John R. Bolton: International Court decision (on Kosovo)

Last week's International Court of Justice decision on Kosovo could have a significant global effect. While there is less there than meets the eye in legal terms, how the ruling is read politically may be quite different.....

Thanks to Slobodan Milošević's wondrous achievements "in the service of Serbia" --no “traitor” he, there are now a host of experts in the West who know what to think of the Serb chauvinists' version of history.

They know that the Albanians are, by very far, the first inhabitants of Kosovo. Says Alain Ducellier Professor emeritus at the University of Toulouse:

"All recent studies, both linguistic and archaeological, tend to prove that the Illyrians are most certainly the direct ancestors of the Albanians.
As regards archaeology, the study of ceramics and ornaments (rings, earrings, bracelets, and especially fibulae) testifies to an extraordinary continuity in the designs and technology between the ancient Illyrian and the new artifacts discovered in the mediaeval settlements which may be dated to the 6th and 7th centuries A. D...
Of course, this Illyrian-Albanian continuity is not only proved on the present-day territory of Albania. The findings in the necropolis of Melje near Virpazar (Montenegro) and in two settlements in the Ohri zone in Macedonia have brought to light artifacts belonging to the same civilization "
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc2m8p62_148dk6crbd7

The claim that the Serbs were Kosovo's "first inhabitants" had always been ridiculous on its face, given that the Serbs had been the last invaders of Europe in the 6th and 7th centuries; but now everyone can know that they started invading Kosovo only at the end of the 12th century -- that is, half a millenium and half a century after their first invasion in the Balkans.
And after the fall of Smederevo in 1459, Serbia disappeared entirely into the Ottoman empire
-- for 340 years, a much longer time than Kosovo was ever part of it :
so much for Kosovo allegedly having "always been part of Serbia".

The Serbs were major allies of the Ottoman invaders of Europe as early as 1371, and were rewarded as such: the Ottomans literally created the Serb Orthodox church in conquered Bosnia, building dozens of churches and monasteries there in spite of Shariah law, and revived the Serbian patriarchate in Peć in 1557.
The Ottoman Grand Vizier in 1557, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha was of Serb origin --when they became Muslim the Serbs defined themselves as Turks, while the Albanians had a much less Turkish definition of national identity and remained Albanians: herein lies probably the flimsy factual basis for the myth that “the Serbs never sold out to the occupiers”.

The Serbs started betraying their Turkish allies only at the end of the 16th century, as the balance of forces had changed, and some of them became auxiliaries of the Hapsburgs on Croatian soil --the Statuta Valachorum is from 1630.

- At the First battle of Kosovo on June 15, 1389, the Serb princes beaten at the battle of the Maritza --notably Marko Mrnjavčević-- were fighting at Murad's side as his vassals.
One year later, Prince Lazar's widow and the dignitaries of the Serb Orthodow church voluntarily accepted to become vassals of the new sultan, in order to fight the Christian Magyars.

- Five years later, at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396, a charge by the Serbian cavalry led by Lazar's son Stefan crushed the Hungarian army, thereby ensuring the triumph of the invading Ottomans over the Christian crusade.

- At the second battle of Kosovo in 1448, Scanderbeg's Albanian army, who fought successfully the invaders for a quarter century, could not add his army to that of his Hungarian ally Hunyadi János because the Serbs led by George Branković retarded their progression and reported on them to the Ottoman occupiers. Hunyadi lost.

Half a millenium later, the Serb leaders found the same affinities with the Nazi occupiers; for the only thing that is true in the tall tales peddled for half a century by Serb diplomats about alleged "Nazi sympathies" among the former victims of Serbian imperialism during the Second World war is that those victims found the Nazi occupation easier to resist --for the Croats and the Bosniaks-- or less genocidal --for the Kosovars-- than the Serbian one.

Otherwise, there were collaborationist governments throughout the territory of Yugoslavia during that war, but the only place where such a government was representative of mainstream political opinion was Serbia.

General Milan Nedić, head of the collaborationist “Vlada Nacionalnog Spasa” (Government of National Salvation) in Serbia, was a former Chief of staff of the Royal Yugoslav Army.

