From: Craig Goodrich <craig@airnet.net>
Cc: lpa-list@al.lp.org
<lpa-list@al.lp.org>
Date: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 10:05 AM
Subject: [LPA] Re: In defence of the Serbian War
In Free Life #30, Roderick Moore presents his case for NATO intervention in Yugoslavia.
> Kossovo is not a backward Third World country. It
is a part of
> Europe only two hours by jet from Heathrow Airport, nearer
to us
> than some of the places where millions of Britons spend
their
> summer holidays.
Russia is as close to Alaska as Scotland is to Norway. Should NATO have intervened in Chechnya? What, precisely, is the relevance of geographic proximity, given that there was no threat to any existing international boundaries (except by the KLA)? Observe that the United States' Monroe Doctrine, for example, was intended to protect independent countries in this hemisphere from outside interference, rather than to justify our interference in their internal affairs (notwithstanding the obvious fact that we have done so repeatedly in this century).
Moreover, it's not obvious to me that simple geographic proximity to Enlightened Mother Europe is relevant to whether or not a country qualifies as "backward" or "Third World"; by nearly all accounts, northern Albania is more similar economically and culturally to a Third World country than it is to Norway, for example, and Kosovo is by far the poorest and most backward area in all of former Yugoslavia (see below).
> Doing nothing about it would have been like seeing
three
> hooligans beating up an old lady fifty yards from your
> front door and saying it was none of your business.
No; it would have been like seeing two gangs of thugs enter the home of a stranger you had never met and start fighting with each other, and deciding to take the family out to a movie instead of joining the fight. (The NATO action, of course, corresponds in this metaphor to walking over to the strange house and tossing an incindiary bomb through the window.)
> The conflict between the Serbs and the Kossovars is
not a
> case of six of one and half a dozen of the other.
You are quite right, it is not. What we have done here is complete the theft of Kosovo from Serbia by Albanian racists. If that seems harsh, study the history of the area. One need not go as far back even as the last century, when with Turkish encouragement the Muslim Albanians drove hundreds of thousands of Serbs from Kosovo, or even as far back as World War 2, when the Italian-sponsored Skanderbeg SS brigade drove upwards of 75,000 Serbs from Kosovo (so that an approximately equal number of Albanians could migrate into the province).
Hoping to lure Albania into the Yugoslav federation, Tito forbade displaced Serbs from returning to Kosovo and granted the province substantial autonomy, which was increased still further in the '60s and '70s. How did the autonomous Albanian bureacracy running the province utilize its power?
1) To divert the enormous (by Yugoslav standards) quantities of development aid from the rest of the country -- it received nearly 50% of the total Yugoslav internal development budget -- into pointlessly grandiose and hideously expensive ethnic monuments, such as the pretentious marble university and library at Prishtina, or the opulent Grand Hotel in Prizren -- rather than into more prosaic industrial projects which might have actually helped Kosovo better its economic status as the poorest (by far) of the Yugoslav provinces, in spite of its fertile soil and mineral resources.
The Christian Science Monitor, May 7, 1981:
Ever since 1945, this backward, onetime Serb "colony" has been the problem child in the effort to forge and maintain a stable Yugoslav union of so many differing peoples, languages, and religions. Anti-Serb demonstrations have flared periodically. Steady federal aid since the 1950s, and the "Albanianization" of the police in 1966, have made little real difference.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Tito's successors are preoccupied with this first menacing threat to his dream of security through "brotherhood and unity." It has even overshadowed massive economic problems --ports still not competitive in the West despite closer ties to the European Community, and a consequent 44 percent dependency on Comecon trade.
Since 1974, Kosovo has had autonomy in all domestic affairs. Why not then republican status? It seems a simple enough solution.
The latest unrest repeated the demand that Kosovo be made a republic and incorporate Albanian populations in the neighboring republics of Macedonia and Montenegro.
A Belgrade newspaper calls it absurd to speak of exploitation (as Kosovo extremists do) of a region that has had so much aid from the rest of the country. But economic gains have not moderated acute nationalist sentiment or the underlying sense of social-political inferiority.
... and in the same paper, December 15, 1981:
Yugoslavia's poorest region, Kosovo, never seems to catch up with the rest of the country no matter how much money is poured into it.
This is because the area's energy and transport facilities are so much poorer than those in the north - and because the birthrate (the highest in Europe) is so much greater in the south. In fact, one unit of investment in northern Croatia is 71/2 times as productive as one in southern Kosovo, the Zagreb Economic Institute calculates.
