Posted on 08/31/2005 3:27:34 PM PDT by mark502inf
The Serbian mistake of 1918, when the victorious kingdom gambled on [establishing] Yugoslavia, rather than consolidating a compact state of Serbia, continues to haunt Belgrade.
Territory governed from Belgrade continues to shrink. Next year, Montenegro can call a referendum to decide whether to secede. -snip-
Montenegro is not alone in contemplating exit. Negotiations are likely to begin this year on the status of Kosovo, formally part of Serbia, in reality a ward of the international community, and in the minds of almost all its ethnic Albanian citizens a putative independent state.
What goes around comes around. Kosovo was the launching pad for the crazed nationalism engineered by Milosevic as Yugoslavia began to crumble. Now it will, in all likelihood, be the last piece of Serbia to go ... -snip-
The problem, however, is that Serbia, ever quick to denounce ethnic Albanian "terrorism" in Kosovo, has scarcely begun to confront the crimes it committed on a vast scale in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.
A video of Serbs killing Muslims at Srebrenica, shown in June, provoked a shock here. That was salutary. It was also a terrible indictment of the degree of Serbian ignorance ...
-snip- ... progress toward EU membership will not occur until two chief protagonists of Serbian violence, General Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, are handed over to the international tribunal. ...
Within the army, younger officers, with an eye on potential NATO membership, favor Mladic's handover. But older officers cannot accept this. "They say they will never accept the arrest of a man with whom they fought in Bosnia," ...
That's interesting. One of Serbia's many fictions is that the Yugoslav Army never fought in Bosnia and the campaign there had nothing to do with Belgrade. Nonsense, of course, but Serbia remains ambivalent about reality.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
There's something in the water... unfortunately the side effects don't include infertility.
Years After Milosevic, Serbia's Illusions Persist
By ROGER COHEN
Every month officers of the armed forces of Serbia and Montenegro are asked if they have taken any foreign trips. The questioning is a routine matter, a hangover from the communist era.
In come the replies - a family holiday in Turkey, a visit to the Black Sea coast. More officers are traveling these days, often with newly acquired passports, although monthly salaries of about $450 (for a lieutenant colonel) limit foreign sojourns.
There is also a problem, not a new one in Serbia, with defining what is inside and what outside the country. Some officers who have visited Bosnia balk at categorizing the trips as foreign travel. They say they were stationed there and will never be able to consider the former Yugoslav territory as "foreign."
The protests are summarily dismissed: An international border now separates Serbia from Bosnia. But such little confrontations, witnessed and related by an army member, say much about the confused state of Serbia as the fifth anniversary of the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic approaches on Oct. 5.
At its most basic level, this confusion centers on geography. Within the greater question of where Europe ends, a matter of growing debate in Brussels, lies the smaller but still volatile question of where Serbia ends.
The historic Serbian mistake of 1918, when the victorious kingdom gambled on a large country that would take the name Yugoslavia, rather than consolidating a compact state of Serbia, continues to haunt Belgrade. Just how to complete the long pullback from this hubris-driven overreach remains unclear.
The territory governed from Belgrade continues to shrink. Next year, under an accord devised by the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, Montenegro can call a referendum to decide whether to secede.
Its union with Serbia is already something of a fiction - the two republics use different currencies - and many weary Serbs are inclined to say good riddance to the funny federation sometimes called "Solandia."
But Vojislav Kostunica, Serbia's conservative prime minister, is opposed to Montenegrin independence. So is the army. So is the EU, which sees no need for another European mini-state. So are many Montenegrins, who worry about losing access to good Belgrade hospitals and other perks. As a result, the 2006 referendum remains in doubt.
This uncertainty is unhelpful. "The sooner they decide, the better," said Goran Svilanovic, a former foreign minister. "We need to know the answer to this question: Are you in my country or not? People suffer from a chronic identity problem."
The nature of that problem is familiar enough. Belgrade is the capital of a vanishing state that once stretched to the Austrian border. Its peeling stucco and abandoned old cars are emblematic of decline. Nobody needs a thousand guesses to determine who the big loser from Yugoslavia's disintegration was. Slovenia and Croatia have left Serbia in the dust.
