Posted on 12/02/2005 10:15:22 PM PST by Hunden
How in your opinion Americans would react if they were in such situation like Serbs are: if they were attacked, part of their core historical territory (like East Coast) was occupied by foreign powers, if they were being expelled by hostile ethnic group while the monuments of the past were being erased.
What is your experience telling you. Do you think that they would "limit displays of pride to and reserve for accomplishments of deeds or goals".
There was no genocide and ethnic cleansing was done and is still being done against the Serbs.
Should be posted here instead.
Debunking all distorted facts, semitruths, malignant omissions and deliberate falsifications would take three times more space than the original article.
This article is total Bravo Sierra.
I probably wasn't clear enough in speech on that, as it was not an accusation. When two sides in one country are willing to fight as long as it takes for one side to prevail, genocide may be the result. Not many civil wars are as restricted to only men fighting, as happened in the USA. And civil wars involving much about religion/ethnicity are often worse.
Partitioning is one attempt to separate two ethnic sides in such conflicts. India and Pakistan are one example. Arrangements like that don't stop the violence completely, but there is hope for eventual peace and less chance of one culture completely extinguishing the other.
When one reads Croatian papers he or she can learn amazing things: That famous Italians, such as Marco Polo were in fact Croatians, that Croatians are in fact Iranians, that medeval Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and her brilliant culture are in fact Croatian although Ragusa became part of Croatia for the first time in 1939, that Croatians discovered America before Columbus and many other amazing things, more fit fit for supermarket tabloids then respoectable newspapers.
The sad truth is that all this garbage is written by people who call themselves journalists and are card carrying members of the media.
This gem by Branka Magas fits the mould perfectly. When personal dishonesty meets disregard for journalist ethic, the result is an article like this.
What a load of crap. Serbia was established in 1878 at the 'Congress of Berlin'.
the idea that Marco Polo was Croatian is based on a misunderstanding that arose in Korcula (he was captured in the battle that took place near Korcula between Venice and Genoa)...it is played up by the local tourism industry but seems like harmless nonsense. There are some scholars who think that the Croatian name may be originally Iranian (there was an ancient Iranian tribe with a similar name)--possibly an Iranian elite conquered a group of Slavs and left them their name, the way that the Bulgars did to a different group of Slavs (the original Bulgars were not Slavic, but not Iranian either).
The people of medieval Ragusa were Catholics and spoke Croatian or a local Romance language which later died out (known as Dalmatian). A lot of people in the Balkans didn't have a firm ethnic identity until the 19th or 20th century--would have spoken a particular language and had a particular religion, but if illiterate peasants may not have affiliated themselves with one of the modern names.
Again, some incredible BS. The AVNOJ is clear on that, the constituent nations had the right to leave and join the federation, as Yugoslavia was a federation of it's peoples. The Albanians were not constituent, nor a slavic nation and they did not had the right to self-determination according to the constitution. http://www.arhiv.sv.gov.yu/a100008g.htm
When Persia decided to call iself "Iran" or Ceylon "Sri Lanka", everyone followed suit. It didn't work with Finland ("Suomi") or Georgia ( "Sakartvelo"), but a change of name may take place when the independence of Kosovo is recognized at long last.
Yet the word is of Slavic origin. Although the Serbs only started invading Kosovo at the end of the 12th century, Slavic invaders had become a majority there by the turn of the 10th it was part of the Bulgarian kingdom of Macedonia. Yet it did have an Albanian, or proto-Albanian name in ancient times: "Dardania" from a word which gave the Albanian "dardha", "the pear" or "the pear-tree".
I was wondering.....none too bright either, it seems. Or have they finally destroyed all of the churches there?
So I guess you will suggest Michigan for the muslims who don't want to be part of our society? Or which state do you think we should let them have?
Spare us the bullshit. Fact is you want another Muslim nation in Europe. You are useful idiot for the Jihad
LOL! If you want to discover another poster with an agenda, look in the mirror!
If it had chosen to go further, it could also have explained why Kosovo was never legally part of contemporary Serbia until 1945: the treaties of London (1913) and Istanbul (1914), by which the Ottoman empire ceded it to the Kingdom of Serbia, were never ratified.
The legal status of Kosovo in the Kingdom of the Serbs, the Croats and Slovenes (SHS), called "Yugoslavia" after 1929, is even also in question. The Treaty of Sèvres, signed by the SHS Kingdom with Turkey in 1920, became null and void, and the Treaty of Ankara of 1925, which involved the mutual recognition of the states, made no specific mention of the territories taken from the one the other in 1912-13. You can only say that the recognition of such annexations took place, and only implicitely, when Ankara opened a consulate in Skopje.
Also, the second Yugoslavia was expressedly built on a rejection of the institutional principles of the first, which had failed because it was a centralized state according to the Serbian political tradition. However credible under Communist rule, the Yugoslav idea was conceived of in Croatia in the 19th century as a voluntary union of equal partners, not as an empire where some conquered peoples were subject to recurring policies of extermination.
You wrote: for this reason, Serbians consider Kosovo the cradle of their civilization. But you gave no reason at all, and there is none: Raska, as I have said, was what is now known as the Sandjak, not Kosovo; the claim by some Serbs that their medieval state was born in Kosovo is nothing but a lie. The Serbs started invading Kosovo, at the expense of the Byzantine empire, after the Nemanjid state had become independent, and the conquest actually took place in the13th century. Is the above slogan supposed to mean that, by their own admission, they had no civilization before?
And then, in 1459, every Serbian state disappeared into the Ottoman empire. The Serbs may be the only nation in the world who have managed to convince otherwise sensible people that a 250-year possession by successive medieval states half a millenium and half a century ago is a valid basis for a contemporary territorial claim.
The truth of the matter is that the Serbian state invaded Kosovo in 1912 and massacred 20,000 of its Albanian natives after it had liberated itself from the Ottomans, because it wanted an access to the sea through the Drin valley (also, because it would help them hold Macedonia). All the Serbian myths now peddled about Kosovo were then fairly recent, as they are re-writings of history from the 19th century, including the claim that the first Battle of Kosovo was of decisive strategic importance.
Among these, the claim that Albanians "immigrated" into Kosovo is a formal absurdity. Since the Albanians are the descendants of the Illyrians, the first known inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia (except Slovenia), the Kosovar Albanians could not, logically, "immigrate" into Kosovo, all the less so when the whole region was part of a single state. They became an absolute majority again in their own country in the mid-19th century, when enough Serbs had left for New Serbia, the principality in the north which offered better prospects as it was de facto independent from the Ottoman empire.
The only instance of a massive influx of Albanians into Kosovo which actually took place is the one the Serbs won't tell you about: when 100,000 Albanians who lived in the region of Nis, Pirot, Leskovac and Vranje were ethnically cleansed by the Serbs in the winter of 1878. All the other stories about Albanians "immigrating" into Kosovo are Serb fabrications.
And when and by whom was the occupation of Serbia and Kosovo&Metohija ratified? See, no one ratified the illegal occupation of Serbia, including Kosovo&Metohija in the first place, so why should anyone need anybody ratifing something when Serbia including Kosovo&Metohija was liberated. Serbs liberated themselves and got rid of those who occupied them for centuries. And you think they should have asked the Ottomans for permission and needed some sort of ratification for doing so.
Peace will only come to the region when the territorial claims of Serbia on foreign lands are at long last rejected. Only then will Serbia become a democracy, and address the real problems of the Serbs.
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