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 | Exerpts from Renowned Journalist, International Syndicated Columnist & Broadcaster Eric Margolis on Kosova |
Geneva - Everyone involved in the strange Kosovo conflict is claiming victory - except for its chief victims, the Albanians.Serbia's ruler, Slobodan Milosevic, has saved his own skin, evaded prosecution for war crimes, and managed, at least for now, to keep Kosovo, which was 93% Albanian until this year's ethnic terror, under Serb sovereignty. NATO's promises to the Kosovars of a future vote on independence have been forgotten in the rush to end the war.
The muddled accord almost certainly assures continued violence in Kosovo and a legion of future troubles for the Balkans. Many of the one million Albanian refugees are afraid to return to Kosovo, whose borders will remain under Serb military and police control, thus cementing Milosevic's terrorism. Albanians know once NATO loses interest in Kosovo, the Serbs will be back.
Milosevic, who keeps power by creating trouble, will now turn hisperpetual-motion crisis machine on neighboring Montenegro, unstable Macedonia, Bosnia, and Serbia's forgotten Muslim region of Sanjak. He will emerge from the war a hero and inspiration to the growing force of racism among Balkan Slavs and the Greeks.
The `peace' deal is being hailed as a triumph of sensible internationalism by the curious, ad hoc alliance of groups that opposed the war: leftists,right-wing isolationists, anti-Americans, and Muslim-haters. Far from a triumph, it is a craven surrender to expediency by NATO'sweak-willed leaders. At the same time, the western democracies have not only invited Russia and China to meddle in the Balkans, they are relying on them as `partners in peace.'
Misery loves company; so do repressive regimes. It was no coincidence semi-communist Russia, and fully communist China, sprang to the defense of Serbia, Europe's last communist state. Nor that Moscow and Beijing reacted furiously to NATO's half-hearted intervention in Kosovo to protect human rights. Both are major violators of human rights and persecutors of restive minorities.
Five years ago, the 1.2 million Muslim Chechens rose up against 250 years of savage Russian oppression. During World War II, 80% of Chechens were massacred, starved, or deported en masse in railroad cars to concentration camps by Stalin. To crush Chechen resistance, in 1994 Russian carpet bombing and heavy artillery killed 50,000 to 100,000 Chechen civilians. Torture and executions were widespread. Virtually all Chechen cities, towns, and villages were leveled in a horrifying prelude to Kosovo.
Russian parliamentarians recently accused President Boris Yeltsin of major war crimes in Chechnya. Yet this same leader, and the same army that committed these atrocities, have been invited by NATO to join the Kosovo peacekeeping force. The Russian contingent, which was said to eventually number 10,000 troops, will be the second largest military force after the British.Far from keeping peace, the Russians will promote the interests of the outlawSerb regime and, of course, Moscow's own centuries-old strategic ambitions inthe Balkans, as Russia's seizure of Pristina airport showed this weekend.
China has been enlisted in the `peace process' because its support in the UN Security Council is essential for diplomatic cover. The accidental bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade presented Beijing with a golden opportunity, which the Chinese immediately seized, to put America on the psychological defensive. China's contrived rage over this trivial incident helped distract attention from China's theft of US nuclear secrets, and deflected world condemnation over the anniversary of the Tienanmen massacre. Russia and China now hold veto power over the UN operation in Kosovo.
More important, China is currently waging an intensifying campaign of repression against the Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people, the majority in China's sensitive western province, Sinkiang - formerly Eastern Turkistan. The Uighurs have rebelled against heavy-handed Chinese rule, and Bejing's campaign to swamp the region with Han Chinese settlers, repeating the process of Chinese ethnic inundation in Inner Mongolia and Tibet.
China recently executed a score of Uighurs, arrested hundreds of suspected nationalists, and imposed martial law in many regions of Sinkiang. While Chinese repression in Tibet has provoked worldwide protest, its equally brutal policies in Sinkiang remain almost unknown. Not surprisingly, NATO intervention to save the Kosovars from Serb ethnic terror set off alarm bells in Beijing, which fears foreign action over its own violations of human and national rights.