... For the Kosovars, it's a cause of constant resentment that they still trail far behind the rest of the country in economic development 35 years after the launching of postwar Yugoslavia with its dreams of economic equalization.
For the Serbs, it's a cause of constant exasperation that the Kosovars turn the donations from the rich parts of the country into marble sidewalks and the handsomest university library in all of Yugoslavia (as one disgruntled northern taxpayer expressed it), while never seeming to get their own industry past the handout stage.
The task of getting a laggard economic region to a takeoff point is not impossible. Bosnia, another Yugoslav hinterland, has made the transition, even though no one admits this yet officially. For the rest of the 1981-85 five-year plan, Bosnia will still receive federal development funds. But by 1985 it will be considered mature enough to continue on its own economic strength, leaving Kosovo and Montenegro as the main underdeveloped regions.
... In the post-World War II period there has been a conscious attempt to bring Kosovo into the 20th century. But setbacks have included (besides the birthrate) politically guided investment in prestige projects rather than in a sound economic base, a draining of population away from farms to the glamorous city, and overeducation of an unemployable Kosovar intelligentsia in the 10-year-old university in Pristina.
2) To further its goal of an ethnically-pure Albanian Kosovo, by the simple expedient of refusing to even investigate, let alone prosecute, anti-Serb violence and theft. (This was the same technique used in the late 1900s; it lost none of its efficacy over the course of a century.)
The Financial Times, February 5, 1982:
Latest reports confirm the situation [in Kosovo] to be still highly volatile, with the great majority of the ethnic Albanians refusing to co-operate with the police. "Nin," the Belgrade weekly publication, has recently revealed that Serbs and Montenegrans are being attacked, their wives and daughters occasionally raped and their property destroyed.
Such "Fascist type" intimidation methods, it said, are forcing them to migrate to other parts of Yugoslavia.
There are sporadic reports about the unrest spreading to Montenegro and Macedonia, where hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians live in compact groups. The demonstrators, primarily young people, last year demanded republic status for the province. The Belgrade leadership has rejected this, seeing it as a prelude to a merger with neighbouring Albania.
... The Belgrade newspapers also admit that ethnic Albanian officials and politicians in the province are often physically threatened and their cars and houses damaged by the nationalists, who regard them as collaborators.
The eruption of national hatred and the accelerated migration of Slavs has provoked an equally dangerous nationalist backlash in Serbia and other parts of eastern Yugoslavia. The crisis in Kosovo has also whipped up nationalistic sentiments among the estimated 35,000-40,000 Albanians working in the West.
In recent months, several Yugoslav diplomatic and trade offices have been attacked by Albanian extremist groups and three politically active Albanian residents in West Germany were murdered in mysterious circumstances last month.
Facts on File, September 10, 1982:
Some 57,000 Serbs had left the Yugoslav autonomous province of Kosovo within the past decade, it was reported July 12.
A great number had left after the riots of March and April 1981, according to local officials. The region's economic problems and the ethnic Albanian nationalism that had sparked the riots were mentioned as the principal reasons behind the Serbian migration.
"The nationalists have a two-point platform, first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania," said Becir Hoti, a Kosovo Communist Party official and an ethnic Albanian.
Officials cited widespread harassment of Serbs by Albanians, including two recent murders, personal insults, defacing of graves, burning of hay and other attacks on property.
The New York Times, April 28, 1986:
The ethnic Albanian majority in the autonomous province of Kosovo is feared by the minority population of Serbs and Montenegrins, who believe the Albanians are seeking to drive them out of the province.
A 1981 fire that gutted the medieval nunnery of the Serbian Orthodox Patriarchate in Pec, a center of Serbian national feeling, has been officially ascribed to bad construction.
An aged nun at the Patriarchate said she and her sisters were convinced that the fire had been set to chase them from Kosovo. But she said the nuns would never leave, and three Serbian or Montenegrin visitors agreed with her.
The provincial leadership, dominated by ethnic Albanians, has said it believes that a Serb grossly mutilated last May by a broken bottle inflicted his injuries himself while performing an auto-erotic act. The maiming of Djordje Martinovic, a 56-year-old farmer and father of three, has become the most widely discussed Yugoslav criminal case in years, debated in Parliament and covered in full detail by television and the press.
The case remains unsolved, but Yugoslavs' minds seem mainly made up on both incidents. They blame ethnic Albanians. They also blame them for continuing assaults, rapes and vandalism. They believe their aim is to drive non-Albanians out of Kosovo.
"A legitimized genocide against the Serbian people is being carried out in Kosovo," said Dobrica Cosic, a dissident novelist published here and in the United States, in an interview in Belgrade. "More than 200,000 Serbs have been forced to leave their home in the last 10, 20 years." A steady exodus continues.
