Milosevic was right: JIHADIST HOTBED IN THE BALKANS: THE TRUTH IS OUT

For years we have been warning that flawed pro-Muslim Western policies would turn the Balkans from a “protectorate of the New World Order into an Islamic threat to Western interests” (Chronicles, December 2001). This has already happened, according to a spate of media reports and statements by Western governments and top diplomats over the past few weeks.

“US to build Balkan anti-terrorism center in Bulgaria,” news agencies reported on January 6, to monitor and detect terrorist threats to the United States and Balkan countries. In addition to the CIA-staffed center, Bulgarian media reported that the FBI also plans to set up an office in Sofia working with the center. US intelligence experts are quoted as saying that al-Qaida has a training base in the Balkans and uses the region as a terror route to West

Two days earlier, on January 4, Associated Press warned that efforts to tighten security for seaborne containers won’t lessen the risk that terrorists could sneak a nuclear weapon into Europe by land through the Balkans. Tom Sanderson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Chris Wright of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London were quoted as saying that smuggling routes through southeastern Europe were well established and said there was “a lot of scope” for collusion between terrorist groups and criminal gangs.

Germany’s news magazine Der Spiegel reported a month earlier (December 8, 2003) that the “monstrous” King Fahd mosque in Sarajevo—the largest in Europe, on which the desert kingdom spent a total of $20 million—is a terrorist threat. “Western security experts” are quoted as saying that Bosnia could become “a hotbed of extremists ready to use force—and would thus carry the fight of the Islamic terror syndicates against the ‘godless West’ to the southeast of Europe.” This creeping infiltration is increasingly suspect to Western observers, the magazine says: “We are extremely concerned,” it quotes a German intelligence chief, August Hanning, as saying; in some mosques preachers are already openly inciting against the West, against Israel and the godless United States. During the war Bosnia become a training camp for Islamist activists from all over the world, the magazine quotes a French expert as saying, with up to 5,000 foreign volunteers fighting with Izetbegovic’s troops. Many remained behind, “too many to be safe,” according to George Friedman, director of Stratfor. The Balkans are “of strategic importance” to Al-Qa’ida, he says; the organization can use the region for its objectives at any time.

Such concerns are now reflected in statements by some U.S. diplomats and Western governments. A remarkable example was provided by the U.S. Ambassador in Sarajevo, Clifford Bond, who declared on December 17 that there is a terrorist threat in Bosnia because of foreigners who arrived there during the war and stayed on. In the same week Greece announced that its national security interests were threatened by Al Qaida-aligned agents in Bosnia. The Cabinet of Prime Minister Costas Simitis is concerned by the threat from Bosnia to the Olympic Games in August 2004.

"UN Adds Bosnian Charity Director to Al Qaeda List,” Reuters reported ten days later (December 29). The name of Safet Durguti, an Albanian born in Kosovo, was added to the list of 300 individuals whose assets should be frozen due to suspected ties to Osama bin Laden or his al Qaeda network. Durguti—apparently the key link between Islamic fundamentalists in Kosovo and Bosnia—is the director of a charity called Vazir, based in the Bosnian city of Travnik. According to the U.S. Treasury Department Vazir was simply another name for the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi charity that was placed on the U.N. list in March 2002. It was formed in May 2003 as an association for sports, culture and education but was based in the same premises as Al-Haramain.

Dozens of similar statements and articles can be quoted from different Western sources over the past month alone. In short, the problem exists, it is freely admitted that it exists by policy analysts and government officials alike, it has acquired massive proportions, and may not be easily resolved any longer. As far back as 2000 a highly classified State Department report—released in the aftermath of 9-11—warned that the Muslim-controlled portions of Bosnia had become a safe haven for Islamic terrorists who present a major threat to Europe and the United States, and who were protected by the Muslim government in Sarajevo. The findings were summarized in the words of a former State Department official: Bosnia-Herzegovina is “a staging area” for Islamic terrorists.