No wonder, then, that Russia and China, sought to be involved in Kosovo. Under the guise of peacekeeping, Moscow and Beijing will try to ensure Kosovo never gains independence from Serb rule, a precedent that would embolden and encourage their own long-oppressed Muslim colonial subjects.
War and peace often make strange bedfellows. But NATO did not need to invite such violators of rights to join its councils over Kosovo. NATO troops massed on Serbia's borders before the bombing campaign would have ended this war before it began, saving Serbia and Kosovo from devastation, and the need to beg Russia and China for help. By failing to deploy sufficient military force - and being seen as ready to use it - NATO has created a quagmire it will long regret. Seeking the aid of big oppressors to curb a small oppressor makes a mockery of NATO's humanitarian mission.
Russia, and to a lesser degree, China are the big winners of this botched war, and at no cost to themselves. NATO and Serbia have achieved merely Pyrrhic victories. They have made a desert, and call it peace. The Kosovar Albanians have lost everything.
Religion’s at the root of Balkan evil NEW YORK - Serbia’s savagery in Kosovo has finally exposed one of Europe’s darkest and dirtiest secrets: the long racial and religious war against the Muslims of the Balkans.Hatred of Muslims is the 1990’s version of the anti-Semitism of the 1930’s that led to the extermination of Europe’s Jews. Just as many Europeans were overtly or secretly happy during the Nazi era to be rid of the Jews, so today, some modern Europeans actively or tacitly support the latest campaign by Serbia’s Muslim-hating racist regime to impose a `final solution’ to the `problem’ of the Balkan Muslims.
After the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1912, hundreds of thousands of Muslim Turks were slaughtered or driven out. At the end of Turkish-Greek war 1920-1928, 400,000 Turks were expelled from the Balkans; simultaneously, one million Greeks were driven from Aegean Turkey. From 1912-1928, large numbers of Slav and Albanian Muslims were expelled from Bosnia, Kosovo, and Serbia. Today, there are almost 2 million people of Bosnian descent and some 1 million of Albanian origin living in Turkey.
These vast expulsions still left some Turks, and millions of native Balkan Muslims, the descendants of Serbs, Albanians, Greeks, and Bulgarians who had voluntarily converted to Islam in the 15-16th Centuries to escape fierce religious persecution by the Catholic or Orthodox Churches, or to avoid a head tax on Christians levied by the Ottomans.
Today, there are some 10 million Muslims in the Balkans: nearly 3 million nominal Muslims in Albania; 2.3 million in Kosovo and Sanjak; 2 million in Bosnia; 2 million in Bulgaria; 180,000 in Greece; and 600-700,000 Muslim Albanians in Macedonia.
In the 1980’s, Bulgaria expelled 300,000 Muslim citizens and forced the remaining Muslims to Slavicize their names and adopt Orthodox Christianity. A few years later, Serbia began attempts to exterminate or drive out Bosnia’s Muslims.
France and Britain, nervous over their own large Muslim minorities, and traditionally anti-Muslim because of their colonial past, thwarted US efforts to halt ethnic warfare against Bosnia’s Muslims. Greece, Bulgaria, and Macedonia gave the Serbs economic and diplomatic support. The west’s tacit approval, or ineffectual opposition, to this ethnic-religious warfare openedthe way for Serbia’s `final solution’ in Kosovo.
Today, there is wide support among Orthodox nations of Eastern Europe for Serbia’s merciless campaign to eradicate its Muslim and Catholic Albanian minority. What we are seeing is not just a war over land, it is an eruption of the most vicious medieval hatred against non-Slavs and non-Orthodox people, encouraged and enflamed by demagogue Slobodan Milosevic and some extremist elements of the Orthodox clergy. Slavs in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Russia, and, sadly, some Greeks, are cheering on this massive pogrom, just as Europe’s Catholic right applauded Germany’s `purification’ of Jews from their midst.
