Zoja -- neither Drago or Silic is a real person.

To Marc.

Then probably you are not a real person either, or are you Drago and Silic?

[...]
"The circumstances in Kosovo are peculiar in that it is the heart of the ancient homeland, but its modern majority is non-Serb, thanks to the
post- World War II politics of Tito's Communist regime. The western third of the Province of Kosovo, Metohija, was established as a direct
dominion of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the Middle Ages and most land there remains the property of the many monasteries and
convents in the region. This relationship was never upset by the Ottoman Turkish conquerors or by Marshal Tito. There is an old Albanian
community, Catholics in the big towns and Muslims in rural districts such as Drenica, who have lived in the province since the 1300s. Urban
Catholics tend to support the government while the rural Muslims are the core of the KLA. In all, lacking an accurate estimate, I think about
20% of the Albanian majority favor the Yugoslav government and about half the remainder only support Rugova or the KLA when under
pressure, as is demonstrated by the flight of refugees into Pristina and Montenegro, as opposed to Albania. It is noteworthy that Albanian
residents are not particularly harassed in Belgrade.

The majority of Albanian residents in Kosovo, though, are not of either of these ancient communities but are Albanian refugees who resettled
in the province during or after World War II. Serb refugees, ethnically cleansed from the Drenica district in 1941-42, were never allowed by
Marshal Tito, to reclaim their property after the war, as part of his multi-ethnic design for a federative republic. Instead, he encouraged more
Albanians into the province and began subsidizing these people as an ethnic group. The situation soured from the mid-1960s as the Albanian
population reached 75%. At that time, Tito instituted a national payroll tax of 1% to subsidize development of Kosovo, but this soon turned
into a welfare subsidy. Serbs in Kosovo at the time were required (and still are) to study Albanian language from 7th to 12th Grade.

[...]

May/June 1999

Rescued from the Memory Hole

The Forgotten Background of the Serb/Albanian Conflict

By Jim Naureckas

In times of war, there is always intense pressure for media outlets to serve as propagandists rather than journalists. While the role of the
journalist is to present the world in all its complexity, giving the public as much information as possible so as to facilitate a democratic debate,
the propagandist simplifies the world in order to mobilize the populace behind a common goal.

One of propaganda's most basic simplifications is to divide participants in a conflict into neat categories of victim and villain, with no
qualification allowed for either role. In the real world, of course, responsibility cannot always be assigned so neatly. Both sides often have
legitimate grievances and plausible claims, and too often genuine atrocities are used to justify a new round of abuses against the other side.

In presenting the background to the Kosovo conflict, U.S. news outlets have focused overwhelmingly on the very real crimes committed by
Yugoslavian and Serbian forces against ethnic Albanians. In the process, they have downplayed or ignored the ways that Albanian nationalists
have contributed to ethnic tensions in the region. These one-sided accounts have reduced a complex dynamic that calls for careful mediation
to a cartoon battle of good vs. evil, with bombing the bad guys as the obvious solution.

In order to eliminate any moral ambiguity from the NATO intervention, media attempts to provide "context" to Kosovo generally start the
modern history of the conflict in 1987, when Slobodan Milosevic began using Serb/Albanian tensions for his own political ends. A New York
Times backgrounder (4/4/99) by Michael Kaufman basically skips from World War II until "1987, when Slobodan Milosevic, now the
Yugoslav president, first began exploiting and inflaming the historical rivalries of Albanians and Serbs." In Kaufman's account, "the conflict
was relatively dormant until Mr. Milosevic stirred up hostilities in 1989 by revoking the autonomous status that Kosovo had enjoyed in
Serbia."

The revocation of autonomy was a crucial decision, one which greatly destabilized the multi-ethnic Yugoslavian system and contributed to the
country's breakup. The loss of autonomy was a grievance that helped pave the way for the rise of an armed separatist movement, in the form
of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

But the decision to end Kosovo's autonomous status did not come out of nowhere, or out of a simple Serbian desire to oppress Albanians.
To get a more complicated picture of the situation in Kosovo in the '80s, Kaufman would only have had to look up his own paper's coverage
from the era.

