Posted on 06/01/2004 1:13:25 PM PDT by GeraldP
In 2001 two events at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague put the subject of genocide in the former Yugoslavia back on the front pages of newspapers. Firstly, Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic was convicted of genocide against the Muslim population of the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, the first conviction at the ICTY for this gravest of crimes. Secondly and more spectacularly, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was indicted and put on trial for genocide against the Muslim and Croat population of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole.
These events at the ICTY inflamed the bitter controversies that have raged over this conflict since it broke out in 1991. Internationally, political opinion has been divided into two camps characterized by their conflicting analyses of the crisis and views of the correct international response. On the one side were those who viewed the war as a result of Serbian aggression and expansionism and who generally advocated military intervention by the West in response. On the other side were those who viewed the conflict as a civil war between competing nationalisms (Serb, Croat, Muslim, and Albanian) in which the Serb side was if anything less to blame than the others. They tended to blame Western interference for catalysing the conflict and to reject military intervention against Serbian forces.
For the sake of convenience, we may refer to the first camp as the ‘orthodox’ and the second as the ‘revisionist’.
The debate between these two camps has continued to dominate discourse on the former Yugoslavia in the West up till the present day. Although the events at The Hague in 2001 marked a defeat for the revisionist camp, its more determined members have responded by denying both the validity of the charges of genocide and the legitimacy of the ICTY. The revisionist analysis of the wars in the former Yugoslavia therefore constitutes one aspect of the Western response to the phenomenon of genocide in the contemporary world, one that is in some ways related to similar ‘revisionist’ analyses of the prior genocide in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and the contemporaneous genocide in Rwanda.
The use of the word ‘revisionist’ to describe this current of opinion serves a dual purpose, for the revisionists seek on the one hand to oppose what they see as the mainstream, orthodox view of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and on the other to challenge the very notion that genocide took place. Thus they are in some ways the counterpart to the Holocaust revisionists. While the revisionists under consideration correctly point out that the massacres in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992-95 and in Kosovo in 1998-99 are not on a scale with those of Auschwitz their arguments resemble in some ways those of the Holocaust revisionists while their own frequent exploitation of the Holocaust legacy contains some startling ambiguities.
Although the revisionist camp stretches right across the political spectrum to encompass liberals, conservatives, socialists, and members of the far right, the ideological motivation of each of these groups is very different. The current I wish to analyse here consists of people who are to the left of mainstream Social Democracy and who oppose what they see as the anti-Serbian or anti-Yugoslav policies of the Western alliance. It includes members of many different far-left traditions: left Labourites and Social Democrats; Christian Socialists; Orthodox Communists; Trotskyists; Maoists; anarchists; and others. For the sake of convenience I shall refer to them as ‘left revisionists’, meaning those who, on the basis of a radical left-wing philosophy, seek 1) to revise the negative evaluation of the Milosevic regime made by politically mainstream commentators; 2) to deny that genocide took place and downplay the violence and suffering involved in the wars in the former Yugoslavia; and 3) to shift the blame for this violence and suffering, as well as for the break-up of Yugoslavia, on to the Western alliance. Other adherents of a radical left-wing philosophy who oppose Western military intervention in the Balkans but who also opposed the Milosevic regime do not belong to this category and are not the subjects of this essay. My purpose here is neither to discuss the merits and demerits of a left-wing philosophy, nor to analyse the events in the former Yugoslavia themselves, nor to address the advantages and disadvantages of Western military intervention. This is a study of the ideology of left revisionism itself. The present author makes no pretence at neutrality in this debate - he belongs firmly in the ‘orthodox’ camp - and this is above all a study of the extremes to which one current of Western opinion is prepared to go and the intellectual and moral somersaults it is prepared to perform, in order to avoid confronting the reality of genocide. In order to understand the erroneous analysis on which left revisionism is based, it is necessary to examine the real causes of the break-up of Yugoslavia, which lie in the policies of the Milosevic regime.
