Posted on 03/30/2002 2:37:53 AM PST by vooch
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Phoney Refugee Camps Found in KosovoBy William Dorich
Note: Rev. Bigler made numerous attempts to meet with Albanian officials in Kosovo but Albanians thwarted these attempts. He took video footage of his entire visit and numerous photographs.
November 23, 1998-The week before NATO was prepared to bomb the Kosovo Serbs, I had a lengthy conversation with Rev. Robert Bigler, a pastor of the First Presbyterian church of Butte, Montana. He had read some of my recent articles about Kosovo including my attack against Pastor Craig Barnes, National President of the Presbyterian Church who used their Washington DC cathedral for a Bosnian Task Force Symposium on December 6th, 1997, in which Serbs were ostracized and vilified from inside the sanctuary of this Christian church. That presentation was nationally televised on C-Span. "The truth," said Rev. Bigler, "seems to be going down a black hole-just like it did in Vietnam."
At the beginning of my interview, Pastor Bigler said he wanted to clear the air that he did not go to Kosovo in the interest of the Serbian people of Butte or for any side. "Besides, Bigler added, I am the interim pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Butte, I am from Idaho Falls, Idaho, and I have only been in Butte since February 9th of this year-I barely know these Butte people.
Rev. Bigler is a former Army chaplain and medical specialist who served this country in Vietnam. He is no stranger to warfare and its victims, nor is he distracted by those who manipulate the facts in war to serve a political agenda. "For the sake of the integrity of my own church, I went to Kosovo to investigate the truth personally. I stopped relying on the nightly news and the media driven version of Kosovo, remember, I had firsthand experience in Vietnam, and when I read about some of the battles I witnessed with my own eyes, the news accounts were pure fiction, why should Bosnia or Kosovo be any different?"
I told Rev. Bigler that I, too, was interested in what he discovered in Kosovo, regardless if it went against my belief system and the Serbs whom I have defended for several years. I assured him that regardless of his findings, I would print his story in the American Srbobran. I am not happy that the news he brings back from Kosovo confirms my worst fears, that this is a Jihad, a religious war to create a Muslim state in Europe, regardless of how small, or at what human sacrifice.
I was granted this interview, three weeks after Rev. Bigler returned from Kosovo. I discovered an all together different Presbyterian minister than the one I had previously spoken with a month earlier. He had become a man with a cause who discovered the truth and was then victimized by the news media as we Serbs have been victimized for the past 6 years. He now refused to let the media mock what he knows to be the truth. His own local newspaper, The Montana Standard, conducted a two hour interview, promising the pastor front page headlines and a truthful presentation of what he had discovered in the Balkans. However, the article was postponed for two weeks, obviously until after the public interest in the Kosovo story had diminish and disappeared from the front pages of America's newspapers. The article written by Lorie Hutson, was an opinion piece about Kosovo peppered with enough of Bigler's remarks that it could technically qualify as an interview.
Q: What was your initial impression of Kosovo?
Bigler went on to disclose, "All of these structures were Albanian in architecture with high walls surrounding them-not out in the open like the houses of the Serbs and other ethnic minorities in Kosovo. In Pristina, a city of about 400,000, nearly all of the apartments in the 10-12 story range had satellite dishes pointing toward Albania. Where is the money coming for all of this I asked myself?"
Bigler also discovered another revelation, "By contrast, I did not find any building whatsoever taking place in the Serbian areas I had passed through or visited. In fact, Richard Holbrooke was staying at the Hyatt Hotel in Belgrade. Nearby the Hyatt are four unfinished hotels contemplated to be as large as the Hyatt, stopped in mid-construction by American sponsored sanctions, unemployment in Serbia is rampant with nearly 75% of the population out of work. How in God's name do you create peace under such deplorable conditions?"
What Rev. Bigler discovered is that the money for this building boom in Kosovo is coming from illegal activities-gun running, drugs, prostitution and the sale of arsenals stolen from the Albanian government last year, being resold to Albanian terrorists. Rev. Bigler also discovered that the 3% tax imposed by the illegal (shadow) government of Kosovo headquartered in Ulm, Germany, was no state secret. Those same Albanians in Kosovo refuse to pay their share of taxes to the Serbian government of whose nation they are citizens.
