<http://www.freenations.freeuk.com> www.freenations.freeuk.com   

 

  _____  

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
<http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/>  Issue 230 published May 1999

(*2) www.freenations.freeuk.com <http://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 

 



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