Origins of "ethnic cleansing"?

New York Times correspondent David Binder filed a report in 1982 (11/28/82): "In violence growing out of the Pristina University riots of
March 1981, a score of people have been killed and hundreds injured. There have been almost weekly incidents of rape, arson, pillage and
industrial sabotage, most seemingly designed to drive Kosovo's remaining indigenous Slavs--Serbs and Montenegrins--out of the province."

Describing an attempt to set fire to a 12-year-old Serbian boy, Binder reported (11/9/82): "Such incidents have prompted many of Kosovo's
Slavic inhabitants to flee the province, thereby helping to fulfill a nationalist demand for an ethnically 'pure' Albanian Kosovo. The latest
Belgrade estimate is that 20,000 Serbs and Montenegrins have left Kosovo for good since the 1981 riots."

"Ethnically pure," of course, is another way to translate the phrase "ethnically clean"--as in "ethnic cleansing." The first use of this concept to
appear in Nexis was in relation to the Albanian nationalists' program for Kosovo: "The nationalists have a two-point platform," the Times'
Marvine Howe quotes a Communist (and ethnically Albanian) official in Kosovo (7/12/82), "first to establish what they call an ethnically clean
Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania." All of the half-dozen references in Nexis to "ethnically clean"
or "ethnic cleansing" over the next seven years attribute the phrase to Albanian nationalists.

The New York Times returned to the Kosovo issue in 1986, when the paper's Henry Kamm (4/28/86) reported that Slavic Yugoslavians
"blame ethnic Albanians…for continuing assaults, rape and vandalism. They believe their aim is to drive non-Albanians out of the province."
He reported suspicions by Slavs that the autonomous Communist authorities in Kosovo were covering up anti-Slavic crimes, including arson
at a nunnery and the brutal mutilation of a Serbian farmer. Kamm quoted a prescient "Western diplomat" who described Kosovo as
"Yugoslavia's single greatest problem."

By 1987, the Times was portraying a dire situation in Kosovo. David Binder reported (11/1/87):

Ethnic Albanians in the Government have manipulated public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs….
Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, and flags have been torn down. Wells have been poisoned and crops burned.
Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls….

As Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years,
and especially strongly since the bloody rioting by ethnic Albanians in Pristina in 1981--an ''ethnically pure'' Albanian region, a
''Republic of Kosovo" in all but name.

This is the situation--at least as perceived by Serbs--that led to Milosevic's infamous 1987 speech promising protection of Serbs, and later
resulted in the revocation of Kosovo's autonomy. Despite being easily available on Nexis, virtually none of this material has found its way into
contemporary coverage of Kosovo, in the New York Times or anywhere else.

Consistent skepticism

It may be, of course, that some of the charges levied against Albanian nationalists during the '80s were exaggerated or even fabricated by
politically motivated Serbs. Those who are tempted to dismiss these accounts based on this possibility, however, should be careful to apply
the same critical standards to media coverage of anti-Albanian atrocities in the '90s. The current coverage of Serbian crimes, if anything,
should be viewed with even greater skepticism, since Yugoslavia has now become an official enemy of the U.S., and establishment reporting
generally shows a strong bias against such countries. (See Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky.)

And if one suggests that the New York Times had a peculiar anti-Albanian bias in the '80s, one still has to explain why similar reports of
proto-ethnic cleansing appeared in the Washington Post (11/29/86) and the Financial Times (7/20/82, 7/22/86).