The threat is not limited to a few elusive extremists: the ruling establishment in Sarajevo has had a symbiotic relationship with the sources of Islamic radicalism for over a decade. “Iran, Bosnia to Exapnd Ties,” reported IRIB (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting) on December 21 on a meeting of the Bosnian ambassador to Tehran Ibrahim Efendic and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The latter said that “the Jihad (holy war) of the the Bosnian and Palestinian nations is praiseworthy and a source of honor for Muslims”:

The resistance and faith of these nations will be registered in the history of Islam, he added… Highlighting the geographical status of the Balkans, Rafsanjani said Iran attaches great importance to Bosnia and Herzegovina and expressed the hope to witness further expansion of bilateral ties between the two countries. The outgoing Bosnian ambassador lauded the humanitarian aid rendered by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The meaning of this unjustly overlooked news item is (1) that the “Bosnian nation” is equated with its Muslim component only, all others being by implication enemy aliens; (2) that Bosnian Muslim government officials are received and treated in Teheran as allies in a jihad; (3) that Islamists see Bosnia as no less important than Palestine to their strategic design (“geographic status”); and (4) that Iran’s “humanitarian aid”—the label used during the war as a cover for illegal arms shipments is still appreciated in Sarajevo. Iran had already obtained a foothold in Bosnia, when the Clinton Administration asked for—and obtained—Teheran’s help in supplying the Muslim army with weapons (“Clinton-Approved Iranian Arms Transfers Help Turn Bosnia into Militant Islamic Base,” U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, January 16, 1997. This was done in violation of the arms embargo initially demanded by the U.S. and behind the back of its European allies (See “Fingerprints: Arms to Bosnia, the real story,” The New Republic, October 28, 1996). The CIA and the Departments of State and Defense were kept in the dark until after the decision was made (“U.S. Had Options to Let Bosnia Get Arms, Avoid Iran,” The Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1996). Along with the weapons, Iranian Revolutionary Guards and VEVAK intelligence agents entered Bosnia in large numbers.

The problem of collusion between American governments and Islamic radicals antedates the wars of Yugoslav succession. Its roots hark back to the support Bin Laden and other fundamentalist Muslims received from the United States following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. According to former CIA director Robert Gates, the U.S. intelligence services began to arm the mujahideen even before the Soviet intervention. Mistaken and shortsighted as this strategy turned out to be, it was conceivably justified by the dictates of the Cold War: one’s enemy’s enemy is one’s de facto ally, if not a trusted friend. Blowback was a risk, but one at least arguably worth taking. A quarter of a century later, it is necessary to rectify more recent mistakes of a similar nature. If the War Against Terror is to be meaningful, the Bush administration should investigate the biggest unknown scandal of the Clinton years: that throughout the 1990's, the U.S. government aided and abetted al-Qa’eda operations in the Balkans, long after he was recognized as a major security threat to the United States.

There are foreign policy strategists in Washington who have sought for decades to turn militant Islam into a tool of policy. This is not a flight of critical fancy: it is a well documented fact; it is not challenged as an accusation, but it is not unduly admitted either. In the beginning those strategists, or their predecessors, may have underestimated the danger of “blowback,” but over the years they have bound good men to bad policy, and they have reinforced failure with gold. “Blowback” is the apt metaphor: poison gas blowing back from its intended victims to choke one’s own soldiers in their trenches. The strategy of effective support for Islamic ambitions in pursuit of short-term political or military objectives has helped turn Islamic radicalism into a truly global phenomenon.

The underlying assumption was that militant Muslims could be used and eventually discarded—like Diem, Noriega, the Shah, and the Contras: CIA’s “Operation Cyclone” poured over $4 billion into setting up training centers where young fanatics were sent to learn terrorist skills. The assumption all along has been that the Islamic genie could be controlled. For the ensuing two decades, in the conflicts that inevitably define the line between Islam and its neighbors, Washington almost invariably supported the Muslims—most notably in Bosnia and Kosovo. By January 1996, Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind of The New Republic approvingly wrote of the U.S. role as the leader of Muslim nations from the Persian Gulf to the Balkans, with the Ottoman lands becoming “the heart of a third American empire” (Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind, “The Third American Empire,” The New York Times, January 2, 1996).

The Bosnian crisis started when Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim leader, reneged on an agreement brokered by the European Union that provided for continued power-sharing in Sarajevo. He opted for an unilateral declaration of independence; in making this decision, he was supported by the U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade, Warren Zimmerman. He was acting in line with the Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who made it clear that a goal was to mollify the Muslim world and to counter any perception of an anti-Muslim bias regarding American policies in Iraq (Eagleburger’s MacNeil/Lehrer PBS NewsHour interview on October 6, 1992). The subsequent portrayal in the media of the Muslims as innocent martyrs in the cause of multicultural tolerance concealed the fact that the war was primarily religious in nature. Before the first shots were fired, Alija Izetbegovic, proudly proclaimed in his “Islamic Declaration” (1974; republished 1990) that “there can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies and political institutions”: “The Islamic movement should and must start taking power as soon as it is morally and numerically strong enough not only to overthrow the existing non-Islamic power structure, but also to build a great Islamic federation spreading from Morocco to Indonesia, from tropical Africa to Central Asia.”

