Posted on 06/29/2008 5:50:12 AM PDT by forkinsocket
On February 17, 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. Some are concerned about what NATO, the United Nations, and the European Union have nurtured there since the military and humanitarian intervention in 1999. James Jatras, a U.S.-based advocate for the Serbian Orthodox Community, put it bluntly last year when he said Kosovo was a “a beachhead into the rest of Europe” for “radical Muslims” and “terrorist elements.” It’s an assertion without evidence. “We’ve been here for so long,” said United States Army Sergeant Zachary Gore in Eastern Kosovo, “and not seen any evidence of it, that we’ve reached the assumption that it is not a viable threat.”
Nine in 10 of Kosovo’s citizens are ethnic Albanians, and more than 90 per cent of them are at least nominal Muslims. Most are so thoroughly modern and secularised that moderate doesn’t quite say it. The only word that can fairly describe Islam as practiced by the majority of Albanian Muslims is liberal. No nation can be entirely free of extremists, but Kosovo is one of the least religiously extreme Muslim-majority countries on Earth. Radical Islamists aren’t there in significant numbers now, and they aren’t likely to be in the future. Some places may be fertile ground for radicalism in the future, but Kosovo isn’t one of them for many of the same reasons that Christian theocracy isn’t coming to Western Europe.
I arrived here shortly after the declaration of independence, and the first thing I looked for – as always when I visit a Muslim-majority country – was the treatment and status of women.
Women who dress with their hair, ankles, and sometimes even faces showing in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan are often beaten or worse.
In Kosovo, by contrast, almost all women, even in small villages, dress like women in the rest of Europe. Streets, cafés, restaurants, and bars are not all-male affairs as they are in much of the Islamic world, where women spend almost all their lives behind walls. If it weren’t for the occasional mosque minaret on the skyline, there is little visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim-majority country at all. Kosovo looks, feels, and is European.
A small number of well-heeled Islamic extremists from the Gulf states have moved into Kosovo to rebuild damaged mosques and transform liberal Balkan Islam into the more severe version found in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. They’ve had a small amount of success with a similar project in nearby Bosnia, but they’re meeting stiffer resistance from Kosovo’s religious community as well as from secular citizens.
“We are working very hard to stop these kinds of movements,” said Professor Xhabir Hamiti, of the Islamic studies department at the University of Pristina. “These kinds of movements are dangerous for all nations, for all faiths, for all religions. We are Muslims, but we think the European way. I am a Muslim, I am a scholar, I know how to deal with Islam in my country. There is no need for Arabs to come here. I have no need for their suggestions, no need for their explanations. We created our Islam ourselves here, and we can continue our Islam with our own minds.”
It would be wrong to suggest Kosovo has no Islamists at all, but in the last election in late 2007, the country’s single Islamic party gained only 1.7 per cent of the vote. Kosovo is not the Middle East, and Albanians are not Arabs. The majority converted to Islam relatively recently under Turkish Ottoman rule, and Albanian culture was first solidly Christian. “We Albanians,” Dom Lush Gjergji recently wrote, “descendants of the Illyrians, are Christians from the time of the Apostles… Without Christianity there would be no Albanian people, language, culture, or traditions… Albanians consider Christianity their patrimony, their spiritual and cultural inheritance.” Gjergji is a Catholic priest, but I heard similar comments from many who self-identify as Muslims. “Albanian people are not very religious,” said Agron Rezniqi, of the Friendship Association between Kosovo and Israel “We come from Catholicism, and for that, we are not such strong Muslims.”
Perhaps the best evidence available that Albanian Muslims, in both Kosovo and Albania proper, differ radically from their Arab world counterparts is their relationship with Jews and with Israel. Jews in Albania had an almost 100 per cent survival rate during the Nazi occupation. The country was known as a safe haven where Jews could find protection under the noses of the German authorities. According to Dan Michman, chief historian at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, there were three times as many Jews in Albania at the end of the Second World War as there were at the beginning.
