[Hoplite]

The Muslims had been directed to kidnap and rape the Serbian women and kill the young men.

This is just another version of the "Jews sacrifice Christian children" method of generating hatred amongst a group by telling them they are being targeted by another group.

Unfortunately, it has worked all too well amongst the groups in the Balkans leading up to their various wars, but, given the lack of hard data to support the claims of what was going on in Kosovo in the 1980's, there's really no good reason to repeat those claims today.

The Kosovar Albanians have their myths about the decades leading up to the war, just like the Serbs, and if you want to go on about how the Albanians were being 'ordered' to kill and rape, then you have to deal with the Serbs poisoning Albanian schoolchildren, but at that point, it has ceased to be about facts, and become a mere hyping contest between opposing victimhood mythologies.

[Eva]

You may be right, but the source was the NYT, so who knows? No one ever claimed that the NYT was a reliable source, except of course, those on the left.

We never saw any sort of retraction of the story, and this one article that was linked was only one of many. Other articles gave much more details of the rapes and attacks on Serbs. One has to know the agenda of the reporter to judge the accuracy of these stories. Like I said, there was such a long history of conflict in this region that the struggle can best be described as fight between mutual combatants, which we had very little self interest in refereeing. ----and for which we received no thanks from anyone, not even from our ersatz allies in Europe.