http://www.post-trib.com/news/810331,kosovo.article
GARY POST-TRIBUNE (USA) Residents sound off on unrest in Kosovo February 24, 2008 By Andy Grimm Post-Tribune staff reporter Last Sunday, the restive Kosovo region declared its independence from the Republic of Serbia, sparking outrage and riots in the Serbian capital of Belgrade. Serbian government officials have declared the province, where 90 percent of the population are ethnic Albanians, would remain Serb territory. Rioters burned the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, and violence also broke out in northern Kosovo. Today, pro-Serb demonstrators, many of them from Northwest Indiana's large Serbian Orthodox congregations, will gather in Chicago's Daley Plaza to stage a peaceful protest of Kosovars' U.S.-backed bid for independence. Though relatively few Serbs now live in Kosovo, and many have fled since a NATO bombing campaign against Serbia ended a violent crackdown of Albanian militants under Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian Orthodox church considers the region its holy land, and the site of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Polje, in which began the conquest of the medival Serbian kingdom by the Ottoman Turks. Centuries later, it was the sight of brutal atrocities by Serb police and military during Milosevic's late 1990s campaign, and violent retribution against Serbs by ethnic Albanians. Northwest Indiana's Serb population still has joined Russia, Spain and a handful of smaller nations in condemning Kosovars for unilaterally withdrawing from Serbia. A few of them, a Serbian priest, a Chetnik veteran of the Word War II, a 20-year-old refugee from the fighting of the last decade, and a Balkans expert weigh in on the latest conflict. The Rev. Father Marko Matic, pastor of St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Church in Merrillville, last visited Kosovo in 1989, before the violent outbreaks there and even before the war in Bosnia. In his dark cassock, he seems more sad than angry over the notion of a Kosovo independent of Serbia. He has stacks of books on the post-Soviet strife in the Balkans, including books with color pictures of slaughtered, tortured victims of the fighting there in the 1990s and toppled churches that have domed roofs and cupolas just like St. Sava. The captions indicate that the corpses are of Serbs, and the buildings toppled, with the death and destruction caused by Kosovo Albanian dissidents. It was 1389 that started the war against terrorism, really. What were the Turks but Muslims who wanted to occupy our land? Even though we lost on Kosovo Polje, morale was very high, and this was because Kosovo was holy land even before the battle. Kosovo was the center, the cradle of Serbian history, our nation, our church. The first Serbian leaders headquarters were in Kosovo, and many of them were not only the best leaders, they became saints. There are great many churches and monasteries there, even before the battle. They say Serbian (mythologize) Kosovo today, but it was there. The churches were built in the 13th Century, not in the 1990s, when Slobodan Milosevic was in power. After World War II, when Serbia was given to communism and Tito, who was not even Serbian, he didn't care about a holy land. In the 1960s, there were demonstrations against Tito, and he was putting in jail Christians and people who fought in the war, and to punish the Serbs, he gave away the Kosovo by opening up the borders with Albania. Tito was always playing one group in Yugoslavia against the others. Albania is poorest country in Europe, and people came across for a better lifestyle, like in Mexico. How would Americans feel if the Mexicans in Texas wanted their independent country? When he was in his 20s, Blazo Dragic, fought with the Chetnik resistance against the Nazis in World War II. In 1952, he immigrated to the United States to escape the communist regime that ruled Yugoslavia. Now 94, he lives in Hobart. He is devout in his Serbian Orthodox faith, and writes poetry about the past and present struggles, of Serbia. As he speaks, often with translation help from Matic and his daughter, Barb Grimsgard of Valparaiso, a painting hangs behind him of a Serbian maiden tipping a pitcher of water to the lips of a dying Serb warrior on the battlefield of Kosovo Polje. I was one of the soldiers, I was 28 maybe when I go with guerrillas in the mountains, to fight against the Nazis. Then I fight against (Yugoslavia's post-war dictator Jozef Tito). After the war, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, they have a meeting and put communism in Yugoslavia. I fought for country in Second World War, I saved airmen from America, and the U.S. is my traitor. They put communism in Yugoslavia, and they give the green light for terrorists there in the (Kosovo Liberation Army), for everyone who is against the Serbs. Communism for 50 years wants to make a big population of Albanians in Kosovo. Who brings in these people? Who kicks them out? Communism kicked out people like me. Communism killed everything, but Kosovo is Serbia. The Albanians who were born in Kosovo, they live good with the Serbs. Then we get problems when communism comes, and who brings communism? I call these three crazy brothers: nazism, communism, and terrorism. Zorica Kurgic has fled what she calls "instability" in her native Yugoslavia three times in her 20 years. When she was 6, her family fled their home in Bosnia to escape the fighting there in the early 1990s. In her early teens, concerns over continued violence in the aftermath of fighting in Kosovo that ended with the 2000 NATO bombing campaign, Zorica and her mother and brother came to Griffith as political asylees. Now 20, she is studying political science at Valparaiso University. We have been talking about Kosovo a lot. Sometimes I wish someone will invite me to start this conversation, because I feel I have a lot to get it off my chest. But sometimes I don't want it, because there is no way to exit the conversation. It's very difficult to understand what is going on in Kosovo without knowing the history of the area. What bothers me is the injustice is heaped on the Serbs in that area. The Serbs fought on your side in every war, and they are not bad people and murders as they are portrayed. I'm learning about the Middle East now, and everything that comes on the news, I think I have to do my own research, because of knowing how America and the UN has handled Serbia, it makes me a little skeptical about what is really happening. Both sides have stories of being bullied by the others. What is going to happen to the Serb minority in Kosovo now? Here is what I think is going to happen, because of the path of history as I see it: there are going to be protests, there are protests, and then things will kind of go to rest, but the independence is going to be recognized. How are they going to go back? It's going, and nobody is lamenting what is happening to the Serbs. Let's try to make it work. But NATO has badly handled Kosovo, and there will be no 1-2-3 solutions. Fred Chary is a retired professor of history at Indiana University Northwest who has traveled in and studied the Balkans. Kosovo is the historic homeland. In the 1389 Kosovo Field is a legendary date, Turks took over Serbia and ended the kingdom of Serbia. It's not that the Serbs feel they were conquered, they believe that they had this great kingdom in the Middle Ages and the Turks toppled it. It doesn't matter who lives there now, it's part of Serbia. Nationalism is that kind of force. Why do people get upset in this country when we wanted to give the Panama Canal Zone back? Kosovo now is an Albanian land. Serbs in Serbia treated the Albanians as second class citizens in the last years of Yugoslavia, there was civil strife and uprisings and a great deal of tension, even under communism. But Milosevic emphasized his nationalism even more than his communism, and that made the tension between Serbs and Albanians even worse. Who's in the right? Well, who's right, the Israelis or the Palestinians? The Catholics or Protestants in Northern Ireland? Who started it? It's hard to say. You can say Serbs started it by discriminating against Albanians, but then they started to make concessions. But the Albanians maybe started it by moving toward independence in the 1990s, when the KLA was carrying out raids against the Serbian police and army, and the Serbian police and army responded brutally. When I teach about the Balkans, I point out that every 50 years or so there's an outbreak, some kind of major disturbance going on in the Balkans and it usually involves one of the Great Powers getting involved to end the violence. They may have a federation again. They may divide it again. Right now, it isn't as bad as it was 10 years ago. We'll have to see. Frankly, I don't want to predict. I'm watching the Kosovo riots on television right now.
