Tito granted “Autonomy” in 1974. Malcolm also ignores the more than 300,000 Serbs cleansed in the past 9 years. No reference is made to the fact that 40% of the Albanians in Kosovo are illegal aliens who cross the border into Serbia as easily as Mexicans cross our border each night in San Diego, California.
Equally disgraceful, the Pajamas Media grants little to no access to your pages to any Serbian historian or journalists to give opposing views. This is hardly freedom of the press, the press is being used in this case to bludgeon Serbia’s cultural aspirations. Pathetic! Worse then SSSR.
So if you are an American of Albanian origin and support Kosovo’s in-dependence then what? I am pretty sure Albanians have killed more Americans in the past 9 years then Serbs have. Also, Serbs aren’t the ones that broke international law on the 17th. Unfortunately Serbs get no credit for *not* killing people and *not* breaking international law. I’m not worried. If they (the mainstream media) want to turn the torching of a few buildings into an issue and ignore the theft of a country’s heartland then let them. This wont be decided with words, unfortunately. Unfortunate because we had such a good case and the last thing that should happen is a war between Serbia and the United States for the sake of a few drug dealers in Pristina.
Resolution 1244 did not say that Kosovo was to remain part of Serbia; it only mentioned Serbia once, and in a sentence which clearly implied that Serbia was a different territory from Kosovo; and it provided for a political process to determine its future status, without excluding independence at all.
The purpose of Resolution 1244 was, while temporarily recognizing its territorial integrity, to establish limitations on the sovereignty of the so-called “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia”, a state which is now completely defunct. It has no bearing at all on the right of colonized nations to declare independence whether the colonizer likes it or not, a right which has been consistently recognized by International Law in the past half-century.
Similarly, recognition by foreign governments is a sovereign act on their part, which can in no way be illegal.
The alleged “great migration” of 1690, which was supposed to have been voluntary, is a pure myth.
Two written personal statements by Patriarch Arsenije have expressedly denied that any significant number of Serb families followed him into Hapsburg territory, so this myth seems to be another gross Serb hoax, in the same league as the one about the “nice Serbs who resisted the occupiers while the evil Croats and Albanians were Nazi collaborators”.
http://www.henryjacksonsociety.org/stories.asp?id=297
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc2m8p62_108hcqzjqc3
And of course, no Serb was expelled from Kosovo after the Treaty of Berlin: on the contrary, 100,000 Albanians were ethnically cleansed from southern Serbia, some of whom went to Kosovo: the only episode of significant Albanian immigration there recorded in history.
The number of 2108 bodies allegedly found in Kosovo in 1999 relates to the number of corpses actually exhumated in November before winter made work impossible from a third of the 529 mass graves discovered there as soon as june 1999. The estimate of the number of victims, which had been around 4500 throughout the bombing, jumped to 10,000 when access was possible to the crime scene; it has remained there since.
There has never been any ambiguity about the proper meaning to be given to the “2108″ figure, so that there is can be no question that its misinterpretation is a deliberate act of disinformation on the part of the Belgrade Gestapo.
And it is ridiculous to present colonel Ceku as a major player in the liberation of the occupied parts of Croatia.
Yet more examples of the extent of pseudo-nationalist Serb mendacity, the discovery of which is a culture shock.
Those who haven’t taken the measure of its impudence have no excuse, since Dobrica Cosic had warned us
http://shmajser.wordpress.com/2006/11/21/cosiclie-as-a-trait-of-our-patriotism-laz-kao-vid-patriotizma/
http://www.bosnia.org.uk/bosrep/augnov99/death_and_denial.cfm
Death and Denial in Kosova
by Francis Wheen, The Guardian, 3 November 1999, Bosnia Report, August – November 1999 New Series no.11/12
[The guy's a complete asshole]
According to the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, there is no such thing as reality – only a system of arbitrary signs, imagistic discourses and `multiple refractions in hyperspace’. Hence the title of his most notorious book, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
Even Baudrillard, however, might raise an eyebrow at a headline in the current issue of the Spectator:
`The Massacres That Never Were. Contrary to propaganda, mass graves in Kosovo are a myth, says John Laughland.’
