While you can't tell that difference since you base ethnic cleansing and chauvinism on your Illyrian myth and "Serb churches aren't Serbian" fairytales.
Posted on 06/01/2004 1:13:25 PM PDT by GeraldP
In 2001 two events at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague put the subject of genocide in the former Yugoslavia back on the front pages of newspapers. Firstly, Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic was convicted of genocide against the Muslim population of the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, the first conviction at the ICTY for this gravest of crimes. Secondly and more spectacularly, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was indicted and put on trial for genocide against the Muslim and Croat population of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole.
These events at the ICTY inflamed the bitter controversies that have raged over this conflict since it broke out in 1991. Internationally, political opinion has been divided into two camps characterized by their conflicting analyses of the crisis and views of the correct international response. On the one side were those who viewed the war as a result of Serbian aggression and expansionism and who generally advocated military intervention by the West in response. On the other side were those who viewed the conflict as a civil war between competing nationalisms (Serb, Croat, Muslim, and Albanian) in which the Serb side was if anything less to blame than the others. They tended to blame Western interference for catalysing the conflict and to reject military intervention against Serbian forces.
For the sake of convenience, we may refer to the first camp as the ‘orthodox’ and the second as the ‘revisionist’.
The debate between these two camps has continued to dominate discourse on the former Yugoslavia in the West up till the present day. Although the events at The Hague in 2001 marked a defeat for the revisionist camp, its more determined members have responded by denying both the validity of the charges of genocide and the legitimacy of the ICTY. The revisionist analysis of the wars in the former Yugoslavia therefore constitutes one aspect of the Western response to the phenomenon of genocide in the contemporary world, one that is in some ways related to similar ‘revisionist’ analyses of the prior genocide in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and the contemporaneous genocide in Rwanda.
The use of the word ‘revisionist’ to describe this current of opinion serves a dual purpose, for the revisionists seek on the one hand to oppose what they see as the mainstream, orthodox view of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and on the other to challenge the very notion that genocide took place. Thus they are in some ways the counterpart to the Holocaust revisionists. While the revisionists under consideration correctly point out that the massacres in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992-95 and in Kosovo in 1998-99 are not on a scale with those of Auschwitz their arguments resemble in some ways those of the Holocaust revisionists while their own frequent exploitation of the Holocaust legacy contains some startling ambiguities.
Although the revisionist camp stretches right across the political spectrum to encompass liberals, conservatives, socialists, and members of the far right, the ideological motivation of each of these groups is very different. The current I wish to analyse here consists of people who are to the left of mainstream Social Democracy and who oppose what they see as the anti-Serbian or anti-Yugoslav policies of the Western alliance. It includes members of many different far-left traditions: left Labourites and Social Democrats; Christian Socialists; Orthodox Communists; Trotskyists; Maoists; anarchists; and others. For the sake of convenience I shall refer to them as ‘left revisionists’, meaning those who, on the basis of a radical left-wing philosophy, seek 1) to revise the negative evaluation of the Milosevic regime made by politically mainstream commentators; 2) to deny that genocide took place and downplay the violence and suffering involved in the wars in the former Yugoslavia; and 3) to shift the blame for this violence and suffering, as well as for the break-up of Yugoslavia, on to the Western alliance. Other adherents of a radical left-wing philosophy who oppose Western military intervention in the Balkans but who also opposed the Milosevic regime do not belong to this category and are not the subjects of this essay. My purpose here is neither to discuss the merits and demerits of a left-wing philosophy, nor to analyse the events in the former Yugoslavia themselves, nor to address the advantages and disadvantages of Western military intervention. This is a study of the ideology of left revisionism itself. The present author makes no pretence at neutrality in this debate - he belongs firmly in the ‘orthodox’ camp - and this is above all a study of the extremes to which one current of Western opinion is prepared to go and the intellectual and moral somersaults it is prepared to perform, in order to avoid confronting the reality of genocide. In order to understand the erroneous analysis on which left revisionism is based, it is necessary to examine the real causes of the break-up of Yugoslavia, which lie in the policies of the Milosevic regime.
Ideology of the left revisionists “What about the Kurds?” is viewed by the left revisionists as their clinching argument in the case against the NATO intervention in Kosovo: if Western leaders were motivated to intervene in Kosovo out of concern at the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians, why have they not intervened to protect the Kurds from Turkish oppression? Or the Palestinians from the Israelis? I wish to turn the question around and to ask “What about the Albanians?” If the left-wing revisionists are concerned with the suffering of oppressed nationalities, as they claim to be regarding the Kurds, Palestinians, and others, it needs to be explained why did they not speak out against Milosevic’s persecution of the Kosovo Albanians, or of the Bosnian Muslims, or of the Croats. It needs to be explained why Serbian or Yugoslav military intervention was less objectionable to them than American military intervention, even when it was incomparably more bloody. It needs to be asked why the six hundred or so Yugoslav civilian deaths during the Kosovo War were ‘worthy’ victims in a way that the tens if not hundreds of thousands of Bosnians killed by Serbian forces were not.
