http://globalpolitician.com/25885-islam-west
According to Hugh Fitzgerald, “One must keep in mind both the way in which some atrocities ascribed to Serbs were exaggerated, while the atrocities inflicted on them were minimized or ignored altogether. But what was most disturbing was that there was no context to anything: nothing about the centuries of Muslim rule. Had such a history been discussed early on, Western governments might have understood and attempted to assuage the deep fears evoked by the Bosnian Muslim leader, Izetbegovic, when he wrote that he intended to create a Muslim state in Bosnia and impose the Sharia not merely there, but everywhere that Muslims had once ruled in the Balkans. Had the Western world shown the slightest intelligent sympathy or understanding of what that set off in the imagination of many Serbs (and elsewhere, among the Christians in the Balkans and in Greece), there might never have been such a violent Serbian reaction, and someone like Milosevic might never have obtained power.”
In 1809, after the battle on Cegar Hill, by order of Turkish pasha Hurshid the skulls of the killed Serbian soldiers were built in a tower, Skull Tower, on the way to Constantinople. 3 meters high, Skull Tower was built out of 952 skulls as a warning to the Serbian people not to oppose their Muslim rulers. Some years later, a chapel was built over the skulls.
Similar Jihad massacres were committed not only against the Serbs, but against the Greeks, the Bulgarians and other non-Muslims who slowly rebelled against the Ottoman Empire throughout the 19th century. Professor Vahakn Dadrian and others have clearly identified Jihad as a critical factor in the Armenian genocide in the early 20th century.
As Efraim Karsh notes, “The Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in response to the nationalist aspirations of their European subjects. The Greek war of independence of the 1820’s, the Danubian uprisings of 1848 and the attendant Crimean war, the Balkan explosion of the 1870’s, the Greco-Ottoman war of 1897—all were painful reminders of the costs of resisting Islamic imperial rule.”
Yes, I am (as all Serbs are) well aware of the Skull Tower (Chele kula) and other atrocities the Ottomans committed during their occupation, and yes, a little less amnesia would have helped attenuate, even avoid the Bosnian civil war. Instead, the west took sides immediately and without historical consideration base don personal antipathy towards Miloshevich. The article is not correct, however, about Miloshevich not coming to power had the west been more sensitive to the historical issues involved.
Miloshevich came to power as a result of nationalist euphoria in Slovenia and Croatians feeding nationalist euphoria in Serbia and vice versa. But his claim to fame came when he, a small an unknown party apparatchik, came to Kosovo and witnessed Kosovo Albania police beating up on Serbs there.
The Province was made judicially independent from the rest of Serbia by the 1974 Constitution, and there was no interest among Serbia's communists to aid the terrorized Serbs in the province (the plight and forced exodus of the Serbs from Kosovo during the 1980's power vacuum was well documented by the New York Times).
Miloshevich was an instant sensation and a grass-roots movement centered around him (people used to say Slobo, Slobodo meaning Slobodan [our] Freedom because the word Slobodan means someone who is free). He also used a nationalist card to get rid of his political rivals because he had Serbs eating out of his hands after years of repression and neglect.
Croatians on the other hand were resurrecting the WWII Ustasha war criminals to the status of national heroes. The fascist emgiree groups were supporting Croatia's nationals leader Franjo Tudjman, and the Serbs were not about to live in another Independent State of Croatia that glorified the Nazi WWII creation (inlcuding returning the fasicst currency used during WWII) that killed so many Serbs, Jews and Gypsies in their concentration camps.
Finally, Izetbegovic, Bosnian fundamentalist Muslim leader didn't help matters either with his "Islamiya" plans for the state. Of course, the Croatians ganged up against the Serbs with their former WWII Muslim allies in hopes of seceding western Herzegovina and attaching it to Croatia.
The ghosts ow world war II massacres were revived all over the former Yugoslavia (let's not forget that Kosovo Albanians were overwhelmingly supporting Nazi German occupation as well), and the Serbs were not about to take it lying down. The western indifference and even animosity to the Serbian fears simply because Miloshevich was not popular abroad made things only worse. The west played a major role in fanning the fires of the wars that ensued.