This is hardly an unusual viewpoint for a sincere and dedicated Islamist, and Izetbegovic should have been commended for his frankness. Nevertheless, it should have been obvious in the West that the Bosnian-Muslims did not want to establish a multiethnic liberal democratic society. The U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office saw the situation more clearly than the politicians: “President Izethbegovic and his cabal appear to harbor much different private intentions and goals” (“Selling the Bosnia Myth to America: Buyer Beware,” Lieutenant Colonel John E. Sray, USA, U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office, Fort Leavenworth, KS, October 1995). Now that Bosnia is a terrorist hotbed we know that this assessment was entirely correct.

The core of Bin Laden’s Balkan network are the veterans of El Moujahed brigade of the Bosnian-Muslim army. It was established in 1992 and included volunteers from all over the Islamic world whose passage to Bosnia was facilitated by Al-Qaeda. The unit was distinguished by its spectacular cruelty to Christians, including decapitation of prisoners to the chants of Allahu-akbar. El Moujahed was the nursery from which an international terrorist network spread to Europe and North America. After the end of the Bosnian war, many Muslim volunteers remained (“Foreign Muslims Fighting in Bosnia Considered ‘Threat’ to U.S. Troops,” The Washington Post, November 30, 1995).

The potential threat persuaded the U.S. and other Western nations to oppose the presence of foreign mujahedeen in Bosnia as part of the November 1995 Dayton peace agreements, which specifically called for the expulsion of all foreign fighters. But the Muslim-controlled Bosnian government circumvented the rule by granting Bosnian citizenship to several hundred Arab and other Islamist volunteers—eliminating their “foreign” status before the accord took effect. Many of them had taken over the former Serbian village of Bocinja Donja, near the city of Zenica in central Bosnia; elsewhere they took over properties and married local women, sometimes by force ( “Mujaheddin Remaining in Bosnia: Islamic Militants Strongarm Civilians, Defy Dayton Plan,” The Washington Post, July 8, 1996). The results followed swiftly, in the form of a dozen executed or planned attacks—from a shootout Lille in France to a terrorist cell Montreal, from the Y2K LAX conspiracy to a wave of recent bombings in Istanbul—that can be traced to the Bosnian Connection.

While an intricate Islamic terror network was maturing in Bosnia, Osama bin Laden was busy looking for fresh opportunities in the Balkans. He found it in Kosovo. European and Israeli sources warned that after Bosnia, Kosovo promised to be the second Islamic bastion. The Clinton Administration ignored the warnings (The Jerusalem Post, September 14, 1998). The KLA earned its spurs in the eyes of its Islamist partners by blowing up Christian Orthodox churches. The relationship was cemented by the zeal of some KLA veterans who joined Bin Laden’s network in Afghanistan:

Perhaps most telling about the minds of those who trained here is a document found at the [Al-Qaeda] camp. “I am interested in suicide operations,”' wrote Damir Bajrami, 24, an ethnic Albanian from Kosovo, on his entry application in April. “'I have Kosovo Liberation Army combat experience against Serb and American forces. I need no further training. I recommend (suicide) operations against (amusement) parks like Disney” (USA Today, November 26, 2001, on documents found at an Al-Qaeda training camp).

Iranian Revolutionary Guards had joined forces with Osama bin Laden to support the Albanian insurgency in Kosovo, hoping “to turn the region into their main base for Islamic armed activity in Europe” (The Sunday Times of London March 22, 1998). By the end of 1998, when Bin Laden’s terrorist network in Albania started sending units to fight the Serbs in Kosovo, the U.S. drug officials complained that the transformation of the KLA from terrorists into freedom fighters hampered their ability to stem the flow of Albanian-peddled heroin into America (The Washington Times, May 4, 1999). By that time the NATO bombing of Serbia was in full swing, however, and the mujaheddin were once again American allies: “Al-Qaeda has both trained and financially supported the KLA. Many border crossings into Kosovo by ‘foreign fighters’ also have been documented and include veterans of the militant group Islamic Jihad from Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan” (Ibid.).

