A Final Solution (The New Republic)

0n June 12, 1990, one of the most important Serbian intellectuals of the twentieth
century was laid to rest in Belgrade. His name was Vasa Cubrilovic, and his funeral was
attended by a who's who of Serbian academia and politics. The dean of Belgrade
University's College of philosophy and a member of the Serbian presidency, who spoke on
behalf of Slobodan Milosevic's government, gave eulogies. "The work that he left
behind marks him as one of the giants of our era" said one official. "He was a man of
understanding and negotiation. "The front-page obituary in the
state-run newspaper Borba said Cubrilovic's "name will be noted in history as one of the
most important people of this country." President Slobodan Milosevic couldn't attend the
funeral, but he did send a telegram to Cubrilovic's family.

Who was Vasa Cubrilovic to receive all these honors?

Born in 1897, Cubrilovic was a 17-year-old member of the Serbian nationalist group that
staged the 1914 assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Spared
execution because of his age, Cubrilovic spent World War I in prison and then returned to
Belgrade to study and work in the government of what was then the Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats, and Slovenes. By the 1930s, he was a professor of history at Belgrade University,
where he taught for 40 years, eventually becoming the head of his department and later
the director of the prestigious Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences Institute for Balkan
Stud-ies. In that time, he assembled a body of historical research on Serbian political
thought that has been hailed even by American academics. And Cubrilovic was the author
of vicious plans to rid Yugoslavia of the Kosovar Albanians.
Cubrilovic first presented his ideas to the Serbian Cultural Club, an organization of
Belgrade intellectuals. On March 7,1937, he submitted "The
Expulsion of the Albanians" to the government as a secret memorandum.
"From 1918 onwards it was the task of our present state to destroy the remainder of the
Albanian triangle [Kosova]. It did not do this, Cubrilovic
wrote. "The only way and the only means to cope with them is the brute force of an
organized state." Cubrilovic suggested that Albania and Turkey would be the best places
to ship Kosovar Albanians. But, if Tirana objected to the deportation, "the Albanian
Government should be informed that we shall stop at nothing to achieve our final solution
to this question."
Cubrilovic explained that "to bring about the relocation of a whole population, the first
prerequisite is the creation of the suitable psychosis.'
This he said can be created in many ways' "including bribing and threatening the Albanian
clergy, propaganda, and "coercion by the state apparatus," a concept he explained at
length: The law must be enforced to the letter so as to make staying intolerable for the
Albanians: fines, and imprisonment, the ruthless application of all
police dispositions, such as the prohibition of smuggling, cutting forests, damaging
agriculture, leaving dogs unchained, compulsory labor and any
other measure that an experienced police force can contrive. >From the Economic
aspect: The refusal to recognize the old land deeds,...requisitioning of all state and
communal pastures,... the withdrawal of permits to exercise a profession, dismissal from
the state, private and communal offices, etc., will hasten the process of their removal....
When it comes to religion the Albanians are very touchy, therefore they must be
harassed on this score, too. This can be achieved through ill-treatment of their clergy,
the destruction of their clergy, the destruction of their cemeteries, the prohibition of
polygamy, and especially the inflexible application of the law compelling girls to attend
elementary schools,
wherever they are .... We should distribute weapons to our colonists, as need be.... In
particular, a tide of Montenegrins should be launched from the mountain pastures in order
to create a large-scale conflict with the Albanians in [Kosova]. This conflict should be
prepared by means of our trusted people. It should be encouraged and this can be done
more easily since, in fact, Albanians have revolted, while the whole affair should be
presented as a conflict between clans and, if need be, ascribed to economic reasons.
Finally, local riots can be incited. These will be bloodily suppressed with the most
effective means.... There remains one more means, which Serbia employed with great
practical effect after 1878, that is, by secretly burning down villages and city quarters.

"My first thought when I read [Cubrilovic's 1937 memo]," says Charles Jelavich, a
professor emeritus of history at Indiana University and an
acquaintance of Cubrilovies since 1949, "was, my God, I think Milosevic read this and
said, "I'm going to implement this plan." Still, some Slavic
studies scholars and former acquaintances of Cubrilovic argue that, in light of what was
happening in Europe and Russia in the 30's, this ghastly vision was not as extreme as it
sounds today. "I think most of these things should be put in the proper context," says
Bosko Spasojevic of the Open Society Institute in Budapest, who was once a teaching
assistant at Belgrade University, where he knew Cubrilovic. "At that time in Europe
things like this were solved in very radical, cruel ways" Indeed, Cubrilovic wrote: "The
world today has grown used to things much worse than this, and it should not be a cause
for concern. At a time when Germany can expel tens of thousands of Jews and Russia
can shift millions of people from
one part of the continent to another, the shifting of a few hundred thousand Albanians
will not lead to the outbreak of a world war."

