Who lost Kosovo?

You're looking at European politics through pro-Native-American US glasses. It's probably true that the earliest surviving people (assuming the equation of a "people" with a language) in Kosova were Albanians (Illyrians),

Archaeology is unequivocal, Roman records are clear. No, I merely reject triumphalism- it is in parts immoralism, denialism of the sacred in other human beings and events, and revisionism.

and that Slavs (Serbs, etc.) are relative newcomers. That, added to the fact that Albanians are now the numerically dominant people, suggests to me that Kosova should be allowed to be independent or join Albania, notwithstanding awkward Westphalian issues (Texas, anyone?). OK, I pretty much agree with you so far.

Right, now the Muslim bit. There were no Muslims in SE Europe until the Turkish conquest in the 14th-17th centuries (read round the horrors of that era a bit, before you make glib anti-imperalist comments).

Thank you for the concern. But Prinz Eugen's reconquest and what followed on it was not exactly a humanitarian stroll in the park either.

Both Albanian and Slav Muslims are descendants of indigenous people who were forced to convert to Islam, or converted to get lower taxes and the opportunity for plunder.

Assuming it all to have been coercion, bribes, force and low motives...why did these people not reject Islam once Turkish power receded? Why do their present descendants remain loyal to Islam- indeed, formed their own moderate variety of it?

The possibility that it might be a religion of authenticity and sufficient in all other aspects...that's too horrible to contemplate, is it not?

Your equation of Muslims with Native Americans is, frankly, bizarre.

Uh, no. Have another reading. The commonality is about resistance to white Christian colonization, and that both groups demonstrate white "Christian" colonization ideologues either immoralists or hypocrites when roles invert.

And another thing, Jillian: The 1389 Battle of Kosova was fought by the Serbs against invading Turkish mujahadin, who aimed to enslave/dhimmify indigenous Slavs AND Albanians. The more I think about your comments, the more I think your history emanates from some sort of parallel universe.

It's not a pretty sight watching you hit that thought-stopper of "dhimmi".

Yes, I try to have a morally consistent point of view about colonization, coercion, etc. Whether it's in my European birthplace, where my relatives run the gamut from death by gas and typhoid in camps to Iron Cross winners and nearly Nobel Prize winners. Or my past and present American surroundings, defined in general terms by Agrarian Age European culture and residual triumphalist colonialism meeting the resurgence of the descendants of the aboriginal peoples of the continent. Or the many landscapes between Algiers, Istanbul, Chennai, and around Jerusalem in which many people very dear to me root on different sides of lines drawn in sands and rubble.

Jillian: "white Christian colonization"

You only use the word "colonization" when referring to actions done by white Christians. The imperialists in SE Europe were Turks. The Serbs were not imperalist - their settlement of Illyria was a tribal folk-movement, analogous to the Germanic settlement of much of formerly-Celtic western Europe after the fall of Rome.

Again, you say "if white Christians erect churches where they grabbed land", but the Albanians were Christan before the Turks arrived, remember. Duh.

A tentative intra-European analogy with the position of SE Europe under the Ottomans is 17th-18th century Ireland. Under the Penal Laws the position of Catholics wss analogous to that of dhimmis under Muslims, albeit towards the less oppressive end of the scale - there was no devshirme, say, but Catholics were not allowed to own guns or good horses, to vote, or to have certain important positions in society, and they were subject to a higher tax rate, as they had to pay tithes to both the Catholic and Anglican churches. The Irish Protestants were, naturallly, hated, and there is an analogy to be drawn betweeen Irish Protestants and Balkan Muslims.

Unfortunately, that last comment of yours is completely true. Like all European peoples, if the Serbs do not have more children, they will lose everything.