Since Albanian nationalists went on a rampage in 1981, leaving at least nine people dead, the level of violence has declined. But enough agitation continues, punctuated by acts of violence, to make a burning issue of the antagonism between the 1.4 million ethnic Albanians and the little more than 200,000 Serbs.
... The overambitious buildings, such as a recent, prematurely rundown, 300-room hotel with 3 restaurants in a little-visited town of 100,000, sustain criticism of the provincial leadership for misuse of federal development funds. To many, the aid represents a futile effort to solve an intractable problem through financial bounty.
... Serbs and Montenegrins feel beleaguered. Communists and non-Communists express distrust of the provincial leadership and chagrin over the federal and Serbian authorities who in their opinion do nothing to halt increasing Albanian domination over a multi-national population and lands that are historically inseparable from Serbian national identity.
... Non-Albanian Yugoslav residents and visitors characterize the atmosphere of Kosovo as frighteningly restrictive and its Communist leadership as so dogmatic as to resemble the rigorously Stalinist regime that holds power in nearby Albania.
In contrast to officials elsewhere in Yugoslavia, who readily acknowledge problems and errors and de-emphasize ideology in favor of pragmatism, a leading Kosovo official, Ekrem Arifi, offered an entirely ideological explanation of Kosovo's problems.
In prepared statements that took the place of replies to questions, he blamed outside forces for all difficulties - agents of Albania and emigres in the West. Mr. Arifi, executive secretary of the provincial party, spoke in Albanian and in stock phrases long out of use in Yugoslavia, such as "proletarian internationalism," "the class enemy" or "the solidarity of the working class."
They are not echoed by the non-Albanian population. Asked whether the nuns felt safe in their rebuilt convent, the old nun replied, "Yes, with God's help."
... Last month, at Kosovo Polje, near Pristina, it was Serb nationalism that almost sparked the prairie fire, when Kosta Bulatovic, a popular Serb leader, was arrested on "hostile propaganda" charges after organizing petitions.
Some 6,000 Serbs flocked to protest at Bulatovic's home and Belgrade had to fly down Serbian Communist Party leader Ivan Stambolic to defuse the tense confrontation with local police.
"If one Albanian policeman had opened fire on those Serbs, it would have been 1981 all over again," a Yugoslav said here.
Thousands more Serbs, meanwhile, organized protest trips to Belgrade and poured out their complaints to the authorities.
An official inquiry later found their grievances justified and a purge of the Kosovo judiciary and police was ordered.
It was found that local security and justice bodies had let Albanian offenses against Serbs go unchecked, including rape, assault, arson, intimidation and property offenses.
... Belgrade argues it has in recent years poured funding amounting to millions of dollars into the region, Yugoslavia's poorest, to subsidize development and raise living standards.
As a result, Pristina is one of Yugoslavia's most impressive cities, with mosque minarrettes [sic] blending in among modern skyscrapers.
About 5,000 Serbs and Montenegrins staged a protest rally in Yugoslavia's ethnically-divided Kosovo province against alleged attacks by the region's Albanian majority, Tanjug news agency reported.
Yesterday's protest followed a series of incidents, including an attack on an 11-year Serbian boy who was hit by a brick thrown by an Albanian teenager, and the burning of a Serbian Orthodox cemetery in the village of Gornje Dobrevo.
Tanjug said that Zoran Sokolovic, secretary of the Serbian party's central committee, promised the crowd at Kosovo Polje that ethnic Albanian separatists will be dealt with severely.
The Belgrade newspaper Vecernje Novosti said Sokolovic was frequently interrupted by hecklers who shouted that no action had been taken since the Yugoslav ruling party plenum in June on the troubles in the province.
Thousands of Serb and Montenegro women participated in a demonstration Friday in Pristina city of the province of Kosovo. They were denouncing a wave of rape crimes and sex discrimination remarks made by a former Kosovo leader of Albanian nationality... The angry women read an open letter, sharply critisizing Fadilj Hodza for his insulting remarks on Serb and Montenegro women. Hodza is the former leader of the province of kosovo. He is now a member of the Yugoslavia Federation Council.
... Violence and riots initiated by Albanians took place regularly since 1981... To drive minority women out of the province, Albanians have pressured them in many ways, including rape. Hodza allegedly said last November that non-Albanian women should work as waitresses in order to avoid to be raped. Prostitutes often work in bars and cafes. This is why Hodza's remark trigged waves of strong protest among Yugoslavian women.