But Serbian illusions persist. As the officers' reluctance to qualify Bosnia as foreign suggests, former bigness is hard to reconcile with current smallness. Belief in some Serbian "Sonderweg," or "special way," endures below the surface. That makes acceptance of a mediocre reality difficult.
Part of this reality is that Montenegro is not alone in contemplating the exit. Negotiations are likely to begin later this year on the status of Kosovo, which is formally part of Serbia, in reality a ward of the international community, and in the minds of almost all its ethnic Albanian citizens a putative independent state.
What goes around comes around. Kosovo was the launching pad for the crazed nationalism engineered by Milosevic as Yugoslavia began to crumble. Now it will, in all likelihood, be the last piece of Serbia to go, but not without a bitter struggle over what many Serbs like to refer to as the cradle of their civilization.
When two Serbs were killed last weekend in a shooting in Kosovo, Kostunica and Boris Tadic, the Serbian president, rushed to issue statements of outrage. In essence, their message was that the incident demonstrated how far Kosovo remains from the basic standards Europe and the United States demand of any community with ambitions to self-governance. They had a point.
The problem, however, is that Serbia, ever quick to denounce ethnic Albanian "terrorism" in Kosovo, has scarcely begun to confront the crimes it committed on a vast scale in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.
A video of Serbs killing Muslims at Srebrenica, shown in June at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague, provoked a shock here. That was salutary. It was also a terrible indictment of the degree of Serbian ignorance a decade after the Bosnian war. Six Bosnian Muslims being shot in 1995 were shown in the video. Six! In the early months of the Bosnian war in 1992, tens of thousands of Muslims were driven from their homes, herded into camps and selectively killed. Over that murderous campaign silence reigns. From Kostunica down, obfuscation of the "They-killed-us-we-killed-them" variety is still encouraged.
"If you ask people here about joining the EU, everyone agrees," said Dusan Pavlovic, a political scientist. "But if you ask them about Serbian responsibility for war crimes, most people would say no. And if you ask them how you can integrate with Europe without accepting responsibility, they stare at you in dismay."
Of course, progress toward EU membership will not occur until two chief protagonists of Serbian violence, General Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, are handed over to the international tribunal. Kostunica and Tadic have committed themselves to their capture, but national sentiment seems divided.
Within the army, younger officers, with an eye on potential NATO membership, favor Mladic's handover. But older officers cannot accept his capture. "They say they will never accept the arrest of a man with whom they fought in Bosnia," said the army member.
That's interesting. One of Serbia's, and Milosevic's, many fictions is that the Yugoslav Army never fought in Bosnia and the campaign there had nothing to do with Belgrade. Nonsense, of course, but Serbia remains ambivalent about reality.
Besides, posting a Cohen article who has publicly stated he is biased and despises the Serbs?
hmmm, while in Beograd and having a casual conversation with him (unbenownst to him I was a Serb-American,but only as an American passing through as a college student/tourist), Cohen states to me that he despises the Serb people. That was back in the summer of 1994, Mark.
Disregard anything he writes about the Serbs.
marks post, bump
The author is completely misinformed on this point.
"Yugoslavism" (preceded by "Illyrianism"), was largely a Croat driven idea. Serbia did not so much aspire to create Yugoslavia, as Croats & Slovenes aspired to join a common south-slavic union where they hoped to be on a more equal footing, rather than constant second class citizens in Austria-Hungary.
Of course Serbia, after the enormous price she paid in blood in WW1, was happy to accept the former Hapsburg territories as compensation. So there was a problem with perceptions from the beginning, as one side initially saw the "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes" as emancipation, while the other side saw it largely as reparations.
From the Serb point of view, they were being generous by accepting their wayward slavic cousins in a common state on an equal footing, considering that Croats & Slovenes, being Hapsburg subjects, had fought against them in the war. But it proved a dissapointment to Croats & Slovenes who wanted a very loose federal structure, something that would give them quasi-independence. Croatia's pro-nazi Ustasha regime during WW2 would seal the bad blood.
I will agree with the author, however, that it was a mistake for Serbia to accept Croatia & Slovenia into Yugoslavia.