It would not be responsible journalism, of course, to imply that crimes against ethnic Slavs justify assaults of even greater magnitude against
ethnic Albanians. The challenge of reporting on a cycle of violence is to make sure that the wounds nursed by each side are not presented as
if they vindicate further violence. The Times' Binder makes an attempt at this in his November 1, 1987 piece:

Many Yugoslavs blame the troubles on the ethnic Albanians, but the matter is more complex in a country with as many
nationalities and religions as Yugoslavia's and involves economic development, law, politics, families and flags. As recently as 20
years ago, the Slavic majority treated ethnic Albanians as inferiors to be employed as hewers of wood and carriers of heating
coal. The ethnic Albanians, who now number 2 million, were officially deemed a minority, not a constituent nationality, as they
are today.

Of course, it's not always the case that both sides are equally or even partially at fault in an ethnic conflict: The Holocaust was not a response
to historic crimes committed by German Jews against German Christians, and the people of East Timor did not provoke an Indonesian
invasion by anti-Javanese pogroms. The question of historical responsibility is one that must be answered through careful research and
reporting. Overwhelmingly, the U.S. media have failed to do that research, instead relying on a simplified, truncated official history that serves
NATO's propaganda purposes more than it serves the citizenry's need for a complete and accurate context.

http://www.fair.org/articles/memory-hole.html

[...]

"Muslim polygamy plays the major role here: a man who can afford it is entitled by the Koran to four
wives ? at any one time; divorce is
executed by three times pronouncing the formula "I divorce thee!". Some of the "wives" are little girls
who, as one (female) observer of
women's rights in Islamic societies aptly puts it, "still playing with dolls". Albanian nationalism abuses
women, using them as baby machines for
the expansion of Greater Albania, not only to include Old Serbia, but also Macedonia, where the
Albanian percentage of the population is
higher than in Old Serbia.. [Where are the feminists? Worrying about sexist pronouns, it seems.]

Besides the differing birth rates, the former Serb majority was literally cut down, under the malicious
tyrannies of the Sultan, Mussolini and
Tito. The latter expelled hundreds of thousands of Serbs and brought in hundreds of thousands of
Albanians from across the border. That's
when the border should have been sealed. Tito then forbade Kosovo Serbs driven out by the
Albanians to return. The Albanian insurrection
is a war of total conquest, merciless jihad towards any minority. (There are other peoples there, too,
not only Serbs and Albanians.) -Serbs
would have no anxieties about living as a minority community in a state that that protects minorities.

Tolerance is not the program of Rugova nor of the KLA, nor of Islamists anywhere. For them the world
is divided into two territories, "the
land of Islam ["Submission"]" and "the Land of the Sword".

A friend of mine, like me not Serbian, related to me a conversation he had in Kosovo back in the
1980s with some young Albanians. He
asked them "what do you guys do for fun?" They answered: "Serb-hunting".

By Daniela on Tuesday, June 1, 1999 - 11:16 am:

[...]

"Serb-dominated Yugoslavia" of the 1991 headlines was a hoax. Tito's motto was always "Weak
Serbia, Strong Yugoslavia". Some "Serb
domination".

Kosovo's autonomy. As Tito detached Vojvodina from Serbia, making it an "Autonomous Region" of
Serbia, and as he detached Southern
Serbia and called it "Makedonija", he also detached Old Serbia from the Serbia that had been
recognized as a sovereign state by the
Congress of Berlin. "Quasi-President" Ibrahim Rugova has admitted that under Albanian domination
many crimes were committed against
Kosovo's Serbs by the dominant Albanians. That was a "quasi" legal state.

Kosovo statistics and how they got that way. "Old Serbia" is the Serb term for Kosovo, and so it was
even for the enemy Austro-Hungarian
Empire. Mosby's paucity of historical information is matched by his statistics, which are meaningless
for their lack of context

Statistics: In 1950 Darryl Huff Ph. D. published a best seller entitled "How to Lie With Statistics", an
excoriation of the stupid uses and evil
uses of statistics to sway opinion. . The stats on Kosovo used in today's press reports would fit right
in with Huff's justly sarcastic horror
stories. Let's look at these "statistics" in several contexts, time, authorship etc. Else they are taken
"out of context", no?

