KOSOVO – THE
BALKANS TODAY, THE WEST TOMORROW
What happens when a government
loses control of immigration and gives special preference to immigrants
for political reasons.
By Edward Spalton February
2008
“A part of the world which produces more history
than can be consumed locally” - Winston Churchill, writing of the
Balkans
“…..substantial self-government for Kosovo,
taking full account of the Rambouillet Accords and the principles of
sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia…”
UN RESOLUTION 1244 (Annex 2, item 8)
Showing any sympathy for the present plight of Serbia is swimming against
the tide of received opinion, which was largely generated by the successful
propaganda of the West, particularly concerning Bosnia and Kosovo. The
demonization of Serbia was taken to grotesque proportions and, in general,
faithfully and uncritically repeated in the mainstream media. So, for
many people, their “default setting” is that Serbs were uniquely
wicked and brutal to their erstwhile fellow Yugoslavs in pursuit of
a “Greater Serbia”.
This narrative is a grossly inadequate basis from which to make an
appreciation of Serbia’s present situation. As the weight of repetition
of the “demon Serb” theory is so overwhelming, I will be putting
the contrary case whilst conscious that no side in the unhappy disintegration
of Yugoslavia was guiltless of atrocity.
At this area of the world’s surface, where the tectonic plates
Of Islam, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity collide,
one could start the story at least as far back as the Fourth Crusade
but it is only necessary to go back to the Second World War to form
a coherent picture of what has happened in Kosovo. It had always been
a heartland of the Serbian Church and national consciousness, containing
churches as important as Canterbury, Salisbury and Winchester are in
England.
The Axis powers favoured Albanians and arranged for a large part of
the Serbian population to be expelled from Kosovo (*1) and replaced
by Muslim Albanian immigrants. This was the beginning of the now overwhelming
Albanian majority in the province. At the end of the war, Marshal Tito
agreed with his communist comrades in Albania that the incomers should
remain in new Socialist Yugoslavia and prevented the expelled Serbs
from returning.
The communist takeover after the war was bloody in the extreme. Not
only were wartime scores settled but there were wholesale massacres
of those deemed to be “enemies of the people.” The new masters
made as sure as they could that there would be no competition with their
leadership from the former elites. The bien-pensant, leftish world came
to regard “non-aligned” Yugoslavia as a more moderate version
of socialism than the Soviet variety but it was certainly not so at
its inception nor for many years thereafter.
Tito’s treatment of the Serbs was conditioned by two considerations
– firstly that many Serbs had backed the royalist Resistance (the
Chetniks) under General Mihailovic and secondly that Serbia should not
dominate the new Yugoslavia, as it had done before the war. The communist
partisans’ civil war with the royalist Chetniks had been fought
at least as vigorously and dirtily as the war against the German occupiers.
To reduce Serbian influence, he drew the boundaries of the constituent
republics, so that large numbers of Serbs would live as minorities in
Croatia, Bosnia and elsewhere outside Serbia. Whilst these borders were
more or less local government boundaries, it was not such a burning
question. Yet these were the boundaries which the Western powers would
later recognize as the borders of sovereign states – states furthermore
with aspirations to Serb-free, racial and religious purity.
A sort of political correctness was enforced in socialist Yugoslavia
in which multiculturalism between and within the constituent republics
was officially maintained. The basis of the state was a form of Marxist
class outlook which was supposed to predominate over cultural and linguistic
differences. The slogan was “unity and brotherhood.” .In some
ways this appeared to be reasonably successful. Intermarriage between
different cultural groups was quite common and the atheist stance of
the authorities tended to mask religious differences. Perhaps Gordon
Brown’s late conversion to official “Britishness” is
a faint echo of this.
As testified by Mitar Balevic at the Hague tribunal, Kosovo was different
- subject to Albanian agitation for an ethnically pure state from the
1950s onwards. There were large scale demonstrations on Albanian Flag
Day in 1968 and Serbs were persecuted throughout the Sixties, Seventies
and Eighties. There were murders, expulsions and rapes, as well as desecration
of churches, exclusion from public employment and medical discrimination
at Pristina Hospital – especially in the maternity department.
