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.
10% of the Albanians in Kosovo are Christian — and by latest reports, the number of converts to Christianity is growing fast. 30% of Albanians in Albania proper are Christian — Albanian Orthodox or Catholic
Oh, I despise the philosophy and thoughts of the civilisational disease that isSlam. But I don’t see the Albanians are being part of that. Pakis, Sauds, yes
Here's Wiki on the Kosovo's birthrate:
At 1.3% per year, ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have the fastest rate of growth in population in Europe.[117] Over an 82-year period (1921-2003) the population grew to 460% of its original size. If growth continues at such a pace, the population will reach 4.5 million by 2050.[118]
By contrast, from 1948 to 1991, the Serb population of Kosovo increased by but twelve percent (one third the growth of the population in Central Serbia). The population of Albanians in Kosovo increased by three hundred percent in the same period – a rate of growth twenty-five times that of the Serbs in Kosovo.
Have no idea where you got that number from!
Wiki Again:
Islam (mostly Sunni, with a Bektashi minority[26]) is the predominant religion in Kosovo, brought into the region with the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century and now nominally professed by most of the ethnic Albanians, by the Bosniak, Gorani, and Turkish communities, and by some of the Roma/Ashkali-"Egyptian" community. I...About three percent of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo remain Roman Catholic despite centuries of the Ottoman rule.
Quite true..........
Precisely my point, thank you.
Where is the archeological evidence? Oh yeah, there is none.
We don’t really care if the Albanians turn out to be our long-lost second cousins, just so long as they quit burning and desecrating our churches and monasteries, stop shooting at little Serbian boys with machine guns, stop drowning old women in their own bathtubs, stop cutting off medical supplies, clean water, and electricity to Serbian home and stop their ethnic cleansing campaign against the Serb, Jew, and Roma legal residents of Kosovo.
By the way, Santino Sonny Corleone sleeps with the fishes, along with all the other pseudonyms of the arch Orthodox-hater Ronly Bonly (spit) Jones.
I got that from Wikipedia too as well as the Guardian that the number of Catholics was 9% at the end of the US action on Kosovo, but that Albanians are converting in increasing numbers (ok, the Guardian says that there probably is an ulterior motive that the Albanians want to become more European and also that the Albanians realise that their country was created by Christianity — just like Russia, Serbia, Poland, Germany, etc.)
It’s good to know that there’s a sane voice here. All the posts calling an ethnic group sub-human is sickening. I will callIslam, the philosophy as sub-human, I won’t call it’s followers sub-human. People can always become good, evil ideas can’t
There is enough Archaeological evidence in terms of the potteries, the continuous human existence in the mountains of Albania, the linguistics, the genetics. There’s as much proof for Albanians to have been descended from ancient Illyrians as modern-day Greeks to be decended from Dorians.
All of those accusations have also been leveled at Serbs. Have Serbs also committed such acts? Some, yes. Should I condemn all Serbs for that? No, I will not. Ditto for this — the entire Kosovo problem started when Milosevic wanted a “pure” Serbian Kosovo —> that’s not possible. I don’t agree with a “pure” Albanian Kosovo either. Both sides have the right to live in that land wherever they want, free from fear
Stop making this an attack on Orthodoxy. I do not see this as being that, I see the entire Kosovo issue as being more ethnic than anything.
Wrong, the most recent problem started when the Kosovo Albanians began their ethnic cleansing of Serb, Jew, and Roma residents by a sustained terror campaign, including rape and murder, in the 1980’s.
This was documented by David Binder of the New York Times.
They demanded a pure ethnic state (you’ve got it completely backwards) and we’ve helped them just about achieve it.
However, let me remind you that this new “liberal” Islam in Kosovo was very busy erasing the Christian heritage that has stood for centuries in Kosovo by destroying Churches, Christian cemeteries, monuments and murdering Christian people because they were Christian.
Your superficial naivete regarding ethnicity and religion or ideology in the Balkans leads you to wrong conclusions.
Post it.
Keep up the good work BB!
You ain’t fooling anyone.
Your real agenda smacks of hatred of Eastern Orthodoxy.
BTW—Since you live in the UK - how about returning the Parthenon Marbles to Greece -— which one of your many looters stole.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.