Since Laughland is a former lecturer at the Sorbonne, you might assume that this is just another exercise in `playful post-modernism’ or some such twaddle.
But he is entirely serious.
Laughland says that NATO maintained public support for its Balkan intervention by pretending that Serbian security forces and paramilitaries had massacred many thousands of Kosovans.
‘Of the impact such stories had, there can certainly be no doubt whatever; their veracity, however, is a different matter.’
The true death toll, he reckons, is probably no more than a few hundred.
This revisionist account is also having quite an impact: its allegations have been repeated in a full-page article in the Sunday Times, and are being assiduously peddled by Stratfor, an online think-tank based in Texas [which has never showed any understanding of such matters].
Their veracity, however, is quite another matter.
Let’s begin with NATO’s alleged hyperbole.
‘On May 16, the US defence secretary, William Cohen, said that Yugoslav army forces had killed up to 100,000 Albanian men of military age,’
Laughland writes.
‘Tony Blair himself implied that the numbers might be even higher when he wrote in the Times on June 5,
“We must be ready for what we know will be clear evidence of… as yet unknown numbers of people missing, tortured and dead.”’
What William Cohen actually said, on the American TV programme ‘Face the Nation’, was that 100,000 men of military age ‘are missing’.
As for the death toll, he continued:
‘We have had reports that as many as 4,600 have been executed, but I suspect it’s far higher than that.’
Not quite the same as asserting that all 100,000 of them had been killed.
Nor did Tony Blair imply a total ‘even higher’ than 100,000 in his article of June 5.
He gave no figures at all, predicting only that journalists and peacekeepers entering Kosovo would find ‘evidence of appalling atrocities and unbelievable cruelties’.
And so they did. By June 16, the Foreign Office minister Geoff Hoon felt able to give a rough estimate.
‘According to the reports we have gathered, it appears that around 10,000 people have been killed in more than 100 massacres.’
Laughland dismisses this as `fantasy’ –and quotes a most surprising source to prove it.
Paul Risley, the spokesman for the international war-crimes prosecutor, apparently told him that
‘a whole string of sites where atrocities were allegedly committed have revealed no bodies at all’,
adding that there were `not very many’ mass graves.
‘The guy’s a complete asshole,’ Risley told me this week, when I reached him by phone in Sarajevo.
‘I said nothing of the sort. We have over 500 “scenes of crime”, and many of them are mass graves.’
Of these 500 sites, only 150 have been investigated so far; the rest will not be dug up until next spring. (As Risley points out, you can’t do exhumations when the ground is frozen.)
‘So,’ Laughland demands impatiently, ‘what is the final body count?’
The question is absurd. After the Paddington rail crash, we had to wait for many days before the police issued a definitive list of victims. If it took so long to identify odd fragments of bone in one railway carriage, imagine the difficulty of searching an entire country – especially one where the retreating Serb forces did their best to destroy or hide the evidence of their crimes.
Nevertheless, the tribunal’s prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, will present an interim report to the United Nations in the next two or three weeks.
Laughland notes that a group of Spanish inspectors ‘only found 187 cadavers’ in Kosovo this summer, as if this proves his hunch that `the number of bodies discovered to date is in the hundreds’.
But the Spaniards comprised only one of 20 forensic teams. A squad of experts from the FBI, who arrived in the town of Gjakova at the end of June, retrieved 200 corpses within five days.
If these results are at all typical, the number of bodies already identified must be at least 3,000 [it would be closer to 2100 in November.. which proves nothing of course].
And, I repeat, the tribunal’s gumshoes have visited only 150 of the 500 `scenes of crime’. All this suggests that Hoon’s figure of 10,000 was remarkably accurate. [It was indeed]
We shall never know the exact total, of course – just as we still don’t have a final tally of those massacred at Srebrenica, more than four years ago. [More than 8,000]
`We do not anticipate recovering every body,’ Risley says.