Both Albania and Kosovo have excellent relations with Israel, and Israelis are more than welcome to travel and even live among Albanians. An Israeli from Tel Aviv named Shachar Caspi opened a bakery and a bistro bar in Pristina. “Nobody has given me any problems or been against Israel,” he told me. “[Kosovars] had good relations with Jewish people even back in the old days. And nobody here is radical. On the contrary, people are very warm, they are very nice, they have taken Islam to a beautiful place, not to a violent place. When they hear I am Israeli, the way they react, they react very warmly.”
Much of the angst about Kosovo’s alleged radicalism centres on the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an organisation that no longer even exists.
It was a short-lived guerrilla movement that rose up against Slobodan Milosevic’s régime, first to fight for independence from an apartheid-like system, and later as a defence against mass murder and ethnic-cleansing. The KLA was always thoroughly secular and in no way resembled a Balkan Hamas or Hezbollah.
Its leaders also distinguished themselves from their Bosnian counterparts when they flatly refused assistance from Arabic mujahideen who wanted to fight a holy war there against Serbs. Albanians don’t fight religious wars, not against themselves, and not against others.
There has been no fighting or even tension between Muslim and Christian Albanians, only between Serbs and Albanians.
The danger in Kosovo isn’t that international peace keepers are nurturing a jihad state. Rather, a premature withdrawal may lead to a resumption of the fighting between Serbs and Albanians that they moved in to stop in the first place.
What a joke! I am an American born & bred, yet you're doing Dateline: Tirana making pronouncements on "a lack of Western values". What's the matter? Don't have family members you can sell for body parts?
Your "Western values", my butt!
Both of these "scholarly" works left out the parts about islam's long history of conquest, oppression, and mass murder, and the central role of jihad, conquest (Fateh), and the Dhimma in all of islam!!!!
As for David Binder, he was a highly respected reporter. We need more of him, instead of the New World Order shills who now populate our media. To a Serbophobe like you, Bonly Boy, anyone who tells the truth is a "Serb apologist".
....The Albanian Kosovars are basically savages; barbarism would be a step upwards for them.....
RIGHT!!!!
That's true. Every country in the world has some kind of mafia going and with all the heroin and illegal trafficking going on in Kosovo by the Albanians, there were bound to be local mafias in Serbia and Montenegro willing to help.
But none of those have the kind of worldwide reach that the Albanian Mafia does -- especially to the US -- to the point that that there were Congressional Hearings on "THE THREAT POSED BY THE CONVERGENCE OF ORGANIZED CRIME, DRUG TRAFFICKING, AND TERRORISM"
And who was at the top of their worry list? Kosovo and the Albanian Mafia!
"During the NATO campaign against the former Yugoslavia in the Spring of 1999, the Allies looked to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to assist in efforts to eject the Serbian army from Kosovo. What was largely hidden from public view was the fact that the KLA raise part of their funds from the sale of narcotics. Albania and Kosovo lie at the heart of the ''Balkan Route'' that links the ''Golden Crescent'' of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the drug markets of Europe. This route is worth an estimated $400 billion a year and handles 80 percent of heroin destined for Europe."
"...The ethnic conscience developed in the '80's and 90's in Albania and in particular in the Kosovo region has established a sense of collective identity necessary to engage in organized crime. This is an element that links organized crime from Albania to Panalbanian ideals, politics, military activities and terrorism. Such criminal troops are hierarchically structured, extremely violent, and are mainly involved in heroin smuggling and trafficking in human beings.They have established a good working relationship with the Italian Mafia. Also, cooperative ties have been formed between Turkish and Bulgarian troops.
"About half a million Albanians have immigrated to the U.S. and Canada in the past 10 years. The European experience has shown that many Albanian immigrants were ideal candidates for recruitment by existing criminal organizations. They started to build up their own networks and through intensive use of violence managed to dissuade other competing groups. The ability they have shown in developing criminal activities in Europe suggests that Albanian crime groups could occupy an important place among criminal groups in North America in the foreseeable future."
“....The Albanian Kosovars are basically savages; barbarism would be a step upwards for them.....”