This double standard may in part be attributed to anti-Americanism or ‘anti-imperialism’, whereby members of the far left subordinate their morality to the ‘higher cause’ of opposing the United States. There is a long tradition on the far left of supporting the weaker country against the stronger on an anti-imperialist basis. V.I. Lenin wrote in 1915 that “if tomorrow Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Russia and so on, these would be ‘just’ or ‘defensive’ wars irrespective of who was the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependant, and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding, and predatory ‘Great Powers’.”[1] Such a line of reasoning might conceivably have led members of the far left to support Milosevic’s Serbia as a victim of ‘American imperialism’, even to the point of ignoring or denying its crimes against the non-Serb peoples of the former Yugoslavia.
Simple ‘anti-imperialism’ is however insufficient to explain the motives of the left revisionists, who do not themselves couch their arguments in ‘anti-imperialist’ terms. Rather they prefer to make pedantic, legalistic quibbles over such issues as the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the authority of the UN Security Council, and the exact numbers of Albanian dead; appropriate arguments for international lawyers, perhaps, but scarcely the kind usually favoured in the polemics of the revolutionary left. The focus of the left revisionists is in fact less on denouncing the US as an evil in and of itself – though this is clearly an element - than on defending politically the Milosevic regime. Other regimes that have clashed with the Western alliance during the past decade – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and elsewhere – have not received similar support from the Western left. To the best of my knowledge nobody has tried to claim that Saddam Hussein is a man of peace who respects the territorial integrity of Iraq’s neighbours or that the Taliban are champions of women’s rights and cultural diversity. Nobody, except Osama bin-Laden and eccentric chess-grandmaster Bobby Fischer, has treated the victims of the World Trade Centre bombing with the callousness and contempt with which left revisionists speak of the dead of Vukovar, Srebrenica, and Racak. The Serbia of Milosevic enjoyed the unique position in the pantheon of the ‘rogue states’ of the 1990s as the only one that was supported politically, not just defended from attack, by much of the Western left.
The left revisionists are holding on to the anti-humanist, anti-moralist, anti-democratic bathwater long after the revolutionary baby has died and its corpse decayed. Instead of being moved by the events in Eastern Europe and the USSR in 1989-91 to reevaluate their political philosophy, many of them reacted by clinging even more stubbornly to every last straw from the wreckage of the Communist Atlantis.
Milosevic and the West
One such straw was the Milosevic regime in Belgrade. Its credentials as a ‘left-wing’ regime were pretty poor: Milosevic’s ruling party was called the ‘Socialist Party of Serbia’ (SPS) and had formerly been the League of Communists of Serbia, but SPS leaders Slobodan Milosevic and Borisav Jovic emphasised from the start their commitment to free-market reforms. Under their tenure the gap between rich and poor massively increased, social services were greatly reduced, free healthcare effectively ended, public transport collapsed, and a large new class of black marketeers and organised criminals created. To look to Milosevic’s Serbia as an ‘alternative’ to the capitalist West was pretty much scraping the bottom of the socialist barrel. Radovan Karadzic’s Bosnian Serb nationalist regime in Pale was even less credibly ‘progressive’: ideologically anti-Communist, Karadzic’s Serb Democratic Party identifies with the monarchist and Nazi-collaborationist Chetnik movement far more openly than the Tudjman regime in Zagreb ever identified with the Ustashas. Nevertheless, in the eyes of the left revisionists, to accept that Belgrade and its proxies were committing aggression and genocide was akin to admitting that the liberals really had been right all along about the negative character of Communism. In their minds the Cold War is still being fought on the battlefields of Kosovo. Twenty-five years ago Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman complained of the poor image conveyed by the Western media of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. They wrote that “What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasising alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial US role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered.”[2] Today both authors use similar arguments to downplay the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians and to shift the blame for it away from the Milosevic regime and onto the US. In Chomsky’s words, Turkey is guilty of “massive atrocities” against the Kurds; Indonesia of “aggression and massacre” of “near-genocidal levels” in East Timor; Israel of “murderous and destructive” operations in Lebanon; but there is no mention of Kurdish, East Timorese, or Palestinian atrocities.[3] By contrast, Chomsky uses no such emotive language when discussing the Serbian killing of Albanians; they are a “response” and “reaction” to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) attacks. Meanwhile the KLA was guilty of “targeting Serb police and civilians”; “killing six Serbian teenagers”; the “killing of a Serb judge, police, and civilians”; and so on. The picture Chomsky consequently sketches is of atrocities by both sides and, since KLA actions were “designed to elicit a violent and disproportionate Serbian response”, the implication is that the Milosevic regime was less to blame than the KLA.[4] When a US client massacres innocent civilians it is wholly to blame; when a ‘socialist’ regime does so it is the victims who are primarily to blame.