But everything else you said… “utterly despicable and evil?” A lot of nations have done unpleasant things in wars, and aggressive wars too, rather than simply trying to hold on to their “own” country which is actually what the Serbs were doing – and I have a horrid feeling that nearly all their detractors and those who like to despise them would have reacted rather worse (and with more hatred) than they did in the same circumstances. It wasn’t just the birth-rate that lost the Serbs Bosnia, Krajina and Kosovo. It was the WW2 genocide that turned the Serbs into a minority in Bosnia for the first time, and it was Albanian persecutions and expulsions of Serbs (always with the backing of the biggest military power at the time, whether the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Fascist Italy, Tito’s communists and finally the US) which gradually saw the Kosovo Serbs reduced to their present numbers (with in particular a massive immigration into stolen lands happening under Mussolini’s occupation). And in the Albanian case it was the Albanians that rejected all integration after Milosevic reduced their former (horribly abused) near-total autonomy.

But in apportioning blame, when you cut through the prejudice and the propaganda on all sides, it should be only too obvious that while Serbia is “still” multi-ethnic, with Albanians and Slavic Moslems and Croats living there in much the same numbers as ever, the breakaway states which the West backed against them are almost entirely mono-ethnic – as actually was much of the Serbian half of Bosnia until the refugee crisis overtook them a few months before the end of the Bosnian war. (Skopje/Macedonia is still multiethnic where Slavs are the majority, it is true, but not, I think, where the Albanians are.) My own experience is very subjective, but I’ve always thought the Serbs had far less hatred of their opponents than was true the other way round – and probably less than was worked up in millions of foreigners throughout the world who allowed themselves to hate a people they knew virtually nothing about except what they got on their TV screens, virtually all of which was twisted, and some of which was patently absurd (like weeping Muslim mothers above graves with orthodox “crosses” on all of them). Part of the problem is that even when what it says is true, television only “works” by using propaganda techniques to get a message across. Still, the newspapers were just as bad.

What I will say is that whatever real crimes happened in the Bosnian war (and they certainly did, on all sides) the particular massacres which were used for the imposition of sanctions (the bread queue in Sarajevo) and for American intervention (Markale), were definitely staged. And while it is the ugly truth that many women were raped among all communities in the general breakdown of law and society (which has happened in every war) the stories of deliberate “rape camps” one used to hear were simple propaganda – as were those of concentration camps. The numbers of casualties were inflated in press reports early on in the war first by replacing the figures for those assumed dead with much larger figures for those “dead or missing”, and then after a while by leaving out the words “or missing”, and combining that with an assumption that these casualties were overwhelmingly Muslim civilians. Still, by the end, total casualties were indeed large, if not as great as was once claimed. Recent assessments suggest that of the hundred thousand or so actual casualties on all sides in the war, about half were civilian, and they were divided pretty evenly among all three communities (although I suspect that many of the Croat and Muslim casualties were actually caused by their own civil war.) Military casualties were overwhelmingly Muslim, but that seems to have been because of their own appallingly stupid generals, who made their WW1 predecessors look positively enlightened, and who basically kept on sending their conscripts “over the top” at prepared positions again and again, year after year, without learning “anything.”

But when you talk of their being no good guys, be sure to include these foreign “humanitarian” enthusiasts, who were the biggest problem right from the start. While both the Croatian and Bosnian wars actually began because their respective separatist leaders insisted on (illegally) seceding with all the territory they claimed without any concessions or negotiations, the reaction of the international media, politicians and public was the “principal” reason why the war went on for so long. Almost at the very start of the Bosnian war, Milosevic agreed to recognise Bosnia’s independence if it went along with cantonisation, and Izetbegovic was initially prepared to accept that (albeit reluctantly). It was the American ambassador Warren Zimmerman who persuaded Izetbegovic he didn’t need to. In other words, Izetbegovic only went on with the war because he’d been given reason to count on US backing. But the reason it went on for so long is precisely because of the success of the propaganda campaign in the West, and because people like you were all cursing the Serbs, as you put it. It made the Bosnian Muslims in particular feel that western intervention on their side was inevitable if the war went on for long enough, and so they very naturally refused for years any deal short of total victory. (They did give nominal acceptance to the Vance-Owen plan precisely because it would have made the Serbian position untenable). And so the Bosnian Serbs, despite great war-weariness very early on, went on fighting, in spite of Milosevic’s increasingly desperate attempts to escape from international vilification, which in the end involved selling out the Krajina Serbs completely. (How Izetbegovic was tricked into reluctantly accepting a brokered deal at the very end is another matter: I’m persuaded that he privately regarded it as a temporary truce to re-arm and try for a more complete victory later on, not realising that Clinton intended the US troops to stay permanently. But this, of course, can never be proved.)