Orthodox priests preach revenge for events 500 years past, even urging a new crusade to `liberate Constantinople (modern Istanbul) from the Turks’ Milosevic began the horrors of ethnic warfare, vowing, a decade ago, `we will send all the Muslims back to Mecca.’
Ironically, Albania was always renowned for religious toleration. Muslims drank and celebrated Christmas and Easter; Catholics often observed Ramadan; Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic Albanians mixed freely and without the slightest rancor. Every member of Albania’s small Jewish community was hidden from the Nazis and Italian fascists.
Yet the easy-going, unreligious Albanians and other Balkan Muslims now are paying a terrible price for long past centuries of religious and racial hatred. They have become scapegoats for the frustrations, economic ruin, and low self-esteem of the failed, only semi-Europeanized nations of the darkest Balkans.
LIKE WATCHING THE HOLOCAUST ON TV NEW YORK - As Jews celebrated the ancient ritual of Passover commemorating the flight of their ancestors from the wrath of a cruel pharaoh, another persecuted people, the Albanian Kosovars, fled their burning homes by the hundreds of thousands before the merciless fury of Serbia's campaign of genocide.The surging flood of terrorized Kosovar women and children, herded by gloating Serb security forces, recalls another, more modern horror: pitiful columns of Jewish survivors being herded by sneering SS troops from the burning ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. Nazism has truly been triumphantly reborn in the Balkans.
NATO attempt to halt Serbia's industrialized atrocities came too late, and with insufficient force. Petrified of incurring casualties on either side, NATO delayed, then delivered pinpricks, rather than the massive air assault necessary to shock the brutal regime of Slobodan Milosevic to stop ethnic genocide.
Once again, the west badly miscalculated. Far from giving in, the wily Serb leader called NATO's bluff, and accelerated ethnic cleansing. So far, nearly half of Kosovo's 2 million Albanians have been expelled at gunpoint to Macedonia, Albania, and Montenegro. All records proving their identity, property ownership, or bank accounts, are being destroyed in a process of ethnic/cultural eradication.
As NATO wrings its hands in anguish, and mobs of angry Serbs demonstrate in western capitals, some pundits still warn against intervention in Kosovo. One recalls Yeats' prophetic lines in his poem, "The Second Coming:""The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
He could have been writing of Kosovo. Nazism has made a second coming in Serbia. Those who today ask "why didn't the democratic nations stop Hitler in 1937 or 1938," need only listen to the chorus timorous voices who warn against sending ground troops to save the Kosovars. A thousand voices call for inaction, citing myriad reasons why Serbia's fin-du-siecle Nazis cannot be stopped: logisticaldifficulties, lack of UN approval, the wrongness of NATO attacking a sovereign state. These are the voices of Munich, 1938.
War teaches geography. Before these frightful weeks, hardly anyone could find Kosovo on a map. Less understood the historical background of this conflict. We must look back to understand today's horror.
Albanians, once known as Illyrians, are a people of Germanic origins, akin to the ancient Greeks, whose ancestors settled the Balkan Peninsula during the Bronze Age. Albanian and Basque are Europe's oldest spoken language.
Serbs, part of the extended family of Slav peoples, first migrated to the Balkans in the 6th century AD. By the 1300's, Serbs had established a powerful empire under their great monarch, Stevan Dusan, that dominated most of the Balkans, and had its heartland in Kosovo. By then, waves of Slav migrations had forced non-Slav Albanians into the Balkan uplands that are today Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro.
In 1389, the Serb empire was crushed by the advancing Ottoman Turks at the epic battle of Kosovo Polje. Serb lands, including Kosovo, were absorbed into the Ottoman Empire. Serb kings became vassals of the Sultan, often fighting alongside the Turks against the anti-Ottoman alliance of Hungary and Albania. Albania, under the renowned Skenderbeg, held off the Turks until the late 1400's, then, too fell to Ottoman rule. Many Albanians and south Slavs converted to Islam.