Q: Could you confirm the alleged oppression of Albanians by the Serbian government?
Q: Did you read the Albanian newspapers in Kosovo?
Q: Could you confirm that Albanians represent 1.8 million in Kosovo?
Q: Did you stop people at random and speak with them? Q: Are the Serbs in Kosovo suffering in this war?
Q: Did the Serbian government give you complete access to the people of Kosovo?
Q: Tell me about the phoney refugee camps.
Q: Was there an apparent shortage of food?
Q: We hear about the KLA walking around with weapons, what can you tell us about this?
Q: Did you feel safe? A: "The only time I was scared was when my driver took me from the Serbian Monastery of Pec to Pristina. We drove over 100 miles per hour. Keep in mind these are not Montana highways as you and I know them. The reason given was that it is much more difficult for snipers to get a good shot when you are traveling at such a high rate of speed. Notice that none of the media stories dwell on the number of Serb and Albanian victims that were killed by snipers."
Q: I understand that you were on Belgrade television?
Q: Did you meet with the Serbian Patriarch? Q: Who in the Serbian government did you meet?
When I arrived in Kosovo I had a meeting with high governmental officials in the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija, Zoran Andjelovic, President of the Provisional Executive Council of Kosovo and members of the provincial council which consisted of two Albanians and one Turkish representative, I apologize for not remembering their names, most of the people I met gave me business cards. I also had meetings with Veljko Odalovic, head of the district of Kosovo and Metohija and Bosko Drobnjak, Provincial Information Secretary. On my return to Belgrade I met with Dr. Miroljub Jeftic, eminent expert in the field of Islam at the faculty of Political Sciences followed by a meeting with the Minister for National Minority Affairs of the Republic of Serbia, Mr. Ivan Sedlak. I also met with Tatjana Lenard, Chief Editor for Foreign Affairs for Radio/Television, Serbia, Belgrade.
An interesting side note, on my return to Butte from Kosovo I was greeted with a telephone call from the Lasiewicz Foundation of Los Angeles who then sent me 17 pages on my fax machine in an attempt to convince me that what I saw with my own eyes in Kosovo was a mirage and therefore I was encouraged to believe her propaganda. Thank you, Mr. Dorich, for informing me that she has never been to Bosnia or Kosovo and that what little humanitarian aid her foundation gave to Bosnian victims went only to non-Serbs. I believe I sensed that from her need to belittle Serbs in our conversation. I have now come to realize that the forces of Islam and the enormous resources being spent in media manipulation is behind this farce to rob the Serbian nation and her people of what is rightfully theirs."
Q: Did you meet with any foreign diplomats?
Q: Now that you have been to Kosovo what do you think is behind this NATO driven policy?
In my opinion, we seem determined to decided for the Serbian people who is qualified to run their government, then shove that decision down their throats. After we have succeeded in destroying their economy we now offer them IMF loans as the carrot at the end of our stick, knowing full well the Serbian people are no longer capable of repaying such loans in this life time or the next. Then, like we are currently doing in Brazil, we will ride in on our white horse and help them survive by buying as many of their national assets as we can get our hands on ... at 20 cents on the dollar, of course. This is truly the tail wagging the dog in our foreign policy. We have allowed the media and special interest groups to distort the truth and to portray the Serbian people as Nazis in order to steal their natural resources. I do not support the Milosevich regime, but, I am totally against achieving political goals by starving a nation of people into submission while denying them medicine and food. That, Mr. Dorich, is genocide by sanctions, and it's just as ugly as anything that was done in this war.
The Serbian government has nearly a billion dollars in frozen assets outside of their country, $600 million in the United States. My goal is to unfreeze these assets and allow the people of Serbia the human dignity of proper medical care. Before this war, Yugoslavia ranked 3rd in medical care in Europe, today they rank at the level of a 3rd world country. Serbian children have died from a simple lack of antibiotics while our elected officials preached self-determination and democracy. For the last seven years, 95% of the Serbian people have received no medical care whatsoever.