There is a term for this attitude: moral relativism. In its far-left variety there are two sides to its coin. On the one hand there is a holier-than-thou condemnation of every Western failing (“What about the Kurds/Palestinians/East Timorese?”), allowing the left revisionists always to damn Western policy for its moral imperfections no matter what it is. The West is therefore damned simultaneously for intervening in Kosovo and for colluding in the Turkish oppression of the Kurds and for maintaining sanctions against Iraq, though it is clear that ultimately the West cannot easily reject military intervention, sanctions, and appeasement all at the same time. Combined with this all-trumping moralism in the left-revisionist mind-set, like the opposite pole of a magnet, is a cold-blooded immoralism, according to which the left-winger is absolutely unmoved by the crimes of the Revolution performed for the greater good. More striking even than the defence or denial of crimes against humanity carried out by the left revisionists is their sheer lack of any positive vision for the future or political raison d’etre whatsoever. They should not be seen as ‘pro-Serb’, for the Serb people are unlikely to benefit from their actions. They are offering precisely nothing to the long-suffering people of Serbia in return for suffering sanctions and isolation and defending war criminals from the ICTY. Rather, they appear to view ‘resistance to Western imperialism’ as something worthwhile for its own sake, no matter how much self-destruction it results in for Serbia and how much misery it inflicts on the Serbs. The Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic accused the British during World War II of “fighting to the last Serb in Yugoslavia”.[5] The same could be said of the contemporary left revisionists, but with one crucial difference: Churchill offered the Serbs something concrete in return for their sacrifices, namely liberation from Nazism, which he duly helped to bring about. By contrast, the left revisionists really are offering the Serbs nothing but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Equally conspicuous by their absence are constructive proposals of the left revisionists regarding Kosovo’s future. For all his lofty denunciations of the West’s policy, the only alternative Chomsky can suggest for a resolution of the Kosovo question that would have avoided NATO bombing is the partition of Kosovo between Serbs and Albanians as suggested by Dobrica Cosic, the father of contemporary Serb nationalism and one of the architects of Yugoslavia’s wars.[6] As the Albanians make up at least 80% of the population of Kosovo and as the Serb villages are scattered in enclaves throughout the province, what this implies is the expulsion of the Albanian majority from half of Kosovo so that it can be settled by Serbs from elsewhere and therefore satisfy the Serb-nationalist demand for a face-saving formula short of Kosovo’s complete independence.
The left revisionists founded their analysis of Yugoslavia’s collapse on the false premise that because Serbia was in some bizarre sense a ‘socialist’ state in their eyes, the West ‘ought to be’ hostile to it, regardless of all evidence to the contrary. They therefore invented a Western conspiracy to explain the Yugoslav collapse and the subsequent defeats of Milosevic’s Serbia. In Michael Parenti’s view all opposition to Milosevic, be it from the Croats, Muslims, Albanians, or even the Serbian opposition, was simply the expression of such a conspiracy. According to Parenti, Western hostility to Yugoslavia was due to the fact that “after the overthrow of Communism throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) [sic - Parenti means the SFRY] remained the only nation in that region that would not voluntarily discard what remained of its socialism and install an unalloyed free market system”. Consequently “the US goal has been to transform the FRY [sic] into a Third World region, a cluster of weak right-wing principalities”.[7] Following the break-up the FRY resisted privatisation of its socialised industry, continues Parenti, and “as far as the Western free-marketeers were concerned, these enterprises had to be either privatised or demolished. A massive aerial destruction like the one delivered upon Iraq might be just the thing needed to put Belgrade more in step with the New World Order.”[8] In other words, the US engineered Yugoslavia’s destruction and then bombed Serbia in order to bring about the privatisation of its socialised economy. Parenti provides not a single source to back up these assertions; he omits to mention that Milosevic privatised Serbia’s telecommunications system with Britain’s Douglas Hurd acting as intermediary.
Of course, Washington in 1991 did seek the end of Communist rule in Yugoslavia, just as it had previously in Poland and Hungary. But Washington did not seek to break up Poland or Hungary. The myth that the Western powers destroyed Yugoslavia and persecuted Serbia because they were ‘socialist’ is made above all to satisfy the emotional need of the left revisionists to believe that the dictatorships they spent years defending were in some sense ‘progressive’ and hence unacceptable to the powers that be.