The media gives the impression that one day Slobodan Milosevic woke up and decided to unleash paramillitaries on Serbia's peaceful co-inhabitants, but that is hardly the case.
Slovenian & Croatian secession started the war, an important point that is quickly forgotten. So Serbs do have a point too...
Disregard anything he writes about the Serbs.
He's more likely to build a shrine to the guy.
This is a typical piece of propaganda BS, loaded with fabrications and author's opinions / interpretations. No factual information.
Fiction:
>>The Serbian mistake of 1918, when the victorious kingdom gambled on [establishing] Yugoslavia, rather than consolidating a compact state of Serbia, continues to haunt Belgrade.<<
Fact:
November 1918
"A National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs met in Zagreb and called for the unification of all the South Slavs in the Habsburg lands. The Croatian Sabor merged with this National Council. Fearful of Italy, the National Council then pledged allegiance to Serbia. In this manner a unified Yugoslav state came into existence before the formal peace talks began."
Fiction:
>>Kosovo was the launching pad for the crazed nationalism engineered by Milosevic<<
Fact:
Gazimestan - June 28, 1989 -- Excerpts from SM's speech:
..." Yugoslavia is a multinational community and it can survive only under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it.
The crisis that hit Yugoslavia has brought about national divisions, but also social, cultural, religious and many other less important ones. Among all these divisions, nationalist ones have shown themselves to be the most dramatic. Resolving them will make it easier to remove other divisions and mitigate the consequences they have created.
For as long as multinational communities have existed, their weak point has always been the relations between different nations. The threat is that the question of one nation being endangered by the others can be posed one day -- and this can then start a wave of suspicions, accusations, and intolerance, a wave that invariably grows and is difficult to stop. This threat has been hanging like a sword over our heads all the time. Internal and external enemies of multi-national communities are aware of this and therefore they organize their activity against multinational societies mostly by fomenting national conflicts."...
So this is how the crazed nationalst Serb leader ignited the fuse, eh? LOL
Fiction:
>>Serbia, ever quick to denounce ethnic Albanian "terrorism" in Kosovo, has scarcely begun to confront the crimes it committed on a vast scale in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.
A video of Serbs killing Muslims at Srebrenica, shown in June, provoked a shock here. That was salutary. It was also a terrible indictment of the degree of Serbian ignorance ...<<
Fact:
The "video" shows execution of 6 men. Not sure what exactly was it supposed to prove, but it most certainly doesn't prove the alleged massacre of thousands of civilians in Srebrenica.
Fiction:
>>One of Serbia's many fictions is that the Yugoslav Army never fought in Bosnia and the campaign there had nothing to do with Belgrade. Nonsense, of course, but Serbia remains ambivalent about reality.<<
Fact:
The author's confusion (or his intent to confuse and mislead semi-informed readers) is again obvious. JNA (Yugoslav Army) pulled out from Bosnia when the "International Community" recognized B&H as a state.
The author's point was that the shock to the Serb citizenry of seeing that video proves the extent to which so many Serbs are living in a state of denial. As further evidenced by your post.
Just as the Americans would be shocked if they were shown all the gruesome things we have done to our adversaries. Every nation lives in denial.
What a moron Cohen is! Kosovo's Albanians are not different than Palestinian terrorists are.
I'll say this for the Serbs, in spite of fighting wars with Christian Slovenia, the Bosnian Muslims, the Christian Croats, and the Kosovar Albanians; ...--the Serbs are still absolutely convinced that everyone else is at fault and they are blameless
And in spite of the fact that the entire world (even in those countries that officially support us) is against our presencre in Iraq ... we maintain that "everyone else is at fault and [we] are blameless." Recognize the pattern?
And they are more right than wrong.
Read the last sentence in the article.
You can't call the Hague Tribunal a court! It is a insult to humanity.
Repeat all the lies you wish, only you Clintonistas hold them to be true.
Only islamofascist shills are so dim as to believe that; everyone else knows that Paddy Ashdown selected the people to issue the false apology.
Of course, the Clintonistas who post such drek fall upon their kneepads and continue to service their true master.
A war with Slovenia? You can't even get your lies right, Osama502inf.