As a medical specialist, I can assure you that the Serbian people suffer from the same percentage per capita of cancer, heart disease and diabetes in their population as the population in the United States. Withholding medicine and medical care from this population for seven years has increased the rate of death from these diseases in Serbia by as much as 20%. Those who have died have suffered inconceivable deaths without traditional pain-killing drugs. This is inhuman, unacceptable and damned unchristian.
Serbian children have already been doomed to a shortened life span that may not be reversible. It is therefore my goal to organize humanitarian aid through the Presbyterian church and through other organizations to distribute aid directly into Belgrade if I have to fly the airplanes myself. I was told by numerous people in the medical system in Serbia that the limited assistance that was attempted to reach the Serbian people during the Bosnian war was pilfered at Serbia's borders by Serbia's neighbors as the United Nations and world looked away. As a Christian minister I refuse to allow people to become complacent or silence, or worse, to seek vengeance believing that Serbs deserve this kind of punishment. No society, especially the American society, can subvert our dedication to human rights by a willful lack of conscience."
Note: Rev. Bigler made numerous attempts to meet with Albanian officials in Kosovo but Albanians thwarted these attempts. He took video footage of his entire visit and numerous photographs.
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He must finally look the people in the eye and say whether it is patriotic to force the people back into poverty or accept the rules of the game said a statement from the Association of Free and Independent Trade Unions.
Kostunica remains opposed to the extradition of war crimes suspects to the UN tribunal in The Hague despite a US freeze on financial aid imposed in the early hours of this morning.
The behaviour of the federal authorities is just another example of them pushing the economy, the workers, the entire people into isolation, the consequences of which would be disastrous, said the association.
Does Kostunica have the right, once again like his predecessor, to isolate the economy and state, poking his finger in the eye of the world (Beta)
The Albanians are oppressive to all non-Albanians - look how the treat the Roma (Gypsies) and Macedonians. There is no multiculturalism where they dominate. Look at their country Albania - oppressive, backwards, blood feuds, etc.
November 1, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 14, Column 1; Foreign Desk
HEADLINE: In Yugoslavia, Rising Ethnic Strife Brings Fears of Worse Civil Conflict
BYLINE: By DAVID BINDER, Special to the New York Times
DATELINE: BELGRADE, Yugoslavia
Portions of southern Yugoslavia have reached such a state of ethnic friction that Yugoslavs have begun to talk of the horrifying possibility of ''civil war'' in a land that lost one-tenth of its population, or 1.7 million people, in World War II.
The current hostilities pit separatist-minded ethnic Albanians against the various Slavic populations of Yugoslavia and occur at all levels of society, from the highest officials to the humblest peasants.
A young Army conscript of ethnic Albanian origin shot up his barracks, killing four sleeping Slavic bunkmates and wounding six others.
The army says it has uncovered hundreds of subversive ethnic Albanian cells in its ranks. Some arsenals have been raided.
Vicious Insults
Ethnic Albanians in the Government have manipulated public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs. And politicians have exchanged vicious insults.
Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, and flags have been torn down. Wells have been poisoned and crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls.
Ethnic Albanians comprise the fastest growing nationality in Yugoslavia and are expected soon to become its third largest, after the Serbs and Croats.
Radicals' Goals
. The goal of the radical nationalists among them, one said in an interview, is an ''ethnic Albania that includes western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, part of southern Serbia, Kosovo and Albania itself.'' That includes large chunks of the republics that make up the southern half of Yugoslavia.
Other ethnic Albanian separatists admit to a vision of a greater Albania governed from Pristina in southern Yugoslavia rather than Tirana, the capital of neighboring Albania.
There is no evidence that the hard-line Communist Government in Tirana is giving them material assistance.
The principal battleground is the region called Kosovo, a high plateau ringed by mountains that is somewhat smaller than New Jersey. Ethnic Albanians there make up 85 percent of the population of 1.7 million. The rest are Serbians and Montenegrins.
Worst Strife in Years
As Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years, and especially strongly since the bloody rioting by ethnic Albanians in Pristina in 1981 - an ''ethnically pure'' Albanian region, a ''Republic of Kosovo'' in all but name.
The violence, a journalist in Kosovo said, is escalating to ''the worst in the last seven years.''