The inescapable conclusions to be drawn from all this are that a) the election of Milosevic was a reaction to decades of abuse by Albanian nationalist thugs, and b) the revocation of Kosovo's autonomy (actually a return to pre-'74 autonomous status) was for cause, not simply from some arbitrary racist whim.
Moreover, Rugova's program of total boycott of Yugoslav elections, taxation, and census helped maintain Milosevic in power. Frustrated democratic activists have repeatedly pointed out that if the Kosovo Albanians had voted in the last several elections, Milosevic would unquestionably have been thrown out of office.
> There is no doubt that the Serbs have committed
ghastly
> atrocities. It is possible that the KLA have also committed
> atrocities, but if so, it is surprising that we have not
heard
> more about them from Milosevic's propagandists.
1) The ghastly atrocities occurred almost exclusively after the bombing began. The so-called "Racak massacre" was very likely faked for the purpose of provoking NATO intervention, like the bombing of the market in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. Both of these incidents were covered well by the French press, but their doubtful origin was ignored by Clinton's propagandists.
2) In a civil war, the usual course of events is for the guerillas to execute as collaborators anyone who reports them, as well as insufficiently revolutionary community leaders. Then the government army comes through and arrests or executes disloyal local officials. Then the guerillas come back again. (And they call it "civil" ....) Nobody plays by Marquis of Queensbury rules:
... Here is another short account of what soldiers and police did to a man they suspected of belonging to a rebel army. They dragged him from his bed at 4.30am, shot at his screaming wife and baby, and marched him to barracks where they made him run barefoot across broken glass and barbed wire between two lines of military police who beat him. They tied him up with a bag over his head, and beat him repeatedly; a week later, 17lb lighter, he was photographed naked and sent to a camp, where he soon learned how lucky he had been. Other detainees had been beaten in the kidneys and testicles, bent over electric fires, anally raped with objects, burnt with matches, urinated on, deprived of sleep, assaulted with electric cattle prods and terrorised by Russian roulette played with blanks.
The victim of this torture was not a Kosovan Albanian but an IRA suspect, Kevin Hannaway, interred in the early seventies, and the men who beat and abused him belonged to the very army currently helping to liberate Kosovo. -- The Guardian, June 21, 1999
Early in 1966, a new pacification technique was developed by American soldiers. It involved surrounding a village, killing as many young men as could be found, and then taking away the women and children by helicopter. The Americans called this procedure "Operation County Fair." -- Howard Zinn, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, 1967
It is all very well to decry such brutality -- any civilized human must condemn it, obviously -- but I am sick unto death of hearing the Kosovo situation described in terms of a moral and factual analysis that makes a Superman comic book seem Talmudic.
> The Kossovars deserve at least one chance to build
a free
> society, and it is within our power to help them.
They had a chance. They have in fact had innumerable chances over the last century and a half. They blew it. And if you are at all following the most recent reports of KLA activity from Kosovo, they are blowing it again. There is no prospect that the province will become an open, multi-ethnic society in the forseeable future, with or without NATO.
The NATO officers pleading with Serb refugees to stay in Kosovo are echoing the exact words of Yugoslav officials for the last two decades.
If you want to have an idea what the government of an independent, ethnically-cleansed Kosovo will be like, take a look at Gheg (northern) Albania. A long, hard look.
> Some journalists have recently argued that even if
the NATO
> powers succeeded in occupying Kossovo, the Serbs could
> harass them for years with guerrilla warfare. I doubt this,
> because guerrilla warfare only works if there is a
> sympathetic local population to support the guerrillas. The
> Serbs only make up one-tenth of the population of Kossovo.
> When the refugees have returned, where is the support going
> to come from?
No place in Kosovo is more than about 50 miles from Serbia or Montenegro. And in fact, the Yugoslav army has been training for exactly such operations since the Soviet split fifty years ago; their basic military doctrine involves husbanding their resources and taking to the hills to harass the enemy until the political situation changes -- a slight variation on Tito's partisan tactics during World War 2.
(They tried doing it differently, with a more conventional doctrine, against the Austrians in World War 1, and it was a disaster. The Serb tradition is stubborn and courageous, but not stupid.....)
> If they choose to unite with Albania in due course,
that is up
> to them.
A large part of the reason Albanians are an overwhelming majority in Kosovo now (in addition to their high birthrate and the driving out of Serbs, Croats, Gypsies, Turks, and any other non-Albanians they may find) when they were only around 50% at the start of World War 2 is the porous border with Albania. Albania is the only country in Europe actually both poorer and worse-governed than Kosovo. Belgrade claims that about 400,000 Albanians are in Kosovo illegally; this is probably highly inflated, but it's likely that the number of illegals is somewhere around a quarter of a million.