Honorary Serb: statistics are statiscs. Too bad you don;t liek them.
Both of you must have slept through the 1990’s and woke up reading Serbianna. But catch up on “Shiptars”:
**********************
“Our negroes, our enemies”
Serbian writer Vladimir Arsenijevic outlines the calamitous relationship of his compatriots to the Albanians.
For all ex-Yugoslavs, but particularly for the Serbs, the Kosovo Albanians used to be simply “our negroes.” Nowadays, however, they are cast as Serbia’s arch-enemies – a myth ruthlessly exploited by nationalist politicians, even as negotiations take place over the future of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, which has been under UN administration since 1999. If anyone in Western Europe asks how all this could have happened, I can tell them, for I have watched and listened to this story unfolding in my country.
The country that used to be mine, the former Yugoslavia, was ethnically and culturally extremely diverse. Marshall Josip Broz Tito used to call this diversity our Yugoslavian “melting pot.” In reality, though, it was never that. After Tito’s death the country’s diversity was tragically instrumentalized; it became socially divided, split ethnically and culturally into sub-groups and economically into a hierarchy of better-off and worse-off regions. Post-Tito Yugoslavia thus became a proverbial European vertical.
At the top of this vertical, in the far north on the border with Austria, was the economically most advanced republic Slovenia. In a certain sense Slovenia stood for the permanent “high” in what was then the common homeland. You then moved on down through Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia in the centre to Montenegro and Macedonia in the far south, the chronic “low” of our former country. “The further south, the more deplorable” (”Sto juznije to tuznije”) was the popular saying used to describe the ladder along which a specifically Yugoslavian brand of racism was always directed at those who were on the next rung down geographically and economically. Hence the Slovenians showed the contempt they felt for the country bumpkins, idlers or failures of the other republics most clearly towards the Croatians; the Croatians for their part passed it on to the Serbs; and the latter, in turn, took pleasure in making fun of the Macedonians or Montenegrins. The Bosnians, on the other hand, as the people who inhabited the centre of the Republic of Yugoslavia, were the object of mockery from all sides.
But right at the very bottom came the Albanians who lived in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo. Their language wasn’t a Slavic language. They were poorer than the rest of us. Their culture was pretty alien. In the motley collection of different kinds of Yugoslavs they, as the southernmost ethnic group, were condemned to play the role of the absolute outsiders.
Anything that the rest of us in former Yugoslavia claimed to know about the Albanians was put together from a hodgepodge of offensive cliches. They were generally referred to derisively as the Siptari or the shiptars. If we didn’t hate them openly, it was only because we did not consider them worthy of our hatred. Even at the best of times there was never any dialogue between “them” and “us.”
The Kosovo Albanians were for us just a bunch of primitive, at most sometimes comical golliwogs, our Uncle Toms. In other words, they were our negroes. Yet just as the existence of the despised Albanians scarcely penetrated the consciousness of the average Yugoslav of the Tito era, so the casual cultural racism of that time seems, from today’s perspective, rather harmless compared with the violent, murderous hatred of the “shiptars” that seized the Serbs following the death of Tito and after the first wave of “unrest” in Kosovo at the end of the twentieth century. This resentment became particularly intense throughout the phase of burgeoning nationalism in all the republics, during the brutal tyranny perpetrated by Slobodan Milosevic, who set out to ruthlessly tear apart the common state. During the 1990s politicians and the media also began using the colloquial and derogatory term “shiptars,” a label that increasingly stuck to make them the object of our paranoia. More and more often people began to speak of them as though the only reason they existed was to crush and annihilate “us Serbs”.