Ideology of the left revisionists “What about the Kurds?” is viewed by the left revisionists as their clinching argument in the case against the NATO intervention in Kosovo: if Western leaders were motivated to intervene in Kosovo out of concern at the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians, why have they not intervened to protect the Kurds from Turkish oppression? Or the Palestinians from the Israelis? I wish to turn the question around and to ask “What about the Albanians?” If the left-wing revisionists are concerned with the suffering of oppressed nationalities, as they claim to be regarding the Kurds, Palestinians, and others, it needs to be explained why did they not speak out against Milosevic’s persecution of the Kosovo Albanians, or of the Bosnian Muslims, or of the Croats. It needs to be explained why Serbian or Yugoslav military intervention was less objectionable to them than American military intervention, even when it was incomparably more bloody. It needs to be asked why the six hundred or so Yugoslav civilian deaths during the Kosovo War were ‘worthy’ victims in a way that the tens if not hundreds of thousands of Bosnians killed by Serbian forces were not.
This double standard may in part be attributed to anti-Americanism or ‘anti-imperialism’, whereby members of the far left subordinate their morality to the ‘higher cause’ of opposing the United States. There is a long tradition on the far left of supporting the weaker country against the stronger on an anti-imperialist basis. V.I. Lenin wrote in 1915 that “if tomorrow Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Russia and so on, these would be ‘just’ or ‘defensive’ wars irrespective of who was the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependant, and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding, and predatory ‘Great Powers’.”[1] Such a line of reasoning might conceivably have led members of the far left to support Milosevic’s Serbia as a victim of ‘American imperialism’, even to the point of ignoring or denying its crimes against the non-Serb peoples of the former Yugoslavia.
Simple ‘anti-imperialism’ is however insufficient to explain the motives of the left revisionists, who do not themselves couch their arguments in ‘anti-imperialist’ terms. Rather they prefer to make pedantic, legalistic quibbles over such issues as the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the authority of the UN Security Council, and the exact numbers of Albanian dead; appropriate arguments for international lawyers, perhaps, but scarcely the kind usually favoured in the polemics of the revolutionary left. The focus of the left revisionists is in fact less on denouncing the US as an evil in and of itself – though this is clearly an element - than on defending politically the Milosevic regime. Other regimes that have clashed with the Western alliance during the past decade – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and elsewhere – have not received similar support from the Western left. To the best of my knowledge nobody has tried to claim that Saddam Hussein is a man of peace who respects the territorial integrity of Iraq’s neighbours or that the Taliban are champions of women’s rights and cultural diversity. Nobody, except Osama bin-Laden and eccentric chess-grandmaster Bobby Fischer, has treated the victims of the World Trade Centre bombing with the callousness and contempt with which left revisionists speak of the dead of Vukovar, Srebrenica, and Racak. The Serbia of Milosevic enjoyed the unique position in the pantheon of the ‘rogue states’ of the 1990s as the only one that was supported politically, not just defended from attack, by much of the Western left.
The left revisionists are holding on to the anti-humanist, anti-moralist, anti-democratic bathwater long after the revolutionary baby has died and its corpse decayed. Instead of being moved by the events in Eastern Europe and the USSR in 1989-91 to reevaluate their political philosophy, many of them reacted by clinging even more stubbornly to every last straw from the wreckage of the Communist Atlantis.
