Posted on 06/29/2008 5:50:12 AM PDT by forkinsocket
On February 17, 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. Some are concerned about what NATO, the United Nations, and the European Union have nurtured there since the military and humanitarian intervention in 1999. James Jatras, a U.S.-based advocate for the Serbian Orthodox Community, put it bluntly last year when he said Kosovo was a “a beachhead into the rest of Europe” for “radical Muslims” and “terrorist elements.” It’s an assertion without evidence. “We’ve been here for so long,” said United States Army Sergeant Zachary Gore in Eastern Kosovo, “and not seen any evidence of it, that we’ve reached the assumption that it is not a viable threat.”
Nine in 10 of Kosovo’s citizens are ethnic Albanians, and more than 90 per cent of them are at least nominal Muslims. Most are so thoroughly modern and secularised that moderate doesn’t quite say it. The only word that can fairly describe Islam as practiced by the majority of Albanian Muslims is liberal. No nation can be entirely free of extremists, but Kosovo is one of the least religiously extreme Muslim-majority countries on Earth. Radical Islamists aren’t there in significant numbers now, and they aren’t likely to be in the future. Some places may be fertile ground for radicalism in the future, but Kosovo isn’t one of them for many of the same reasons that Christian theocracy isn’t coming to Western Europe.
I arrived here shortly after the declaration of independence, and the first thing I looked for – as always when I visit a Muslim-majority country – was the treatment and status of women.
Women who dress with their hair, ankles, and sometimes even faces showing in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan are often beaten or worse.
In Kosovo, by contrast, almost all women, even in small villages, dress like women in the rest of Europe. Streets, cafés, restaurants, and bars are not all-male affairs as they are in much of the Islamic world, where women spend almost all their lives behind walls. If it weren’t for the occasional mosque minaret on the skyline, there is little visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim-majority country at all. Kosovo looks, feels, and is European.
A small number of well-heeled Islamic extremists from the Gulf states have moved into Kosovo to rebuild damaged mosques and transform liberal Balkan Islam into the more severe version found in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. They’ve had a small amount of success with a similar project in nearby Bosnia, but they’re meeting stiffer resistance from Kosovo’s religious community as well as from secular citizens.
“We are working very hard to stop these kinds of movements,” said Professor Xhabir Hamiti, of the Islamic studies department at the University of Pristina. “These kinds of movements are dangerous for all nations, for all faiths, for all religions. We are Muslims, but we think the European way. I am a Muslim, I am a scholar, I know how to deal with Islam in my country. There is no need for Arabs to come here. I have no need for their suggestions, no need for their explanations. We created our Islam ourselves here, and we can continue our Islam with our own minds.”
It would be wrong to suggest Kosovo has no Islamists at all, but in the last election in late 2007, the country’s single Islamic party gained only 1.7 per cent of the vote. Kosovo is not the Middle East, and Albanians are not Arabs. The majority converted to Islam relatively recently under Turkish Ottoman rule, and Albanian culture was first solidly Christian. “We Albanians,” Dom Lush Gjergji recently wrote, “descendants of the Illyrians, are Christians from the time of the Apostles… Without Christianity there would be no Albanian people, language, culture, or traditions… Albanians consider Christianity their patrimony, their spiritual and cultural inheritance.” Gjergji is a Catholic priest, but I heard similar comments from many who self-identify as Muslims. “Albanian people are not very religious,” said Agron Rezniqi, of the Friendship Association between Kosovo and Israel “We come from Catholicism, and for that, we are not such strong Muslims.”
Perhaps the best evidence available that Albanian Muslims, in both Kosovo and Albania proper, differ radically from their Arab world counterparts is their relationship with Jews and with Israel. Jews in Albania had an almost 100 per cent survival rate during the Nazi occupation. The country was known as a safe haven where Jews could find protection under the noses of the German authorities. According to Dan Michman, chief historian at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, there were three times as many Jews in Albania at the end of the Second World War as there were at the beginning.
Both Albania and Kosovo have excellent relations with Israel, and Israelis are more than welcome to travel and even live among Albanians. An Israeli from Tel Aviv named Shachar Caspi opened a bakery and a bistro bar in Pristina. “Nobody has given me any problems or been against Israel,” he told me. “[Kosovars] had good relations with Jewish people even back in the old days. And nobody here is radical. On the contrary, people are very warm, they are very nice, they have taken Islam to a beautiful place, not to a violent place. When they hear I am Israeli, the way they react, they react very warmly.”
Much of the angst about Kosovo’s alleged radicalism centres on the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an organisation that no longer even exists.
It was a short-lived guerrilla movement that rose up against Slobodan Milosevic’s régime, first to fight for independence from an apartheid-like system, and later as a defence against mass murder and ethnic-cleansing. The KLA was always thoroughly secular and in no way resembled a Balkan Hamas or Hezbollah.
