Dear Yokes,
Humour me, what would you say to a situation:
It is 2013. Serbia launch “Operation Mayhem”, massive military assault to “liberate” Kosovo from the “occupation”. They are helped by Russian planners and aircraft. The Kosovo Albanian authorities order Albanian civilians to flee for their lives in the face of the Serbian assault. Those civilians flee mostly to Albania, the ones that do not flee are killed. Thousands of their properties are destroyed. All of this is witnessed by Canadian NATO peace-keepers.
13 years later, those refugees are still in Albania where they are both poor and their plight ignored. They form a large bloc of support for Radical Albanian political parties, mostly because people in the West are ignorant of their plight and deny they suffered any wrongs.
Yokes, would you say those people are “Ethnically Cleansed” or not? Would you say that what happened to them was justified? How do you think the world would react to Serbia celebrating that “liberation” of Kosovo as a national holiday?
I am sure you can see what I am saying now that I have illustrated what happened in the Krajina using more traditional victim groups and villains.
A double standard always applies when it comes to Serbs and Serbia. When Serbs are the victims they are not “Ethnically Cleansed” but Voluntarily Repatriated or merely “displaced”. When Croats forcibly suppress a regional rebellion within their sovereign borders (and permanently expel nearly the entire population) it is described as justified liberation, when the Serbs suppress an insurrection in a province within their sovereign borders, it is a war crime that requires NATO intervention.
This is my gripe with you and others. You seem to be constitutionally incapable of fairness when it comes to the Serbs. You treat them unfairly, you malign them, you insult them and you deny historical wrongs perpetrated against them and then you marvel at their rejection of the people and countries who are treating them so unjustly.
You want it both ways. You want the Serbs to be guilty of crimes they have committed but then you want exactly the same crimes to be reclassified as justified actions (i.e. NOT crimes) when Serbs are the victims.
I am afraid the magic power of the “Blame the Serbs” fairy dust is wearing off. People like me are waking up to the bigotry and hypocrisy of people like you. Democratic Serbia is limping but still on its feet. And if we can just get bigots like you to shut up and stop giving ammunition to the radicals and grievance mongers here, we may be able to finish the job started when Milosevic was toppled by the young European-inclined people of Serbia, the job of building a prosperous democratic pluralist Serbia at the heart of a stable, peaceful and prosperous Balkans.
