Kosovo, Croats, Serbs, Albanians and religious violence (split thread)

[Grace]

The founder: Metropolitan Sebastianos
A Life Of Struggle And Contribution To Orthodoxy And Hellenism

Btw: in Kosova, the Serb "priests" actually praised Mladic and Karadzic while inciting violence against Albanians; before that no one touched the Churches.

[Paulos Melas]

Th crimes against the serbs in Kosovo and Metohija are countless.
Destruction of churches, rapes of innocent nuns all this from the fanatic islamist UCK albanians. So don t speak about the attitude of Albanians

[Grace]

Originally Posted by Paulos Melas

Th crimes against the serbs in Kosovo and Metohija are countless.
Destruction of churches, rapes of innocent nuns all this from the fanatic islamist UCK albanians. So don t speak about the attitude of Albanians

Oh, please. Reading from a propaganda book?
Post a link about the "rapes of innocent nuns all this from the fanatic islamist UCK albanians." Islamist, ha! Funny how the "fanatic islamist UCK albanians" are not touching Albanian Catholic Churches.

Here's what your wonderful "Christians" did, long before anyone touched the churches:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/spec...o/victims.html

But Serb paramilitary forces have used rape to target the families of supporters of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), fully aware of the devastating effect the rapes have on the fighters and their home communities. For a year or more before the onset of the NATO air offensive, Serb forces were routinely detaining women family members of men suspected of separatist activity.

http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9904/17/kosovo.rapes/

"I want fresh girls," the paramilitary, who was wearing a light green uniform, said in fluent Albanian. The sexual assaults would continue for another hour before a Yugoslav soldier came upon the scene and, enraged by what he saw, beat and drove off the militiaman as he attempted to rape the new mother.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...pagewanted=all


http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...pagewanted=all

http://www.motherjones.com/news/spec...o/victims.html

No one has destroyed more Christian chuches than Serbs...the Catholic ones in Croatia.

Oh, and they destroyed about 40% of the houses, schools, libraries, monuments of culture, mosques, and threw out some 1 million people. They are really nice people, those Christians Serbs, and they are all walking freely today. Surprising why the Albanians didn't bring them flowers when they got back

[Tsontos]

Grace, what do you think about the Al-Queda connections the KLA had? Do they in any way put a dampner on the Albanian narrative about Kosovo's liberation?

[edessa]

I prefer the serbs to anyone else in the balkans...even though they are nationalist fuks who do the 3 finger salute in every picture they pose for...at least they respect the greeks

[Grace]

Originally Posted by Tsontos

Grace, what do you think about the Al-Queda connections the KLA had? Do they in any way put a dampner on the Albanian narrative about Kosovo's liberation?

what connections? Those invented by the Serbs? In Bosnia 100's of Islamists went as the slaughter lingered for 3 years. In Kosova, people, largely speaking, are NOT religious at all and could care less. You can look at the pictures and you will not see covered women at all, and any "conservative habits" are actually from being Albanian, not Muslim. Our national hero is Catholic (maybe orthodox?), and so is Mother Teresa and no one cares.

The plis on older men it's a national dress (north expecially.) If a few people slipped in, that does not mean anything. Everyone with a gun was "KLA," but I know they pushed them away and Albania stopped quite a few at the border as well. Ironically, any extremists that is there now is thanks to Serbs having burned almost all the mosques and many "do gooders" are "trying to help them" by building new ones. The government knows and just this week one of them was thrown out.


KLA made it clear that foreign fighters would no be accepted, because they knew the would be accused of that. If I find the article from 1999 (from Independent) I'll post it. Those we Serb lies to justify what they did. They pulled similar stunts for Croatia, Bosnia, Kosova and even Montengro.


The Serb priests almost threatened civil war!!!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programme...ent/861500.stm

More than a decade of Milosevic's rule has resurrected Montenegrin nationalism, turning it into potent political force.
The Church has become a central symbol of this dispute over nationhood.

Priests are on the frontline of a religious battleground. "One of them told us, 'We will cut your throats. Almost every day there is one more case of our priests beaten up on the streets.'" Father Jovan, a Serbian Orthodox priest, was speaking to me on the balcony of Montenegro's ancient monastery in Cetinje, the former capital of this tiny Adriatic country. Jovan and his colleagues have become caught up in the battle for Montenegro's independence.