General Dragoljub (Draža) Mihailović, who stopped resisting in the Autumn of 1941 and then offered his services to the Fascists and the Nazis against the Partisans (the Fascists accepted immediately, the Nazis only after the Italian capitulation in September 1943), took orders from the Serb King in exile.

Among the more than 500 distinguished Serbs who signed ‘An Appeal to the Serbian Nation’, which called for loyalty to the occupying Nazis on 13 August 1941, the first three signers were bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

The famous Serb Bishop of Valjevo, Nikolaj Velimirović, had stressed the values of national socialism and racism in his many public appearances and written works years before the war. In the Spring of 1935, two years after Hitler had come to power in Germany, he delivered in Belgrade a speech "The nationalism of St. Sava" (published in 1937), where he stated:

"One has to give due respect to the present German leader (Adolf Hitler), who as a simple artisan and man of the people realized that nationalism without faith was an anomaly, a cold and unreliable mechanism. And thus in the 20th century he came to the idea of St. Sava and as a layman undertook for his own people that most important of all works that becomes only saint, a genius and a hero. And for us this work was done by St. Sava... Hence Serbian nationalism is as a matter of fact the oldest in Europe."

He confirmed his enthusiasm for Hitler's Nazism in 1939, in his speech on the 550th anniversary of the First Battle of Kosovo. On that occasion he said quite openly in the monastery of Ravanica:

"We are the children of God, people of the Aryan race to whom fate gave the honoured role of being the leaders of Christianity in the world... "

Nikolaj Velimirović was the Serbian Fascist leader Dimitrije Ljotić's confidante and "spiritual leader".

Nikolaj Velimirović was "canonized" by the "Holy Synod" of the "Serb Orthodox Church" on May 19, 2003.

"Saint" Nikolaj's intellectual model, the then Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Varnava, also thought and wrote in the spirit of those years. In January 1937, for example, he made a statement that was printed by the German paper "Völkischer Beobachter":

"The Führer of the great German nation is leading a battle for the benefit of the whole of humanity... the justified battle of the German people for equality deserves the respect of all nations".

Patriarch Varnava announced, also in January 1937, to the "München Neueste Nachrichten", that nobody less than

"God had sent to the German people a far-seeing Führer... We believe in the Führer and in the truth of his word."

As Nazism spread over Europe, the German occupiers found collaboration across the board in Serbia: At the beginning of May 1941, the Germans gave civil administration over to the so-called Council of the Commissariat for Serbia, at the head of which was general Milan Aćimović. The tasks of the Commissariat were administrative and political, and economic. First of all it had to work towards the pacification of the country and the support of the system of military occupation. In effect the Commissariat was the executor of the orders of the occupier.

After the Nazis abolished the Commissariat on August 28, 1941, a civil government --the "Government of National Salvation"-- was formed "whose president was a general of the former Yugoslav army Milan Nedić... Nedić created armed units, the so-called Nedić army".

Apart from these units, there were also the Chetniks of Kosta Pečanac and Draža Mihailović and Dimitrije Ljotić’s Serbian Volunteer Corps.

In 1976, documents relevant to the years 1941-1944 were published in Belgrade under the title "The collaboration of D. Mihailović's Chetniks with the enemy forces of occupation". The original documents had been collected by the Serbian scholars Dr Jovan Marjanović and his collaborator Mihail Stanišić. The preface goes:

"The chetniks of Draža Mihailović have been represented as fighters against the occupier, while in fact they were the allies of the Nazi fascists [sic] in Yugoslavia
"... This collection covers documents from the war years of 1941-44. Documents from 1945 have not been included here because by that time the Chetnik units of D. Mihailović had become wholly incorporated in the German front in Yugoslavia
"... The documents in this collection indicate clearly and unequivocally that the Chetniks collaborated with the occupiers, both in the military and political sphere, as well as in the domain of economic activity, intelligence and propaganda..."

