Posted on 02/21/2003 8:23:13 AM PST by Destro
Serbian Orthodox suffer
At least 110 Serb Christian sites (churches, monasteries, graveyards etc.) have been damaged or destroyed in Kosovo since the United Nations took control in June 1999.
Most recently, a church building in the village of Ljubovo was completely destroyed by an explosion in the early hours of 17 November last.
A second explosion damaged another church in the town of Djurakovac. The bombings came on the eve of a visit to Kosovo by UN General Secretary Kofi Annan.
Church leaders and Orthodox worshippers also face violence and hostility from ethnic Albanians, especially where UN checkpoints in the vicinity of churches have been withdrawn in recent months.
Ethnic Albanian Muslim extremists regard churches as symbols of Serbian domination and see them as legitimate targets.
Seems reasonable at first. But the end result? Kravica.
If Serbs in Croatia or Bosnia didn't like the local government, they had every right to vote with their feet and move to Serbia, selling their homes at a reasonable price to Croats or Muslims who didn't want to live under Slobo. But NOOOOOO. YOU guys started playing the "Why should I live as a minority in YOUR state when YOU can be a minority in MINE?" game. End result? Kravica.
Maybe civil war was inevitable given the Jackson Pollock demographics of the three countries, which to an outsider is really one nation consisting of three groups of religious bigots. Had you kept the fighting to solder-against-soldier, we wouldn't have gotten involved.
But when you exterminated huge numbers of helpless and captured prisoners, you lost the right to settle it by inherent force of arms. We came, we saw, we kicked your ass. And peace, of a sort, came.
Be glad you didn't REALLY tick us off. The Republika Srpska is a corrupt bastard state, Moldova without the charm, and given the way things out, we would have been better off having the Croats and Muslims conquer the whole thing. As it is, we're stuck with it. And you.
Karadjordje
If Serbs in Croatia or Bosnia didn't like the local government, they had every right to vote with their feet and move to Serbia, selling their homes at a reasonable price to Croats or Muslims who didn't want to live under Slobo.
No, I have to repeat it again for you. The Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia were Yugoslav citizens on Yugoslav soil at that time. No one had the right to stripp them of their constitutional rights. As Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina claimed the right to self-determination to seperate from Yugoslvia, the serbs of Krajina and Republika Srpska in response claimed their right to self-determination and secession from the newly created statelettes. That right was denied to the serbs from the begining on, no negotiations were offered, it was just prohibited by Tudman, Izetbegovic, Genscher... and so the doors for an armed conflict were openend. Not to mention, that the secession of Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina were unconstitutional in the first place and against the declared will of the serbian population, a constituent people, within those republics.
Is that so difficult to understand for you?
Let's just set the record straight: recognition of Yugoslavia's breakaway republics as independnet states was a violation of the Helsinki Agreement because it was a violation of the Yugoslav as well as republican constitutions. Recognizing internal republican borders as international boundaries was also illegal.
"Our orders so far had made no mention of exactly how we were to enforce anything. In fact, we were pretty much told to step aside if the belligerants wanted to kill one another. If that was a case, what the hell were we doing? Why had they named us the 'UN Protection Force'? The Serbs in the enclave agreed to remove the very weapons that were protecting their lives because they believed the UN would protect them. Unknown to them, our orders were to simply let the Croat forces pass if they really wanted to attack, which is exactly what happened. The end result was that we managed to defeat the Serbs for the Croats by preying on their faith in the UN. If that little with the flower died when the Croats attacked, then it was my fault and the fault of the UN's stupidity."
James R. Davis' book "The Sharp End, A Canadian Soldier's Story", published by Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver/Toronto, 1997, p. 131.
Source: http://www.balkanpeace.org/wcs/wct/wctu/wctu02.shtml (<- click)
Karadjordje
Well, ahem, they were there to protect the relief personnel, NOT the locals. And what the UN failed to do in Serb-controlled Croatia in 1995, they ALSO failed to do in Srebrenica in what became Serb-controlled Bosnia in 1995 as well. So don't complain. The very fecklessness that allowed the Croats to get away with it in Knin ALSO allowed YOU GUYS to get away with Kravica.
The utter fecklessness of the EU/UN piecekeepers is well known. But one thing for DAMN sure: EVERYONE in Bosnia knew not to screw with the United States--we're such crazy cowboys that nobody dared to take us on.
Articles written when Kosovo was not famous...