All along, the Clinton Administration was positively elated about the shift in alliances and attitudes displayed by the Kosovo intervention:

Insofar as Kosovo emerged as a unique case of U.S. support for a Muslim population against an avowed Christian state and led to an alliance with a Muslim guerilla army, it is something of a watershed event. The breakthrough in Kosovo also came about at the tail end of major changes in the international and domestic politics of Muslim societies over the course of the preceding decade. Policymakers are challenged to respond to those changes in order to bring American foreign policy in line with the reality of Islam’s place in domestic, regional, and international politics. Given the importance of Islam to international affairs and the sheer number of Muslims who live in areas that affect Western and U.S. interests, rethinking America’s foreign policy on Islam may be a welcome development (Georgetown Journal of International Affairs).

Where does more than a decade of U.S. involvement leave the Balkans? “The small jihad is now finished and we have—some of us—survived the war. The Bosnian state is intact. But now we have to fight a bigger, second jihad,” says Mustafa Ceric, the Reis-ul-Ulema in Bosnia-Herzegovina—educated, incidentally, at Al-Azhar in Cairo and the University of Chicago. Clinton’s intervention in the Balkans had for its end result the strengthening of an already aggressive Islamic base in the heart of Europe that will not go away. The unspoken assumption of the architects of such policies, that generosity would be rewarded by loyalty, is mistaken: loyalty to unbelievers is not a Muslim trait; pragmatism is—and, as Yohanan Ramati has remarked, “pragmatism prescribes that when dealing with fools, one milks them for all one can get, demoralizes them until they are incapable of protecting their interests, and then deprives them of any influence they have left.”

A generation ago it was understandable, even excusable, for bone-headed CIA bosses to work up a hatred of atheism and enjoy dealing with believers. They used Muslims in just the way they used the Church of Rome in the early 1950s in their fight against the Communists. But appeasement by their feeble successors in our own time only breeds the contempt and arrogance of the radicals and fuels their ambition. Changing the self-defeating trend demands recognition that the West is in a war of religion, whether it wants that or not, and however much it hates the fact.

On the Islamic side this war is being fought with the deep and unshakeable belief that the West is on its last legs. The success of the demographic deluge is reinforced by the evidence from history that a civilization that loses the urge for biological self-perpetuation is indeed finished. Falling birthrates in Europe and the need to support European welfare entitlements with a host of “guest-workers” and immigrants seem to make it inevitable that the colonization of Europe by Islamic peoples will continue. Some leaders such as President Bush may have been hoping to domesticate Islam under the aegis of the nondenominational deism that is professed in their rhetoric. The attempt will continue to fail. So far this failure has not been admitted. Hence the enduring fantasy of an American-Islamic alliance against extremism.

Of course, it would be preferable to have a reformed Islam as our global neighbor, rather than the grim variations on the same theme that currently prevail in Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, but Islam’s ability to reform itself is undermined by the appeasement of Islamism that continues in the Balkans. Such appeasement will only enhance a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression that may culminate sooner or later in yet another bout of alien domination.

Muslims, as Christians once did, tend to sympathize with each other in a familiar and more or less nationalist fashion. If this tendency goes unchecked it produces a lunatic account of world affairs in which Muslim societies are always victims of the West and always innocent. It is not just the extremists who believe that in Palestine, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Kashmir, the Muslims are entirely in the right: at present, almost every Muslim thinks so. The “politically correct” Westerners accept the Muslim judgment. But this is extremely dangerous, as the West cannot afford to concede such a large measure of moral approval to so self-conscious and agitated a force in world affairs.

Western policy in the Balkans should be reappraised because to continue encouraging the Muslim sense of pure victimhood—notably with the myth of the “genocide” in Srebrenica, and the accompanying US-financed Muslim shrine—is to feed the minds of would-be suicide bombers in Sarajevo and Pristina with a political pap that nourishes their hate. The obstacle to doing so is often the apologetics and the tradition of pro-Muslim appeasement of the Clinton decade; but that appeasement must stop. Pandering to Islam’s geopolitical designs—in the Balkans, or anywhere else—and sacrificing smaller Christian nations in the process, is counterproductive: the morsels will only whet the Islamic appetite, paving the way to a major confrontation some time in this century.

You know, that's one of the most moronic statements that I've ever read of Free Republic, even if I only compare it to the other usually moronic statements vomited forth by the small Serb-hating contingent here on FR.