Milosevic and the West
One such straw was the Milosevic regime in Belgrade. Its credentials as a ‘left-wing’ regime were pretty poor: Milosevic’s ruling party was called the ‘Socialist Party of Serbia’ (SPS) and had formerly been the League of Communists of Serbia, but SPS leaders Slobodan Milosevic and Borisav Jovic emphasised from the start their commitment to free-market reforms. Under their tenure the gap between rich and poor massively increased, social services were greatly reduced, free healthcare effectively ended, public transport collapsed, and a large new class of black marketeers and organised criminals created. To look to Milosevic’s Serbia as an ‘alternative’ to the capitalist West was pretty much scraping the bottom of the socialist barrel. Radovan Karadzic’s Bosnian Serb nationalist regime in Pale was even less credibly ‘progressive’: ideologically anti-Communist, Karadzic’s Serb Democratic Party identifies with the monarchist and Nazi-collaborationist Chetnik movement far more openly than the Tudjman regime in Zagreb ever identified with the Ustashas. Nevertheless, in the eyes of the left revisionists, to accept that Belgrade and its proxies were committing aggression and genocide was akin to admitting that the liberals really had been right all along about the negative character of Communism. In their minds the Cold War is still being fought on the battlefields of Kosovo. Twenty-five years ago Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman complained of the poor image conveyed by the Western media of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. They wrote that “What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasising alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial US role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered.”[2] Today both authors use similar arguments to downplay the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians and to shift the blame for it away from the Milosevic regime and onto the US. In Chomsky’s words, Turkey is guilty of “massive atrocities” against the Kurds; Indonesia of “aggression and massacre” of “near-genocidal levels” in East Timor; Israel of “murderous and destructive” operations in Lebanon; but there is no mention of Kurdish, East Timorese, or Palestinian atrocities.[3] By contrast, Chomsky uses no such emotive language when discussing the Serbian killing of Albanians; they are a “response” and “reaction” to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) attacks. Meanwhile the KLA was guilty of “targeting Serb police and civilians”; “killing six Serbian teenagers”; the “killing of a Serb judge, police, and civilians”; and so on. The picture Chomsky consequently sketches is of atrocities by both sides and, since KLA actions were “designed to elicit a violent and disproportionate Serbian response”, the implication is that the Milosevic regime was less to blame than the KLA.[4] When a US client massacres innocent civilians it is wholly to blame; when a ‘socialist’ regime does so it is the victims who are primarily to blame.
There is a term for this attitude: moral relativism. In its far-left variety there are two sides to its coin. On the one hand there is a holier-than-thou condemnation of every Western failing (“What about the Kurds/Palestinians/East Timorese?”), allowing the left revisionists always to damn Western policy for its moral imperfections no matter what it is. The West is therefore damned simultaneously for intervening in Kosovo and for colluding in the Turkish oppression of the Kurds and for maintaining sanctions against Iraq, though it is clear that ultimately the West cannot easily reject military intervention, sanctions, and appeasement all at the same time. Combined with this all-trumping moralism in the left-revisionist mind-set, like the opposite pole of a magnet, is a cold-blooded immoralism, according to which the left-winger is absolutely unmoved by the crimes of the Revolution performed for the greater good. More striking even than the defence or denial of crimes against humanity carried out by the left revisionists is their sheer lack of any positive vision for the future or political raison d’etre whatsoever. They should not be seen as ‘pro-Serb’, for the Serb people are unlikely to benefit from their actions. They are offering precisely nothing to the long-suffering people of Serbia in return for suffering sanctions and isolation and defending war criminals from the ICTY. Rather, they appear to view ‘resistance to Western imperialism’ as something worthwhile for its own sake, no matter how much self-destruction it results in for Serbia and how much misery it inflicts on the Serbs. The Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic accused the British during World War II of “fighting to the last Serb in Yugoslavia”.[5] The same could be said of the contemporary left revisionists, but with one crucial difference: Churchill offered the Serbs something concrete in return for their sacrifices, namely liberation from Nazism, which he duly helped to bring about. By contrast, the left revisionists really are offering the Serbs nothing but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Equally conspicuous by their absence are constructive proposals of the left revisionists regarding Kosovo’s future. For all his lofty denunciations of the West’s policy, the only alternative Chomsky can suggest for a resolution of the Kosovo question that would have avoided NATO bombing is the partition of Kosovo between Serbs and Albanians as suggested by Dobrica Cosic, the father of contemporary Serb nationalism and one of the architects of Yugoslavia’s wars.[6] As the Albanians make up at least 80% of the population of Kosovo and as the Serb villages are scattered in enclaves throughout the province, what this implies is the expulsion of the Albanian majority from half of Kosovo so that it can be settled by Serbs from elsewhere and therefore satisfy the Serb-nationalist demand for a face-saving formula short of Kosovo’s complete independence.