Stat # 1: Context of authorship: - Says who?. The population figures ranging from 1.5. to 2 million
Albanians in the province have a spread
that is acceptable to nobody with statistical and demographic smarts. Kosovo Albanians, like
Chicago's First Ward Democratic Party
organization, have creative ways of counting, let us, awe old Army grunts, say, bodies. Some
constituents vote from the graveyard, some
from exile in far-off countries. Some great grandmothers and still-born infants had been receiving their
pensions/benefits every month. A
number to take seriously would be one million Kosovo Albanians.

Stat # 2. "Kosovo 92 percent Albanian". Context of time: When? If this means in 1998, how about a
few years back? -- Poland used to one
third Jewish.-- How did that change? In Old Serbia it wasn't German gas chambers, but knives and
guns of Albanian pandours, successively,
of Ottoman Turkey, Mussolini's Repubblica Sociale, then of the Socialist Federative Republic
Yugoslavia of the Stalinist Comrade Josip Broz
"Tito", son of a Slovene mother and a Croat father. In World War I the good soldier Broz had been an
Austro-Hungarian sniper killing
Serbs."
[...]

http://www.hackworth.com/

Kosovo must be independent
Is there ANY OTHER POSSIBILITY for sustainable peace?
But preferably,
Serbia should become a province of Greater Kosovo.

After we finish with Serbia,
there will be so much money going into Kosovo,
they will have the financial power
to rule Serbia.

Thanx Milo !
Great planning (again).
You don't care who you hurt,
as long as you hurt ....

Daniela,
the way you speak of 'muslims' and 'Albanians'
is no different than the way
NAZI's spoke of 'jews' and 'Gypsies'.

It comes as no surprise to me
because many Serb-lovers like you
use the same language.

All human beings deserve to be respected,
and if their ways are different -
try to understand and accept it.

This is the essence of Western Freedom
Liberty, Justice, Equality, Fraternity.

Your rethoric should have died 50 years ago with Hitler,
but latest a decade ago with the Soviet Union.

Reply to JACK LONDON on Saturday, June 12, 1999 - 05:03 pm:
Daniela,
the way you speak of 'muslims' and 'Albanians'
is no different than the way
NAZI's spoke of 'jews' and 'Gypsies'.

The Jews in Germany did not look for Jerusalem in Germany. The albanians have their own country. Guess what it's called Albania, if you go there you will see why they want to live in Kosovo, Yugoslavia.

The Nazi's built death camps for the extermination of the Jews. You will find no death camps anywhere in Kosovo.
The Serbs went to the trouble of expelling not exterminating the Albanians from their country.
If they wanted to kill them it would have been alot quicker and easier.

Gavrillo,

1 out of 10 HUMANS living in Kosovo
are of Albanian ancestry.
It is by all means THEIR country,
and until recently under the dominion of Serbia.

I will not respond to the rest of your arguements,
rather,
I will quote them
so you can read them again
and THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU WROTE :

Gavrillo says :
"The Nazi's built death camps for the extermination of the Jews. You will find no death camps anywhere in Kosovo.

"The Serbs went to the trouble of expelling not exterminating the Albanians from their country.
If they wanted to kill them it would have been alot quicker and easier."


Need I say anything?
...... Can I say anything !

To: Jack London
Re: "Need I said anything?"

You'd better keep silent and return to school, buy a good computer, link to libraries, learn history, especially that of Kosovo, read Noam Chomsky, "War And Peace" of Tolstoy. Good luck. Otherwise Your uncontrolled emotional impulses will lead You to call 911-NATO and pursue them to bomb Madrid over Basques, Istanbul over Kurds, Tel-Aviv over Palestinians, Delhi, Karachi, etc... . And that might constitute a first-degree brain abuse in furtherance of a crime.
A WELLWisher.

That Drago is a liar - no Serb would write Kosovo
Kosova
Luv you all.
Kissie

Kissie,
so we understand one another,
your position is that
you support Gavrillo's contentions.