It is true that Serbia was subjected to a NATO assault in 1999 and that Western leaders rejoiced in Milosevic’s overthrow the following year. But to deduce from this that the West was already ‘anti-Serb’ during the Croatian war in 1991 - eight years earlier - is a bit like saying that the West viewed Saddam Hussein as an enemy during the Iran-Iraq war or Osama bin-Laden as an enemy during the Soviet-Afghan war. During the Gulf crisis of 1990-91 the Milosevic regime supported the US-led drive to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait. Thus, following a meeting with US President George Bush on 1 October 1990 Borisav Jovic, at the time President of Yugoslavia, recorded that “President Bush expressed special satisfaction and gratitude to Yugoslavia for adopting the same position of condemning Iraqi aggression and the annexation of Kuwait. He is pleased and encouraged by the unity of the international community regarding the crisis in the Gulf and Iraq.” Jovic on this occasion boasted to Bush that “we [Yugoslavs] are the only Eastern European country that has almost developed and established a market economy system. Now we are at a critical point, but we will overcome it too over the next few years, which is why we need the understanding and aid of the United States with international financial institutions and in the business world.” Finally, responding to Bush’s query regarding the presence of Iraqi jets in Yugoslavia, Jovic informed him that “We have a contract from earlier, before the crisis, to repair 16 MiGs for the Iraqi air-force. They will not be delivered to Iraq now. Two of them were dismantled in the workshop, after which they were gathered up and tested or transferred to another location in order not to hinder the normal work in the workshop.” Jovic records that “President Bush thanked me for that.”[9] So much for the argument that the US victimised Serbia as a ‘socialist’ and ‘defiant’ state. The left revisionists are fond of pointing out that both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin-Laden were originally allies of the US, but they are reluctant to acknowledge Western collaboration with Milosevic because such an admission would ruin their claim of Western victimisation of ‘socialist’ Serbia.
In 1991 the American UN mediator Cyrus Vance negotiated the so-called ‘Vance Plan’ to end the conflict in Croatia involving the use of UN peacekeepers to protect Serb-held territory in Croatia; even Jovic described it as “exceptionally favourable to the Serb side”.[10] Every single Western peace plan for Bosnia was based on the premise of Bosnia’s partition; every one gave Karadzic’s Bosnian Serbs a much larger share of Bosnia than their proportion of the population would warrant. UN troops in Bosnia collaborated systematically with Ratko Mladic’s forces, helping them murder the Bosnian Deputy Prime Minister in 1993; British troops in Central Bosnia killed dozens of Croat troops[11] and in his memoir of the conflict British Major Vaughan Kent-Payne describes beating up a Croat soldier.[12] UN forces drove the Bosnian Army from Mt. Igman in the autumn of 1994, using rocket launchers to destroy its trenches. Most notoriously, the West maintained an arms embargo against Bosnia which the British and French, though not the Americans, enforced rigorously to the bitter end. Meanwhile not a single NATO missile struck Serbia throughout the Croatian and Bosnian wars while Milosevic was the respected interlocutor of Douglas Hurd, David Owen, and Richard Holbrooke. The Dayton Accord of 1995 compromised the sovereignty of the Bosnian state far more than the Rambouillet treaty of 1999 threatened the sovereignty of the Yugoslav state: it abolished the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina and recognised Radovan Karadzic’s ‘Republika Srpska’, with rights far greater than those ever offered to the Kosovo Albanians. The left revisionists’ ‘anti-interventionism’ does not seem to extend to these particular instances of Western intervention.
(Excerpt) Read more at glypx.com ...
ping
Yawn.
The European Union and German influence in Eastern Europe
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1134656/posts
Back atcha.
What a load of crap, to put it bluntly, the article itself is an exercise in revisionist posturing.
Oh come on, don't give me that. Serbs keep talking about "Old Serbia", and how Kosovo/a is the cradle of the Serbian nation, but it doesn't take a genius to realize this is not about a piece of land. It is about Kosova's population, and as long as the population is ethnic Albanian, Serb nationalism will not rest regardless of whether Serbia has sovereignity or not. When they say "Kosovo is Serbia", they imply "Kick the Albanians out". Beating around the bush, talking about Kosova as a piece of land, and saying there is no problem with the "good Albanians", is tantamount to using a pillow cover to conceal the big white elephant. The goal of Serb nationalism with regards to Kosova, has and will be the "Expulsion of the Albanians" alla-Vasa Cubrilovic.
As for Vasa Cubrilovic he was just one man, and his opinions were never supported by the Serbian government. I don't understand why Albanians constantly refer to him. I'm sure I could find some random Albanian somewhere who advocates the expulsion of Serbs from Kosovo, does that mean I should constantly refer to that random Albanian as if he speaks for the Albanian government?
By the way I do support the expulsion of all Albanians from Kosovo who do not have documentation proving that they are Serbian citizens. We both know it would have been impossible for Albanians to become such a large majority in Kosovo if there wasn't some illegal immigration from Albania. I estimate at least 50% of Kosovo Albos are illegal immigrants, or the offspring of illegal immigrants. They should be kicked out. That's not ethnic cleansing.