The Serbian Volunteer Corps (Srpski Dobrovoljački Korpus) was formed by Dimitrije Ljotić on from Chetniks and activists of his Zbor Movement on 15 September 1941 to serve as auxiliaries of the Nazis. It was fully equipped by the Nazis, who greatly its performance. 9,886 men were enlisted in the Serbian Volunteer Corps as of August 1944
(Bundesarchiv, RH 19 XI/31 Militärbefehlshaber Südost Ia, Gegenüberstellung der Feindstärken und der eigenen einsatzfähigen Kräfte im serbischen Raum, 21.8.1944).
On 8 October 1944 The Serbian Volunteer Corps left Belgrade, moving to Syrmia and finally retreating to Slovenia where Ljotić was killed.
In November 1944 the Waffen-SS took over the job of supplying the SVC, and on paper naming it the “Serbian SS Volunteer Corps”.

In a survey conducted by Belgrade-based Strategic Marketing, in February 2009, which asked "Has Serbia lost Kosovo?", over 61 percent of citizens of Serbia answered that Serbia indeed had lost Kosovo. Only 2.5 percent of those surveyed believe that Kosovo was part of Serbia, while 16 percent had no position over the issue.
Yet, contrary to the reality acknowledged by the Serbia people, the Serbia leadership, their accomplices and their dupes continue to peddle chauvinistic propaganda about Kosovo.

The Serb chauvinists' Oriental lies could exert undue influence on Western opinion at the time of Garašanin, when few cared about those faraway countries and journalists were for sale.
They were given an unexpected shot in the arm after the Great war, when the Western powers had to cover up the fact that millions had died for nothing but the petty imperialist ambitions of a tyrannical backwater.

Now the specialists who direct Western policy have learned the history of the region, they know that the dominant political culture in Serbia is the heart of the problem, and they are not going away.
That culture is a mixture of Jacobin and Ottoman trends: the Jacobin trend does not allow for the recognition of minority rights, the Ottoman legacy accounts for the Serbs' confusion of nationality with religion.

That is why they cannot understand that the Albanians have maintained their national identity in spite of Muslim influence. In their eyes the Serbs who became Muslims are Turks, and those who were Catholic ended up calling called themselves "Croats" -- to the extent of packing the ranks of the Ustaše.
Yet, the Albanians have remained Albanian in spite of their three different religions. "The Albanian's religion is Albanian national identity" is Albania's motto, and such a reality is incomprehensible to the Ottomanized Serbs --as is the fact that someone might endeavor to counter their lies and denounce their crimes just because they are precisely THAT.

It even helps explain their denial of not only the rights but the very existence of the Albanian people as a nation; but it happens to be the Western, modern notion of nationality. And the West is now calling the shots.
To persist in denial --denial of actual history, as an excuse to deny the rights of others-- has resulted in the destruction, by the Serbs themselves, of the only state where all Serbs could "live in one state": Yugoslavia.

The Constitutional rights of the Republics and the Provinces, which they denied and tried to destroy, have emerged triumphant; of the eight constitutive entities of the former Yugoslavia, seven are now independent states. 200,000 young Serbs, the future of the country, have left Serbia and its corrupt, harebrained policies, as 200,000 others were forced to abandon Croatia and 65,000 to leave Kosovo.
The Montenegrins, who originally were ethnic Serbs, have severed their ties with Belgrade and proclaimed independence according to the right they had under the 1974 Constitution, even before the Kosovars.
And if the Serb political class remains mired in its incompetence and refusal to deal with reality, who knows if Voivodina might not follow suit?

Even Vuk Drašković has given up on the absurdism of his fellow politicians now:

"Drašković, the head of the opposition Serbian Renewal Movement, told Radio Free Europe he hoped the Serbian ruling coalition partners would accept his proposal and remove references to 'Kosovo and Metohija' because the constitution is currently an obstacle to negotiations with Kosovar officials over the status of Kosovo.

'Serbia cannot...offer in negotiations with Kosovo Albanians, which will happen, anything that is contrary to the constitutional preamble that the province of Kosovo and Metohija is part of the sovereign state of Serbia,'

"Drašković said.