I am sure you have read the following clips before

SANU Memorandum 1986 - Clips

"Ethnic interests have taken precedence over class interests, and the provinces have insisted more on their status as a constituent element of the federation than on the fact that they are an integral part of Serbia. Balances of this sort have served as a means of pacifying those who were concerned about maintaining the state and economic integrity of the country as a whole, but they have also encouraged separatists of all stripes to push through their own agendas in practice".

[...]

"In order for the necessary changes to be effected, we must throw off the ideology which lays primary emphasis on ethnic and territorial considerations. Whereas in modern-day civilized society integrational trends are gaining momentum, with full affirmation of civil and human rights, the superseding of authoritarian forms of government, and democratization of government, what we have in our own political system is growing centrifugal forces, local, regional and national egoism, and authoritarian, arbitrary government, which on a large scale and at all levels of society violates universally recognized human rights. The propensity to divisions and fragmentation of global entities in society, which is in fact resistance to a modern, democratic, integrated federation, takes shelter behind the specious ideological catchword of a struggle against ‘‘unitarism’’ and ‘‘centralism.’’ However, the real alternative to ‘‘unitarism’’ and ‘‘centralism’’ is ethnic egoism and polycentrism, with local ‘‘national’’ (in fact republican and provincial) economies, with forcible restriction of science, culture, and education within territorial boundaries and the subjugation of all aspects of public life to the unchecked power of republican and provincial oligarchies. The real alternative is a democratic, integrating federalism, in which the principle of autonomy of the parts is in harmony with the principle of coordinating the parts within the framework of a single whole, in which political institutions at all levels of society are set up in a consistently democratic way, in which decision-making is preceded by free, rational, and public debate, and not by secret behind-the-scenes manoeuvring by cabals of self-styled and self-appointed champions of special ethnic interests".

[...]

"Self-management is stunted and deformed not just because it has been reduced to the level of social micro-entities, but also because it has been completely subordinated to the organs of alienated authority -- from the communes all the way up to republican and provincial governments. The disintegrated working class has been turned into a conglomerate of work collectives, placed in a situation where they have to fight with one another over how to divide up income".

[...]

"It is paradoxical that in a society which considers itself to be socialist, the working class has no opportunities of becoming organized or of being represented in the Federal Assembly. Just how much the ethnic and territorial principle has gained ascendancy over the economic principle of production can best be seen from the vehemence with which the idea of setting up a chamber of associated labour in the Federal Assembly is being resisted".

[...]

"There is no need to say that separatism and nationalism are both at work on the social scene, but there is not enough awareness that such trends were made ideologically possible by the 1974 Constitution. The constant strengthening and synergetic effect of separatism and nationalism have cut the national groups off from one another, to a critical degree. Machinations with language and the caging of academics and cultural personalities in republican and provincial enclosures are depressing signs of the burgeoning strength of particularism. All the new ethnogenies are not so much the unfortunate fabrications of an academic community shut up within a provincial bell jar and plagued by the incubus of regional ideologies as they are symptoms of growing alienation, not only from a common present and future but even from the common past. It is as though people were in a hurry to get out of a house which is tumbling down around their ears and were trying to run away as fast and as far as possible. The intellectual climate provides a warning that the political crisis has come close to the flash point of complete destabilization of Yugoslavia. Kosovo is the most obvious portent. Incidents such as Slivnitsa leave no one in doubt that those who have aspirations to Yugoslav territory have already defined their interests".

[...]

"The working class cannot stay a genuine vanguard for long if its intellectuals are looked upon as unreliable fellow travelers of the revolution. The limited confidence placed in the intelligentsia is perhaps most disastrous in that the country is losing step with technical advances. Deliberations on the system of production, the taking of investment decisions, organi-zationand development of production do not go beyond the conceptual framework of the second technological revolution, which is on the way out. The right moment for joining in the third technological revolution has, it appears, been missed".

[...]

"We have come to such a pass that almost nobody knows what values Yugoslav society seeks to uphold. The horizon of needs has never been seriously opened up for democratic debate. Consequently, the scale of priorities of needs is created spontaneously, largely under the influence of the consumer society mentality. This psychology, linked with an untrammeled primitivism, has greatly strengthened the propensity towards kitsch in literature, music, film, and entertainment of all types. This propensity is even being deliberately and systematically pandered to by the press, radio and television. Under the assault of the aggressive kitsch which reigns supreme on the scene, genuine cultural values have failed to take root on a large scale in society, despite the large number of important accomplishments in Yugoslavia’s cultural life. There are few planned efforts to bring these works to a wider public".

[...]