>>>The conclusions this article makes are the direct opposite of reality. It was the left who was pushing for interference in the Balkans and bombing the Serbs, while the right was mostly of the opinion that this was the ex-Yugoslavs' problem and the west should let them sort it out themselves.
The conclusions of the article are indeed correct. Note that this article is written from a Europian (British) perspective, and in Europe it is the Euro-Socialists/neo-communists who uphold the point of view that Serbia was the victim of a conspiracy. It is a sort of strange irony that here in the US it is quite the opposite (of course there are no bonafide Socialists in the US, even though the dems come pretty close to it). This irony comes as a consequence of the fact that:
1) Most conservatives hate Bubba with a passion and it happened under Bubba's watch so it was inherently wrong.
2) They mistakenly view it as a religious conflict.
>>>As for Vasa Cubrilovic he was just one man, and his opinions were never supported by the Serbian government.
Yes Vasa Cubrilovic was one man, so let's move on to another man. Let's see if you can guess who said it:
"Serbia may lose the war, but there will be no more Albanians in Kosovo"
>>>By the way I do support the expulsion of all Albanians from Kosovo who do not have documentation proving that they are Serbian citizens.
How convenient to state this, considering that it is well documented Serb military tore the papers of many Kosovars as they were kicking them out of Kosova.
>>>We both know it would have been impossible for Albanians to become such a large majority in Kosovo if there wasn't some illegal immigration from Albania. I estimate at least 50% of Kosovo Albos are illegal immigrants, or the offspring of illegal immigrants.
Serb myth, sort of like the one that said there were 16 unclaimed bodies from Albania proper in the morgues after the riots (thoroughly debunked). I would be shocked if the total number reached 5%. Ethnic Albanians have been the majority in Kosova at least since the end of the 17th century; I suggest you look at birth rates and Serb emigration patterns for a real explanation of why the Albanian majority rose to such a high percentage.
I have never believed in the whole sale ethnic cleansing of all the Albanians from Kosovo , but you're post does nothing more than promote the argument that there are no good Alabanians in Kosovo. If the Albanians in Kosovo all think like you, I have no problem with promoting their relocation to Albania proper and their expulsion from Albania improper (Kosovo).
You are not helping the Kosovo Albanians cause in any way. I'm afraid that you may not even realise this because you're Albanian. It really is quite a shame.
You wanna fight? Then fight. Tell the Kosovo Albanians to stop being such little pansies hiding behind Turkey, Nazi Germany, Tito's Yugoslavia or the United States' apron strings. Stop hiring former CIA opperatives to fabricate massacres. Stop hiring PR companies to paint pretty pictures of Albanian terrorism and stop being such little friggin' girls already. Grow a pair. I'm so sick of this Albanian crap. Albanians have nothing outside of their heroin dealings and the Code of Lek to offer the world. You know it. I know. and the entire world knows it. Kosovo IS Serbia in our hearts AND on paper.
Milosovic won't be around to hold the Serbs back the next time our forces enter Kosovo (I hope the irony isn't lost on you and you don't actually believe your own garbage propoganda). Really think about that before then next time your fingers touch the keyboard.
I was all for the partion of Kosovo and giving the Albanians 90% a couple of months ago. Between the recent pograms and your irresponsible blathering, I have recinded my opionion. For the sake of the World and all of humanity I declare Kosovo to be Serbian. This insanity must stop now before the land grabbing Albanians becomes a cancer on Europe and then points unknown.
Are all Albanians incapable of knowing when or where to stop? Maybe I should be presenting this question to Macedonia, Montenegro, Italy, Germany, and Sweden. I think the Serbs have already figured out the answer.
The religion of Albanians is Albanian.
Kosovo is Serbia.
>>>I have never believed in the whole sale ethnic cleansing of all the Albanians from Kosovo , but you're post does nothing more than promote the argument that there are no good Alabanians in Kosovo. If the Albanians in Kosovo all think like you, I have no problem with promoting their relocation to Albania proper and their expulsion from Albania improper (Kosovo).
Think like what??? Why do you want to keep a blind eye to what is clearly the ultimate goal of Serbia with regards to Kosova? Do you really, really believe that the reaffirmation of Serbian sovereignity over Kosova is enough? I'm afraid not. I do not say that Kosova should gain independence out of blind nationalism, I say it because I am a pragmatist, and as a pragmatist I know that no Kosovar Albanian would ever want to be submitted to Serbian rule again. I say this not as some noble, romantic notion, I say it because it is the truth, and it is something you and I have to deal with. We can talk all you want about history, ancient, modern, and recent, but what it must and will come down to is the Kosovar people's will.
All your romantic notions about "Kosovo is Serbia" can only be fulfilled through bloodshed. Why? Why are you so hellbent over fighting for Kosova. Because of its historic significance? Because of its churches and monuments? You sound as ominous as captain albala does. I have been trying to avoid his posts because I am not here to get into a pi**ing contest about Balkan nationalism.