"Drašković said that if the constitution was not changed, Serbia could only offer Kosovar Albanians provincial status within Serbia, which he called 'absurd.' He said Belgrade would not even be able to offer them substantial autonomy as a territory of Serbia because of the current constitution.

"'Serbia has no national sovereignty over Kosovo whatsoever. All of Serbia knows that Kosovo is not really a province within Serbia, that it is completely beyond the control of the government and the state of Serbia,'

"added Drašković, who was foreign minister in 2004-07.

"'The emperor is naked, there are no clothes on him, but no one in Serbia may say, It will bring no good to this country or our people.'"

"Drašković said the Serbian people and the future of the country 'cannot be held hostage' to the constitution. He said that if the constitution

"'is an obstacle to the state and national interests, then...it must be changed. I am convinced that this is the only way to put an end to a defeatist policy.'

"He said he had spoken with Serbian President Boris Tadić about his idea to change the constitution and that he was hopeful that

"'in the end, [and] we should not be late, state policies will move in this direction.'

"Drašković said that Serbia's proposed UN resolution on Kosovo should be very brief. He said it must state

"'that the UN General Assembly calls upon the authorities in Belgrade and Pristina to start, with the mediation of the European Union and the international community, negotiations on the establishment of a comprehensive cooperation and essential protection of the Serbian people and its religious heritage in Kosovo. Period.'"

Your problem, as I have said, is that what you call "propaganda and lies" is what not only Western governments, but on certain issues a majority of the Serbian people, also believe, and are willing to act upon.

To be sure, it has taken ten years for the West to abandon the "ancient ethnic hatreds" meme and understand that the dominant Serb political culture is the problem.

Anyone, without even having studied the issue, can understand the same, if he only cares to ponder the implications of your own behavior, as:

-- you are unable to argue on the facts, dismissing as "propaganda lies" the history of the region as told by professional Western specialists
--whereas chauvinist Serbian historiography basically can be summed up by the ridiculous slogan "Skanderbeg was a Serb"
http://www.pescanik.net/content/view/1742/152/

-- you deny the obvious --for instance that Kosovo is monoethnically Albanian, even more than Slovenia is monoethnically Slovenian, with 92 percent of its residents being Albanian.

-- You are content with repeating gross racist slogans to dehumanize a people of several millions, one of the oldest in Europe, which gave an emperor and several Popes to Rome, in order to deny their national rights.

When the Serbian National Assembly discussed the issue of Kosovo in the year 2007, they discussed it as if it were empty of its 2 million people.

"... no one ever mentions Kosovo’s population. What is talked about in such conversations is only ‘Kosovo’ - a Kosovo that does not exist in reality, a Kosovo without the people.
"It is my view that Serbia lost Kosovo essentially on that issue. For the Serbian political and intellectual class, Kosovo never implied its inhabitants, but only territory - an imaginary territory torn out of time, torn from reality. A battlefield without people, in the year 1389!"

Dubravka Stojanović "Kraj nacionalne arogancije", Helsinška povelja (Belgrade), January-February 2007
http://www.bosnia.org.uk/news/news_body.cfm?newsid=2266

That says it all:
the only logical "solution" the Serbian political class could have for Kosovo in 2007 if "by miracle" they were to retake it was:

--the same as Nikola Pašić's in 1912-1915,
--the same as Vaso Čubrilović's in 1937,
--the same as Slobodan Milošević's from 1990 to 1999:

falsely call those 1.8 million indigenous people "recent immigrants" (what the Serb delegation said at the London Conference in December 1912, while Vojislav Šešelj called them "tourists" in 1998), and exterminate them.

This bloody-mindedness, also illustrated by the veritable industry the Serbs have set up to deny the Srebrenica genocide ( https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1SRStxN6DZwTBQwN6a61VOnWxvQNF3o94wLHs70tJxI0&hl=fr&authkey=CJfMtK4O ), can only land them in more trouble http://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/legal-ruling-the-whole-world-is-against-the-serbs/ .

The "Normal Serbs" are those who really care about Serbia's interests, and it is the chauvinists who are the "traitors".

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