One of the legends that did the rounds in Milosevic’s version of the news was a historical myth that went roughly like this: “Once there were far fewer Albanians than Serbs in Kosovo. But over the years (by means of a miracle that has never been fully explained! V.A.) they came to Kosovo across the Albanian border and just settled here in our country, before our very eyes, without so much as a ‘by your leave’.” Equipped with what in our eyes were positively animal-like qualities, they developed the collective determination of termites and, what is more, bred like rabbits. Their uncontrollable virility and high birth rates made us shiver, indeed we shuddered with disgust. At the same time the Serbs were constantly being publicly entreated to profess their hatred of the “shiptars.” No Serb was considered worth his salt unless he cherished this hatred. Thus official propaganda during the Milosevic era, supported unerringly by the media, declared the “shiptars” to be the Serbs’ archetypal enemy; indeed, without this enemy the Serbs’ own existence would have been practically unthinkable. For where would Batman be without his Joker? Now the “shiptars” were no longer pathetic Uncle Toms. On the contrary, they had transformed themselves into terrifying, dangerous demons, intractable and persistent in their mission to take over our historic territory, to snatch away from us the Kosovo Polje, the Kosovo Field, “the cradle or our culture,” to steal our myths, to rob us of that which belonged to us by “historic right”. (More here)
Determined to settle scores with these “shiptars” once and for all, our President Milosevic conceived a fantastic plan. In his murky empire of evil, poverty, ethnic hatred and hyperinflation, the army and the police aided by the mass media were to be allowed to discriminate against and humiliate the Kosovo Albanians without incurring sanctions. The Albanians would be able to be arbitrarily dismissed or arrested, their property plundered, their families and villages destroyed. Absolved of any responsibility and encouraged by popular support, the president for many years painstakingly put his plan into action, bringing violence and destruction first to Kosovo and then to the whole territory of Yugoslavia. Following the Dayton Agreement in December 1995 there was a brief ceasefire, but in 1999 the spiral of violence finally led Milosevic back to where it had all started, back to Kosovo.
Yet Kosovo was also the place that was to seal Milosevic’s fate after thirteen years of his destructive rule. When NATO began bombing the main culprit, Serbia-Montenegro, at the end of March 1999, it destroyed some more of the infrastructure and claimed hundreds of civilian victims. Yet what followed was the end of Serbian state power in the province of Kosovo. At the same time the roles of perpetrator and victim were once more reversed in this hapless place. There was an exodus of thousands of Serbs and Roma and a rampage of revenge by the victors; and once again the victims were almost exclusively innocent civilians. The hope of any normality between ordinary Serbs and Albanians, of them being able to live side by side in the foreseeable future, was gone.
Milosevic had played his game so cunningly that only one kind of epilogue was possible: the UN war crimes tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia in The Hague. Nevertheless, even then, Milosevic managed to escape the place where justice might have been done, if only by suffering a heart attack. By eluding justice he left us with the question of blame. Not least for this reason the citizens of Serbia are burdened with guilt and shame, whether we accept it or not.
A few years ago the Serbian media reported for months on end on mass graves whose dead had been identified by forensic experts as Kosovo Albanians. One of the most horrific images was that of a refrigerated lorry out of which murdered Kosovo Albanian women, children and old people were disposed in Lake Perucac, near the mouth of the river Derventa. On our screens we saw half-decayed, clothed corpses being pulled out of the water, we heard the shocking confession of the driver, who had been told to transport the dead out of Kosovo in order to cover up the crime. At the time a Belgrade television station broadcast an interview with a man bathing untroubled in this beautiful lake from whose green waters the corpses had just been pulled. When the reporter asked whether this bothered him the simpleton stood there shaking his head as the water dripped off him. Blinking innocently and smiling laconically, he looked at the camera and said without turning a hair: “To be honest, I don’t believe all that,” and dived defiantly back into the water.
The guy is mad, you might think. But actually the opposite is the case. His reaction is absolutely understandable. Serbian citizens have a decade of brainwashing by politicians and the media behind them, a decade of lessons in how continuous lying can eventually make people believe their own lies. The bathing man was simply using that acquired skill.