Do I want to fight? No, my friend I do not want to fight, I want peace, and I want social, political, and economic prosperity for Albania, Kosova and Serbia. I do not want to fight over a piece of land, but I will fight for a peoples and their freedom. And that's what it really comes down to; you apparently consider legends more important than people and their lives. Your "noble notions" about Kosova are likely to condemn my children, and your children to a lifetime of conflict.
>>>For the sake of the World and all of humanity I declare Kosovo to be Serbian. This insanity must stop now before the land grabbing Albanians becomes a cancer on Europe and then points unknown.
So the gloves are off, huh? No more Mr. Nice Guy? How sad to see the hatred in your post. You said in a post once that you submitted your respect for my opinion, what has happened since then? Has my Albanianness become too unbearable? You know, you and the captain strike me as smart people, I wish you could step back and see how much hate and prejudice you radiate through your posts.
Why are historical reasons valid when it comes to Israel but stupid when they apply to Serbia?
You keep calling it "Kosova" -- that shows how ignorant you are. The name is Kosovo because it actually means something. It is a Serbian adjective of the word "kos" (blackbird). Kosova is a bastardization of that word, and means nothing in Albanian.
Thirty years ago it seemd impossible for the Soviet Union to collapse. Right now, Albanians in Kosovo can't imagine that their protagonists may not be there thirty years form now. They may have to face up to a different reality one day. What they do today is what they will be billed for tomorrow.
Kosovo is Serbia. This is recognized by the UN according to their related resolutions.
Do we wish to be on the side of International Law or against the rule of Law on this one?
Do we wish to reward the terrorists for their campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-Albanians in Kosovo?
Do we wish to reward their illegal immigration which, combined with their terror campaign, has resulted in them establishing a majority in part of someone else's country?
Let's stay on the side of the Rule of Law and on the right side of the moral question; Kosovo is Serbia.
>>>Why don't you try being a pragmatist (whatever that means) with American Jews and try to tell them how stupid they are for wanting to fight over something out of "romantic" notions of history, their historic land, and so on?
This is a gross distortion of facts, you want to make an analogy to the Holy Land? Ok let's make one.
The Palestinians claim that all of Israel/Palestine is theirs, and they will not rest until it is all theirs. However this is ignoring the fact that Israel is populated by Jews, thus what they actually mean is genocide/ethnic cleansing. Serbs are doing the same thing by delibeartely ignoring the fact that Kosova is populated by Albanians, how else would that change except through an act of mass murder/expulsion?
But even building on you analogy, Kosova would be the equivalent of the Gaza strip. Sharon was smart enough to realize that on this one he would win by losing. I wish a Serbian equivalent of Sharon would arise to lead the Serbs away from their blind nationalism in regards to Kosova.
>>>You keep calling it "Kosova" -- that shows how ignorant you are
No I call it Kosova as a symbol of my respect for Kosovar self-determination. You want to call it Kosovo? Do as you please, this is quite a silly point as far as I am concerned.
>>>Thirty years ago it seemd impossible for the Soviet Union to collapse. Right now, Albanians in Kosovo can't imagine that their protagonists may not be there thirty years form now. They may have to face up to a different reality one day. What they do today is what they will be billed for tomorrow.
Yes I have heard this same wish before. What you are in fact hoping for is the collapse of the US, or the American do-good will around the world. Well I am here to tell you that I am a firm believer in America's Manifest Destiny, and for all your wishing otherwise the US will continue to support freedom around the world, and will never turn a blind eye to ethnic/nationalistic folly.
>>>What they do today is what they will be billed for tomorrow.
You and a couple of other posters here are getting more and more open about this. Who and what are you exactly threatening? What the hell do you think makes you better than me? Because you're a Serb/Orthodox/whatever? The God that I believe in loves all His creation the same, and does not prefer one language over another. The Lord that I believe in spilled His blood for all mankind, including Albanians.
While you can't tell that difference since you base ethnic cleansing and chauvinism on your Illyrian myth and "Serb churches aren't Serbian" fairytales.
It's amazing to realise that GeraldP can't understand one nation can rule the territory populated by other nation without intention to ethnicaly cleans it.
GeraldP - The Palestinians claim that all of Israel/Palestine is theirs, and they will not rest until it is all theirs. However this is ignoring the fact that Israel is populated by Jews, thus what they actually mean is genocide/ethnic cleansing. Serbs are doing the same thing by delibeartely ignoring the fact that Kosova is populated by Albanians, how else would that change except through an act of mass murder/expulsion?
He just can't accept the situation where albanians rule their local communities inside serbian state. Maybe that's why they can't accept serbian autonomy within Kosovo?
GeraldP - I wish a Serbian equivalent of Sharon would arise to lead the Serbs away from their blind nationalism in regards to Kosova.
