Serbia's Population in Sharp Decline (say goodbye to Serbs)

[Grace]

11 July 2008 Belgrade _
In the next two decades Serbia's population will decline by a half million people, latest statistics say.

Belgrade daily Danas cited an estimate from the National Statistics Bureau that the country will have 6.8 million people by 2023, compared to the current 7.3 million inhabitants.

The birth rate in the richest northern part of Serbia has registered a decline since 1989, while in central Serbia the population has been falling since 1992.

The birth rate has risen in several municipalities but that has not been enough to offset the mortality rate across the country.

Earlier data showed that Serbia’s population was the forth oldest in the world and that the number of 15-year-olds was almost equal to those aged 65 years.
Some experts have said that the generally low living standards is the main reason behind the decision by young couples to have one child or not to have children at all.
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/main/news/11763/

Here's the catch: if the econ improves, that usually means lower birth rates anyway.

On he other hand: 3.6 Mil Albanians in Albania, ~2 million in Kosovo and at least 0.5 million in FYROM. Leaving alone the Albanian immigrants, I see close to 9 million in 20 years.

[Tsontos]

9 million you've got to be farken joking where are you going to put them all?

Anyway in this respect at least (having ageing population, declining birth-rates) Serbians are much closer to other Europeans and Albanians closer to Afghanis. Hopefully as Albania integrates more with Europe you will stop breeding like Muslim rabbits and sending tens of thousands of immigrants to Greece every year. Greece seriously cant handle all the overwhelming numbers of foreigners coming it's had since the 80s.

[TirAlb]

Serbia's Population in Sharp Decline (say goodbye to Serbs)

Good bye serbs!.

[Draco]

The "doom and gloom" of population ageing are of economic importance only. Rest assured that Serbs will outnumber Albanians for all of our lifetimes.

On a slightly different issue, Grace's consistently unrealistic Albanian population estimates demonstrate that he is operating under the delusion that Albanian immigrants to western European countries keep their ethnicity intact. This is mistaken as evidenced by the generation of children of Albanian immigrants currently growing up in Greece. They are totally ignorant of the Albanian language (except maybe for a knowledge of the meanings of the words "po" and "jo") and would sooner learn English (with a Greek accent) than Albanian. Immigrants pass only a fraction of their ethnic identity on to their offspring, intermarrying only accelerates the process.

[Grace]

Originally Posted by Tsontos

9 million you've got to be farken joking where are you going to put them all?

Anyway in this respect at least (having ageing population, declining birth-rates) Serbians are much closer to other Europeans and Albanians closer to Afghanis. Hopefully as Albania integrates more with Europe you will stop breeding like Muslim rabbits and sending tens of thousands of immigrants to Greece every year. Greece seriously cant handle all the overwhelming numbers of foreigners coming it's had since the 80s.

Muslim rabbits? Do you know that catholics have the same birthrate as Muslims? It has nothing to do with religion, but you knew that, you jut wanted to sneak in an insult.

Greece should throw the immigrants out. Unless of course it needs them. Who will pick your olives? We know you aren't doing it out of goodness of your heart.

First Serbia isn't European, at least economically, and their population is the 4th oldest in the world. Look at the GDPs/PPP and Albania has the same one as Serbs if you add the gray economy. With the roads and electricity solved by next year, Albania will focus on the the next project: tourism and real estate.

Here's a sample: http://www.balkantravellers.com/en/read/article/666

The Omnix investment group intends to construct a large tourist complex on Albania’s Adriatic Sea coast worth $1 billion (about 638 million euro), national media reported recently.
The group, which has participating investors from Dubai and Qatar presented Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha with their final project for the complex on Tuesday, the Albanian daily newspaper Panorama reported. A Council of Ministers statement to the media, in addition to announcing the project’s worth, claimed it will be completed in four years.

That's a lot of money for Albania. And there is one in Kakome, and Saranda will become a city of 100,000 from 30,000 and so it goes. Apartments need workers to be built, taxes will pour in on materials, salaries and sales. Hotels will need workers and will buy local produce. A $1 Billion road will link Kosova with Albania and they will visit our beaches and sites, in addition to trade and use our ports for the imported Chinese junk ('Macedonia' too probably.) Things are changing fast and soon tourists will choose the shorter route...to Albania . Let's not forget that Greece until recently was an immigrant nation as well.