September 1, 2005 Rejecting Reality
by Nebojsa Malic
And the Hypocrites Who Do It
In October 2004, Roger Cohen wrote a column for the International Herald Tribune titled "The Serbian Question," arguing that reducing Serbia to a more manageable size and turning it over to the benevolent hegemony of the European Union would finally resolve the issues behind the 1990s wars. It was the ICG platform in a nutshell, reiterated just three months later in a barrage of editorials and adopted in May as Washington's "new" Balkans policy.
Cohen revisited the issue this Wednesday, in another IHT column, titled "Years After Milosevic, Serbia's Illusions Persist." According to him, even though the fountainhead of all evil was deposed and sent to the Hague Inquisition, Serbia is still stubbornly refusing to come to grips with reality.
If so, then – good for Serbia! It isn't the one that has issues with reality.
In his screed, Cohen claims Milosevic used Kosovo as the "launching pad for crazed nationalism" in 1989. Yet even a cursory glance at the oft-mentioned but never quoted 1989 speech reveals precisely the opposite. Cohen accuses Serbia of both the creation and destruction of Yugoslavia; both "crazed nationalism" and a "chronic identity problem" (this from someone suffering from just such a problem, treacherous former Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic). He even has the temerity to accuse the Serbs of exceptionalism.
Throughout all this, he makes absolutely zero mention of outside involvement in the Yugoslav crisis. There is no reference to Washington's support of Croatian and Bosnian secession, its lavish funding of the separatists in Montenegro, or its financial, logistical, diplomatic, and military support for the Albanian separatists in Kosovo. The expulsions of Serbs from Croatia in 1991 and 1995; the death tolls from Bosnia that indicate it was a brutal civil war, not "aggression" and certainly not "genocide"; the NATO bombing of 1999; the KLA's subsequent ethnic cleansing of non-Albanians from Kosovo – to Cohen, these either never happened, or do not merit mention. Instead, all of it is blamed on some sort of phantom Serbian psychosis. This argument isn't new; it's been used by Austria-Hungary in 1914, by Hitler in 1941, by the Communists since 1944, and is now being aggressively pushed by servants of the American Empire.
On Saturday night, two Serb youths were killed and one wounded when "unidentified attackers" shot up their car near Strpce in Kosovo. It was just another in a long string of deliberate attacks aimed at intimidating the remaining Serbs into abandoning Kosovo to its Albanian occupiers. Of course, mainstream news agencies and newspapers didn't see it that way. Reuters chose to focus on the statement of UN police commissioner Kai Vittrup that "the police consider this to be an isolated incident."
The agency's report also downplayed the protests of Serbian authorities, and provided a lengthy "context" section explaining that Kosovo was occupied by NATO after "Serb forces" were "accused of atrocities," while Serb civilians "fled a wave of revenge attacks."
"I am shocked and appalled by this senseless and tragic crime," UN viceroy Soren Jessen-Petersen told journalists. Nicholas Wood of the New York Times (published in IHT on Monday) was so impressed with this platitude, he actually wrote it up twice in his story about the attack. Or was it the story about UNMIK's reaction to the attack, rather? That seems to be the problem with articles about Kosovo; they are always about the opinions of NATO, UNMIK, the State Department, or the European something-or-other bureaucrat, but never about what actually happened to the people there.
Wood also quoted one Neeraj Singh, "a UN official," who said, "Incidents may happen from time to time, but that does not establish a trend really." Singh should be promoted to the Reality Denial Administration at once; only someone with no sense of decency, or the IQ of toast, could make such an idiotic statement after six years of "incidents" that absolutely do establish a trend. Had Mr. Singh not heard of the farmers of Staro Gracko (1999)? Or the children in Gorazdevac and the Stolic family in Obilic (2003)? Or the pogrom of March 2004?! The pattern is clear as day – except to those whose job is to deny it.