Between 1961 and 1981, the Albanian population doubled and the Serbs
declined from being one quarter to one sixth of the population.
Tito granted local autonomy in 1974 but this only increased the Albanian
appetite for driving out the Serbs. The Serbian alphabet was banned
and Serbian school text books destroyed. Some 20,000 Serbs fled after
the riots of 1981. After the death of Tito in 1980, German foundations
and institutes, deniable instruments of government policy (*2), were
prominent in supporting the Albanians. Their efforts were increasingly
supplemented by the German Secret Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst)
which fostered the separatist movements in all parts of Yugoslavia.
It was against this background that Slobodan Milosevic went on 24th
April 1987 to speak at Kosovo Polje, holy ground in the Serbian national
story – the battlefield where the Serbs went down to glorious defeat
at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1389 – The Field of the Blackbirds.
This speech has been consistently misrepresented in the West as a sort
of declaration of war on the mostly Muslim Kosovo Albanians but that
is a total untruth (*3). Milosevic’s words were shot through with
the Yugoslav brand of multicultural Political Correctness. “Protect
brotherhood and unity”…. “nationalism always means isolation
from others, being locked in a closed circle and stopping growth”…
He exhorted people to “emerge from a state of hatred, intolerance
and mistrust” whilst making clear that there would be no ethnically
cleansed Kosovo, from which all Serbs would be expelled.
That may have been one cause of Albanian outrage. Until then, they
had been consistently successful in working towards that aim. The other
famous incident on this occasion was an attack by Kosovo-Albanian police
on some of the Serbian crowd which provoked Milosevic’s remark
“Nobody should beat you”. This was reckoned to be very un-
PC in the vocabulary and discourse of “unity and brotherhood”.
Apart from that, he appealed for calm. Yet time after time, this speech
is represented in the West as the provocative ravings of an extreme
nationalist.
A couple of quotations from separatist leaders supported by the West
make an interesting comparison.
“Genocide is a natural phenomenon in keeping with the human-social
and mythological divine nature. It is not only permitted but even recommended
by the Almighty…for the maintenance and spreading of the One True
Faith” (*4) FRANJO TUDJMAN – first President of post war Croatia,
who also said “Thank God, my wife is nether a Jew nor a Serb”.
(Mrs. Thatcher later accepted a decoration from him).
And
“There can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith
and non-Islamic institutions. The Islamic movement must and can take
power as soon as it is morally strong enough, not only to destroy the
non-Islamic power but to build a new Islamic one”. (*5) ALIJA IZETBEGOVIC,
first President of Bosnia- Hercogovina, eulogized at his funeral by
Paddy Ashdown as the father of his people. With Ashdown’s approval,
Bosnian war dead were officially classified as “shahid” –
martyrs in the Jihad against the Infidel.
So, a clerico-fascist and an Islamic extremist were supported by Western
intelligence agencies, governments and armed forces as bearers of “European
values” to the benighted Balkans. To do this, the EU member states
broke their obligations under the UN charter and the Helsinki Accords
by which they had guaranteed to accept existing national borders in
Europe. They recognized Slovenia and Croatia diplomatically. This was
done principally at Germany’s instigation and the German government
regarded this sudden about turn by the other EU states as a triumph.
The Foreign Minister was cock-a-hoop “By this, Germany has regained
diplomatically everything lost in Eastern Europe as a result of two
world wars”. It opened the way for the new “Drang nach Osten”.
The pretext for the later air war on Yugoslavia was based on the accusation
that Serbs were committing genocide against the largely Muslim Albanians
in Kosovo. It undoubtedly was an unpleasant, dangerous time. Statistics
from the period before the war suggest that an Albanian in Kosovo was
about as likely to meet a violent death as an ordinary inhabitant of
Washington DC at the same period, whereas a Serb was around twelve times
more likely to come to an untimely end.