Sharon has many faces. One from 1973 Yom Kippur war, from 1982 Lebanon invasion and 2004. "peace talks" with Hammas. I can hardly wait for some Serbian Sharon to start peace talks with KLA.
GeraldP - I call it Kosova as a symbol of my respect for Kosovar self-determination
Yeah Kosta, if Albanians want to call apples oranges, it's their right, and don't youy dare to say them it's wrong, you serbian fascist opressor!
Who wants US to collapse? Serbs want US to open it's eyes, not to collapse. It was us who had pretty good relationships with USA, from 19th century onward, even when you Albanians were siding with germans, and afterwards with Stalin and Chinese communists. And you're the one who don't care about US and wheter it'll collapse, since you'll just swutch sides, what have you been doing all your history.
That's why Kosta is better then you, Kosta doesn't switch sides according to who has more power.
Yah, all His creations... all languages, I presume that's why you can't speak Serbian in Pristina if you want to stay alive???
That has nothing to do with it. Conservatives aren't so stupid that they support or oppose something simply because of who orders it. Clinton ordered many strikes against Iraq during the late 90's, did you hear conservatives complaining about that? Of course not, because it was the right thing to do. The opposition to Clinton's war exists because it was wrong, not because Clinton was in charge when it happened.
2) They mistakenly view it as a religious conflict.
Mistakenly? Did the Albanians destroy hundreds of Christian churches, or did they not? Did many "mujahiden" come to fight for the Albanian cause or did they not? The Albanians have been trying to portray themselves as "moderate muslims" after 9/11 but before 9/11 they were bragging to Arabs how muslim they were in order to get help from Arabs.
Yes Vasa Cubrilovic was one man, so let's move on to another man. Let's see if you can guess who said it: "Serbia may lose the war, but there will be no more Albanians in Kosovo"
You just don't get it. Statements made by anyone are irrelevent unless they are made as oficial statements of the government representing the people. There are thousands of Albanians who make similar statements about Serbs, so what?
How convenient to state this, considering that it is well documented Serb military tore the papers of many Kosovars as they were kicking them out of Kosova.
It's not well documented, this was claimed by Albanian refugees but it has never been proven, and Albanian refugees aren't exactly known for telling the truth. The fact is, when someone is born, his birth is recorded at his local church, which then copies the information to the municial government, which then copies the information to the federal government in Belgrade. This is how it was done all over ex-Yugoslavia. So proof would exist in several different places and if someone was born in Yugoslavia (to legal citizens) it would be impossible to erase all traces of it.
Serb myth, sort of like the one that said there were 16 unclaimed bodies from Albania proper in the morgues after the riots (thoroughly debunked). I would be shocked if the total number reached 5%. Ethnic Albanians have been the majority in Kosova at least since the end of the 17th century; I suggest you look at birth rates and Serb emigration patterns for a real explanation of why the Albanian majority rose to such a high percentage.
In 1455, Turkish cadastral tax census (defter) of the Brankovic dynasty lands (covering 80% of present-day Kosovo) recorded 480 villages, 13,693 adult males, 12,985 dwellings, 14,087 household heads (480 widows and 13,607 adult males). By ethnicity:
12,985 Serbian dwellings present in all 480 villages and towns
75 Vlach dwellings in 34 villages
46 Albanian dwellings in 23 villages
17 Bulgarian dwellings in 10 villages
5 Greek dwellings in Lauca, Vucitrn
1 Jewish dwelling in Vucitrn
1 Croat dwelling
Thus, Serbs were the overwhelming majority in Kosovo in 1455 according to TURKISH sources.
In 1871, According to Austrian colonel Peter Kukulj in a study done for the internal use of the Austro-Hungariann army: In the mutesarifluk of Prizren (corresponding largely to present-day Kosovo)) there was some 500,000 inhabitants, out of that:
318.000 Serbs (64%),
161.000 Albanians (32%),
10.000 Roma (Gypsies) and Circassians,
2.000 Turks
Thus, Serbs were the majority in 1871 according to AUSTRIAN sources.
I hope you'll agree that neither Turkish nor Austrian sources would have any reason to lie in favor of Serbs. In fact, the first source which puts Albanians at a majority is the Yugoslav census of 1948, which puts Albanians at 68%. So the tipping scale probably happened during WWII (when the Albanian Nazi division SS Skenderbeg killed tens of thousands of Serbs and drove many thousands more north). And it would be impossible to go from 68% in 1948 to 90% in 40 years in a population of 1.5 million, unless there was immigration of Albanians from Albania, emmigration of Serbs out of Kosovo, or both.