I don't think I calculated immigrants at all. In 10 years I doubt anyone will emigrate from Albania. If Kosova or 'Ilirida' is poorer, they will come to Albania and settle, probably south. I do think we will surpass Serbs in our lifetime, they have lost an entire generation already and the 65+ will die soon whereas the 15 years olds will probably have 1-2 kids each when their time comes.

joking where are you going to put them all?

we have an entire area untouched. The area from Chameria till Arta only has about 300,000 people and 100,000 are in Janina

If we reach it 9 Million (or even 8) with Kosova and 'Ilirida' isn't that much more than it is now. Industry and tourism will support them. As far as space: don't 4-5 million Greeks live in one city?

[Grace]

Originally Posted by Draco

Grace's consistently unrealistic Albanian population estimates demonstrate that he is operating under the delusion that Albanian immigrants to western European countries keep their ethnicity intact. This is mistaken as evidenced by the generation of children of Albanian immigrants currently growing up in Greece. They are totally ignorant of the Albanian language (except maybe for a knowledge of the meanings of the words "po" and "jo")

First you have to admit that Greece is different in having 'no minorities' and with people having to look as 'Greek' as possible.
Maybe they cannot write it but they speak it at home, so ignorant isn't , but eventually it will go away. I understand that. Many immigrant Albanians have built homes in Albania though, as TirAlb will tell you. You drive into the countryside and see all these beautiful mansions all over the place. Hopefully we will have a good enough economy to stop the loss and maybe even get a few back in a decade. If our GDP /PPP is about half of Greece, people will stay in Albania where they have a home, family, things are cheaper etc. IMO.

I included Kosova and Fyrom Albs in my calculation. 3.5+2+0.5=6 million right now. God knows how many are in Europe.

[pankration]

The Muslim birth rate in Europe is triple that of the Catholic rates so I don't know where Grace got that information from. Italy, France, Spain and other Catholic countries have the lowest birth rates in Europe. In Canada, the lowest birth rate of all the provinces is Quebec, the only overwhelmingly Catholic province. The Catholic Church may not believe in birth control but Catholics are NOT following that order. At current rates of birth and immigration, Europe will be an Islamic entity within a hundred years.

[Mygdonia]

Grace could not be no more than 7 years old, surely.

[Grace]

Originally Posted by pankration

The Muslim birth rate in Europe is triple that of the Catholic rates so I don't know where Grace got that information from. Italy, France, Spain and other Catholic countries have the lowest birth rates in Europe. In Canada, the lowest birth rate of all the provinces is Quebec, the only overwhelmingly Catholic province. The Catholic Church may not believe in birth control but Catholics are NOT following that order. At current rates of birth and immigration, Europe will be an Islamic entity within a hundred years.

In Albanian areas it's related to rural living and education level. Here is the secret about Albanians, I'll bold it:
Blood and 'clan' (region) ties are much, much more important.
Several clans for example have all three faiths (two is common).
Back in the day you'd die and kill for your clan, not the faith. Now it's the same too, although clans don't get together and fight when the elders decide like in Ottoman times.

A smaller collective sub-group within an Albanian clan -- or, at least, within most of them -- was the vellazeri, or brotherhood (Srb.: bratstvo), which did indeed consist of a group of blood-related families (again, only through the male line). The vellazeri was like a looser version of a zadruga: the family structure was similar, but it did not live in a single set of buildings and did not pool its earnings and expenditure in a single budget. In the Malesi, each clan had its own territory, consisting of its grazing-lands and an inhabited valley or group of valleys. In Kosovo, where members of different clans intermingled, this territorial principle could seldom be applied, and clan loyalties were somewhat eroded. So while in the Malesi blood-feuds could reach the point of pitting one whole clan against another, in Kosovo the basic unit of cooperative retribution was not the fis but the family.

In between those two collective identities, large and small, some other groupings also existed. Some of the larger clans were divided into (or had been composed of) several smaller clans. With their belief in patrilinear descent, the malesors regarded any relative on the paternal side as the same blood, and marriage to such a relation as incestuous. The clans were therefore `exogamous', acquiring their brides from other clans. But in a few cases the sub-clans of a large fis were seen as sufficiently unrelated (or their supposed common ancestor was thought sufficiently distant in time) for them to exchange brides with one another. In some cases also one sub-clan might convert to Islam, while other components of the same overall fis remained Catholic; their mutual loyalty as fellow clan-members would remain unaffected by their religious differences. http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m...r=1&oref=login

You can go back since Byron and even before and they mention Islam as a non-issue. Saudis will not change that, they will be driven out like they were thrown out of Albania. In all seriousness, to better understand, think of Kosova as nominally Muslim, but it does not effect their life or what they do. This, attributed to a catholic does a lot a more.

