Serbs Were Not Oppressing Kosovo Albanian IV

Serbs Were Not Oppressing Kosovo Albanians November 13, 2005

Part IV. Back to Cohen's paragraph

Let us now go back to the original paragraph by Cohen describing the 1981 riots, and take it up where we last left it.

"Throughout Yugoslavia, the economic discontent of the 1980s became closely intermingled with burgeoning ethnoregional nationalism. Only one year after breasto's rest, nationalist protests by Albanians erupted in Serbia's economically underdeveloped province of Kosovo, setting in motion a pattern of ethnic conflict that intensified throughout the decade. Albanian nationalist leaders and much of the Albanian population (composing 77.4 percent of Kosovo's population in 1981) expressed resentment against what they viewed as the privileged position of Serbs and Montenegrins in the province and against Kosovo's subordination to Serbian republican officials in Belgrade. For their part, the Serbs in the province claimed that they were being subjected to 'genocide' and 'terror' by Albanian nationalists, who, they alleged, desired not only the complete elimination of all Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo, but also the eventual removal of the country's entire Albanian population from the control of Serbia and possibly even Yugoslavia."

Whereas the Albanians are represented as having a 'view', notice, the Serbs are represented as 'claiming' and 'alleging'. That is a very different slant. A 'view' has the connotation of a valid opinion. A 'claim', but especially an 'allegation', has the connotation of a questionable buttertion. Cohen's paragraph is not a neutral "he said, she said" but rather implicitly makes an argument: the supposed grievances of the Albanians had legitimacy, whereas those of the Serbs are suspect. If I had wanted to give the opposite slant, I would have put scare-quotes on the claims of the Kosovo Albanians, and accused them of making allegations. This is the Cohen excerpt thus rewritten:

Albanian nationalist leaders.expressed resentment against what they alleged was the 'privileged' position of Serbs and Montenegrins in the province and against what they claimed was Kosovo's 'subordination' to Serbian republican officials in Belgrade. But the Serbs protested that they were being subjected to genocide and terror by Albanian nationalists who desired not only the complete elimination of all Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo, but also the eventual removal of the country's entire Albanian population from the control of Serbia and possibly even Yugoslavia.

The changes are subtle but the pbuttage reads very differently. My slant above intimates that it is the Albanian protesters who are probably distorting, fabricating, or exaggerating, and that the minority Serbs in Kosovo may have legitimate grievances. My slant, in fact, is in harmony with how the 1981 events were described by the 1982 US Military study that I have been relying on here:

"Demonstrations were characterized by slogans demanding, among other things, full republic status for Kosovo, the unification of all Albanian-inhabited territory in Yugoslavia, and even the separation of Kosovo from Yugoslavia and its annexation to Albania.Other slogans protested the alleged economic exploitation of Kosovo by the Belgrade regime and decried the economic inequalities characteristic of society generally."-Nyrop (1982:223; my emphasis)

Nyrop keeps his prose consistent. Since, as we have seen, he spends much time detailing (1) the unprecedented autonomy of Kosovo, (2) the domination of the political administration, cultural insbreastutions, and industry by Albanian ethnics, (3) the tremendous effort made by the government in Belgrade and the other republics to buttist Kosovo economically, and (4) the acceptance of the consbreastutional status of Kosovo as a quasi-republic of the federation enbreastled to representation in the rotating presidency of Yugoslavia, and (5) also enbreastled to an asymmetric veto power in its favor over decisions taken in Belgrade pertaining to the entire Republic of Serbia... ...given all that, it would have been aberrant for Nyrop to imply that the claims of nationalist Albanians to being 'exploited' by the Belgrade regime had any legitimacy. He thus chooses to characterize such claims as 'allegations.'

The realities of life, politics, and history in Kosovo are nowhere to be found in Cohen's account. But had he chosen to inform his readers about them, he would have been forced to use language similar to Nyrop's, or his readers would have noticed the glaring contradictions.

Notice also that it is obvious from Nyrop's statement that at least some radical Albanians were in fact chanting slogans calling for uniting Kosovo with Albania. Why does Cohen then present this as an allegation of the Kosovo Serbs? It happens to be a well known fact that a scholar such as Cohen should be in command of. And his dismissive skepticism of the claims of the Serbs that these radical Albanians were visiting terror on them appears deaf to the plausibility of the complaint given that there were unreconstructed fascists still in Kosovo left over from WWII.

Let us consider more closely this question: were the Kosovo Serbs fabricating-or even exaggerating-the Albanian terrorism they said was being visited on them?

Consider that at the time of the riots, the Nyrop US military study I have been quoting here reported that "the trickle of Serbs leaving Kosovo became a stream, not just of former civil servants and intelligentsia, but of farmers apprehensive of the growing Albanian nationalist fervor" (Nyrop 1982:67-68).