Denial is one of the central new Serbian qualities. It is so new that we don’t even have a proper word for it, and those who realize what is happening simply use the English word instead. Denial. This denial, coldness in the face of human suffering, an inability to show the most rudimentary empathy, shows that we as a society are in a no-man’s land. Sometimes it seems as if we did not want to escape the maelstrom of the past. The question of the status of Kosovo, and at least as important, of our future relationship with the Kosovo Albanians, are among the most decisive questions of all, and they could be used as a measure of our political maturity. The reasons why we don’t take a constructive approach to them are more profound. Today’s Serbian society is tired of politics. It is tired of lost wars, exhausted by chronic poverty and the feeling that the Serbs must see themselves either as victims or as the guilty party. It fears change and shirks responsibility.
In other words, events have ensured that our view of the Kosovo Albanians will remain unchanged for a long time to come. To the traditional resentment there has simply been added the subliminal rage of the loser, which is vented in self-pity and may be coupled with the mystical idea of being inherently in the right. Indeed, the unavoidable loss of the former southern Serbian province of Kosovo is in certain circles of our society perceived as tantamount to an apocalypse. Not long ago the centre of Belgrade was plastered with posters designed to fool us: “There is no Serbia without Kosovo!” But whoever says that is lying, and many people fundamentally know this – for despite everything it is becoming increasingly evident that the status of Kosovo is becoming marginal in the everyday life and concerns of the Serbs. In fact many citizens – our young particularly – disappointed by all sides, seem to have decided that they don’t believe in anything any more, like that simpleton bathing in the lake.
But what can one expect from a generation that has been raised amid war and destruction, fed with a policy of overt hatred, and that can’t get a visa to become acquainted with other countries and cultures? Unfortunately, probably not very much. Our young people have begun to hate again, without inhibitions, with a frivolous delight. Surveys of school students are enough to make your hair stand on end – and they confirm the impression one gains from everyday life. More than 30 percent of the pupils at Serbian middle schools believe that one “should neither become friends with Albanians nor visit them.” Almost a third of young people believe that the Chinese – the only relatively large group of foreigners in our country – should have their residence permits removed, even if they obey the law. Every third teenage boy and every second teenage girl is looking down on homosexuals and people infected with HIV.
The thought of the ghastly success with which contemporary Serbian society has deformed the thoughts and emotions of young people makes one shudder. Maybe the solution is simply to wait stoically and be patient. Maybe one only needs to hope that a new generation will grow up under more peaceful and healthier circumstances. Perhaps the only thing left for us is to believe that our grandchildren will be our real children.
*
Vladimir Arsenijevic was born in 1965 in Pula/Croatia. His prize-winning novels have been translated into many languages. He lives in Belgrade.
This article orignally appeared in German in Die Zeit on 20 September, 2007.
http://www.signandsight.com/features/1582.html
I celebrated Vidovdan with our Serbian Orthodox community last Saturday.
Kosovo will ALWAYS be Serbian, despite the evil workings of the antichrist New World Order and its Muhammadan thugs, and despite the lies of the Soros-shill Totten and of Ronly Bonly Jones!!!!
could, would, maybe, possible...right now we do know that your cousins, the Russians are on top. They deal with billions and billions. In the 80’s and 90’s Serbia ruled the Balkans and is still very well represented.
Your propaganda aims are pretty clear, this will fail too, just as the “Bin Laden mosque” did and the “Jihadi state” is. Focus on Serbia, demonizing will not get you anywhere. It will only turn people off.
Ah, no wonder the Caliban-like Albanians are called the “Somalis of the Balkans”! Even the Arabs snicker and call them that (and worse, and deserved, things having to do with personal hygiene)! :)
RIGHT!!!!
Aside from any question of ideologies or nationalities which might have been involved in SlicK KKKlinton's action in Kosovo, there was something else I noticed about Slick: Any time you ever had any sort of a situation in which the interests of normal, decent, middle-class people came into conflict with the interests of trash, you could absolutely count on Slick to come down four square on the side of the trash. Blood being thicker than water or something like that....
How could I convince him of something that I don't believe myself?
You’re so right about the middle class. In everyday America we see the decent middle class people doing things like this:
“Women, including girls as young as 12, were forced into sexual slavery for the occupying soldiers. They were selected for nightly gang-rapes and sexual torture and women were sometimes assaulted by up to 10 men at a time.
