Two things I have recently read sent chills down my spine, an involuntary innervation I don’t suffer often or easily. The first was the Wikipedia entry on the Armenian Genocide, with its photos of starving Armenian children laying down to die in the street, as Turks walk by a few metres away (“Turkish rule…meant unutterable contempt…The Armenians (and the Greeks) were dogs and pigs…to be spat upon, if their shadow darkened a Turk, to be outraged, to be the mats on which he wiped the mud from his feet.”, wrote ethnographer William Ramsay); photos of gaunt corpses, piles of them, illustrating the tales of calculated butchery, of nauseating, jarring inhumanity.
The second is this article by Julia Gorin on the Balkans. The Balkans as they really are now, and not as they have been painted in the media and in the movies for the last decade, with the villanious Serbs a tide and a yolk upon their no longer subjugated neighbours, to whose rescue NATO so nobly stepped forth. The Serbs are absolutely guilty of atrocities, there is no question about that. But have a read below about the Croats, the Bosnians, the Kosovar Albanians, about their conduct in the wars of the 90s, their (resurgent) history, culture and current direction. A direction the rest of Europe is tied to whether they like it or not.
The background for her story is Richard Gere’s recent visit to Bosnia to film his new movie, “Spring Break in Bosnia” about a hunt for the former Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic:
The Serbs, yet again, will be collectively portrayed as the villains in the Balkan tale. Never mind that Gere returned from Bosnia to Croatia ahead of schedule last month, after only 10 days of shooting, reportedly because he was “too scared to stay” in the area.
One wonders what could have spooked him. What did he have to fear from Bosnia? Could it be the ominous signs that the country has been reawakened by the Saudis from its communist slumber to its Islamic roots? Or did something happen that might have reasserted Bosnia’s fascist sympathies, which the UK Telegraph’s Robert Fox described in 1993:
These are the men of the Handzar division. “We do everything with the knife, and we always fight on the frontline,” a Handzar told one U.N. officer. Up to 6000 strong, the Handzar division glories in a fascist culture. They see themselves as the heirs of the SS Handzar division, formed by Bosnian Muslims in 1943 to fight for the Nazis. Their spiritual model was Mohammed Amin al-Hussein, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who sided with Hitler. According to U.N. officers… “[m]any of them are Albanian, whether from Kosovo…or from Albania itself.”
They are trained and led by veterans from Afghanistan and Pakistan, say U.N. sources…The first political act in this new operation appears to have been the murder of the two monks in the monastery…Mysteriously the police guard disappeared a few minutes before.
Whatever it was, Gere returned to the “villa on a hill” where he’d been staying in Zagreb, Croatia. Though the Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians are often at each other’s throats, they have an uncanny similarity. You see, “Croatian” is more or less a synonym for “Nazi.” Except the Croatians managed to sicken even the Germans with the creative lengths they went to for Serb-slaughter, including sawing heads off slowly. (Bosnian Muslims, meanwhile, served in Croatia’s concentration camps such as Jasenovac, where 700,000 Serbs were killed alongside tens of thousands of Jews.)
Nazism is not just part of Croatia’s past; it is their present as well.
In 1998, NY Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal wrote: “In World War II, Hitler had no executioners more willing, no ally more passionate, than the fascists of Croatia. They are returning, 50 years later, from what should have been their eternal grave, the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Western Allies who dug that grave with the bodies of their servicemen have the power to stop them, but do not.”
Indeed, we happily assisted them — even providing Croatia with Serbian weapons to kill Serbs.
In an article titled “Pro-Nazi extremism lingers in Croatia,” the Washington Times in 1997 reported: “A German tank rolls through a small village, and the peasants rush out, lining the road with their right arms raised in a Nazi salute as they chant ‘Heil Hitler.’ Mobs chase minorities from their homes, kicking them and pelting them with eggs as they flee into the woods. Europe in the 1940s? No. Croatia in the 1990s.”
In 1995, the London Evening Standard’s Edward Pearce wrote that “you can understand Croatia best by saying flatly that if there is one place in the world where a statue of Adolph Hitler would be revered, it would be in Zagreb.”