...

Metrolpolitan Mihailo distributes a book entitled "The Crimes of Amfilohije". It portrays Amfilohije as a hardened Serb nationalist and includes accounts of meetings with indicted war criminals. A picture records a visit to Cetinje Monastery by a notorious paramilitary leader known as Arkan, who was wanted for war crimes until his recent murder.

Mihailo's makes a dramatic accusation: "Mr Amfilohije should be called to account at the Hague Tribunal. I think it should happen and it will happen. These people should be warned, because Mr Amfilohije wants to provoke the same crises in Montenegro as in former Yugoslavia.
Metropolitan Mihailo


Metropolitan Amfilohije laughs off such accusations, claiming that people are paid to attack him for political reasons. Amongst this welter of abuse, Amfilohije goes on to assert that a priest in the Metropolitan Church is a thief on the run from the police in Serbia, that other clergy have broken their vows and that another has "problems with women".

[Tsontos]

Originally Posted by Grace

KLA made it clear that foreign fighters would no be accepted, because they knew the would be accused of that.

It did accept and actively recruit foreign Mujahadeen fighters until the Americans told them to stop immediately, so they did. It's well documented. I'm not saying by any means that Kosovar Albanians are Islamists but the Al-Queda connection is now a historical fact.

How the KLA went from an extremist, terrorist listed group with links to Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East and little credit even among Kosovar Albanians to rulers of a defacto independent Kosovo:

Ten years ago, Kosovo was at relative peace. Albanian demands for independence from Belgrade were being channeled through the peaceful Democratic League party of Ibrahim Rugova, while the small groups of Albanian paramilitaries that did exist were isolated and had little public support.

According to a report by Jane's intelligence agency in 1996, the Kosovo Liberation Army, the most extreme of Albanian paramilitary groups, does not take into consideration the political or economic importance of its victims, nor does it seem at all capable of hurting its enemy.

It has not come close to challenging the region's balance of military power. As late as November 1997, the KLA, officially classified by the US as a terrorist organisation, could, it has been estimated, call on the services of only 200 men.

Then, in a policy shift whose repercussions we are witnessing today, the West started to interfere big time. The US, Germany and Britain increasingly saw the KLA as a proxy force which could help them achieve their goal of destabilising and eventually removing from power the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, which showed no inclination to join Euro-Atlantic structures.

Over the following year, the KLA underwent a drastic makeover. The group was taken off the US State Department's list of terrorist organisations and, as with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan a decade or so earlier, became fully fledged freedom fighters.

Large-scale assistance was given to the KLA by Western security forces. Britain organised secret training camps in northern Albania. The German secret service provided uniforms, weapons and instructors.

The Sunday Times in Britain published a report stating that American intelligence agents admitted they helped to train the KLA before NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, Rugova's Democratic League, which supported negotiations with Belgrade, was given the cold shoulder.

When the KLA's campaign of violence, directed not only against Yugoslav state officials, Serb civilians and Albanian collaborators who did not support their extremist agenda, led to a military response from Belgrade, the British and Americans were ready to hand out the ultimatums.

During the 79-day NATO bombing of Yugoslavia that followed, the West made promises of independence to the KLA which, eight years on, are coming back to haunt them.

Recognising an independent Kosovo will push Serbia from the Western orbit as well as creating a real chance of war. And it will set a precedent: if the rights of self-determination for Kosovan Albanians are to be acknowledged, then what about the rights of self-determination for Serbs in Bosnia, who wish to join Serbia?

Doing a U-turn, and attempting to get independence postponed, runs the risk of violence from Kosovo's Albanian majority. It's an almighty mess, but one of the West's own making.

Had it not intervened in Yugoslav internal affairs 10 years ago, it is likely a peaceful compromise to the Kosovan problem would eventually have been found between the government in Belgrade and the Democratic League. Rugova's goal was independence for Kosovo from Serbia, but only with the agreement of all parties.

What is certain is that without Western patronage the KLA would never have grown to the force it eventually became.

By championing the most hardline force in Kosovo, the West not only helped precipitate war, but made the issue of Kosovo much harder to solve.

It is ironic that for supporters of liberal intervention, Western actions in Kosovo are still seen to have been a great success. It was at the height of the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 that the then British prime minister, Tony Blair, made his famous speech at Chicago in which he outlined his doctrine of the international community.