Background material about Kosovo, especially the material disseminated by mainstream channels, is deficient in many aspects, but perhaps the most startling feature of many such articles is the singular way of examining the history of the region. We are told that Kosovo is the cradle of Serbian nation and we learn about the battle of 1389 and then, in most articles, with a gigantic leap that would make envious any athlete, the article strides 600 years later, in 1989, when the Kosovo autonomy was rescinded by Milosevic. What happened during these 600 years, pray tell? Or, at least, what happened during the last few years before 1989?
It is now difficult to write about the recent past of Kosovo without taking into account the war which is raging just now. So, it occurred to me that if I managed to find articles written in the 80s, when Kosovo was not famous, at least these would be free of any bias due to the later events.
A good friend who is also a wizard in database searching undertook the task and here is the fruit of his labours, a bunch of older articles about Kosovo. Be warned, the articles were not written for posterity. These were run-of-the-mill, "boring" articles about contemporary events. But perhaps here lies their interest, for they present the situation without any make-up. Anyway, here they are...
N.S.
http://members.tripod.com/~sarant_2/ksm.html
The Wall Street Journal, "The ´Balkan Connection´", September 9, 1985
Source: http://www.balkanpeace.org/cib/kam/kosd/kosd05.shtml (<- click)
Karadjordje
I se that you are an insider. OK, assuming that you speak the truth, whose those unidentified bodies where? Serbs or Muslims or both?
Is that so difficult to understand for you?
Okay, I'll take the bait. Though it requires a quick review of Yugohistory. I'll give it a shot.
Yugoslavia was a "constitutive kingdom" when founded in a mutual love feast between Serbs and Croats in 1918 (the international equivalent of two drunken lovers having a night of really great sex and then getting married the next morning before they sober up). The kingdom was, in point of fact, a mini-Serb empire, a reward to Serbia by the Western allies for what it suffered at the hands of the Hungarians. Croat, Slovenia, and a chunk of what had been Hungary was given to Serbia, as well as a piece of Bulgaria and the formerly-Austrian controlled Bosnia. The Serb king became the king of all of the Kingdom-of-Serbs-Croats-Slovenes-And-A-Bunch-Of-Minorities-Whose-Existence-They-Did-Not-Deem-Worthy-of-Mention-Because-We're-More-Important-Than-They-Are.
What it really was, though, was a mini-Serb empire. The Croats and Slovenes discovered that their marriage to the Serbs meant rule by a Serb king, a Serb bureaucracy, a Serb army, and a Serb-dominated national assembly. Naturally, they decided they didn't like it very much.
In 1929, the Serb kingdom decided that a foot-long official name was unwieldy (they had to print their currency on butcher paper to fit it all in) so they shortened it to "The Kingdom of Yugoslavia." The Serb king (Peter I? one forgets) decided to abolish all the internal provincial identities and impose "banovinas" (governorships) to try to suppress local nationalist pressures. Didn't work; the Serb king was shot by Croatian Nazis in '34, replaced by his 11 year old son, and by 1940 Yugoslavia was on the brink of civil war all on its own.
Then Hitler showed up and the whole thing fell into a byzantine mess. The Croats declared independence and became a Nazi minor ally; the Serbs were occupied by the Germans; the rest of the territories were carved up like a Christmas turkey and served to the neighbors.
The Serbs, I'll say, DO have a legitimate beef with the Croats' cooperation with the Germans in War Two, and a hell of a lot of them DID die at the hands of the (REAL!) Ustashe in 1940-1945. The Croats, who were the villains of THAT war, built a death camp at Jasanovac and killed a hell of a lot of Serbs (whether 70,000, 700,000, or some number in between will not be revealed to us in this life).
A three sided civil war then broke out, between the Ustashe in Croatia, the Chetniks in Serbia, and the Partisan Communists all over. The Partisans of course gained the upper hand through military victory, skilled diplomacy with the Allies, and a number of stupid moves made by the Chetniks in particular (involving temporary cooperation with surrendering Italian Fascists that got misinterpreted by the wrong parties in London).
"Modern" Yugoslavia, founded in 1943, was absolutely a bastard Communist construct from the beginning of its reemegence. It was entirely artificial and a Communist creation. The Communists built the state on a pile of skulls, 300,000 or so executed after the war. Most of the skulls were Croatian Ustashe, but a lot of them were Serb Chetnik skulls as well. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s nationalism was suppressed and the state was maintained through a secret police force. The chant "Bratsvo i edinstvo" (Brotherhood and Unity) and a political correctness that would make you gag with disbelief was used to drown out any nationalist sentiment at all.
Then Tito died, and the system began to die as well, in 1980.