An AP report the same year described NATO American Commander Colonel Gregory Fontenot in Bosnia turning to two black soldiers in his brigade and saying, “It’ll be interesting to hear what you two see, because the Croatians are racist…They kill people for the color of their skins.”
In 2000, Julius Strauss wrote in the UK Daily Telegraph, “Five years may have passed since the end of the Bosnian war but in Ljubuski, one of dozens of Croat villages scattered through the mountains of southwestern Bosnia, hardliners are still in control. By way of greeting, the Croat party official said: ‘I hope you’re not a Jew or an American. My father fought at Stalingrad. He wore the German insignia with pride. At the end it was only us Croats who stayed faithful to the SS.’
The same year, there was this from The Washington Post: “It was not unusual to see such chilling graffiti as: ‘We Croats do not drink wine, we drink the blood of Serbs from Knin,’…[referring] to the capital of the Krajina region of Croatia where hundreds of thousands of Serbs were ethnically cleansed in 1995 by troops commanded by Gen. [Ante] Gotovina.”
In her September 1999 book Nazi Nostalgia in Croatia, Balkans expert Diana Johnstone wrote:
When I visited Croatia three years ago, the book most prominently displayed in the leading bookstores of the capital city Zagreb was a new edition of the notorious anti-Semitic classic, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. Next came the memoirs of the World War II Croatian fascist Ustashe dictator Ante Pavelic, responsible for the organized genocide of Serbs, Jews and Romany (gypsies) that began in 1941, that is, even before the German Nazi ‘final solution’.
And the hit song of 1991, when Croatia once again declared its independence from Yugoslavia and began driving out Serbs, was “Danke Deutschland” in gratitude to Germany’s strong diplomatic support for Zagreb’s unnegotiated secession. In the West, of course, one will quickly object that the Germany of today is not the Germany of 1941. True enough. But in Zagreb, with a longer historical view, they are so much the same that visiting Germans are sometimes embarrassed when Croats enthusiastically welcome them with a raised arm and a Nazi “Heil!” greeting.
So it should be no surprise that this year’s best seller in Croatia is none other than a new edition of “Mein Kampf”. The magazine “Globus” reported that “Mein Kampf” is selling like hotcakes in all segments of Croatian society.
Despite the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s requests for it to seek extradition, the Croatian government remains uninterested in going after two Croatian Nazis (Ustashi) who killed hundreds of Jews, Serbs and gypsies and now live in brazen retirement in Argentina and Austria.
As independent journalist Stella Jatras summed up, “Today, Croatia arrogantly and blatantly flies its fascist checkerboard flag without fear of condemnation from the world. It has renamed its streets after its Nazi war heroes, and proudly displays its ‘Sieg Heil’ salute at weddings, funerals, and other functions.”
As with Bosnia’s Handzar division, in Croatia’s Serb-cleansing war of secession from Yugoslavia, the Croats were gifted with an Albanian volunteer — Agim Ceku — such a Serb-hunting enthusiast that when the early, Croatian leg of the wars kicked off, this Kosovo Albanian high-tailed it to Croatia and became a colonel in its army. He led Croatian troops in the 1993 offensive on Croatia’s Medak Pocket, where Serbs lived. As Canadian journalist Scott Taylor wrote:
It was here that the men of the 2nd Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry came face to face with the savagery of which [Agim] Ceku was capable. Over 200 Serbian inhabitants of the Medak Pocket were slaughtered in a grotesque manner (the bodies of female rape victims were found after being burned alive). Our traumatized troops who buried the grisly remains were encouraged to collect evidence and were assured that the perpetrators would be brought to justice.
Nevertheless in 1995, Ceku, by then trained by U.S. instructors as a general of artillery, was still at large. In fact, he was the officer responsible for shelling the Serbian refugee columns and for targeting the UN-declared “safe” city of Knin during the Croatian offensive known as Operation Storm [which the New York Times called "the largest single 'ethnic cleansing' of the war"]. Some 500 innocent civilians perished in those merciless barrages, and senior Canadian officers who witnessed the slaughter demanded that Ceku be indicted. Once again, their pleas fell of deaf ears.