Blair argued that the principle of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign states - long considered an important principle of international order - should be subject to revision. "I say to you: never fall again for the doctrine of isolationism," Blair pleaded.

But after surveying the global debris of a decade of Western interference, from the Balkans to Afghanistan and Iraq, is it any wonder that isolationism and observing the principle of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign states again seems so appealing?

Neil Clark, a regular contributor to The Spectator and The Guardian in Britain, teaches international relations at Oxford Tutorial College.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...8-7583,00.html

[Grace]

Tsontos, any group that rises up with guns is a terroristsorganization, almost by definition. It's a label. Even Nelson Mandela is on the US terror list today from 1960's:

The former South African president and some in the now-ruling African National Congress are still blacklisted under U.S. laws and need special permission to enter the United States more than a decade after the apartheid struggle ended.

No plan has been announced for Mandela to visit the United States once the bill passes. He last visited the United States in May 2005.

The ANC was banned by South Africa's white rulers in 1960, its leaders jailed or forced into exile until the ban on the movement was lifted 30 years later.

Strict security measures passed by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks against the United States kept the ANC's "terrorist" label because it used armed force as part of its campaign against apartheid.

http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnN19276478.html


On asking Jihadis for help: Nope it isn't documented by reputable sources even though I would not blame them given that they were fighting for their lives. Quite the opposite actually:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlConte...1/nkos611.html (1999)

The volunteers are allocated to military training in camps around the Albanian capital. Ex-servicemen from the Albanian or Yugoslavian armies receive just 15 days of training. If they are without military experience they are sent away for a month's training.

New soldiers are then assigned to the infantry, artillery or anti-tank units. Some are sent straight to the front to fight. The KLA claims that it has turned away hundreds of other volunteers because it is sticking to its strict policy of only allowing Albanians to join the army.

More than 300 non-Albanians, many of whom are British-based Muslims or former British servicemen, have asked if they can fight in Kosovo. They have been turned away because the KLA does not want to be accused by Serb propogandists of running an Islamic movement or an army of foreigners.

http://books.google.com/books?id=1n8...MjzEUtUz6LMGzg

Balkanpeace.org and Kosovo.net are (just two of the many) Serb propaganda sites and they have tried extremely hard to portray Albanians as Jihadis and Serbs as the good guys. They also said that "Albanians are raping our women" when rape and crime were much lower in Kosovo than Serbia. They used that as a pretext to take away the autonomy in the 1980's.

From Michael Sells a US based college professor:

"These new allegations against NATO are ominously similar to Serb nationalists' charges in 1986 that Kosovar Albanians were destroying the monasteries. This charge was combined with other inflammatory allegations that Kosovar Albanians were illegal immigrants who should be expelled; that Albanians were using their high birth rate as a tool to commit" demographic genocide" against Kosova's Serb minority; and that they were carrying out widespread rapes of Serb women. In 1986, Serbian Orthodox bishops repeated these allegations and charged that genocide was being carried out against Serbs in Kosova. The same charges were repeated in the famous "Memorandum" written by Serbian intellectuals attacking the Yugoslav constitution and the autonomy of Kosova. In this inflamed environment, Slobodan Milosevic made his leap to power by promising he would protect the Serb people and their shrines against their enemies.
What was the truth of these frightening allegations? There were genuine grievances by both Serbs and Albanians in Kosova, and both groups felt threatened. But Serb independent journalists and human rights workers found the more inflammatory charges to be total fabrications. A study of police records in Kosova showed only one rape of an ethnic Serb by an Albanian in an entire year. Similarly, the alleged destruction of Serb shrines turned out to involve isolated cases of vandalism, graffiti, and cutting of trees on church property -- hate crimes, perhaps, but surely not the organized, genocidal annihilation that was claimed.

Yet the charge that Albanians were out to destroy Serb sacral heritage had a life independent of any evidence to the contrary. The charge fed into a mythologized history that presented the Ottoman Turks and native Balkan Muslims as obsessed with eradicating Serbs and Serbian sacred sites. Serb nationalists make this charge repeatedly -- despite the survival of this magnificent heritage through five centuries of Ottoman rule amidst Albanian neighbors and despite the Ottoman record of supporting the Serbian Orthodox patriarchate and authorizing the building and repair of Serbian churches."

http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/Kosovo/Koso...nt_News233.htm

How nice of that editorial to suggest that Albanians only wanted autonomy before and even after what happened they should allow Serb police, customs and Serbian soldiers to guard them. This only happened 9 years ago, and Serbs don't even admit that they did much wrong. Just "Milosevic might have done some bad things, but this is what Albanians did to us"...down to stolen shoes.