"The crisis in culture is seen not just in the fact that genuine social values cannot compete against kitsch. Cultural life is becoming more and more regionalized; the Yugoslav and universal significance of culture is becoming obliterated, and in large part it is putting itself in the service of republican and provincial aspirations to carve out their own fiefdoms in this sphere as well. The overall provincialization of cultural life lowers standards and makes it possible for the less talented to gain wide public recognition. Deep-rooted as they are in provincial cultural life, separatism and nationalism are becoming increasingly aggressive".

[...]

"The economic reform of 1965 essentially marked a change of course in the strategy of social development: the plan for political democratization was supplanted by a plan of economic liberalization. The idea of self-management, which pivots on the disalienization of politics, was replaced with the idea of decentralization, which led to the setting up of regional centres of alienated power. The ethics of mutual aid and the welfare state gave way to a spirit of grasping individualism and promotion of group interests".

[...]

"The working class enjoys no legal right of self-organization or strikes, and it does not have any real voice in political decision-making. Relations between national groups are characterized by clashes of conflicting interests, exploitation, and poor cooperation between autarkic national economies. We can no longer even speak seriously of a Yugoslav development policy or an integral Yugoslav market. Etatism has not been abolished; it has merely been transferred to the republican level, where it is the most inefficient and malignant".

[...]

"Unless there is a change in this Constitution and the political and economic system based on it, it will be impossible to resolve any of the basic problems in our society; it will be impossible to halt the present process of disintegration, and the country will slide ever deeper into crisis".

[...]

"If a monopoly of economic power is also one of the means by which elites are formed, which can foist themselves upon society and gain full control over its political life, then all the institutions which make such a monopoly of power possible are incompatible with the principle of the sovereignty of the people, regardless of whether it is big capital or a bureaucratic state. In this sense, full sovereignty of the people could be achieved only in a classless society, in which political, economic, and cultural life would be organized in a democratic manner. The prerequisite for such a democracy (‘‘consultative democracy’’ or ‘‘integrated self-management’’) is the free election and recall of all officials, public oversight of their work, a separation of powers, and the absence of bureaucratic privileges. These prerequisites have long ago been created in modern society. Yugoslavia has still not achieved this level, even though many years have gone by since it proclaimed the ideas of self-management, de-bureaucratization, and de-professionalization of politics".

[...]

"In modern, civilized society, any political oppression or discrimination on ethnic grounds is unacceptable. The Yugoslav solution of the national question at first could have been regarded as an exemplary model of a multinational federation, in which the principle of a unified state and state policy was happily married to the principle of the political and cultural autonomy of national groups and ethnic minorities. Over the past two decades, the principle of unity has become weakened and overshadowed by the principle of national autonomy, which in practice has turned into the sovereignty of the federal units (the republics, which as a rule are not ethnically homogeneous). The flaws which from the very beginning were present in this model have become increasingly evident. Not all the national groups were equal: the Serbian nation, for instance, was not given the right to have its own state. The large sections of the Serbian people who live in other republics, unlike the national minorities, do not have the right to use their own language and script; they do not have the right to set up their own political or cultural organizations or to foster the common cultural traditions of their nation together with their co-nationals. The unremitting persecution and expulsion of Serbs from Kosovo is a drastic example showing that those principles which protect the autonomy of a minority (the ethnic Albanians) are not applied to a minority within a minority (the Serbs, Montenegrins, Turks, and Roms in Kosovo). In view of the existing forms of national discrimination, present-day Yugoslavia cannot be regarded as a modern or democratic state".

[...]

"Only Serbia made genuine sacrifices for the sake of the development of the three underdeveloped republics and the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo, helping others at the price of its own economic stagnation. This has not been the case as far as the three developed regions are concerned. Application of a rate of contributions proportional to the social product did not observe the basic rule that taxes should be levied according to ability to pay. The proportional rate of contributions spared Slovenia, Croatia, and Vojvodina from progressive rates of taxation, a fact which enabled them not only to grow at a normal rate but also to improve their own relative position in relation to the Yugoslav average. However, such rates of taxation have been an enormous burden for Serbia proper. Its economy has been setting aside about half its net capital savings for the underdeveloped regions, as a result of which it has itself been dragged down to the level of the economies of the underdeveloped republics".

[...]