As the Commie party began to rot after Tito died, the Serbs saw this as a chance to reimpose the old Serb-dominated order, less the royalty. The beginning of this was the entirely artificial sense of "crisis" over the situation in Kosovo. Slobo, in 1988+, started to suck up to Serb nationalists in the province, crushed the local elected government (as well as that in the former Hungarian territories in Vojvodina) and reasserted Serb dominance over the Yugoslavian national government, given that four of the eight votes in the central counsel--Serbia, Voivodina, Kosovo, and allied almost-Serb Montenegro--were now in a unified voice.
Naturally, nobody else in Yugoslavia was really keen on being under the thumb of the Serbs. The Slovenes had seen the train coming for years and bolted at the first opportunity. The Serbs let them go; no Serbs live in Slovenia (or at least not all that many). But Croatia and Bosnia made for a different story.
The Croats only got on board the independence bandwagon about 1990 or so. When they decided to bolt, they were only half prepared. And Bosnia, which also bolted with Croatia, was COMPLETELY unprepared; Alia Izetbegovic trusted that Bosnia's status as an Internationally Recognized State would make it immune to Serb aggression. As Otter would say, "he ----ed up! He trusted us!"
So the upshot: Serbia, driven by old imperial fantasies, less old fears of Croatian genocide, and new fantasies of Muslim "aggression", decided to take as much of their neighboring territories as they could.
What was the Serb error?
Simple. The Serbs could not comprehend that the rest of the world, and particularly the Europeans, could not tolerate the concept of forced transfer of territory from one nation to another.
From the point of view of the world system of nation states, with the impending death of Yugoslavia as a state, authority then devolved down to its constituent republics. The international system is VERY committed to the maintenance of international borders. It is one thing for one nation to split into two, like Czechoslovakia--or in the case of the former Yugoslavia, into six. It is quite another thing to imagine that provinces can be grabbed from one country by another by force of arms. THAT is a grave threat to the international order; once that is allowed, the flood gates open to wars of miniaggression and irredentism worldwide. THAT is intolerable.
A Bosnia that has split into two might be tolerated; a Serbia that splits Bosnia into two and then eats one of the two halves is NOT.
So. Anything that protects the territorial integrity of nation states will be supported by the international community, the EU, the US, and the UN. In that, Alia Izetbegovic was not far wrong. HIS mistake was thinking we'd show up over the horizon on Day 1 and save his bacon. We weren't prepared to do that, until Srebrenica made ignoring the Bosnian problem intolerable.
What I'm saying is this: the old Yugoslav communist state's death was INEVITABLE with the death of the Communist party, since it was founded ab initio as a Communist state. Hence, claims to the 'constitutionality' of constituent state independence is inoperative. HOWEVER, the territorial integrity of each of the subordinate states of the former Yugoslavia MUST be preserved as much as possible, as the international order is based on the involiability of international borders. So Serbia was between a rock and a hard place. They didn't want to let Croatia and Bosnia and etc go, but had no legitimate claim on the whole of Croatia and Bosnia because the Communist system that had kept all the states together was as dead at Tito himself. On the other hand, Serbia tried to assert authority over cantons and opcinas of its neighbors, and that the international community could not tolerate. So it was a losing proposition.
Had Serbia and Croatia (leaving Bosnia aside for a moment) been ruled by Vlacev Havels or Mikhail Gorbachevs, there's a possibility the Yugoslav state could have been preserved or, more likely, an amiciable "velvet divorce" achieved. But NOOOOOOO. Serbia was ruled by the Nazi Milosevic, Croatia by the thug Tudjman, and Bosnia by the naive and romantic noodnik (albeit very sharp negotiator, as we discovered at Dayton) Izetbegovic.
So back to your question:
The Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia were Yugoslav citizens on Yugoslav soil at that time.
Unfortunately Yugoslavia had been founded by a thug party that was dead. Without the Communists, the state was as dead as Tito. Claims of any legitimate hold on that basis was inoperative. No one had the right to stripp them of their constitutional rights.
Well, they still retained their full measure of inalienable human rights. But the constitution that protected them was gone. They tried to replace it with claims of rank nationalism. Didn't work.
As Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina claimed the right to self-determination to seperate from Yugoslvia, the serbs of Krajina and Republika Srpska in response claimed their right to self-determination and secession from the newly created statelettes.
See above about the inviolability of international borders.
Is this ultimately the interference of outside powers in the affairs of the Balkans? Yep. Tough noogie. You guys want to sell Yugos to unsuspecting customers in other countries, that carries with it an obligation to play by Real World Rules under the international community. And that meant, ultimately, that Serb attempts to grab pieces of Croatia and Bosnia were intolerable to the rest of the world, and had to be stopped.
Okay, where does that argument leave what happend in Kosovo?