Today Ceku is the Prime Minister of Kosovo, and he enjoyed a warm reception from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when the two met over the summer to discuss how best to speed along independence for the Serbian province that this war criminal governs, sans rule of law and beholden to al Qaeda.
“Throughout the air campaign against Yugoslavia,” continues Taylor, Ceku — by then commanding KLA terrorists in driving two-thirds of the remaining Christian Serbs out, along with the gypsies, Croats, Jews, Ashkalis, Gorani, and other non-Muslim or non-Albanians in Kosovo — “was portrayed as a loyal ally and he was frequently present at NATO briefings with top generals such as Wesley Clark and Michael Jackson.”
Today, the “bin Laden Mosque,” built in 2001 (aptly enough), stands tall in Kosovo, where Bill Clinton murals and Wesley Clark Streets are almost as prevalent as bin Laden keychains.
There is quite a lot more to Gorin’s story, read the whole thing. And check out the links in her article also (all links in quoted text above hers, not mine).
The next conflict could break out in the region sooner than you may think. The UN decision on Kosovo independence was originally expected by the end of this year, however the UN has recently maneuvred it towards the middle of next year, safely past the Serbian elections on January 21st. The ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party (even Slobodan Milosevic thought their nationalism a tad too earnest) is looking strong and would be sure to win were Kosovo to be given independence (by an outside power, as they see it) before the elections. It was only on Wednesday that Serbia passed their new constitution, which reaffirms Kosovo as a part of Serbia – a constitution that was needed because the last one was invalidated by the secession of Montenegro in May. The current government in Serbia does not want another war and would rather look forward to joining the European Union instead. Should the ultranationalist SRP get in power, however, their priorities may change. Meanwhile the Kosovar Albanians are showing signs that they are losing patience. Ceku, the butcher written about above, made statements to this end yesterday:
Pristina- Kosovo’s parliament may proclaim independence even if the United Nations does not recognize it, the prime minister of Serbia’s breakaway province said Thursday. Prime Minister Agim Ceku said that a UN Security Council resolution recognizing Kosovo as a sovereign state would be the “best solution.”
“Kosovo will become an independent state. The time and the way it will be proceeded is still under discussion,” he told reporters after meeting the head of the UN mission governing Kosovo, Joachim Ruecker.
“We certainly wish and prefer … that independence is proclaimed by a UN resolution”, he said, but added that, even without UN, Kosovo’s parliament could proclaim independence from Serbia.
“It’s a possibility that we have foresee,” he said, insisting that it was not a “threat.” Pristina and Belgrade have been involved in futile UN-mediated talks on the status of Kosovo since early 2006.
Thats the situation in Serbia. What about Bosnia? The political situation there is growing more and more tense and some analysts are predicting civil war between the Bosnian-Croat Federation and the Republika Srpska, the two currently self-governing pseudo-states of Bosnia. On October 1st Bosnian and Serbian nationalists took shared power and as far as the Bosnians are concerned Republika Srpska should seize to exist as a separate entity. The Serbs? They are kind of keen to leave Bosnia entirely and rejoin Serbia. The “international community” is also keen to do away with the current two state system (a situation the Bosnians call the Curse of Dayton) and create a unified Bosnia by mid next year. Should Kosovo gain independence Republika Srpska may seek to follow, providing yet another mechanism for regional destabilisation. In a country full of secret weapons caches, where children go to strictly Croat, Serb or Bosnian Muslim schools and 4 weeks ago a mosque was attacked with a rocket-propelled grenade (by a Croat) the matter is unlikely to be resolved with diplomacy.
Now, where does that all look like its heading?
Croatia meanwhile is on its best behaviour, in reflection of a US push for them to join NATO in 2008, which would make it the first of the former Yugoslavian states to do so. And how would a Croatia, Serbia’s old enemy, that is a part of NATO, look to the Serbians? Serbians perhaps supported by a Russia keen to reasserts itself in the region and blatantly hostile to NATO expansionism into what it considers its own sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus?