The left revisionists founded their analysis of Yugoslavia’s collapse on the false premise that because Serbia was in some bizarre sense a ‘socialist’ state in their eyes, the West ‘ought to be’ hostile to it, regardless of all evidence to the contrary. They therefore invented a Western conspiracy to explain the Yugoslav collapse and the subsequent defeats of Milosevic’s Serbia. In Michael Parenti’s view all opposition to Milosevic, be it from the Croats, Muslims, Albanians, or even the Serbian opposition, was simply the expression of such a conspiracy. According to Parenti, Western hostility to Yugoslavia was due to the fact that “after the overthrow of Communism throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) [sic - Parenti means the SFRY] remained the only nation in that region that would not voluntarily discard what remained of its socialism and install an unalloyed free market system”. Consequently “the US goal has been to transform the FRY [sic] into a Third World region, a cluster of weak right-wing principalities”.[7] Following the break-up the FRY resisted privatisation of its socialised industry, continues Parenti, and “as far as the Western free-marketeers were concerned, these enterprises had to be either privatised or demolished. A massive aerial destruction like the one delivered upon Iraq might be just the thing needed to put Belgrade more in step with the New World Order.”[8] In other words, the US engineered Yugoslavia’s destruction and then bombed Serbia in order to bring about the privatisation of its socialised economy. Parenti provides not a single source to back up these assertions; he omits to mention that Milosevic privatised Serbia’s telecommunications system with Britain’s Douglas Hurd acting as intermediary.
Of course, Washington in 1991 did seek the end of Communist rule in Yugoslavia, just as it had previously in Poland and Hungary. But Washington did not seek to break up Poland or Hungary. The myth that the Western powers destroyed Yugoslavia and persecuted Serbia because they were ‘socialist’ is made above all to satisfy the emotional need of the left revisionists to believe that the dictatorships they spent years defending were in some sense ‘progressive’ and hence unacceptable to the powers that be.
It is true that Serbia was subjected to a NATO assault in 1999 and that Western leaders rejoiced in Milosevic’s overthrow the following year. But to deduce from this that the West was already ‘anti-Serb’ during the Croatian war in 1991 - eight years earlier - is a bit like saying that the West viewed Saddam Hussein as an enemy during the Iran-Iraq war or Osama bin-Laden as an enemy during the Soviet-Afghan war. During the Gulf crisis of 1990-91 the Milosevic regime supported the US-led drive to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait. Thus, following a meeting with US President George Bush on 1 October 1990 Borisav Jovic, at the time President of Yugoslavia, recorded that “President Bush expressed special satisfaction and gratitude to Yugoslavia for adopting the same position of condemning Iraqi aggression and the annexation of Kuwait. He is pleased and encouraged by the unity of the international community regarding the crisis in the Gulf and Iraq.” Jovic on this occasion boasted to Bush that “we [Yugoslavs] are the only Eastern European country that has almost developed and established a market economy system. Now we are at a critical point, but we will overcome it too over the next few years, which is why we need the understanding and aid of the United States with international financial institutions and in the business world.” Finally, responding to Bush’s query regarding the presence of Iraqi jets in Yugoslavia, Jovic informed him that “We have a contract from earlier, before the crisis, to repair 16 MiGs for the Iraqi air-force. They will not be delivered to Iraq now. Two of them were dismantled in the workshop, after which they were gathered up and tested or transferred to another location in order not to hinder the normal work in the workshop.” Jovic records that “President Bush thanked me for that.”[9] So much for the argument that the US victimised Serbia as a ‘socialist’ and ‘defiant’ state. The left revisionists are fond of pointing out that both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin-Laden were originally allies of the US, but they are reluctant to acknowledge Western collaboration with Milosevic because such an admission would ruin their claim of Western victimisation of ‘socialist’ Serbia.