Although parts of Cubrilovic's plan were put into effect during the 30's,World War II
temporarily interrupted any mass deportation. But, after
Soviet troops liberated Belgrade in late 1944, Cubrilovic, who spent part of the war in a
German prison camp, submitted another plan to Yugoslavia's new Communist leader, Josip
Broz Tito the second document, "The Minority Problem in the New Yugoslavia," advocated
the expulsion of not just Kosovar Albanians but all of Yugoslavia's minorities. "Yugoslavia
can achieve peace and ensure development only if it becomes ethnically pure" he wrote.
The army should "systematically and without mercy cleanse the minorities of these
regions, which we want to settle with our own national element." He advocated taking
advantage of the war chaos to help "ethnically conquer" Kosova: "That which in peaceful
times takes decades and centuries in time of war will be accomplished in a matter of
months and years." He also called for concentration camps, the development of a
complicated government bureaucracy to conduct ethnic cleansing, and stressed that
"[t]he hatred and irresistible wish of our masses to do away with minorities must be
utilized in a constructive way," for "t may be that we might never again have such an
opportunity in order to make our state ethnically pure."

It tells you something about the sincerity of Tito's "brotherhood and unity" slogan that he
invited Cubrilovic to serve as a federal minister from 1945 to 1951. During this period, the
Tito government did send tens of thousands of Albanians to Turkey and, according to
some estimates, executed tens of thousands more.

Yet some say that, by the time of his death in 1990, Cubrilovic had mellowed and no
longer believed in the brutal solutions he had once
advocated. "I think he was afraid of what [post-Tito nationalism] would unleash, " says
Norman Cigar, who is completing a study of the infamous 1986 Memorandum of the
Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the intellectuals' manifesto that became the
inspiration for Milosevic-era Serbian nationalism. "He was dead against the memo' "says
Cigar. "He said it was going to lead to bloodshed " However, at the same time Kirilovic
was predicting that the memorandum would break up Yugoslavia, he also threatened that
blood would be spilled if Kosovar Albanians sought independence.

Whatever intellectual shifts he may have gone through at the end of his life, Cubrilovic
had created an ideological monster he could no longer control. Shortly after his death,
The Collected Historical Studies by Vasa Cubrilovic was trotted out by nationalist Serbs
to bolster the case for the wars that Milosevic later launched.

Confronted today with more than half a million deportees and reports of unspeakable
violence, many in the West wonder at the lack of dissent among Serbian intellectuals.
But, as Cubrilovic's work shows, the historical rationale for ethnic cleansing has been
provided by some of the most respected academics in Serbia. The present generation of
Belgrade scholars is hardly different. As Miranda Vickers, the author of Between Serb and
Albanian, puts it, "The more educated the Serbs are, the more nationalist they become."
During the Milosevic era, Dusan Batakovic, a Belgrade University historian, has emerged
as the leading advocate for the minority Serb population in Kosova. Like many nationalist
writers, though, his scholarship seems clouded by a wildly chauvinistic reading of Serbian
history. He notes that the Kosovar Albanian intelligentsia consists of "semi-intellectuals
capable of taking in only a limited number of ideas. " He writes that during World WarII
some 100,000 Albanians immigrated to Kosova under a secret Italian resettlement policy.
(The Axis powers occupied Albania during the war.) In Kosova: A Short History, however,
Noel Malcolm exposes this assertion as "pure fantasy." He writes, "No evidence of any
such mass migration during the war can be found in any of the documents of the
occupying powers'
Writing about the deportation of Kosovars to Turkey in theories, Batakovic insists that
mainly ethnic Mirks were sent and that the number of Albanians was "negligible. " He fails
to mention that, before the deportation, Albanians were coerced into declaring
themselves as Turks (the number of "Turks" in Kosova increased by 2,500 percent in six
years). Today, this spurious "researcher" is a widely respected historian, and it is said he
will likely follow in Cubrilovic's footsteps and be named director of the Institute for Balkan
Studies.

Yet Cubrilovic's true legacy may be what is now happening in Kosova the enactment of
his decades-old blueprint for ethnic cleansing through
Milosevic's meticulously planned Operation Horseshoe. "NATO didn't realize that this
'Cubrilovic syndrome of the 1930s was still active in the 1990s, says Vickers. "But the
Serbs have always said, "We don't want Albanians living with us". There's no hypocrisy on
their part."