Putin yesterday in an interview:
(As for frozen conflicts,) we are ready to work with all our international partners and the EU as a whole in dealing with problems whenever and wherever they exist. This includes Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno Karabakh and Transdnistra…..
…As far as Kosovo is concerned we have (UN) Resolution 1244 and we cannot manipulate or ignore the Security Council decisions. Also our actions in this respect should be coordinated certainly and care should be taken of all interests in the process. One can`t apply one rule to Kosovo and other rules to other situations. In what way is the Kosovo situation different from the Abkhazia situation or the South Ossetia situation. In nothing. They are no different. If we start to manipulate the situation we will find problems. People will feel disappointed and disillusioned.“
In Kosovo, we have to think about what’s going to happen in future if Kosovo`s independence is recognized…..We heard it said things would be alright in Iraq but in Iraqi Kurdistan only the Kurdish flag is raised.”
Meanwhile in Belgrade on Tuesday:
BELGRADE, November 7 (Itar-Tass) — Russia objects to a hasty or imposed definition of the Kosovo status, State Duma First Deputy Speaker Lyubov Sliska said in Belgrade on Tuesday.
She leads a delegation of six State Duma representatives at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). The visit is being paid by the invitation of the leader of the Serbian parliamentary delegation at the PACE.
“Russia is positive that no one has the right to breach international legal principles in the definition of the Kosovo status,” Sliska said at a meeting with Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica.
She opposed Western politicians, who think that the Kosovo status must be legalized before the end of this year, and said, “the search for a solution to this problem goes on, and there must be no deadlines.”
“The referendum, at which the people of Serbia supported a new constitution that describes Kosovo as a part of the national territory, must be taken into consideration while making a decision on Kosovo,” Sliska said.
Kostunica thanked Russia for “firm adherence to the international legal principles in the definition of the Kosovo status.”
The delegation also met with Serbian Parliament Speaker Pregrag Markovic. “Russia was and will be a reliable partner to Serbia,” Sliska said at the meeting. “There are huge possibilities in the development of bilateral cooperation, in particularly, in the economy.”
She suggested forming “a Russian-Serbian parliamentary forum in 2007, so that it promotes the development of the bilateral relations.”
Clearly should Kosovo be allowed to declare independence Moscow will use that as a pretext to push ahead with overt support for separatist regions in the former Soviet republics in which it has interests (“Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno Karabakh and Transdnistra”). Just yesterday Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov stated in an interview, regarding the Georgian separatist regions: “It is hard to say how events will develop. But much will depend on how the West behaves on the question of recognizing Kosovo”. However a growing alliance between Russia and Serbia, which would most probably be enhanced by Serbian nationalists being in power, who’d welcome a powerful backer against NATO-supported Kosovar separatists, could entail an attempt to prevent the Kosovo secession, seemingly in opposition to Moscow desire for said pretext. On the other hand this would in turn bar the way for Serbia to join NATO, a desirable outcome for the Russians.
So whats the game plan here for Moscow? If the Serbian referendum that described Kosovo as part of Serbia must be taken into consideration, as Sliska insists above, are the Russians in turn going to take into account a Georgian referendum on Abkhazia and South Ossetia? An Azeri referendum on Nagorno Karabakh? Obviously neither would go in their favour, so no. Perhaps their actions will depend on the success of their general strategy to bring former USSR republics back under their control by buying up their state asserts and using energy blackmail in the near future (as is currently being done with Belarus, the Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia) and for now they are just playing for time. On the other hand, how far are they willing to go in supporting Serbian nationalists, should hostilities break out over Kosovo or even Republika Srpska? And is Serbia undergoing a re-re-alignment, again looking eastward, realising that 2007 will be the year of an ascendant Russia, declining EU (following the addition of Bulgaria and Romania, invalidating French and German domination), a NATO transfixed on Afghanistan and a US (still) tied up in Iraq?