I recently came across a great aflatoon who, for one reason or another, actively pursuits this notion that Kosovo conflict is ethnic driven, and not religious. The following article is for this maha-aflatoon as well for rest of us.
Kosova Task Force,
USAAction Alert – 4/26/99
NEW YORK -
Serbia¹s savagery in Kosovo has finally exposed one of Europe¹sdarkest and dirtiest secrets: the long racial and religious war against theMuslims of the Balkans.
Hatred of Muslims is the 1990¹s version of the anti-Semitism of the 1930¹s thatled to the extermination of Europe¹s Jews. Just as many Europeans were overtlyor secretly happy during the Nazi era to be rid of the Jews, so today, somemodern Europeans actively or tacitly support the latest campaign by Serbia¹sMuslim-hating racist regime to impose a final solution¹ to the problem’ of theBalkan Muslims.
After the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1912, hundreds ofthousands of Muslim Turks were slaughtered or driven out. At the end ofTurkish-Greek war 1920-1928, 400,000 Turks were expelled from the Balkans;simultaneously, one million Greeks were driven from Aegean Turkey. From1912-1928, large numbers of Slav and Albanian Muslims were expelled from Bosnia,Kosovo, and Serbia. Today, there are almost 2 million people of Bosnian descentand some 1 million of Albanian origin living in Turkey.
These vast expulsions still left some Turks, and millions of native BalkanMuslims, the descendants of Serbs, Albanians, Greeks, and Bulgarians who hadvoluntarily converted to Islam in the 15-16th Centuries to escape fiercereligious persecution by the Catholic or Orthodox Churches, or to avoid a headtax on Christians levied by the Ottomans.
Today, there are some 10 million Muslims in the Balkans: nearly 3 millionnominal Muslims in Albania; 2.3 million in Kosovo and Sanjak; 2 million inBosnia; 2 million in Bulgaria; 180,000 in Greece; and 600-700,000 MuslimAlbanians in Macedonia.
In the 1980¹s, Bulgaria expelled 300,000 Muslim citizens and forced theremaining Muslims to Slavicize their names and adopt Orthodox Christianity. A few years later, Serbia began attempts to exterminate or drive out Bosnia¹s Muslims.
France and Britain, nervous over their own large Muslim minorities, and traditionally anti-Muslim because of their colonial past, thwarted US efforts to halt ethnic warfare against Bosnia¹s Muslims.Greece, Bulgaria, and Macedonia gave the Serbs economic and diplomatic support.The west¹s tacit approval, or ineffectual opposition, to this ethnic-religiouswarfare opened the way for Serbia¹s `final solution¹ in Kosovo.
Today, there is wide support among Orthodox nations of Eastern Europe forSerbia¹s merciless campaign to eradicate its Muslim and Catholic Albanianminority. What we are seeing is not just a war over land, it is an eruption ofthe most vicious medieval hatred against non-Slavs and non-Orthodox people,encouraged and enflamed by demagogue Slobodan Milosevic and some extremistelements of the Orthodox clergy. Slavs in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Russia, and,sadly, some Greeks, are cheering on this massive pogrom, just as Europe¹sCatholic right applauded Germany¹s `purification¹ of Jews from their midst.
Serb propaganda paints Albanians and Muslims as dirty, violent Turks,¹ whobreed like rabbits,¹ run drugs,¹ and flood Slav lands with their alien offspring, the vanguard of a vast Islamic horde about to invade Christian Europe.¹ Orthodox priests preach revenge for events 500 years past, even urginga new crusade to liberate Constantinople (modern Istanbul) from the Turks¹ Milosevic began the horrors of ethnic warfare, vowing, a decade ago, we will send all the Muslims back to Mecca.¹
Ironically, Albania was always renowned for religious toleration. Muslims drankand celebrated Christmas and Easter; Catholics often observed Ramadan; Muslim,Orthodox, and Catholic Albanians mixed freely and without the slightest rancor.Every member of Albania¹s small Jewish community was hidden from the Nazis andItalian fascists.
Yet the easy-going, unreligious Albanians and other Balkan Muslims now arepaying a terrible price for long past centuries of religious and racial hatred.They have become scapegoats for the frustrations, economic ruin, and lowself-esteem of the failed, only semi-Europeanized nations of the darkestBalkans.
Copyright: Eric Margolis, 1999
Circulated with permission.
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