Many Yugoslavs blame the troubles on the ethnic Albanians, but the matter is more complex in a country with as many nationalities and religions as Yugoslavia's and involves economic development, law, politics, families and flags. As recently as 20 years ago, the Slavic majority treated ethnic Albanians as inferiors to be employed as hewers of wood and carriers of heating coal. The ethnic Albanians, who now number 2 million, were officially deemed a minority, not a constituent nationality, as they are today.
Were the ethnic tensions restricted to Kosovo, Yugoslavia's problems with its Albanian nationals might be more manageable. But some Yugoslavs and some ethnic Albanians believe the struggle has spread far beyond Kosovo. Macedonia, a republic to the south with a population of 1.8 million, has a restive ethnic Albanian minority of 350,000.
''We've already lost western Macedonia to the Albanians,'' said a member of the Yugoslav party presidium, explaining that the ethnic minority had driven the Slavic Macedonians out of the region.
Attacks on Slavs
Last summer, the authorities in Kosovo said they documented 40 ethnic Albanian attacks on Slavs in two months. In the last two years, 320 ethnic Albanians have been sentenced for political crimes, nearly half of them characterized as severe.
In one incident, Fadil Hoxha, once the leading politician of ethnic Albanian origin in Yugoslavia, joked at an official dinner in Prizren last year that Serbian women should be used to satisfy potential ethnic Albanian rapists. After his quip was reported this October, Serbian women in Kosovo protested, and Mr. Hoxha was dismissed from the Communist Party.
As a precaution, the central authorities dispatched 380 riot police officers to the Kosovo region for the first time in four years.
Officials in Belgrade view the ethnic Albanian challenge as imperiling the foundations of the multinational experiment called federal Yugoslavia, which consists of six republics and two provinces.
'Lebanonizing' of Yugoslavia
High-ranking officials have spoken of the ''Lebanonizing'' of their country and have compared its troubles to the strife in Northern Ireland.
Borislav Jovic, a member of the Serbian party's presidency, spoke in an interview of the prospect of ''two Albanias, one north and one south, like divided Germany or Korea,'' and of ''practically the breakup of Yugoslavia.'' He added: ''Time is working against us.''
The federal Secretary for National Defense, Fleet Adm. Branko Mamula, told the army's party organization in September of efforts by ethnic Albanians to subvert the armed forces. ''Between 1981 and 1987 a total of 216 illegal organizations with 1,435 members of Albanian nationality were discovered in the Yugoslav People's Army,'' he said. Admiral Mamula said ethnic Albanian subversives had been preparing for ''killing officers and soldiers, poisoning food and water, sabotage, breaking into weapons arsenals and stealing arms and ammunition, desertion and causing flagrant nationalist incidents in army units.''
Concerns Over Military
Coming three weeks after the ethnic Albanian draftee, Aziz Kelmendi, had slaughtered his Slavic comrades in the barracks at Paracin, the speech struck fear in thousands of families whose sons were about to start their mandatory year of military service.
Because the Albanians have had a relatively high birth rate, one-quarter of the army's 200,000 conscripts this year are ethnic Albanians. Admiral Mamula suggested that 3,792 were potential human timebombs.
He said the army had ''not been provided with details relevant for assessing their behavior.'' But a number of Belgrade politicians said they doubted the Yugoslav armed forces would be used to intervene in Kosovo as they were to quell violent rioting in 1981 in Pristina. They reason that the army leadership is extremely reluctant to become involved in what is, in the first place, a political issue.
Ethnic Albanians already control almost every phase of life in the autonomous province of Kosovo, including the police, judiciary, civil service, schools and factories. Non-Albanian visitors almost immediately feel the independence - and suspicion - of the ethnic Albanian authorities.
Region's Slavs Lack Strength
While 200,000 Serbs and Montenegrins still live in the province, they are scattered and lack cohesion. In the last seven years, 20,000 of them have fled the province, often leaving behind farmsteads and houses, for the safety of the Slavic north.
Until September, the majority of the Serbian Communist Party leadership pursued a policy of seeking compromise with the Kosovo party hierarchy under its ethnic Albanian leader, Azem Vlasi...
Because there is a limit to what even a kangaroo court can get away with.