Last week, as the show trial of Slobodan Milosevic resumed, the Hague Inquisition ran into a brick wall, when its definition of "Greater Serbia" was demolished by none other than its most outspoken advocate. According to the clear definition by the currently testifying Radical leader Vojislav Seselj, the prosecutors' concept of "Greater Serbia" is absolutely inaccurate. The waffling prosecutors then tried to redefine the term to fit the indictment, coming up with a "definition" that easily fit the old Yugoslav federation. This prompted a sarcastic comment from Milosevic: "Three years on, and you still have no idea what you're accusing me of!"
For, if Yugoslavia was the same as Greater Serbia, then why would Milosevic and his "co-conspirators" seek to destroy it in order to build a Greater Serbia? The sheer mindlessness of this "logic" is painful. Why, using the Inquisitors' "definitions," Josip Broz Tito could be indicted as a member of the "joint criminal enterprise"! And that concept, even less substantial than the ephemeral "Greater Serbia" of ICTY's imagination, was created specifically for the Inquisition as a way of assigning guilt by perceived association. Alice in Wonderland made more sense…
When in the aftermath of Sept. 11 some Americans started paying attention to claims that Islamic terrorists had infiltrated the Balkans during the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, the "strategic class" that had suppressed the jihad dimension of those conflicts immediately issued stringent denials. "Serbian propaganda," was the knee-jerk response of those who had peddled anti-Serb propaganda for years.
Then Serbian authorities arrested one of the Madrid bombing suspects. The arrest was made in June, but only made public Aug. 18, to the muted reaction of Imperial press. To acknowledge that international Islamic terrorists were traveling through the Balkans, or that Serbian authorities had a hand in their apprehension, went against the grain of their Balkans reporting. Only 10 days later did the AP come up with a story that tried to smooth the jagged edge of jihad in the peninsula:
"News reports during the conflict in Bosnia suggested that outsiders joined Bosnia's Muslims in their conflict with the region's Serbs and Croats – though the extent of their impact in the chaos was never clear."
Suggested? There is a mountain of evidence concerning the mujahedin presence in Bosnia, and their "impact" is similarly well-documented in snuff videos used for jihad recruiting. AP reporters also collected statements from NATO and EU spokesmen in Bosnia and Kosovo, who offered meaningless statements of "concern," but also denied there was any al-Qaeda presence or threat.
Rubbish, claimed the Muslim weekly Slobodna Bosna. Citing the locations of jihad camps and the identity of their organizers, the magazine accused the Empire of deliberately ignoring terrorism in Bosnia as part of a strategy:
"The paper quoted former UN representative in Bosnia, Jacques Klein, as having confirmed to the Security Council that Islamic terrorists were active in Bosnia, but added that it was good they were concentrated in one place, because 'the rest of the world would be safe.'"
Ah, the famous "flypaper" strategy that has worked so spectacularly for Madrid and London.
As it becomes clear from just these few examples, it isn't the Serbian people that lack connection with reality. Their politicians, perhaps – but even so, nowhere near to the extent of Empire's presstitutes, bureaucrats, inquisitors, and PR hacks. It is more than a bit rich for them to accuse someone of rejecting reality, when the entire Empire is based on explicit contempt for the "reality-based community."
Serbians do have many illusions, the greatest of which is that the Empire means them well. Right after that is a belief that in today's world there are still laws and rules. The "reality" they are being bullied into accepting has been conjured by lies and maintained by force, and they do well by rejecting it. More people should – and will. The harder the Empire violates reality, the harder it will snap back to reassert itself.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
A war with Slovenia? You can't even get your lies right
History and about 284,000 web-sites disagree with you.
As this Slovene writes below, the Slovene war for independence had several causes, but was sparked by Milosevic's nationalist agenda and oppression in Kosovo. The Slovenes did not want the same treatment.
As soon as Kosovo's duly elected government was forcefully ousted by the Serbian leadership, the government of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia sought to bring this violation of the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution (as well as the infringements of the rights of the Albanian majority of this province) to the attention of the international community. For Slovenes the events in Kosovo were an omen of what could happen to them and the other small republics and provinces of the federation. Once the Yugoslav League of Communists was dissolved into republican factions and the federal presidency was effectively in the hands of protagonists for a "Greater Serbia" there remained for Slovenia no other recourse than to request that the federal constitution be re-negotiated to guarantee the sovereignty of the federation's constituent republics and autonomous provinces
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