This is not a one time thing: since 1912 when Russia helped them get it they have tried to literally exterminate people, starve them out (and then ship them to Turkey) and apartheid regime.

-------------Part of larger paper; why Serbs can no longer rule Kosova---------
http://www.seep.ceu.hu/archives/issue61/herbert.pdf

The Possibility of Repair: An Empirical Assessment
The modern history of Belgrade’s rule in Kosovo is grim. Its
twentieth-century span is book-ended by extended episodes of official violent
repression, from 1912 to 1919 and from 1998 to 1999; marked by elaborate
colonization programs aimed at restoring the Serbs’ medieval majority status;
and institutionalized by a series of flawed constitutions that implicitly
identified Kosovo’s majority as second class citizens. Serbia founded its
modern state on a decision to treat its Albanian community as more worthy
of alienation than integration. Belgrade’s governance of Kosovo from 1912
to 1999 and its current Kosovo policies show in both word and deed that it
has not, up to the present day, reversed this basic decision.

Serbian forces occupied the territory of Kosovo in 1912, burning
Albanian villages from the Kosovo border to Pristina (Malcolm 1999: 251)
and failing to notice, as Banac (1984: 292) has drolly put it, that there were
hardly any Serbs left in the land they called “Old Serbia.” The liberation was actually a horrific military occupation, (296) in which the Serbian army punished Kosovo’s Albanians for having sided with the Ottomans [let me remind you that Serbs wanted 1/2 of Albania and Greeks the other half, so siding with Turks after 1878 saved us; Serbs were great vassals too] (Vickers1998: 78). The Serbs’ attempt to subdue Kosovo’s Albanians between 1912
and 1919 resulted in a wave of Albanian militancy and protracted low intensity
conflict that ebbed and flowed throughout the 20th century.

The early violence reached a peak in the winter of 1918-1919, when the Serbian army rampaged through several villages of western Kosovo, laying waste to more than 900 houses and killing hundreds of civilians (Banac 1984: 298).
The military campaigns in Kosovo were augmented and followed by
elaborate attempts at colonization, which together advanced the official
Serbian policy of assimilating or expelling Kosovo’s Albanians (Banac
1984:298). Far from keeping such dark intentions secret, Serbian officials
and intellectuals went on the public record often and at length to articulate
the state’s desire to alienate its Albanian minority (Malcolm 1999: 268, 280,
283; Banac 1984: 298).

An official Serbian report on the agrarian reform of
the mid-1930s states plainly that the policy of limiting Albanian landholdings
was aimed at reducing their demographic presence: “This [maximum
Albanian land parcel] is below the minimum needed for survival. But that
was precisely what we wanted; that is, to prevent them from living and
thereby force them to emigrate” (Banac 1984: 301). The architects of
colonization wrote detailed memoirs of their efforts at anti-Albanian
demographic engineering (Vickers 1998: 107, 116),13 and two official
decrees on colonization stand as eminent subjects of the public record.14
In all, Serbia attempted two, arguably three, colonization programs
in Kosovo between 1912 and 1999.

The first, which spanned the years from
1918 to 1928 (105), achieved mixed success from Belgrade’s perspective.
Tax and property incentives for Serbs to move to Kosovo produced a
measurable demographic change in Kosovo’s cities by 1929, but the
province’s overall ethnic balance remained roughly 60% Albanian, 35%
Serb. Vasa Čubrilović, the architect the second Kosovo colonization
program, concluded from the first program’s shortfalls that a passive
schedule of incentives for Serbs and disincentives for Albanians was not
sufficient to effect the desired shift in demographics. Serbia’s new objective
would be the active, organized “mass emigration” of Albanians from Kosovo
(Malcolm 1999: 284). During the second program, from 1929 to 1941,
Belgrade pursued twin policies of “Turkifying” its Albanian citizens through
language education and encouraging their mass transfer to what was defined
as their “natural” homeland, Turkey.