Many of the women have been left with permanent gynaecological damage or have become infertile.
“I remember he was very forceful. He wanted to hurt me,” said one of Foca’s victims as she gave testimony to the Hague war crimes tribunal.
“I think for the whole of my life, all my life, I will feel the pain that I felt then,” said another, who was 15 at the time.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1184531.stm
unlike those savage Albanians. I also think that whoever gets elected should give the “decent, normal” middle class a tax break, so they can buy artillery to shell civilians villages from miles away.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19950817/ai_n14000562
“Kosovo will ALWAYS be Serbian,”
Always is kinda long, but Serbia lost her chance for a long while. NATO,as an organization, is not going anywhere for at least 20-30 years, short of a major disaster, so no war will happen till then. By then, Albanians will be 10 million (they are 6 now in the Balkans, not counting immigrants) and with a very professional army. Hundreds of million$ have already been spent. The GDP in 20-30 years will be as high as many EU countries so $billions will go towards the army each year. Fyrom Albanians will be in a loose confederation if not united with Albania, and Kosovo will be linked next year via a $1 Billion road. They already made agreements on same tax rate, commerce flow via the Albanian ports, energy and Kosovo isn’t even recognized. You can guess what will happen 5 years down the line.
Serbia on the other hand is losing population each year and is full of non-Serbs (who are gaining as Serbs are losing). Armed with the same weapons, Serbs will not even dare to think about attacking Albanians (if they read history books they’ll know why) and alliances are tricky as you never know who joins the other side. If Serbs lose, Albanians still remember the massacres and expulsions from Nis so Serbia will lose a lot of land. Ulcinj and surrounding (now) Montenegro cities are still Albanian. Greece will be too busy guarding her islands that a 70 million strong Turkey would love to have and Albanians call Ioanina, Janina. If Russia etc get involved in Europe others will balance them out.
Basically, anything can happen, but it’s unlikely that Serbia will ever have the same advantage they had with the full control of JNA while others barely had anything. Of course we know that no US President will reverse course as that means an immediate regional war and the powers are tired of wars. Serbs better start to practice the the Golden Rule with the “shiptars,” it may not be too late.
Personally,I think it sound’s more like Fusion than RBJ...
Btw, whatever happened to mark50inf? Haven’t seen him around for a while.
rofl!! Thanks.
You guys will enjoy it.
Those were my thoughts. I sure miss Fusion. This one is about as intelligent and full of it as he was.
And after all, now he quotes one commie...Vladimir Arsenijevic, LDP member, Yugoslavia lover (his site: http://www.leksikon-yu-mitologije.net/index.php well at least bad) just if in his “creative opus” wasnt one manipulation - utopia of resurecting Yugoslavia when all the former yugoslav republics became members of EU - yugoslav brotherhood and unity again but in EU confederation ??? ...also co-author along with albaian writer J. Bayray of novel (”war-diary”) Mexico...shalow as his books...always shitting on his own people hoping to get some points from westerners
great...I understand why you worship LDP so much, after all Chedo is serbian Gulliver for your sad Lilliputans...I didn`t know about this Arsenijevic`s intelectual diarrhea in german Time...thanks for sharing Corleone
It’s too bad you won’t be here so we can ping you to the good news when the KLA slime hits the dirt face first.
You wish. I saw on you tube the albanian army. I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe.
"Kosovo - Europe's highest birth rate, smallest GDP"
And the darndest thing is that you are actually proud of the enormous birthrate of Albanians, even though you've got 50% unemployment, can't afford to support the kids you have so you steal other people's land in Serbia, Greece, Montenegro & Macedonia.
But I guess, no worries for you now that the American taxpayer is picking up the tab for your over-breeding and then sitting on your ass. Americans are a lot richer than Serbs. Yeah, baby you hit the friggin' mother lode!
We Americans got rid of welfare here only to have to finance slackers over there -- and even worse, church-burning, Muslim slackers! No wonder American politicians love you -- you give to them and they they steal from us -- you have a lot in common!
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