"The attitude taken to Serbia’s economic stagnation shows that the vindictive policy towards this republic has not lost any of its edge with the passing of time. On the contrary, encouraged by its own success, it has grown ever stronger, to the point of genocide. The discrimination against citizens of Serbia who, because of the representation of the republics on the principle of parity, have fewer federal posts open to them than others and fewer of their own delegates in the Federal Assembly is politically untenable, and the vote of citizens from Serbia carries less weight than the vote of citizens from any of the other republics or any of the provinces. Seen in this light, Yugoslavia appears not as a community of equal citizens or equal nations and nationalities but rather as a community of eight equal territories. And yet not even here is Serbia equal, because of its special legal and political status, which reflects the desire to keep the Serbian people constantly under control. The watchword of this policy has been ‘‘a weak Serbia ensures a strong Yugoslavia,’’ and this idea has been taken a step further in the concept that if the Serbs as the largest national group are allowed rapid economic expansion, they would pose a threat to the other national groups. It is for this reason that all possible means have been used to hamstring Serbia’s economic progress and political consolidation by imposing more and more restrictions on it. One such restriction, which is very acute, is the present undefined and contradictory constitutional status of Serbia".

[...]

"In the absence of a commensurate counterbalance in coordination, as a rule the practice of regionalization turns into provincial narrow-mindedness and blindness to broader national interests".

[...]

"The problem will never be resolved in this fashion, and Serbia will continue to dissipate its energies coping with conflicts without any prospect of achieving complete success in the enterprise. This no doubt was the idea when the provinces were given wider autonomy, especially since the perpetuation of strife in Serbia gives others an excuse to interfere in its internal affairs and in this way prolong their domination over it. After the federalization of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, such interference in the internal affairs of a republic has only remained possible in the case of Serbia".

[...]

"There has been no real showdown with neo-fascist aggression; all the measures taken to date have merely removed manifestations of this aggression from the streets, while in fact steeling resolve to achieve its uncompromising, racially motivated goals at any cost and using all possible means. Even the deliberately draconian sentences handed down against young offenders have been designed to incite and spread ethnic hatred".

[...]

"…between 1876 and 1912, some 150,000 Serbs were driven from hearth and home by the savage terror of the local privileged Albanian bashibazouks. During World War II, more than 60,000 Serbs were expelled from Kosovo and Metohija, but it was after the war that this exodus reached its highest proportions: in the last twenty-odd years, upwards of 200,000 Serbs have been forced to leave".

[...]

"Unless things change radically, in less than ten years’ time there will no longer be any Serbs left in Kosovo, and an ‘‘ethnically pure’’ Kosovo, that unambiguously stated goal of the Greater Albanian racists, already outlined in the programmes and actions of the Prizren League of 1878-1881, will be achieved".

[...]

"Kosovo’s fate remains a vital question for the entire Serbian nation. If it is not resolved with the sole correct outcome of the imposed war; if genuine security and unambiguous equality for all the peoples living in Kosovo and Metohija are not established; if objective and permanent conditions for the return of the expelled nation are not created, then this part of the Republic of Serbia and Yugoslavia will become a European issue, with the gravest possible unforeseeable consequences. Kosovo represents one of the most important points in the central Balkans. The ethnic mixture in many Balkan lands reflects the ethnic profile of the Balkan Peninsula, and a demand for an ethnically pure Kosovo, which is being actively pursued, is not only a direct and serious threat to all the peoples who live there as minorities but, if it is achieved, will spark off a wave of expansionism which will pose a real and daily threat to all the national groups living in Yugoslavia".

[...]

"The fanatic zeal to create a separate Croatian language countervailing any idea of a common language of the Croats and Serbs in the long run does not leave much hope that the Serbian people in Croatia will be able to preserve their national identity".

[...]

"The school system based on so-called ‘‘career-oriented’’ education and characterized by inferior quality of instruction has proven to be completely bankrupt. Several generations of school-leavers have been intellectually crippled and impoverished; we are turning out a surplus of uncultured, half-baked professionals, unequipped to take an effective role in the economy and social services and unprepared for creative and Intellectual efforts".

[...]

"Law-makers have de jure created eight educational systems, which are growing farther and farther apart from one an-other, and no amount of consultation about core curricula can reverse the course of development which has been mapped out in the legal statutes".

[...]

"What first must be done is to eliminate those laws which have a centrifugal effect so as to continue along the line of togetherness and unity which has been followed in these parts for more than one hundred and fifty years. Otherwise, we shall produce, and we are producing, generations who will be less and less Yugoslavs and more and more dissatisfied national romantics and self-seeking nationalists. A country which does not have a uniform system of education cannot hope to stay united in the future".

