SerbiannaColonized Kosovo: Muslim demands and Western servitude
By Boba Borojevic
Ottawa, November 14, 2005 - The violence that started Oct. 27 among Muslim youths in the dreary industrial suburbs northeast of Paris soon grew into a nationwide insurrection in the banlieus, of arson and clashes with police. Prime Minister de Villepin said the nation faced a "moment of truth" over its failure to integrate Arab and African immigrants and their children into its mainstream.A thousand miles away and 16 months ago, on March 17, 2004, Albanian mobs burned down hundreds of Serbian houses and some thirty Serbian Orthodox churches. They also expelled over 2000 non-Albanians from Kosovo. Some voices in the “international community” tried to explain this violence as the result of Albanian frustration for not getting independence from Serbia. Is there any significant similarity between demands and actions of Albanian Muslims in Kosovo and Muslim "youths" in France?
Dr Srdja Trifkovic, director of the Institute for International Affairs at The Rockford Institute in Illinois says that the difference is two-folded.
The riots in Kosovo in 1981, 1989, in the 1990s and than on several occasions following the NATO occupation but most notably on March 17, 2004, are based in a combination of nationalist and Islamic motives. It would be inappropriate to ascribe them completely to the influence of religious teaching, just as it would be wrong to exclude Islam from the mix of emotions that drive the Albanian political mainstream. Significant segments of the Albanian Kosovo youths active in the KLA and associated groups are primarily driven by the desire to declare independence from Serbia, to expel the remaining Serbs and other non-Albanians, and to have a mono-ethnic Kosovo. Their murderous antagonism is not fully explicable, however, without some reference to the gap that Islam breeds between Muslims and non-Muslims, in the Balkans and elsewhere.
In France by contrast, many of the North African youths of Arabic origin, most of them of an Algerian, Moroccan or Tunisian parentage, want their self-rule within France, rather than independence from France. For at least some of them the ultimate objective is to take over France and the rest of Europe altogether, but for now they have one key political demand that is not sufficiently publicized in the Western media: the acceptance of no-go areas for the police in certain “difficult” areas with a Muslim majority, and de facto autonomy for those areas. Young Muslims want their turf to be governed by themselves, within the boundaries of the French state but definitely outside the French society. Their community leaders, imams and sheikhs, hope that eventually the application of the Sharia law within their communities will be only a matter of time.
The exclusion for the French state, its police forces, judicial and administrative authorities from the areas in which the Muslims comprise a majority would be only the first step. What they are asking for is reminiscent of the Turkish millet system of local authority exercised by different religious and ethnic units within the Ottoman Empire. “It presupposes the right of the Muslims in Europe to be treated as a separate community, guided by its own rules and not subject to the prevailing laws and mores of the secular host society,” explains Trifkovic.
Although many rioters in France have rather vague notions of what they reallt want, Trifkovic cautions that we need to look at the statements by their community leaders, by people who are demanding “negotiations” with the French government. “What we are witnessing is the first step of the intifada that will seek to gradually establish pockets of Muslim-ruled areas that will be inhabited solely by Muslims. We have seen the same progression in North Africa and the Middle East in the early stages of Muslim expansion in the 7th and 8th centuries.”
The reason why western governments and the mainstream media have failed to address the issue of intifada in Europe, Trifkovic says, is that it would imply the recognition that integration and assimilation have failed miserably.
“What we have witnessed in the past 40 years is a massive influx of Muslim immigrants into Europe. We are talking about 20-plus million people – the greatest migration of people ever recorded in history! It far exceeds the European emigration into North America. Even in the late 19th century, in no single year had more than half a million Europeans migrated to the rest of the world, including North and South America, Australia, South Africa etc. This massive migratory onslaught has been accompanied by the demand of the European elite class for the newcomers’ “inclusion,” for the host-nations’ “tolerance” of alien practices and cultural assumptions, for multiculturalism, for an irreversible welcoming mat for the newcomers who have never intended to be integrated. They have compact communities, which can function on their own terms and in their own right without ever learning the language of the host society and without ever accepting any of its cultural assumptions and values,” concludes Trifkovic.
Colonial Attitudes
According to Finish newspapers the appointment of Martti Ahtisaari as an UN Special Envoy authorized by the United Nations and the great powers to lead the talks on the future status of Kosovo is another impressive demonstration of the authority and confidence the former President enjoys among the international community in such matters. Trifkovic sees Martti Ahtisaari as the one of ever-present faceless bureaucrats picked up by the so-called international community when they want a process with the preordained outcome to get underway.