Although the plan fell well short of its
targets, the 1935 Belgrade-Istanbul agreement to transfer 200,000 Albanians
is a lasting testament to its ambitious nationalist goals. The FRY
government’s Yugoslav Program on Kosovo, which lasted from 1990 until
Serbia’s pullout in 1999, arguably constituted a third colonization effort,
although unlike its predecessors, it was not named as such by official decree.
Under the Yugoslav Program’s terms, Serbs were given new apartments and
tax benefits and unduly compensated for administrative jobs in Kosovo. The
Milošević “crisis administration” of the 1990s eased this effort along by
summarily relieving several thousand Albanians of jobs subsequently filled
by Serbs (Vickers 1998: 245).

The Albanians’ constitutional status under socialist Yugoslavia
formalized their truncated relationship with the state. The arcane Titoist
system of ethno-civic terminology encoded ethnic communities with rights
and liberties derived from their “rightful” homes of origin. Nations had their
proper guardians of benefits in their respective Yugoslav republics.

The Serbs had Serbia, the Croats had Croatia, and so forth. In principle, the
republics reserved the right to secede from the Yugoslav federation, as
constituent units of a federated state. However, those members of
nationalities who had homelands outside Yugoslavia’s borders were
effectively denied the right to self-determination and a full schedule of other
civic benefits. As a nationality under the Titoist system, the Albanians were
implicitly defined as second-class citizens. Their nation-state and, by
implication, their “natural homeland,” was Albania. Farcically, this implied
that Tirana was the proper guarantor of the Yugoslav Albanians’ most basic
rights and liberties, despite the glaring political reality that Albania’s
sovereignty did not extend to its co-nationals in Yugoslavia. An Albanian’s
choice to remain in Yugoslavia was implicitly a choice to accept second class
citizenship or emigrate. Or, in Paijic’s terms, it was an acceptance of one’s
status as a “historic guest,” invited to remain, but only at the pleasure of
Yugoslavia’s “hosts,” the nations (Mertus 1999: 288).


The Albanians’ poor record of integration within a state purportedly
guided by “brotherhood and unity” eventually shamed the Tito government,
for a short while, into improving the Albanians’ situation. In the late 1960s
and early 1970s, Tito made a handful of upgrades to the civil status of
Yugoslavia’s Albanians’, lightening the repressive police presence in Kosovo
and allowing the unrestricted printing of Albanian-language books. These
measures stimulated greater self-assertion within the Albanian community,
but ultimately only served to mitigate the marginal effects of the Yugoslav
state’s decision to withhold a full social contract from its citizens. They did
not reverse the state’s fundamental decision to treat its Albanian community
as more worthy of alienation than integration.

The Albanians’ share of state-protected rights and liberties reached
its high-water mark with the 1974 Yugoslav constitution, attaining all the
attributes of full citizenship, but without delivering a fundamental change in
their status of nationality. The initial Serbian objections to the 1974
constitution and the developments of the 1980s and 1990s in Kosovo were to
show how fleeting first-class civil rights could be if bestowed ad hoc on
second-class citizens, against the wishes of the state’s first-class citizens and political elite.

After Tito’s death in 1980, the Yugoslav political system in general,
and the SFRY presidency in particular, drifted into a “pattern of inertia”
(Crnobrnja 1994: 83). Despite the apparent calm, the country was
approaching the boiling point of ethnic separatism and economic collapse,
but the country’s politicians, eager to maintain the fiction that Tito’s death
had not left a leadership vacuum, were determined to gloss over the factors
of instability. “Nobody wanted to rock the boat,” according to Crnobrnja
(82).

In March of 1981 Kosovo’s Albanians presented the first serious
challenge to the uneasy stability of post-Tito Yugoslavia. Two thousand
students demonstrated over poor living conditions at Pristina University,
provoking hundreds of arrests and touching off a series of large, violent
demonstrations throughout Kosovo. The demonstrations quickly took on the
most political of dimensions. Kosovo’s Albanians demanded republican
status and with it, the right to self-determination.