In 1991 the American UN mediator Cyrus Vance negotiated the so-called ‘Vance Plan’ to end the conflict in Croatia involving the use of UN peacekeepers to protect Serb-held territory in Croatia; even Jovic described it as “exceptionally favourable to the Serb side”.[10] Every single Western peace plan for Bosnia was based on the premise of Bosnia’s partition; every one gave Karadzic’s Bosnian Serbs a much larger share of Bosnia than their proportion of the population would warrant. UN troops in Bosnia collaborated systematically with Ratko Mladic’s forces, helping them murder the Bosnian Deputy Prime Minister in 1993; British troops in Central Bosnia killed dozens of Croat troops[11] and in his memoir of the conflict British Major Vaughan Kent-Payne describes beating up a Croat soldier.[12] UN forces drove the Bosnian Army from Mt. Igman in the autumn of 1994, using rocket launchers to destroy its trenches. Most notoriously, the West maintained an arms embargo against Bosnia which the British and French, though not the Americans, enforced rigorously to the bitter end. Meanwhile not a single NATO missile struck Serbia throughout the Croatian and Bosnian wars while Milosevic was the respected interlocutor of Douglas Hurd, David Owen, and Richard Holbrooke. The Dayton Accord of 1995 compromised the sovereignty of the Bosnian state far more than the Rambouillet treaty of 1999 threatened the sovereignty of the Yugoslav state: it abolished the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina and recognised Radovan Karadzic’s ‘Republika Srpska’, with rights far greater than those ever offered to the Kosovo Albanians. The left revisionists’ ‘anti-interventionism’ does not seem to extend to these particular instances of Western intervention.
(Excerpt) Read more at glypx.com ...
>>>That fact is covert and will not ever be verified.
How convenient.
BINGO, Exactly, Mr shiptari!
Why do you use Windows2000?
When was this? What were the circumstances surrounding the attack? Do you know who the perpetrators were, or could you identify them by sight?
I always wondered what a Win2k logged on to an RD on XP which is SSH -X -ed to an OS X which is then X -query -ing a Linux machine would show up as.
slip of the tongue tsk! tsk! tsk!You should be more precise--that would be a slip of the keyboard; if it really were a slip. :-)
The constant attacks on the Serbian people of Kosovo by Albanians over the past 100 years has only strengthened the myths of Kosovo in the hearts of the Serbs. The Albanians in Kosovo can ignore this at their own perile. They're not thinking past their own noses. That is often a fatal mistake. You can't wish away June 28th. It's going to be there every year.
SPare me with your "explanations" of why albanians supported nazis. It's obvious. Nazis dominated balkans, and albanians wanted to use that to expell as many serbs as possible from Kosovo. Now USA dominates, so albanians are the best fans of USA. etc.
Albanian partisans were, like croat or muslim partisans, communists. Serbian partisans however, were common, ordinary people, led by croatian, muslim and serbian communists. That's big difference. Istead of fighting communists and save their own lives by not joining them, serbian people rose to arms against nazis, thus turning germans against them as well. That's huge difference between us and you.
Well you should know, speaking about communists giving Kosovo to Albania, that it was just an idea, like it was Cubrilovic's plan for expulsion of albanians. But it seems you don't care wheter people have ideas or they implement them in real life. So, if you have an idea that, since you're descendants of Illyrians, you have right on Kosovo, well that has to be true. And if Cubrilovic said Albanians should be expelled, it must had happened!
Do you know about communist plans for taking Albania for part of Yugoslavia? Or ideas about Bulgaria and Yugoslavia merge into one state?
Besides, communists sided with ustashi, so communists were anti-serbian all the way. In Sremska Mitrovica prison, in 1930's, Mosha Piade (communist) and Mile Budak (ustasha), signed an agreement of cooperation between communists and ustashi. Also, communists were hailing ustashi terrorist attacks on yugoslavian police, back in 1930's.
But I doubt you care so much for history.
GERALDP - If a few Kosovar Albanians were misled to join the Germans...
Hahaha... maybe, since you like dedijer so much, you should check some other partisan literature on Kosovo Albanians and few of them siding with germans. I'll mention just 1944 rebelion in Drenica, mass rebelion against partisans. Nowhere in the world at that moment nazis were in offensive, but in drenica.
GERALDP - Once again for all your erudition, you appear to be incapable of critical thinking when it comes to Balkan history
Spare me, please...