By the way, your forefathers didn't want to pay their taxes, that was what the Boston Tea Party was about.
The tax on tea was too high, no idealism in that at all, just money.
That figures.
Wrong. You've got your chronology all wrong. I'm talking about why a greater percentage of Serbs fled during NATO's bombing for humanity than Albanians, not about the Serbs that fled after it was over and UN Security Council 1244 was put into effect.
Prior to 1244 the Serbs were dominating on the ground. There was no sign that NATO would convince the JNA to leave Kosovo and turn it over to the KLA or that NATO's bombing was even putting a tiny dent in Yugoslavia's defense of Kosovo.
Your retribution argument is weak. One could make the same argument that what was happening to the Albanians 1989-1999 could also be regarded as retribution. Essentially all you're doing is making an argument for the continuation for the cycle of violence. Following you line of logic, it's now the Serbs' turn to get back into Kosovo and take their turn at retribution.
Not too bright.
This all started a long time ago, and there are rights and wrongs on both sides, as the background report from OSCE says.
However, the plain fact is that the Albanian/Kosovo Muslims and Serbs have never liked each other, and only Tito managed to keep the lid on it.
The biggest wrong was by Milosevic, who used overwhelming military force against a civilian population, as a means of removing the Albanian/Kosovo Muslims fron Kosovo. That is called ethnic cleansing.
Smaller scale unrest, and repression happens all the time, all over the world. What made this intolerable was the scale. Over 1 million internally and externally displaced Albanian/Kosovo Muslims.
They were displace by the Serb military and paramilitary, not by NATO bombing, as the "big lie" from Milosevic would have it.
That is why he is on trial, and that is why he will be locked up, and the key thrown away.
By the way, I am not in favour of retribution, but human nature being what it is, there was bound to be a lot in these circumstances.
A bit like feelings of retribution from the USA, after 9/11
.Can you imagine the stiuation if 250 million US citizens were forced out of their country by intimidation and atrocity. That is the scale.
Would there be retribution?
You bet your bottom dollar there would.
Excerpt from OSCE:
KOSOVO: THE HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL BACKGROUND
In the early 20th century Kosovo and western Macedonia, emerging from the dismantling of the Ottoman empire in south-eastern Europe, were the main areas of collision between Albanian and Serb nationalist aspirations. The Albanian national revival, under way since the foundation in 1878 of the League of Prizren, aimed at uniting the areas of mainly Muslim Albanian-speaking populations. The Serb focus was on history and symbolism rather than on contemporary demographics. Serbian historians held the Kosovo area to be the cradle of their civilization, where some of the defining events relating to their sense of nationhood had taken place, notably the final and unavailing stand made by Prince Lazar against Ottoman forces at the Battle of Kosovo Polje in June 1389. The Orthodox monasteries of Kosovo were of great significance in their religious and cultural identity; Pec/Peja in particular was the seat of the Serbian Patriarchate.
Serbia, itself an independent principality only since 1878, after centuries of almost uninterrupted Ottoman rule, gained control of Kosovo in 1912 as a result of the First Balkan War. The Albanian state which came into being at this time thus did not include territory where some 800,000 Albanians lived. Only briefly during the Second World War, when the area was conquered by Italian and then German forces, was an Albanian vassal state allowed to administer most of Kosovo (1941-44).
Movements of population during this period are a matter of much dispute. From 1912 onwards, Serb families were moved into Kosovo in considerable numbers, the wealthier Albanians living there were dispossessed by land reforms, and possibly as many as half a million Albanians were moved out. Conversely, it is frequently asserted by Serbs that hundreds of thousands of Albanians moved into Kosovo between 1941 and 1945.
Under communist rule in post-1945 Yugoslavia, Albanians were recognized as a minority nationality, with legal rights to education in their own language and protection for cultural institutions. Kosovo, as part of Serbia, had a degree of home rule, extended in 1968. End
Well not really IMO. He could actually be that Pantsdown Paddy witness we saw at Milosevic's 'trial'.
Milosevic has been in jail now for a year! And will be for another 2 until the trial is over, if the Brits have their way.
Very disgenuous of you to say ' its not a Kangaroo court'.
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