In response to the riots, Belgrade began incrementally to reverse
Tito’s Albanian-friendly policies. The Serbian and Yugoslav governments
steadily removed the legal guarantees of Kosovo’s limited autonomy,
eventually annulling significant portions of the 1974 constitution. In response
to Serbian agitation in Kosovo (largely orchestrated by Milošević), Belgrade
imposed an emergency administration in 1990, which deprived the
province’s Albanians of numerous common rights and liberties. The Serbian
emergency administration peremptorily halted broadcast media in the
Albanian language (Vickers 1998: 245), fired senior editors of the Albanian
daily Rilindja, and replaced over 1,000 Albanian media-sector staff with
Serbs (246). Albanian medical staff, school teachers, and university
professors were also fired en masse and replaced by Serbs. Security forces
squelched the right to public assembly, disregarding the distinction between
peaceful and violent gatherings (224, 242). The state’s summary use of
administrative, legal and coercive power against the Albanian community
amounted to the deliberate oppression of its own citizens.


The FRY’s and Serbia’s use of indiscriminate violent force on their
own citizens in the late 1990s demonstrated a decisive commitment to the
policy of alienating Serbia’s Albanian community. When fighting began to
escalate in 1998 between the nascent Kosovo Liberation Army and the FRY
and Serbian security forces, Belgrade resumed the repressive methods by
which it conducted the 1912 liberation of Kosovo, the 1918 reoccupation,
and the 1946 suppression of the Drenica Valley—applying indiscriminate
military force to targets of questionable validity, including whole villages of
non-combatants.

Far from observing the military principles of
proportionality and precision necessary to subdue an insurgent force, FRY
and Serbian forces attacked and killed Serbia’s own citizens indiscriminately
and in large numbers.16 The 1998-1999 counter-insurgency campaign
constituted a gross, deliberate violation of the state’s obligation to apply the
highest diligence to its use of coercive force against its own citizens. Despite
the overwhelming record of evidence to this effect, the current Government
of Serbia, and many commentators in Belgrade, hold dramatically different
opinions regarding the current situation in Kosovo.

Belgrade’s own understanding of the Kosovo narrative since 1999
casts serious doubt on its ability to adjust policy. To hear the Serb side of the
Kosovo story today—rendered in press interviews, on government Web
pages17 and publications of the Serbian Orthodox Church—there is,
strangely, no conflict to speak of, only unmotivated repression and
inexplicable fear. Rather than spinning the strands of recent history into a
narrative that is somehow consistent with the record of ethnic antagonism in
Kosovo, Belgrade simply presents Serb suffering and Albanian terror as two
co-existing but logically unrelated facts. Early and mid twentieth century
Serbian policy on Kosovo was at least honest in its acknowledgment (and
promotion) of conflict. The current administration’s refusal to countenance
hard truths about Kosovo seems, by comparison, disturbingly out of joint
with reality.

This is not to say there are not elements of truth in Serbia’s
current Kosovo narrative; in fact, its spokespersons show a mastery of
extracting from isolated facts a plausibility they transfer onto otherwise
jarringly incredible characterizations of the situation in Kosovo.
The Serbian Orthodox Church’s “Post War Human Rights Abuses
against the Serbs and Other Non-Albanians in Kosovo” and “Crucified
Kosovo” are signal examples of this exercise in plausibility-transfer. The
former is a catalogue of Albanian violence directed at Serbs since the 1999
conflict. It mixes faithful, corroborated reports of attacks on Serbs with broad
defamations of the Albanian community and dark speculation about the
political sponsors of Albanian terrorism. “Crucified Kosovo” documents the
destruction of Serbian churches, monasteries, and cemeteries in Kosovo since
1999, with extensive photographic evidence.

Both publications allege
international complicity in Albanian violence, and both are widely accepted
in Serbia as fair and accurate. Only through the collusion of the great powers
and the implacably violent Albanians, the Church’s narrative suggests, could
such heinous events, as have happened since 1999, have befallen Kosovo’s
Serbs. These fresh catastrophes have simply hit the Serbian nation out of the
blue, fitting neatly with a predominant view among Serb nationalists that
they are doomed to suffer historically unwarranted misfortunes.18
http://www.seep.ceu.hu/archives/issue61/herbert.pdf

Another Alternative POV:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/com...cle3037002.ece


we can discuss on whether it's their "craddle" or not if you want. It isn't. They took it from the Byzantines some 200 years after they had a state and church. Ironically, Kosova might actually be the source of Albanians if this http://www.jogg.info/32/bird.pdf guy is right. Some 8000 years ago of course.