`There’s compelling evidence of tampering with evidence, and attempts to destroy the bodies of victims.’
Even so, we get the picture; and those who seek to deny the scale and brutality of `ethnic cleansing’ should watch John Sweeney’s film Prime Suspects, to be shown on Channel 4 tomorrow at 9.30 p.m., which describes how more than 100 people were lined up and shot dead in a hay barn in just one small Kosovo village.
None of the bodies has been recovered: the killers blew up the barn, leaving nothing but two huge holes in the earth. Laughland and his fellow revisionists could therefore argue that the deaths were yet another `fantasy’, a Baudrillard-style refraction in hyperspace.
No doubt Rasim Batusha, who lost 22 members of his family in the massacre, will find this a great consolation.
Come on everybody this bigoted hate speech does not even deserve a response from us.Besides punctuation there is nothing correct in this story.This person who seems to be uncertain of identity just wrote it to get the expected reaction anger and indignation.
Everything America blames Srbija for they have done x 100,000,000.
The positve and understanding response towards Serbs is appreciated but I guess any sane person would react when faced with bigotry and what I like to call belligerent ignorance.
lets just crrect one thing the embassy did not burn down.A window was broken and a flare was thrown inside it did not burn like Srbija burned in 1999.We Serbs are not sheeple and we are goint to react when faced with injustice anfter injustice.America and Germany broke up Jugoslavia and they supported the most nationalistic vile and evil groups as long as they were willing to kill Serbs n secret.One question Serbs being the largest ethnicity in Jugoslavia and having power why would we want to change a good thing.We were reacting not acting to Corat and Muslim hostile action.Anyone who knows our history knows there was no genocide.The Muslims stared war in Bosna and then Kosovo-Metohija and then backed away and screamed murder! They were not even brave enough to do the fighting themselves.With CIA funding training and intel along with BND training in Germany and Albania were able to start an insurgency.This is bigger than Srbija this is about American control of important oil pipline routes from the Caspian google AMBO pipeline and see why Bondsteel is there and it has nthing to do with Serbs or Albanians.Serbs historically have said “NO” to imperial salesmen and Albanians have sided with any power that takes over so Americans needed to make Srbija small enough and weak enough to manage
I have no desire to comment on the politics of the balkan region,however…………
I was recently in Bosnia, it´s a scary place, the serb people are very agressive and the athoritys are corrupt, did you know that it´s possible to buy a passport semi-officially. or to buy a gun almost totally open. With the amount of open agressivness and the fact that the Serbian people seem to think that they are somehow better than the rest of the human race I´m not surprised that they have had a war of mindless violence and slaughter.
It´s only a matter of time until the next one.
The Serbs have a history of such atrocities. After the end of fighting in Europe on May 8, 1945, more than 200,000 ethnic Germans who had remained behind in Yugoslavia effectively became captives of Tito and his Serb partisans. Some 63,635 ethnic German civilians (women, men and children) perished at the hand of these partisans 1945 and 1950 — that is, some 18 percent of the ethnic German civilian population still remaining in the new Yugoslavia. Most died as a result of exhaustion as slave laborers, in “ethnic cleansing,” or from disease and malnutrition. Much of the credit for the widely-praised “economic miracle” of Titoist Yugoslavia, it should be noted, must go to the tens of thousands of German slave laborers who, during the late 1940s, helped to build the impoverished country.
Property of ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia confiscated in the aftermath of World War II amounted to 97,490 small businesses, factories, shops, farms and diverse trades. The confiscated real estate and farmland of Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans came to 637,939 hectares (or about one million acres), and became state-owned property. According to a 1982 calculation, the value of the property confiscated from ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia amounted to 15 billion German marks, or about seven billion US dollars. Taking inflation into account, this would today correspond to twelve billion US dollars.
Yes, the Serbians are a kind and gentle people.