After 400 years of Ottoman rule, Serbs revolted in 1804, battling the hated Turks until 1828, when they won independence. Kosovo, however, remained under Ottoman rule. During the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars, a resurgent Serbia defeated the Turks, seized Macedonia from the Bulgars, and was given Kosovo as a fruit of victory by the Great Powers. During that period, Serbs staged the first ethnic cleansing of Albanians and other Muslims, killing or expelling some 100,000, including the family of Mother Theresa. Kosovo – or Kosova, in Albanian – was also the cradle of modern Albanian nationalism. The Kosovo-based League of Prizren led post-Ottoman Albania to independence and national rebirth.
After World War I, Yugoslavia was created by the allies, an unstable, bitterly divided kingdom in which the Serb majority constantly feuded with Croats, Slovenes, and Albanians. At the time, a coterie of Serb nazi academics advocated the total "ethnic purification" of "inferior" Muslims and Albanians from Yugoslavia. During 1945-1947, another 100,000 Albanians were killed or expelled from Kosovo. Serbs were then in the majority.
The Yugoslav leader Tito, a Croat, sought to diminish Serb power in Yugoslavia by creating federal republics. Over bitter Serb objections, he made Kosovo into an autonomous republic that guaranteed nominal Albanian cultural and political rights. Yugoslavia started to unravel after Tito's death in 1980. Serbs began leaving Kosovo, the nation's poorest region, for economic reasons, and to escape growing animosity and violence between Slavs and Albanians.
Milosevic rose to power in the late 1980's by inflaming religious and racial hatred, vowing to "crush the Albanians" of Kosovo, restore a Serb majority, and expel "the Turks," as Serbs called all Muslims and even Catholics. By then, Kosovo was well over 80% Albanian, due to Serb emigration, and the high birth rate of Albanians. Milosevic promised to evict Albanians, and repopulate "Serbia's heartland" with Slavs.
Over the n ext decade later, Milosevic launched three wars against Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, in an effort to create an ethnically and religiously pure Greater Serbia. Milosevic, a communist and former banker, surrounde d himself with the vilest elements of Serb society: fascists, gangsters, brutish warlords, and rabidly anti-Muslim, anti-Catholic leaders of the Orthodox Church. Though his wars destroyed the Yugoslav state, killed over 250,000, and created more than 2.5 million refugees, including 100,000 Serbs of Krajina, Milosevic consolidated his personal power, using his secret police and gangs of nazi thugs to crush all internal opposition.
The brilliant, wily Milosevic knew exactly how to enflame the passionate patriotism of Serbs, a people who combine a deep belief they have been victimized by history, with outburst of nationalistic aggression. Like Hitler in Germany, Milosevic took a cultivated, highly capable European people and infected them, with racist hatred and a bogus historical mythology. Like Weimar Germany, Serbia's foundering economy, rampant inflation, and national demoralization, fuelled the rise of nazi power. And as in Nazi Germany, a demagogic tyrant focused hatred on a scapegoat people: Albanians and Muslims.
Unless NATO improbably makes a major ground assault on Yugoslavia - for which troops are not available - Kosovo, and Sanjak, just to the north, will be "cleansed" of most or all their 2.3 million Albanians and Muslims. Kosovo will then be 'Muslimfrei.' Hitler would have beamed approval. The Milosevic regime is certainly not Hitler's equal in numbers of victims, but it intimately shares the same nazi philosophy of historical victimization, ethnic crusading, and racial purity.
Like Hitler in the Rheinland and at Munich, a determined Milosevic has brilliantly out-bluffed and out-maneuvered a militarily superior coalition arrayed against him. In another week, while NATO dithers and debates, Kosovo will be rid of Albanian "untermensch." Then, Milosevic will then call for negotiations, allow a token few refugees to return, and revel in the adulation of his people. He is counting that NATO, like the European democracies of the 193O's, does not have the stomach to launch a ground war against him.
As Hollywood celebrates the victory over Nazism in World War II, the Balkan's reborn nazis are already celebrating their victory. NATO, however well meaning, is left looking like a paper tiger. The genocide that NATO vowed would never happen again, has happened before our eyes. NATO is busy bombing empty buildings while Europe’s neo-Nazis commit ethnic murder on a vast scale.
Hitler remarked, as he p