The Kosovo Liberation Army was known to police authorities all over
Europe as a major criminal organization, deeply involved in drug smuggling
and human trafficking.
Yet both the German and American governments contributed to its training
and arming for Kosovo’s “liberation”. Its commander from
1998 (later prime minister of Kosovo in 2006) was one Agim Ceku, a former
Yugoslav army captain who first became a general in the HVO (Croatian
Army). Assisted by access to all NATO intelligence on Yugoslav forces
and with the aid of NATO airpower, he was a very successful commander,
responsible for the expulsion of around 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina
region of Croatia in “Operation Storm”(1995). He also appears
to have had command responsibility at the time of the Medak Pocket massacre
where Croatian forces fired on Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light
Infantry. They later discovered the evidence of the massacre for which
nobody has been brought to book. An Interpol warrant exists for Ceku’s
arrest.
Wartime “information” from NATO told us that at least 100,000
young Albanian men from Kosovo were missing, presumed murdered. Yet
the Spanish forensic team, sent to look for mass graves was gravely
embarrassed. In late 1999 its leader complained that he and his colleagues
had become part of “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda
machine because we did not find one, not one mass grave”. The Wall
Street Journal concluded that NATO stepped up its claims when it saw
“a fatigued press corps drifting towards the contrary story –
civilians killed by NATO bombs… The war in Kosovo was cruel, bitter,
savage. Genocide it wasn’t”.
The Spanish forensic team found 2108 bodies in 1999. The killing did
not stop with the end of the war. According to a report in the Sunday
Times 420 Albanians were killed between June 1999 and March 2000, as
the KLA dealt with perceived traitors. In the same period 1041 non Albanians
(mostly Serbs) were killed. The “protection” offered by KFOR
and their KLA allies was distinctly shaky. Serbs have continued to “disappear”
or be found dead since, yet nobody has been brought to court, let alone
convicted. In the same period (1999-2008) some 150 Orthodox Serbian
churches have been destroyed and some 300 mosques have been built with
funds from extreme Saudi Arabian Wahabi organizations. Like Bosnia-Hercegovina,
where some 1500 foreign Mujahedin have settled as Bosnian citizens,
Kosovo has become part of the “green wedge” of Muslim territories
pushing closer to the gates of Vienna.
In spite of its experiences at the hands of the West in general and
EU powers in particular, there is considerable support for membership
of the EU in Serbia. The recent re-election of Boris Tadic as president
(with 50.57% of the vote) is an indication of this. Pro EU Serbs think
that the EU is “modern” and a safe place to be. Given Serbia’s
former demonization, isolation and pariah status, it is easy to see
the attraction of this. Then their clinching argument is “It is
inevitable”. But the narrowness of Tadic’s victory shows that
there is a large body of opinion which is by no means reconciled. Tadic
has talked tough for domestic consumption but, if he runs true to form,
he will succumb to EU blandishments.
Will the EU dispensation eventually make former Yugoslavia into an
area of harmony and cooperation? How stable is the EU/NATO-imposed settlement?
Is it a settlement or merely an armistice until some shift in the balance
of great powers? In the map which follows, Great Britain, “Britoslavia”,
is divided up, approximately as Yugoslavia was. It does not quite match
the regionalization plans of John Prescott but would have much the same
effect in reducing the independence, defensibility, security and international
influence of the inhabitants of these islands.
Acknowledgements & References
I am indebted to Dr Srdja Trikovic and to Rodney Atkinson for suggestions
and assistance.
(*1) http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk Issue 230 published May
1999
(*2) www.freenations.freeuk.com various articles and also contribution
by former ambassador Miroslav Polreich, Czech Republic in “European
Voices” Section
(*3) www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/milosevic-1987-3-eng.htm
(*4) www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/smorg-rp100104.htm
The resurgence of fascism and war in Croatia by Andy Wilcoxon
(*5) www.srpska-mreza.com/library/facts/alija.html