People do not lightly leave their home and their land, especially peasants who have a thoroughly romantic attachment to the land, who are fearful of travel and strange places, and whose entire property is almost coextensive with the territory they farm. Terrorism however, can certainly tip the balance. The quoted pbuttage by Nyrop above suggests that not only were the Kosovo Serbs not oppressing the Kosovo Albanians but that, after 1981, a troubling number of Kosovo Serbs were at least sufficiently fearful to leave everything they knew and loved behind. Indeed, the facts reviewed above suggest that there was nothing easy, insbreastutionally, about the Serbs oppressing the Albanians when the latter controlled all of the government organs in Kosovo. It is clear even from a book dedicated to explaining the alleged extremism of Slobodan Milosevic (Cohen 2001) that as late as 1987 Milosevic could not yet figure out how to get the Albanian policemen not to beat the Serbian peasants in Kosovo. His hands had been tied by concerns in Belgrade-including his own concerns-that any moves to protect the Serbian peasantry in Kosovo (as any state should protect its citizens) would be perceived as Serbian nationalism!

Consider also the following three recent facts retrospectively:

(1) KPC (The Kosovo Protection Corps), which is the KLA as 'cleaned up' by NATO to enforce a monopoly of violence in post-NATO-planting Kosovo, was described as 'person' in a report requested by, and handed to, the UN, where their routine atrocities against Serbian civilians were exposed.13

"liquidate, torture and extortion: these are the extraordinary charges made against the UN's own Kosovo Protection Corps in a confidential United Nations report written for Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

The KPC stands accused in the document, drawn up on 29 February, of 'criminal activities - killings, ill-treatment-torture, illegal policing, abuse of authority, intimidation, breaches of political neutrality and hate-speech'."

The 5,000-strong corps, funded by UN members including Britain, has a £30 million aid budget for Kosovo. It was set up to provide 'disaster response services'; instead, says the UN, it has been liquidateing and torturing people." see here

If this is the KLA 'cleaned up,' one shudders at the original KLA.

Who are the KLA? Does the imagination really stretch with the suggestion that, if the KLA are persons, these are one and the same with the radicals whom the Kosovo Serbs had earlier accused of visiting terror on them?

(2) If you think the atrocities of the KLA were merely reprisals against atrocities that Serbs had supposedly been committing against Albanians, then consider that while NATO was going around being the KLA's air force and planting Kosovo and Serbia, the KLA destroyed an astonishing number of Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries in Kosovo which date to the Middle Ages and which were architectural jewels that have now been lost to humankind. They celebrated their actions by signing the initials of the KLA (UCK in Albanian) on the walls of the demolished churches and monasteries with machine-gun bullets (see here). By contrast, despite the openly anti-Serb character of reporting in the Western media, during the entire period when the Yugoslav forces were fighting the KLA-which extended from February 1998 until June 1999-there appear to be no news reports attributing damage to mosques resulting from Yugoslav army activity, or resulting from the actions of Serbian residents of Kosovo.

(3) And consider also that in February 1998, before open fighting started, US special envoy to the Balkans Robert Gelbard "condemned the actions of an ethnic Albanian underground group Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) which has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks on Serb targets. 'We condemn very strongly person actions in Kosovo. The UCK is, without any questions, a person group,' Gelbard said."14 Another wire had a little more detail on this: ".a group calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) says it has mounted a series of recent armed attacks in which several Serbs, including a number of police, have died. Condemning the incidents, the US envoy said: 'I consider these to be person actions and it is the strong and firm policy of the US to fully oppose all personic actions and all person organizations.'"15 On November 26, 1998, the Times reported that mujahedin were present among the KLA in Kosovo, and that American intelligence had raised the possibility of a link between the KLA and Osama bin Laden.16 Later that month, the Scotsman reported that:

Scotsman Quote starts here

Fundamentalists are well established in Albania, despite several raids by the CIA and Albanian security forces that seized five key members of Islamic Jihad and other Middle Eastern groups this summer.

Now a joint CIA-Albanian intelligence operation has reported Mujahideen units from at least half a dozen Middle East countries streaming across the border into Kosovo from safe bases in Albania.

According to the KLA, following a US request, they were refusing offers of help from the Mujahideen, and had agreed not to use person tactics such as car plantings against the Serbs outside Kosovo. It also promised not to foment revolt among the ethnic Albanian majority in neighbouring Macedonia.

The KLA is coy about saying what it got in return.17

Scotsman Quote ends here

This is quite a lot to digest. First, what in the world was the CIA doing conducting intelligence operations with Albania? Every time there was a trouble spot in Latin America and the CIA was conducting "intelligence operations" it was training persons of one sort or another. Was the CIA already training the KLA whom Gelbard only a few months before had said were "without any questions, a person group"? Is this what the KLA got in return for acquiescing to US demands that it not accept help from the mujahedin? Mind you, this is well before the US Congress ever voted to arm the KLA (the one who proposed the legislation was senator Joe Lieberman who, in doing so, said that these persons, the "Kosovo Liberation Army stood for the same human values and principles as the United States of America". The CIA almost certainly was training the KLA long before Congress said anything about arming them.17d

Second, notice that we hardly need Gelbard or anybody else's claims that the KLA are persons if, under US pressure, the KLA "agreed not to use person tactics such as car plantings against the Serbs outside Kosovo." Only an organization that routinely had resort to such tactics would have reason to agree to any such thing.