Q: Isn't it ilegal to attack a sovereign state?
A: Yugoslavia is not recognized as a sovereign state. It pretends to continue previous Yugoslavian federation, but that one ended in 1991.

Q: We have no electricity! We have no water! Why are you doing this to us?
A: Among cities with water supply cut by Serbs for three consecutive years, biggest were Sarajevo (Bosnia, pop. 500,000) and Zadar (Croatia, pop. 140,000). Electricity plants were among first targets, as well as the complete water dam at Peruca undermined in 1993. Why didn't you raise your voices at the time needed?

Q: My baby bleeds! My parent is killed by shrapnel in the kitchen!
A: That is sincerely awfull to happen. Wasn't your son, husband or friend extending "West-Serbian" borders in 1990-1995?...... He can tell you how it feels to cause it to somebody else's children and parents.

Q: Kosovo is historical cradle of our Empire and Church.
A: False. Ask any Serbian to declare a historical cradle of Serbian state between Rashka (Rascia) and Kosovo, and you will hear the answer. Also, the Patriarchate was founded outside of Kosovo.

Q: Albanians have no significant memories and historical monuments at Kosovo.
A: In fact, the very state of Albania was founded in Kosovo, by the League of Prizren in 19th century.

[May 11] I am amazed to see how well the Yougoslavian people are brainwashed by their leader and his companians. They just don't seem to know how treacherously mr.Milosevich has acted in the past and is continuing in the present. Unfortunately, he is a very intelligent person who will continue to use the media in a extremely clever way to stay in power. But the people of Serbia should learn that he is the only reason why the international world no longer trusts Serbia and why the leaders of the western world have been willing to let act their NATO as an international policeman to counter the brutalities of the Serbian army, police and paramilitary groups against the muslim inhabitants of Kosovo. Why don't Serbian lawyers and professors in law not ask themselves what could be the reason why a great deal of the world is so much against them? Don't they see that the only way to correct the situation is to get rid of mr.Milosevich? If they
really would have the courage to do so, I am sure NATO would immediately stop its actions. Milosevich and his wife are a very power hungry couple, and unfortunately the Serbs are so naive to beleive them. But what happens is that NATO goes on with its actions and the Serbian people are punished for the belief in their leader, just like the Germans were punished for their belief in mr.Hitler. Each day a greater part of their country will be destroyed and like sheep they keep asking "what did we do wrong?". Well, what they do
wrong is trusting Milosevich and not getting rid of him. It is true, to deal with a person like Milosevich is very hard. He plays the media very well and he will certainly have a whole lot of trustworthy followers around him, yes-sayers that depend on him. But in some way the Serbian peolple should be smart enough to get rid of this evil person. A person who in many different ways has shown that he cannot be trusted, a person who many times has broken his word or the word of his predecessors. It is time that the Serbian people take the future in their own hand.
From..... http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/response.htm

A question for the Belgrade law professors:

What should happen, and who should intervene under international law when a government systematically expels the population of a region inhabited by an ethnic minority using soldiers to terrify the population, by raping the women, and killing the young men?

http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/response.htm

Prishtinë, May 25, (Kosovapress)

Reports from within Kosova report that everyday, large numbers of Serb troops are leaving their posts.

As reported yesterday from KLA forces working out of the Llap region, more than 2000 paramilitary forces and Serb army personnel have left Kosova via Krushevc. The deserters formed a column of tractors stolen from Kosovar civilians, loaded with household goods looted from homes.

In addition to these desertions, more than 1600 others, stationed in Ferizaj and Shtima, dropped their weapons yesterday and took the road leading back to Serbia.

In apparent revenge, military commanders of the KLA have reported Serb special security forces executed the local Serb commanders of Krushevc accusing them of stirring up dissent among the ranks.

Radical Serb MP Assassinated

Klinë, May 25,

Yesterday, Dragan Milunovic, a member of the Radical Party of Ultranationalist leader Vojslav Sesel, was assassinated in Klina (Kosova).

It is reported Milunovic was killed after quarrelling with Serb Paramilitary troops who refused to follow his orders to continue killing Kosovar civilians.

help us
Thursday, 20-May-1999 16:43:07

Message:
195.103.144.19 writes:

We are trying to have information about a family. family name is Selmanj and they are from kosovo, Podujeve. If you know were we can have information, please write to
Roberta Renzetti
roberta.re@technet.it

I do disagree with the military policy in one important respect, though it's a bit late now. If I had been in charge of the air campaign, I would have bombed the following FIRST with cruise missles and smart bombs:

1. Slobbo the Butcher's house(s).
2. Slobbo the Butcher's family's houses -- his momma's, his children, and any other relatives out to second cousins.
3. Same for all the top thugs in his so-called government.
4. Same for all the top military officers.