“He was already involved in 1999 in negotiating the agreement in Kumanovo that persuaded the withdrawal of Serbian police and military units from Kosovo before NATO came in. The interregnum assured that most of the Serbian and other non-Albanian population would be expelled by Albanians. His subsequent association with the so-called International Crisis Group (ICG), an organization implacably committed to the concept of the Albanian independence, is not promising at all. The Serbian authorities would have been well advised to declare that his services are not welcome for that reason. The Serbs should have demanded someone more evenhanded, less compromised by bias and by prior political activities. There is no doubt that, had the international community appointed someone who has said that Kosovo should stay within Serbia, the Albanians and their cohorts would have cried murder and demanded that person’s replacement.”
Brelgrade’s negotiating team consisting of the prime minister of Serbia Vojislav Kostunica, president of Serbia Boris Tadic and president of the state union Serbia and Montenegro, Svetozar Marovic, includes vastly different and mutually incompatible personalities and views on how to conduct the negotiations and how the future status of Kosovo should look like, says Trifkovic.
“It is enough to look at the well exploited phrase ‘more than autonomy and less than independence’. Professor Kosta Cavoski, one of the leading Serbian jurists, has explained that there is nothing in between those two terms. You either have autonomy, which means self-rule that falls short of independence, or you have more than that, which means full sovereignty without even a resemblance or pretence of institutional link between Belgrade and Pristina.
“The phrase more than autonomy and less than independence is very damaging for the Serbian side. It implicitly recognizes that whatever Kosovo gets it will be de facto independence, under whatever name. For as long as Belgrade does not have a specific plan, the one that will be based upon already existing models elsewhere in the world, such as the autonomy for Swedes in Finland, the models of coexistence or, to be more precise, the methods of separation of Greeks and Turks of Cypress, the models of territorial autonomy that the Vatican’s institutions enjoy in the Italian republic, for as long as we are always inventing some new models – of which the world remains unaware to this day – we are following one-way street to de facto independence of Kosovo under whatever name,” says Trifkovic.
Constant Pressure on Serbs by Foreign Powers
Belgrade newspaper “Politika’ reported that the American senator Joesph Biden had said at the meeting of the Foreign policy committee of American Senate on November 9, that: “If we do the right thing in Kosovo, it’ll remind Muslims round the world the US helped Kosovo Muslim population to build a strong, independent, multi ethnic democracy."
Biden's opinion does not surprise Trifkovic who said that we had witnessed that attitude in the past decade. "Joe Biden was consistently wrong on every Balkan issue and remains wrong to this day. The senator from Delaware does not understand the Balkans or Islam. Giving Muslims a few morsels in the Balkans in the hope that the US will justify itself for the policy in Iraq and the policy of supporting Israel has been proven false under the Clinton administration. People who still maintain the same cause today are either politically very naïve, or deliberately mendacious, or just plain stupid.
"As for the issue of substance the declaration of either the House of Representatives or the Senate that has no legal binding value, that has no character of policy declaration that the administration has to follow is symbolic and should not be treated by the Serbs as a tool of heavy pressure," says Trifkovic.
When push comes to shove, without Serbia’s agreement an independent Kosovo cannot function. If the Serbs declare that they will not accept Kosovo’s travel documents, customs forms, passports, license plates, etc. it would be impossible for an independent Kosovo to function. The only functional link between Kosovo and the heartland of Europe goes through Serbia to the north and west. And if the Serbs are determined in the defense of their concept of sovereignty, no “independent” Kosovo would be able to function.”
According to Trifkovic, the Serbian side strategy at the moment should be defensive. “The Serbs have no need to accept the deadline of 2006, or any other year. There are crisie in the world such as Middle East crisis that has been subjected to many deadlines in the past. We’ve had Madrid, we’ve had Camp David I, Camp David II, and Oslo and yet it remains unresolved. Why should the Kosovo crisis be subject to any cut-off date? And why should the Serbs negotiate today if the UNSC Resolution 1244 from 1999 remains unfulfilled? Those two issues have not been answered in satisfactory manner,” Trifkovic says. The Serbs can insist on 1244 as the preconditions for negotiations. Belgrade has strong arguments, and that is why the implicit intention of those who want an independent Kosovo is to make Belgrade give up on UNSC 1244,” concluded Trifkovic his interview for “Monday’s Encounter” on CKCU 93.1 FM in Ottawa.