I salute and respect your family's persistance! I salute the honorable memory of your grandfather. I'm not joking. I'm not sarcastic. But even if you and your family are the best people in the world, still it makes no difference since your not majority of your people. What do I care if there are 5, 10, or 10 000 croats good people, if they can't change croatian overall hatred toward Serbs, thet led three times in XX century to genocide? I don't care, since they can't change anything.
GERALDP - Yes Enver Hoxha declared the US an enemy of the “proletariat”, but even then the US was secretly admired by most Albanians.
:-)))))
US envoy was there to represent his country. Such statement didn't slip his tongue.
GERALDP - When you say “You took our land. We want it back” I wish you could step back and see the folly of your position. You are threatening a people with war to insatiate you blind nationalism.
I'm being nationalist for wanting my territory to be mine again? And you're not nationalist for wanting my territory to become yours and you took it by violent means? I'm violent for wanting a thief to be dispossed of something he took away illegaly? Why do you underestimate me so much? It's insulting to see your "logic". Find some better arguments.
GERALDP - Moreover you are condemning our children to a lifetime of war with no higher purpose, no noble outcome, no end in sight, for you know and I know that it will not be over so easily.
Look several lines up.
"To place foot upon tyrany's neck,
to lead tyrants to knowledge of the right,
this is the most sacred of man's duties!"
Thank you Njegosh, for these fine verses.
I will reply to your post in more detail later, for now I only have one thing to point out.
>>>What do I care if there are 5, 10, or 10 000 croats good people, if they can't change croatian overall hatred toward Serbs, thet led three times in XX century to genocide?
And what of Serb hatred? This is what I was referring to by critical thinking, you say the words but you appear to be incapable of applying them to yourself. What of your own hatred captain albala? Is there anything or anyone that will be able to change that?
Give us back our land, stop with ethnic cleansing. Then we can talk.
I wish we were hating you before. That might have led to our protection. But no, we didn't hate anyone for real. That was our mistake.
google is your friend
It's not an analogy. Kosovo is Holy Land for the Serbs. The sooner the Albanians relaize that, the better it will be for the future of both people.
Some kind of comprise will be necessary, but simple demographic majority will not be the determining factor. It may work in New Jeresey when voting districts are drawn. It doesn't work in Israel and it won't work in Kosovo.
The fact is that sooner or later the Arabs will be the majority in Israel. Israel is, by definition, a Jewish state. If demographics are to determine the future of Israel, then Israel is doomed to a failure (unless its Arab population is either ignored or expelled, because the Arabs will not accept Israel as their country).
By analogy, if you wish, Serbia is a state of Serbs first and foremost, and Kosovo is a cultural, historical, spiritual and physical part of Serbia, has been and will be. End of discussion.
ping
The scope of the Jihad network is illustrated by the countries where the 107 defendants in the 1999 trial were arrested ?Albania, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. It was Egypt's biggest terrorism trial since that of Jihad members in 1981 for the assassination of Sadat. In what became known here as "the trial of the Albanian returnees," the court convicted 87 people and sentenced 10 of them to death, including Dr. Zawahiri, who was tried in absentia.
After the failed 1993 assassination attempts, Yemen became less hospitable, and many Jihad members moved to Sudan, where Mr. bin Laden had established a base and provided them work, and then to Albania.
According to the trial documents, the Albania cell's members, most employed at Islamic charities in Tirana, were forced to transfer 26 percent of their salaries to Islamic Jihad.
Some defendants said they were also instructed to find money to set up a training camp "to serve the purposes of Jihad" in Albania. The instructions, they said, came from Muhammad al-Zawahiri, the brother of the Jihad leader.
BOSNIAN AL-QA'IDAH MEMBERS PLAN ATTACKS ON NATO - TERRORISM EXPERT
SRNA - October 17, 2003
New York - A group of Islamists, 10 mujahidin trained in Afghanistan, have entered Bosnia-Hercegovina with the help of Sandzak connections and are currently in Al-Qa'idah camps near Zenica (central Bosnia) and Tuzla (northeastern Bosnia), a Serb terrorism expert, Darko Trifunovic, has told SRNA. He added that a plan to blow up a tunnel through which a column of American vehicles was meant to pass was prevented in the last moment.