I would then have bombed the following during the day, when the maximum number of people would have been in the buildings:

1. military headquarters -- whatever they call their counterpart of the Pentagon, plus regional military hubs.
2. "special police" headquarters.
3. party headquarters.
4. television and radio stations.

Cut off the head, and the serpent dies.

I denied everything i said before.
It was a big mistake. Sorry again to all serbians ppl!

By CARLOTTA GALL

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Protests have begun again in towns and villages in Yugoslavia as army reservists, supported by their mothers, wives and other family members, have resisted orders to go back to Kosova after a short leave.

Crowds of at least 1,000 people, and perhaps more, gathered in the towns of Krusevac and Aleksandrovac on Sunday, residents said, when the reservists received orders to report for duty in Kosova after only three days' leave. Demonstrators were out on the streets again Monday, the majority of them women, demanding that their men be spared another tour of duty in the war-battered Serbian province.

The protests follow days of demonstrations last week by the women of the region south of the capital, Belgrade, and not far from the border with Kosova, which is the southernmost province of Serbia. Many of the reservists called up for duty in Kosova in the last two months are from this region.

The initial protests ended when the military authorities allowed hundreds of reservists to return home from Kosova. While the authorities seemed to have stemmed the public anger last week, the new call-up showed that the issue was far from resolved.

The unrest appears to be spreading in the region. As crowds appeared back on the streets in Krusevac and Aleksandrovac, protests by reservists and their families were also reported in the town of Raska, close to the border with Kosova.

A determined group of protesters in the town of Cacak, closer to Belgrade, tried to demonstrate against the war on Sunday but was broken up by police. The group, which calls itself Citizens' Parliament, has been making weekly protests, calling for a negotiated peace. Members were prevented by police officers from even gathering in a restaurant on Sunday and resorted to lighting candles together in a church.

Demonstrators in Krusevac chanted, "Give us our children back!" and "We want peace!" said a resident who watched the protest on Sunday. Reservists were particularly angry that they were being ordered back into Kosova, when the authorities had told them just days before that they would not have to go back, the resident said.

The man, reached by telephone, estimated that perhaps as many as 2,000 people demonstrated for several hours in the city center Monday and the same number on Sunday. The demonstration was peaceful but firm, he said. "They are determined not to go back to Kosova," he said of the reservists.

The Yugoslav military is clearly seeking to negotiate with the men and prevent the dissent from turning into open disobedience or desertion.

Representatives of the Yugoslav third army arrived from the military headquarters in Nis to speak to the reservists but apparently failed to persuade them to comply with their orders, residents said. Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, the army's top general and commander of the operation in Kosova, arrived in Raska on Sunday to talk to demonstrators there, the independent VIP news agency reported.

The reservists, who face criminal charges if they refuse the call-up, are not refusing outright to serve in Kosova, residents who described the protests say, but are asking that other reservists do a tour of duty first. Many accuse the local authorities, and in particular the governing Socialist Party, of showing favoritism and allowing young men with connections to avoid being ordered into active service.

Demonstrators in Aleksandrovac, a smaller town west of Krusevac, were demanding that their men be the first to be withdrawn from Kosova as the Yugoslav army winds down its campaign, one resident said.

The government has repeatedly announced over the last two weeks that it is withdrawing troops from Kosova and has raised expectations among many families that their men are coming home.

But residents said many men who arrived home last week had received orders to return on Sunday, and local television announced that men of special units should report for duty at their local command centers.

Mothers immediately organized meetings, and many came in from outlying villages to join the protests. A number of women made speeches to the
crowd gathered in Aleksandrovac on Sunday. Women outnumbered the men in the crowd, but there were soldiers in uniform and young men in civilian clothes, a resident of Aleksandrovac said.

"They are telling one story," he said of the soldiers. "Their lives are in danger down there. Planes are flying very low -- they don't hit them much, they are targeting mostly armor and military objects, but the men do not see the purpose of being there. They feel like live targets, they feel that NATO can just cover them with bombs any time it wants and they might die for nothing."

The resident said the soldiers who returned had said they no longer felt as safe in Kosova as they did earlier. "This is not a political protest," he said.
"It is simply people who are trying to save their necks."

....................................................By on Wednesday, May 26, 1999 - 01:23 am:

"I denied everything i said before.
It was a big mistake. Sorry again to all serbians ppl! "

THAT POST WAS NOT FROM ME, I HAVEN'T DENIED ANYTHING, JUST POSTING THE TRUTH!