>>> This is not true. Why didn't serbs force albanians to get back to albania before the world war two, why didn't they do it after WW II, and why did they agree on more and more autonomy for Kosovo, untill Kosovo became de facto independant from Serbia inside of Yugoslavia? On the other hand, why did the Albanians commited genocide against Serbs in WW II, and why did they continue to fight partisans untill 1951, and why did they continue to opress Serbs all the time during Yugoslavia, untill Milosevic used it to seize the power? Why did Albanians staged drowning of three boys in March, using that fraud to attack those miserable people, Serbs in Kosovo, didn't albanians feel satisfaction to see Kosovo is theirs and Serbs have only their ghettos to live in? Couldn't Albanians allow Serbs to live in their ghettos, if nothing else? It's not strange then that people like getofmylawn conclude, "there can be no appeasement, we're claim all of our property if you're not satisfied even with 90% of it!"
The Serbs did indeed try to force Albanians out of Kosova before, during, and after WWII. And that was one of Vasa Cubrilovic’s main points, that the gradual methods the Serbs were using at the time were too slow and ineffective, that they had to do something drastic while they had the chance. But you have read none of that, you have read nothing about the Serbian atrocities as they ravaged through Kosova and North Albania. Either that or you choose to dismiss them, because they are not convenient to your nationalistic ideology. Instead you refer to propaganda that alledges all Albanians cooperated with the Nazis. You refer to the SS choosing to ignore that Albanians fought the Nazis and the Fascists as hard as any other Balkan nation, and had no more collaborationists than Serbia. Albania does in fact bear two distinctions from WWII; it was the only nation to get rid of the Germans without any Allied intervention, and it was one of few Europian nations where the Jewish population was larger at the end of the war than at the beginning.
>>> That's why Serbs had to flee Krajina, because they didn't revenge for Croatian genocide and centuries of opression, but wanted to make peace. Serbs lost many territories in Bosnia for not wanting to revenge for genocide and centuries of opression. In Herzegovina serbian priests were forcing Montenegrins not to revenge to muslims in 1918. And they didn't. And Serbs lost Kosovo for not wanting to revenge for genocide and opression.
This sense of victimization that you and all your fellow Serbs display is really quite annoying, because you relish in it and you use it to feed the hate you possess to the next generation, and worst of all it is based on myth, and historical inaccuracies and omissions. But each and every leader that comes into power in Serbia uses it to their own advantage, and so it never dies, it hovers right beneath the surface only to raise its ugly head at times like the 1990s. Even now it is waiting for a chance to explode onto the surface, and I dread that day because I see it coming, I see it in your words.
>>>You had everything in Kosovo during socialist Yugoslavia, but no, you wanted independence all the time.
Someone once said “Give me freedom or give me death”. Is desiring independence a bad thing? I don’t believe so, not as long as terrorist means are not used, and for all your claiming otherwise, Kosovars are not terrorists.
>>>So, if you don't want to fight for the land, why don't you all grab your things and return to Albania where you came from?
Sounds like what they told the Chams when they deported them to Turkey “why don't you all grab your things and return to Turkey where you came from?”, except there was only one thing wrong at the time, the Chams where standing where they always had, same for the Kosovars.
>>>I want to fight for the land, and you don't, so give me the land. How's about this? But no, you wanted Kosovo more then we did. Did. That's why your numbers in XX century, "under serbian rule of fear and terror", were increasing, and serbian decreasing.
You want to fight for the land, but the Kosovars are not going anywhere, so you will go and fight for Kosova and maybe retake military control of it. Now you either have the choice of implementing Vasa Cubrilovic’s plan or leaving the Kosovars (both Serb and Albanian) in dire and miserable condition. What is so beautiful and noble about that? Instead you could allow the Kosovars to have what they want and then require they fulfill the responsibilities that come with it. This seems like a much more rational choice.
>>>So, in order to avoid bloodshed, give us back what's ours, because you're men of peace, you don't want bloodshed. Enough with this. Huntington said it nicely. Land disputes can't be solved by discussion.
What you are talking about is not a land dispute it is aggression. The aggression you are rooting for, may or may not happen. If and when it does, I suspect that the Serbs will use the same “restraint” as previously, and knowing that alone will make people fight to defend their homes.
>>>I just have the problem with people breeching my rights. Be them Serbs or Canadians or Albanians.
Wow, that’s a good one. What rights of yours am I exactly breeching?. Are you referring to Serbia’s right to be the greatest nation on Earth, or the Serbs right to view everyone else in the Balkans as underlings, or maybe your right to rule over a land inhabited by people who want nothing to do with you
>>>. No, we use legends (and true events, also :-) to inspire us to continue our struggle for our rights.
I’m afraid in this case you are fighting to suppress those rights, rather than defend them.
I guess you'd prefer us to smile as we're kicked in the head? While our churches are burned? While our neighbors are shot while working in their fields?
Oh, those annoying Serbs! They dare complain about Albanian hospitality!
Here's a fact to chew on: The Serb Army will return to Kosovo one day. Not today, maybe not tomorrow, but they will come back.
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