Trifunovic is currently in Washington, where he is talking with American anti-terrorism experts and prominent members of the Congress about the spreading and aims of Islamic fundamentalism in the Balkans and especially in Bosnia-Hercegovina where - as Trifunovic said - they operate "with the blessing of top Muslim officials".
He said that a group of about 300 young Kosovo Albanians, who had been attacked by the concept of a Greater Muslim state, was trained in northern Albania and then transferred to Kosovo with their trainers, mujahidin fighters from Middle Eastern and North African countries. According to intelligence reports, a third of the group went to the border with Macedonia tasked with destabilizing that country. Another third went towards Serbia, where some have already been caught, while some headed for Sandzak (Raska (old Serbian name for the region)) and on the way there killed Serb children in Gorazdevac (Kosovo).
I can get you more on this topic if you want
You are doing nothing more than overreaching in an attempt to prove something convenient to you, but that has no factual basis. Let's go look at the article you linked to three times.
"To support their terrorism, they skimmed money from a charity for Muslim orphans in Albania and robbed an Italian diplomat's home in Jordan."
Nennsy, Albania was in desperate shape after the overtrow of the totalitarian regime. We needed all the help we could get. Some criminal as well as terrorist organizations tried to take advantage of this.
However once we realized who the men behind some of these "charities" were, it was taken care of:
"In what became known here as "the trial of the Albanian returnees," the court convicted 87 people and sentenced 10 of them to death, including Dr. Zawahiri, who was tried in absentia"
This is what OBL claimed the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were in return for, the 10 "Albanian returnees".
Also, the Albanian police knew how to handle AlQaeda"
"There have also been reports that the police in Albania used torture to extract confessions from suspects arrested there"
As for your other allegation:
" a Serb terrorism expert, Darko Trifunovic, has told SRNA."
That's all I need to see. This is nothing more than circular logic and self-reinforcing delusion. If these forums are an indication of anything, it is that many Serbs have an unnatural disdain of Albanians and a vested interest in tying them to America's enemies. After all you all keep saying "you have powerful allies, we'll wait". Your attempts to tie Albania and Kosova to AlQaeda are nothing more than attempts to precipitate the situation.
'The Charleston Gazette.' November 30, 1998 - Page 2A
BIN LADEN RUNS TERRORIST NETWORK, REPORT SAYS
"LONDON - The man accused of orchestrating the U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa operates a terrorist network out of Albania, The Sunday Times reported.
"The newspaper quoted Fatos Klosi, the head of the Albanian intelligence service, as saying a network run by Saudi exile Osama Bin Laden sent units to fight in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
"Bin Laden is believed to have established an Albanian operation in 1994 after telling the government he headed a wealthy Saudi humanitarian agency wanting to help Albania, the newspaper reported.
"Klosi said he believed terrorists had already infiltrated other parts of Europe from bases in Albania. Apparent confirmation of Bin Laden's activities came earlier this month during the murder trial of Claude Kader, 27, a French national who said he was a member of Bin Laden's Albanian network, the newspaper said.
"Kader claimed during the trial he had visited Albania to recruit and arm fighters for Kosovo.
The restoration and replacement of religious artifacts of history, icons, church bells and alleviating the suffering of all Kosovo people is the focal point of the DMRF.
The lost, damaged or destroyed Decani Monastary property from the terrorist attacks are now finding their way to the black market. KFOR has recently been arresting Albanians entering Macedonia with Church Icons and other Church property.
It is called turf war, ever hear of it? The OBL squad moving in on the Alb territory, cutting into profits=gang warfare.
Doesn't take a rocket scientist, Einstein, to figure that out.
Your turn HotShot!
>>>It is called turf war, ever hear of it? The OBL squad moving in on the Alb territory, cutting into profits=gang warfare.
You have quite a vivid imagination don't you Miroslav?
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