[Tsontos]

It's not like it has any relevance today Grace. We know Albanians and Kosovars arent interested in jihad. Kosovo for all intents and purposes is independent and both she and Albania will eventually accede to NATO and the EU. Albania is not like Bosnia at all any more.

I just like the small stain of illegitimacy it gives the whole Kosovo "liberation" and the KLA. It's especially funny because of how these days Albanians love to go on about how they are the "secular ethnicity".

Congressional Testimonies on KLA-Al Qaeda links

In the mid-1990s, the CIA and Germany's Secret Service, the BND, joined hands in providing covert support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In turn, the latter was receiving support from Al Qaeda.

According to Frank Ciluffo of the Globalized Organised Crime Program, in a December 2000 testimony to the House of Representatives Judicial Committee:
"What was largely hidden from public view was the fact that the KLA raise part of their funds from the sale of narcotics. Albania and Kosovo lie at the heart of the "Balkan Route" that links the "Golden Crescent" of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the drug markets of Europe. This route is worth an estimated $400 billion a year and handles 80 percent of heroin destined for Europe." (U.S. Congress, Testimony of Frank J. Cilluffo, Deputy Director of the Global Organized Crime Program, to the House Judiciary Committee, Washington DC, 13 December 2000).

According to Ralf Mutschke of Interpol's Criminal Intelligence division also in a testimony to the House Judicial Committee:
"The U.S. State Department listed the KLA as a terrorist organization, indicating that it was financing its operations with money from the international heroin trade and loans from Islamic countries and individuals, among them allegedly Usama bin Laden" . Another link to bin Laden is the fact that the brother of a leader in an Egyptian Jihad organization and also a military commander of Usama bin Laden, was leading an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict."(U.S. Congress, Testimony of Ralf Mutschke of Interpol’s Criminal Intelligence Division, to the House Judicial Committee, Washington DC, 13 December 2000.)

Madeleine Albright Covets the KLA

These KLA links to international terrorism and organised crime documented by the US Congress were totally ignored by the Clinton Administration. In fact, in the months preceding the bombing of Yugoslavia, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was busy building a "political legitimacy" for the KLA. The paramilitary army had --from one day to the next-- been elevated to the status of a bona fide "democratic" force in Kosovo. In turn, Madeleine Albright has forced the pace of international diplomacy: the KLA had been spearheaded into playing a central role in the failed "peace negotiations" at Rambouiillet in early 1999.

The Senate and the House tacitly endorse State Terrorism

While the various Congressional reports confirmed that the US government had been working hand in glove with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, this did not prevent the Clinton and later the Bush Administration from arming and equipping the KLA. The Congressional documents also confirm that members of the Senate and the House knew the relationship of the Administration to international terrorism. To quote the statement of Rep. John Kasich of the House Armed Services Committee: "We connected ourselves [in 1998-99] with the KLA, which was the staging point for bin Laden..." (U.S. Congress, Transcripts of the House Armed Services Committee, Washington, DC, 5 October 1999,)

In the wake of the tragic events of September 11, Republicans and Democrats in unison have given their full support to the President to "wage war on Osama".

In 1999, Senator Jo Lieberman had stated authoritatively that "Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." In the hours following the October 7 missile attacks on Afghanistan, the same Jo Lieberman called for punitive air strikes against Iraq: "We're in a war against terrorism... We can't stop with bin Laden and the Taliban." Yet Senator Jo Lieberman, as member of the Armed Services Committee of the Senate had access to all the Congressional documents pertaining to "KLA-Osama" links. In making this statement, he was fully aware that that agencies of the US government as well as NATO were supporting international terrorism.

While British SAS Special Forces in bases in Northern Albania were training the KLA, military instructors from Turkey and Afghanistan financed by the "Islamic jihad" were collaborating in training the KLA in guerilla and diversion tactics.:(The Sunday Times, London, 29 November 1998).

"Bin Laden had visited Albania himself. He was one of several fundamentalist groups that had sent units to fight in Kosovo, ... Bin Laden is believed to have established an operation in Albania in 1994 ... Albanian sources say Sali Berisha, who was then president, had links with some groups that later proved to be extreme fundamentalists." (The Sunday Times, London, 29 November 1998).

http://www.israelenews.com/view.asp?ID=874