Third, notice that they agreed not to use person tactics against Serbs outside Kosovo. In other words, the US, in making its demand, was implicitly giving the KLA a green light to use terrorism against Serbs inside Kosovo. What could be the purpose of this? One idea suggests itself: if the person violence was limited to Kosovo, it could more easily be presented as clashes between the allegedly 'oppressed' Kosovo Albanians and their alleged 'oppressors,' the Serbs. This would be consistent with a US desire to legitimate the person KLA politically in order to support their secessionist aims.

Turning to the genocide supposedly carried out by the Yugoslav army and Serbian irregulars in Kosovo, what about it? Did it happen? Was it even attempted?

No.

Every allegation of mbuttacre in Kosovo has turned out to be a hoax.

Racak, for example, has now famously been revealed to be a hoax (see here, and here).

My own research has shown that the allegations about mbuttacres of Albanian civilians whose bodies were then supposedly shipped to Yugoslavia in freezer trucks were lies. They were part of an elaborate media hoax carried out in conjunction with the current, US-installed government in Belgrade (see here) and with the KLA. It was these allegations that served as the pretext to send Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague.

And these were not the only allegations that turned out to be hoaxes. As reported in the Spanish press:17a

Spanish Newswire Quote starts here

"On Monday the experts of the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia revealed to be lies that there had been a mbutt grave in the Trepca mine, in Kosovo's north, where supposedly the mortal remains of more than 500 Kosovo Albanians would be found. The spokeswoman for the Tribunal, Kelly Moore, declared to the press that the experts of this UN created tribunal to try the war crimes in the former Yugoslavia had not found any human remains in the Trepca mine.

The Tribunal's experts investigated this locale following reports in the Kosovar Albanian press that there were hundreds of Kosovar Albanians buried in this mine, supposedly buttbuttinated by Serbian security forces."

Spanish Newswire Quote ends here

A team of Spanish forensic experts who went in to document the supposed genocide reported that they had found no evidence of it. They still butterted there had been 'crimes of war,' even though they had found no evidence of Serbian guilt. Perhaps they felt they had to talk about Serbian crimes of war a bit, given the media onslaught. But the truth is that they came back empty-handed and very critical of NATO accusations.

Their statements to the press were reported in El Pais, a Spanish daily (see here for an analysis of the press report below):

El Pais Quote starts here

"Crimes of war, yes; genocide, no. Such was the no-nonsense declaration yesterday by the team of Spanish experts -- composed of members of the scientific police and civilian forensic experts -- which has just returned from Istok, the area north of Kosovo under control of the Legion. The 187 corpses found and analyzed in nine villages were buried in individual pits, most of them oriented towards Mecca -- to respect the beliefs of the Kosovar Albanians -- and they showed no signs of torture. "There weren't any mbutt graves.perhaps the Serbs are not as bad as they have been portrayed," mused the forensic expert Emilio Perez Pujol.

That was not his only ironic remark. He also questioned the numbers that "the allies" have been offering concerning the tragedy in Kosovo: "I have been reading the UN's data," said Perez Pujol, director of the Anatomic Forensic Insbreastute of Cartagena, "and they began with 44,000 dead, then down to 22,000 and now they are at about 11,000. I can't wait to see in the end how many they really were.!". The Spanish mission, which must send a report to the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, left Madrid early August with the expectation that it was going straight to Hell. "They told us that we were going to the worst area in Kosovo, that we should prepare ourselves to practice more than 2000 autopsies, that we would be working at it until late November; things have turned out quite differently: we only found 187 corpses and we are already back", was the very graphic explanation given by chief inspector Juan Lopez Palafox, responsible for the Anthropology section of the Scientific Police."17b

El Pais Quote ends here

Less than a month later, Pujol was already being obliged with much lower numbers:17c

Spanish Newswire Quote starts here

"The initial estimate of violent rests during the Kosovar conflict from 1998 to the present year was 50,000 people, but it has been going down as low as less than 10,000, and sources from the UN are saying privately that it will not be more than 2000."

Spanish Newswire Quote ends here

The final figure was less than 3000, and the bulk of these, and any civilian casualties among them, are easily due to NATO and the KLA. But accusations of atrocities against civilians by the Yugoslav army have proven baseless (see here).

If you don't read Spanish, then you never heard about this. The press conferences that these Spanish forensics gave were repeated nowhere else. Strange bias, isn't it? When people come back with hard facts that contradict the image of the Serbs as monsters, the media is nowhere to be found. But when unfounded rumors against the Serbs are made, then you get front-page headline after front-page headline, with positively baroque elaborations (see here for a thoroughly analyzed example of this 'bias').

. . .

At this point, you may be reeling. So am I.

The Albanians were not being oppressed. The Serbs were not oppressing them. It was exactly the opposite. And at no point was the Yugoslav government organizing violence against Albanian civilians. They told us a bunch of lies. And they destroyed Yugoslavia with those lies. Hundreds of thousands of people died because of those lies.

What my analysis of Cohen demonstrates is that some academics participate in this dishonesty. He is far from being alone, and soon I will be publishing analyses of other academics who have done the same.

-- Jim Union Against Multiculty

"Abolish Multiculty and String Up The Traitors!"