No such system of local self-government could subsist without a strong framework of customary law. Large-scale assemblies were infrequent, and were usually aimed at getting agreement on action or policy, not at legislation. All the essential rules of human life -- relating to marriage, inheritance, pasture rights, criminal acts, and so on -- were laid down in traditional codes of law, transmitted from memory to memory; the job of the elders was not to make new laws but to interpret the facts of any particular case in the light of the laws they knew. Over time, of course, the codes of different geographical areas diverged on some points; several regional law codes have survived into the twentieth century. Of these, the only one which matters for the history of Kosovo, and for most of the Malesi, is the most famous of them all: the Kanun of Lek Dukagjin. The name `Kanun' is derived (via Arabic and Turkish) from the Greek word which gives us `canon'. Lek Dukagjin is commonly identified with a fifteenth-century member of the Dukagjin family (`Lek' or `Leke' being an abbreviated Albanian form of Alexander). The attachment of this nobleman's name to the law may be spurious: some scholars have suspected that it was originally known just as the law of Dukagjin, referring to the territory, not the family. But even if a fifteenth-century individual did put together this code, it is clear that he was codifying many customary practices which went back much further into the past. The Kanun remained unwritten until the nineteenth century, when summaries of it by non-Albanian writers began to appear in print. The fullest and most authoritative text was compiled by a Catholic Albanian priest, Father Shtjefen Gjecov, and issued first as a sequence of articles in a Catholic journal; it was eventually published as a book, four years after his murder by Serb extremists in 1929.

The importance of the Kanun to the ordinary life of the Albanians of Kosovo and the Malesi can hardly be exaggerated. `Whenever in the mountains I asked why anything was done,' wrote Edith Durham in the 1920s, `I was told, "Because Lek ordered it." ... "Lek said so" obtained more obedience than the Ten Commandments, and the teaching of the hodjas [Muslim clerics] and the priests was often vain if it ran counter to that of Lek.' Anyone who has read Ismail Kadare's novel Broken April will associate the Kanun above all with the archaic and terrible laws of the blood-feud; and some news reports on the revival of the blood-feud in post-Communist Albania have given the impression that the Kanun, which is now being implemented again in the Malesi, is nothing more than a system of vendettas. But the Kanun covered most aspects of human life (there are sections, for example, on the duties of blacksmiths and millers); it specified the system of assemblies, judges and juries; and it laid down punishments for a range of criminal offences (fines for minor ones, and execution, plus the burning down of the offender's house and the expulsion of his family, for serious crimes).

One leading scholar has summed up the basic principles of the Kanun as follows. The foundation of it all is the principle of personal honour. Next comes the equality of persons. From these flows a third principle, the freedom of each to act in accordance with his own honour, within the limits of the law, without being subject to another's command. And the fourth principle is the word of honour, the bese (def.: besa), which creates a situation of inviolable trust. Gjecov's version of the Kanun decrees: `An offence to honour is not paid for with property, but by the spilling of blood or a magnanimous pardon.' And it specifies the ways of dishonouring a man, of which the most important are calling him a liar in front of other men; insulting his wife; taking his weapons; or violating his hospitality. The reference to hospitality here is important: entering a man's house as his guest creates, like the word of honour, an inviolable bond between the two, and there are stories of Albanians sacrificing their lives to protect a perfect stranger who had taken shelter with them for one night. The reference to weapons should also be noted: the history of Kosovo and northern Albania is punctuated by a series of revolts caused by ill-starred official attempts to disarm the population. In the words of one English traveller of the 1880s: `The pride of a farmer in his livestock, or of a collector in his specimens, is nothing to the pride of an Albanian in his weapons. They are ... the guardians of his hearth, the object of his admiration, and his perpetual glory.'

[pankration]

I can't speak for Albania as I don't live there nor have I ever been there. My reference to Catholic birth rates was in response to what I perceived to be a very general erroneous statement. But if you tell us that your reference was meant for Albania only, then I'll let others argue the point. However, even in Albania I'm willing to bet the Muslim birth rate is higher than the Christian one.