One problem which made the war much worse than it otherwise would have been was that for hundreds of years the Ottoman system of rule had worked by focussing on the towns, which they Islamified as much as possible, and then used as bases to rule (and exploit) the countryside. This created a pattern across Bosnia of largely Muslim towns surrounded by overwhelmingly Serb villages, and made so much of the war a matter of sieges, where neither side could win because the besieged were continually supplied with provisions (and arms) by international organisations. Things got ugly because the Bosnian Serbs never had the manpower to hold such a very long front line without making full use of their artillery advantage (which they did) and because these very towns could be used as bases for terrorist attacks against the mainly elderly inhabitants of the Serb villages just outside, with the perpetrators then retreating back to the specially-designated “safe havens.”

My personal theory as to why the Kosovo war happened was that the propaganda of the Bosnian war had bounced western elites and media people (and much of their public) into thinking of the Serbs as genocidal monsters that had got off very lightly, and who deserved much more nasty things to happen to them – bombing, and the taking away of Kosovo, and sometimes even occupation and “denazifcation” as well. Actually, ever since the fall of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, I suspect that left-wing people felt the lack of a people they had got used to hating, and (the way they were being portrayed) the Serbs seemed to fit the bill best. And of course, on the right-wing side, it was very easy for those of a cold-war mindset to think of the Serbs as surrogate Russians. And with Russia falling apart at the time, and Muslims supporting their co-religionists, the Serbs had no friends to speak of, and were a very easy target. Among other advantages, a successful campaign would also help maintain the illusion of US omnipotence and indispensability, its right to intervene anywhere as the world’s knight in shining armour, and maybe to cow other nations around the world into doing as they were told. All that was left was to support (and whitewash) a particularly ugly criminal/terrorist organisation, paint a counter-insurgency as attempted genocide, give an impossible ultimatum whose refusal could then be portrayed as a refusal to negotiate, and then start bombing until they surrendered. Refinements were to keep up support by flooding the public with endless pictures of refugees (and the idea that it’s disloyal not to support what our troops are doing), wait till Milosevic came to a deal, and then renege on it once he’d withdrawn his forces.

Also, it’s worth remembering, that if people like yourself had been more sceptical of the propaganda back then, and more critical of what your government and armed forces were doing, the next government would not have found it anything like as easy to talk your country into going into Iraq. Exactly the same thing is true of Britain, except that we had the same leaders for both Kosovo and Iraq. The success of the propaganda campaigns of the 1990s against the Serbs were pivotal in changing the very nature of western public opinion to make it perfectly acceptable to bomb, blockade and invade anyone who has been sufficiently demonised – as well as radicalising Moslems everywhere into thinking of themselves principally as victims. Not that they were the slightest big grateful to the US for helping their fellow-Muslims in the Balkans. I believe that the London bombers were initially radicalised precisely by how these events were portrayed on British TV. If there ever was any intention of diverting Muslim anger as a whole away from the west (especially Israel and the US) towards their eastern Christian neighbours generally, it didn’t actually work out like that.

But basically: the bad guys did win in the 1990s, and are going to try and grab what’s left in the next few years, and it’s not simply just because your country helped them. The fact that they fought at “all” (instead of coming to a deal) is precisely because they could see that the US was so completely on their side. The whole long Yugoslav conflict was in many ways a simple war of secession and counter-secession, with a twist that it was not only fuelled and prolonged but to a great extent actually "caused" by the intervention and propaganda of the great powers.

Everyone has lost, really. The Kosovo Albanians will have a half-independent semi-state subsidised and overseen by the EU and ruled by gangsters for the foreseeable future, while Saudi money re-Islamises them after its own particular model.