You agree with him when he says :
"The Nazi's built death camps
for the extermination of the Jews.
You will find no death camps anywhere in Kosovo."

I think we will.
I think we will find many MASS GRAVES.
The objective of the Nazi death camps was to kill humans.
Your beloved Serbs have done just that.
Maybe we won't find the camps,
but we are already finding the graves.

Kissie, you and Gavrillo seem to agree,
when you say :
"The Serbs went to the trouble of expelling
not exterminating the Albanians
from their country.
If they wanted to kill them
it would have been alot quicker and easier."

Expelling = Deportation

Have you ever seen the pictures
of the cattle trains to Aushwitz, Bergen Belsen, etc.
Did you see HUMANS in those wagons?
Wasn't this supposed to END 50 YEARS AGO?


So you deny the HOLOCAUST.
Look at the pictures of humans in cattle-wagons.
Do they touch you at all?
Feel anything?
Doesn't your soul react to this?

Do you feel anything when you see them?
You don't seem to.

Just bear in mind
these are HUMAN BEINGS
you are treating them like waste
- like garbage.

There is no way - NO WAY
we could allow the likes of you
and supporters of your ideals
to have any position of power in this world.

We will defeat you. ALWAYS.
Always have and always will.
You and yours MUST CAPITULATE - SURRENDER.

Cowardly as they are ,NATO MORONS cut water and electricity to whole 10 mil nation and blackmailed government.....without fighting Serbian army 'cause nato morons didnt have bal.s .......anyway without defeating army and without access to whole YU they didnt get what they want and this is just first step in NATO morons conquering...

Albanians were favored by turks first and Serbs were leavingand comming back after they chased them out........NAZIs were favoring Albanians who were their puppets during WW2Srbs again were leavingand comming back after they chased them out..........and again NATO NAZIs are favoring their puppets albanians and Serbs will leavebut they will come back again and crush their enemies .......History is repeating itself....

DEJA VU.......


This EXCERPT is from the RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS of the UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA-studies in social sciences[1925]…. By M.W.TYLER,[associate prof. of HISTORY in the university of Minesota…….................... ………of the other nationalities in the Balkans in the early part of the nineteenth century there is little to be said. In the mountains to the west ,along the Adriatic sea,dwelt the Albanians[not illyrians].The great days of Scanderbeg when this people had been focus of a Christian resistance to the Turks were long past.Majority of the Albanians embraced Islam,and the people as a whole,were content to provide numbers of loyal soldiers and servants to the sultan ……….Moreover they were divided among themselves,occupied with intertribal quarrels and it is only recently that they have gained EVEN the rudiments of a national feeling and culture.In one way,alone,were they noticeable before 1815.During the later part of the eighteenth century many Albanians,finding opportunities too limited in their barren mountain land,had begun to push down into the plains seizing cattle and LANDS.Albanians either DROVE OUT,or practically enslaved ,the Serb inhabitants,built their windowless castles from which they TERRORIZED,ROBBED,and controlled the countryside. It is the old story of highlander[Albanians]and lowlander[Serbs] over again,except that in this case the government[Turks] favored the freebooting highlander[Albanians].The turks,glad to play off one national element against another ,and only too willing to assist an immigration that was to a large extent moslem, allowed to the Albanians EVERY MEANS OF ATACK AND TO THE HARD PRESSED SERBS NO MEANS OF DEFENCE.THE RESULT WAS THAT LANDS THAT WERE SLAV SERBS IN 1750 HAD BECOME ALBANIAN BY 1850,FOR THE SLAV SERBS HAD EITHER BEEN SO SUBDUED AS TO FORGET THEIR NATIONALITY OR ELSE HAD EMIGRATED. THESE ARE FACTS NOT TO BE FORGOTEN WHEN THESE LANDS ARE CLAIMED TODAY FOR THE NEW ALBANIAN STATE... ..........

To: Milano

Agreed. The irresponsible amateurish political ambitions on rampage in Washington have set a dangerous precedent.