Its leaders also distinguished themselves from their Bosnian counterparts when they flatly refused assistance from Arabic mujahideen who wanted to fight a holy war there against Serbs. Albanians don’t fight religious wars, not against themselves, and not against others.
There has been no fighting or even tension between Muslim and Christian Albanians, only between Serbs and Albanians.
The danger in Kosovo isn’t that international peace keepers are nurturing a jihad state. Rather, a premature withdrawal may lead to a resumption of the fighting between Serbs and Albanians that they moved in to stop in the first place.
Please allow me to translate this double-speak into understandable English: The KLA, being nothing more than a gang of international drug traffickers and common criminals, more resemble the Taliban of Afghanistan than they do the fundamentalist jihadist Balkan Hamas or Hezbollah.
Amazing that anybody would see the action of running and terrorizing every other ethnic group out of the province as “liberal” or anything like that. The Albanian Kosovars are basically savages; barbarism would be a step upwards for them.
the part i think is interesting is how the albanians were
communist chinese affiliated during tito’s yugoslavia.
now, they emerge as islamic jihadists!
Don’t you mean the Serbs?
Point is more than enough guilt to go around for alll parties.
Bump
Yeah right....just play the youtube in my name
So this means they haven’t been razing hundreds of churches for years now? Or ethnically cleansing Christians when they are in the minority in an area?
No, I emphatically do not mean the Serbs. From everything I’ve ever managed to get hold of which appeared believable, the Serbs are the closest thing there is to normal, decent, middle-class people in the Balkans. I’m convinced everything we’ve been fed by NATO and Clinton propaganda organs about the Balkans over the last 15 years or thereabouts is total unadulterated BS. Christians simply and basically do not do the kinds of things Serbs have been accused of. Slammites on the other hand not only do those kinds of things, but excel at falsely accusing others of doing them.
Tell that to four of the Kosovo Albanian members of Ft. Dix Six, one of whom was a KLA sniper during the war.
Or how about the now-renamed bin Laden mosque in Kosovo?
Totten is apparently fairly well respected on Iraq, but he's a complete moron on the Balkans. He thinks that just because he sees Albanian women without covered heads, he is seeing "moderate Islam". Yeah, right -- someone should take him on a tour of the 150+ Christian churches that were destroyed by these "moderate Muslims" -- or introduce him to YouTube where he can see it as it happened!
You really don’t know much about the Balkans then.
The Churches were demolished because they were Serbian churches and those acts were of a national, not a confessional nature. In the meantime, the Albanians in Kosovo are raising a Roman Catholic Church.
Jared Israel's site is as good a place as any to educate yourself about the Balkans.
The question anybody has to ask himself is, after that one, what part of the BS are we supposed to go on believing??
The Yugoslav Wars of Dissolution
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/yugoslavia.htm
Lecture 25: The Yugoslav Civil War*
http://www.lib.msu.edu/sowards/balkan/lect25.htm
Google Yugoslav Wars
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=%22yugoslav+wars%22&start=0&sa=N
“Christians simply and basically do not do the kinds of things Serbs have been accused of.”
Don’t read much history do you.
I read a LOT of history; apparently considerably more than several of the people posting on this thread.
Considering that I’m from the Balkans I’ll pass on Jared Israel and his Marxist interpretation of Balkan history. Why a member of Free Republic would use a Marxist source like Jared Israel is beyond me.
The recent problems in Kosovo started when Milosevic rescinded the autonomy of the region in 89. Basically, he HAD to; every other ethnic group in the province was being brutalized by the Albanians.
The stories on that page are from the NY Times before there was any sort of a NATO or KKKlinton axe to grind on the topic. The stories describe AK behavior:
...Ethnic Albanians in the Government have manipulated public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs. And politicians have exchanged vicious insults.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....
...The federal Secretary for National Defense, Fleet Adm. Branko Mamula, told the army's party organization in September of efforts by ethnic Albanians to subvert the armed forces. ''Between 1981 and 1987 a total of 216 illegal organizations with 1,435 members of Albanian nationality were discovered in the Yugoslav People's Army,'' he said. Admiral Mamula said ethnic Albanian subversives had been preparing for ''killing officers and soldiers, poisoning food and water, sabotage, breaking into weapons arsenals and stealing arms and ammunition, desertion and causing flagrant nationalist incidents in army units....
I mean, the behavior of these people hasn't changed, they were a gigantic problem in Yugoslavia and Kosovo is a gigantic problem now, basically the crime capital of Europe responsible for or involved in more than half of all of numerous major categories of crime including narcotics trafficking, trafficking in women, trafficking in stolen vehicles, and pretty much any sort of thing you could name.
And they are milking it for all the publicity they can get, to whitewash the bin Laden Mosque debacle.
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