[...]

"Precisely at a time when public funds are being lavishly squandered, a policy of restricted spending has been introduced for the universities, which have been receiving less and less money. For a decade and a half the university faculties have not been able to employ new teaching assistants, so that the oldest Yugoslav universities, especially the Belgrade University, have never before in their history had such a high average age of their professors and researchers. Higher education and scientific research, which in all countries are the basic engine of development in the computer age, have been completely neglected. University ‘‘reforms,’’ most often carried out under political duress and not for academic reasons (as witnessed by the introduction of vocational diplomas in higher education, the compartmentalization of university faculties on the model of basic organizations of associated labour in the economy, etc.), have all been wide of the mark. Particular harm was done by the removal of the scientific research effort from university auspices, the creation of barriers, systemic and administrative, between research done in institutes and research done in universities. As a result the universities lost access to many laboratories; parallel programmes were created; research personnel in the field of science lost contact with one another, and the normal flow of scientists from universities to research institutes and from institutes to the universities was interrupted".

[...]

"After the dramatic inter-communal strife in the course of the Second World War, it seemed as though nationalism had run its course and was well on the way to disappearing completely. Such an impression has proven to be deceptive. Not much time passed before nationalism began to rear its ugly head again, and each successive constitutional change has created more of the institutional prerequisites needed for it to become full blown. Nationalism has been generated from the top, its prime initiators being the politicians. The basic cause of this manifold crisis is the ideological defeat which nationalism has inflicted on socialism. The disintegrational processes of all descriptions which have brought the Yugoslav state to the verge of ruin, coupled with a breakdown in the system of values, are the consequences of this defeat".

[...]

"The present state of depression of the Serbian people, against a background of chauvinism and Serbophobia which are gaining in intensity in some milieux, provides fertile soil for an ever more drastic manifestation of the national sensi-bilities of the Serbian nation and reactions which might be inflammatory and dangerous. It is incumbent upon us not to overlook or underestimate these dangers for a single moment. But at the same time, while calling for a struggle against Serbian nationalism as a matter of principle, we cannot condone the ideological and political symmetry, which has been established in apportioning historical blame. This equal apportionment of historical guilt, so corrosive to the spirit and morale, with its time-worn injustices and falsehoods, must be abandoned if we wish to see a democratic, Yugoslav, humanistic climate prevail in contemporary Serbian culture".

[...]

Admittedly, the first article of the Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Serbia contains a clause declaring that Serbia is a state, but the question must be asked what kind of a state is denied jurisdiction over its own territory or does not have the means at its disposal to establish law and order in one of its sections, or ensure the personal safety and security of property of its citizens, or put a stop to the genocide in Kosovo and halt the exodus of Serbs from their ancestral homes. Such a status is evidence of political discrimination against Serbia, especially in the light of the fact that the Constitution of the SFRY has imposed upon it internal federalization as a permanent source of conflict between Serbia proper and its provinces. The aggressive Albanian nationalism in Kosovo cannot be brought to heel unless Serbia ceases to be the only republic whose internal affairs are ordered by others".

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"It is imperative that this constitution be amended so as to satisfy Serbia’ s legitimate interests. The autonomous provinces should become genuinely integral parts of the Republic of Serbia, while receiving that degree of autonomy which does not disrupt the integrity of the Republic and which will be able to satisfy the general interests of the community at large".

[...]

"While supporting the arrangements first outlined by the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation during the war, Serbia will have to bear in mind that the final decision does not rest with it, and that the others might prefer some other alternatives. Consequently, Serbia has the task of clearly assessing its own economic and national interests, lest it be taken unawares by events. By insisting on the federal system, Serbia would not only be furthering the equality of all the national groups in Yugoslavia but also facilitating resolution of the political and economic crisis".

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"An era in the evolution of Yugoslav society and Serbia is obviously coming to an end with an historically exhausted ideology, general stagnation, and a deepening recession in the economic, moral and cultural spheres. Such a state of affairs makes it imperative to carry out radical, well-studied, scientifically based and resolutely implemented reforms of the entire state order and organization of the Yugoslav community of nations, and also in the sphere of democratic socialism, for a faster and more effective participation in contemporary civilization. Social reforms should to the greatest possible extent harness the natural and human resources of the entire country so that we might become a productive, enlightened, and democratic society, capable of living from our own labour and creativity and able to make a contribution to the world community".

[...]

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