Well, we have a new factor, born in the ashes of WW2, and asserted in Bosnia: genocide and ethnic cleansing is become intolerable in Europe. We intervened in Bosnia when Sreb happened. We intervened in Kosovo when it became clear to us that a second Sreb was going to happen in Kosovo.
So where does the inviolability of national borders apply in Kosovo and Serbia?
Beats the hell out of me. My guess? Kosovo will eventually be either allowed to become independent or to federate very loosely with Serbia (just as Montenegro has just done). Whatever the solution, the International Community will never allow Albania to take Kosovo. That would violate the same rule about the sacredness of national borders mentioned above.
This is not the best of histories, I'll admit, but it sure beats chanting SUMASRPSKA while beating Muslims over the head with truncheons.
Cowboy? COWBOY? Thank you. I haven't felt so good since the first time my wife asked me if I was a cop.
I'm fed up with you claiming here some moral highground.
I ain't perfect, we ain't perfect. But SOMEBODY had to blow the whistle on the wargy of '95.
You can come up with bs like Srebrenica and I'll tell you about Nasir Oric.
Oooh ooh ooh, Nasir Oric, the boogyman. Oooh. Oooh. Interesting cat. Granted, he's a thug, and he certainly did some things that were Not Very Nice. But you know what? The ICTY has dug and dug and dug through the evidence of his war time activities: they'd LOVE to send his butt to the Hague. But every time they dig into his "war crimes" they turn out to be just militarily successful guerilla raids. They have never found ANY evidence he committed atrocities. Did he kill a lot of SBA soldiers? Youbetcha. Did he kill civilians in combat? A few. Did he stick old people into churches and massacre them? No. Zero evidence has been found of that. The ICTY very publicly arrested him a few years ago. They let him go for lack of evidence. Pi$$ed them off too--they would have LOVED to show how evenhanded they were. But you know those damn lawyers and those damn rules of evidence...
Is he a crook? Oh yes, he belongs in jail. But is he a war criminal? So far, doesn't look like it.
Or what about the killings in Vukovar by the ZNG'e, before the serbs liberated the town?
What about the killings in Vukovar before the CROATS "liberated" the town?
The Racak hoax? What about the extermination of native americans, the indians? What about Hiroshima, Nagasaki? What about agent orange in Vietnam? You don't have any moral highground.
Maybe not, but we got drug in there willy nilly. I'm here to tell you this: I, and my friends, didn't kill any indians. We didn't nuke Hiroshima. We weren't in 'Nam. And SOMEBODY had to sort things out. No, we're sinners. But Satan forever points at the sinner and screams "SINNER!" to keep the sinner from interfering with Satan's work. No, we're not perfect. We're just the only thing to put a stop to what happened.
Climb down from your horse and start answering to my questions from the begining of this discussion.
Read on, MacDuff. Or is that Duffovic...
Stavka2, who served in Bosnia, claimed the Croats marked their properties with Swastikas. Do you say otherwise?
I never saw it, but that's not saying much; the American sector has very few Croats (maybe 10% of the population). One DID see swastikas, but generally either in Serbia or on the Welcome-to-Republika-Srpska signs as I described earlier. In the Bosnia context the German swastika means a generalized "eff-you" more than anything else.
I behold the Islamic 5th column and I am amazed at its impotency.
On FreeRepublic you are just an opportunity to prove how the cancer of Islam had a hold on this nation in the 90s. You know a report about the destruction of churches even you do not repute is approved by you and every response of yours bumps this thread to the top. Let the thousands read it and learn. In this I thank you.
While in Bosnia-did you enjoy the services of the underage white slave girls in the Muslim sector or just looked the other way when passing the slave pens?
Is he a crook? Oh yes, he belongs in jail. But is he a war criminal? So far, doesn't look like it."
Have you ever been at the Serb graveyard in Bratunac?
Karadjordje
So tell me, Destro, are you still beating your wife?
We acted to stop trafficking in women where we could. But 1200 troops can't be everywhere. That's the whole point of leaving as much as possible to local cops in charge.
The only case I know of "white slavery" where US guys (not soldiers) were involved was where two guys bought a 14 year old girl's passport, gave it to her, and immediately (i.e, within 10 minutes) put her on a bus back home to Ukraine. Her freedom cost them $3000.
There WERE SFOR troops who bought local girls for themselves: but not Americans, or under American command. That would have been very harshly punished, to keep guys like you from making snide comments like this one.
Matter of fact, yes. Very nice, very clean, very well kept. The dead are respectfully buried with headstones. None of them are wrapped in plastic and waiting in a refrigerated morgue complex. Unlike some dead I could name.
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.