Now, as a libertarian, I don't believe in immigration restriction at all. But on the other hand, I have to say that if, for example, Mexicans in Texas or California really want to live in Mexico, all they have to do is cross the border the other way. Most of them came over in the first place because -- for whatever reason -- they didn't want to live in Mexico.
Bear in mind also that for the last 20 years at least, Albanian nationalists have been intimidating ordinary Kosovo Albanians, as is the KLA just this week, with beatings, murders, and torture. In the small-town culture of Kosovo, who do you think would control any voting, the idiological fanatics or the ordinary Kosovars, who -- like the ordinary Serbs, the Gypsies, and nearly everybody else on the planet -- simply want to make their livings and raise their families in peace without politicians and crusaders interfering with them?
> To prepare them for independence, we will have to
arm and train
> them so that they can defend themselves when we withdraw.
Mmmpf. With AK-47s going for about $5 in Tirana and the KLA getting a 3% tax on European heroin profits, why should American or British taxpayers have to cough up any assistance? And with the CIA, various Middle Eastern groups, and former officers from the Bosnian and Albanian militaries providing training, why should we pay for still more?
> They should be capable of this, because the
mountainous terrain
> will be on their side this time, and they will have the
morale
> which comes from knowing that they are defending their own
> homeland.
So are the Serbs.
> Contrary to what Sean Gabb says, Kossovo is not
just
> another Bosnia. The difference is that in Bosnia the
> population is split into three rival camps, none of which
> has an overall majority. The proportions are roughly
> two-fifths Moslem, two-fifths Serb and one-fifth Croat. In
> Kossovo before the ethnic cleansing, on the other hand, the
> population was nine-tenths Albanian.
No, in Kosovo before the ethnic cleansing of the 19th century, it was about 60% Serb. At the time of the First World War, it was around 18% Serb. By the Second World War, it was about 40% Serb. After the war it was about 25% Serb. (Always with about 10% Gypsies, Turks, Croats, and "other.") Twenty years ago it was 16% Serb. Ten years ago it was about 12% Serb. Then the Albanians boycotted the census, so nobody has any good numbers since then.
Doesn't it strike you as at all odd that during 40 years of continuous complaint about oppression from Albanian nationalists in Kosovo, the number of Albanians kept rising and the number of everybody else kept dropping?
> Of course, that would mean that the Western powers
would have to
> stop treating the idea of multiculturalism as a sacred cow
and
> face the fact that multicultural states usually do not work.
The
> future of Bosnia depends on whether realism can triumph over
> political correctness.
And doesn't it strike you as at all odd that the only truly successful multicultural democracy in the area is Serbia? And that when the Croats are led by apologists for the Ustasha, which murdered 600,000 Serbs (and Jews, and Gypsies, and Magyars, and ...) in their Jasenovac death camp, with the eager cooperation of Bosnian Muslims, while the Serbs lost 15% of their population resisting the Nazis and sheltered countless Jews (including Madeleine Albright, who was 5 at the time) -- doesn't it strike you as extremely odd, I say, that whenever an ethnic conflict breaks out in the Balkans, it's somehow always solely the fault of the Evil Racist Serbs?
Give me a break.
Craig
===========
Craig Goodrich
Rural Village Systems
somewhere in the woods near Huntsville, Alabama
Politics for the Thinking Redneck -- http://airnet.net/craig/g4c
Linux miscellany -- http://airnet.net/craig/linux
I prefer the most unjust peace to the most righteous war. -- Cicero
I suppose it was too much to expect the president to bomb the Serbs without asserting that this policy decision, like all others, was for "our children." "You may not know a great deal about Kosovo," said Mr. Clinton, but here's the thing: "I want our children to have a Europe, I want this young girl here" -- he waggled his finger at some Monica-in-waiting he'd spotted in the crowd -- "to grow up in a world that is safer and more secure and more prosperous." The Commander-in-Chief is a caring humanitarian warmonger: He wouldn't be able to bomb all these countries -- Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, you name it -- if he didn't have the endorsement of that little girl. It takes a child to raze a village. -- Mark Steyn, The National Post, Apr 5, 1999
There's bad news and there's good news in the Kosovo fiasco: the bad news is that, like it or not, we are being dragged into the global snake pit known as the New World Order. The good news is that the people trying to drag us there are the greatest conglomeration of blithering idiots ever to assemble on the world stage in all history. -- Phil Brennan, June 16, 1999
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