Marcus Papadopoulos says that the Western media have got it very wrong about Kosovo with disastrous results
LAST month marked Kosovo’s first anniversary as an independent state following its unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008. Messages of congratulations were conveyed to the Kosovan authorities by many Western governments along with assurances of continued support for Europe’s newest country.
However, most Western governments and mainstream media outlets did not inform their domestic audiences of the nature of the new nation which had been created in Europe and the implications of this in the global fight against international Jihadism, drugs and weapons smuggling and the sex trade.
Instead, people were told by politicians and journalists that Nato’s military intervention in Kosovo in 1999 had justified the policy of “humanitarian intervention”.
The majority of Western journalists who reported on the wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s presented the conflict from a one-sided perspective: like a Hollywood version of good versus evil. Ignorant of Yugoslavia’s complex history, influenced by their respective governments’ own leanings on the conflict and relying on accounts from warring parties which understood the importance of public relations, these journalists helped to influence government opinion into taking decisions which would have far-reaching consequences and helped to lay the ground for stifling debate on alterative causes and events of the Yugoslav civil war.
Commentators who question Kosovo’s independence or any other aspect of the Yugoslav conflict are derided as “Serb apologists”. As Lewis MacKenzie, the former United Nations Protection Force general in the former Yugoslavia and commander of the Sarajevo sector, has said: “Those of us who served as UN commanders in Bosnia realised the majority of the media reports were biased, to say the least. Whenever we tried to set the record straight we were – and continue to be – accused of being ‘Serbian agents’.”
Nato’s justification for intervening in Kosovo was to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Albanian population by Belgrade. Many Western journalists had reported stories of Serb forces murdering Albanian civilians en masse. As in previous wars in the former Yugoslavia, journalists seldom corroborated their articles with trustworthy evidence, relying instead on hearsay and official Albanian sources.
Nonetheless, these stories provided Western governments, especially the United States, with an opportunity to achieve economic and geostrategic objectives under the guise of humanitarian intervention. The US State Department cited a figure of up to 500,000 Kosovan Albanians murdered. Few commentators questioned these figures at a time when the West had no personnel in Kosovo.
Forensic experts acting on behalf of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia have now exhumed 2,788 bodies in Kosovo, believed to be both Albanians and Serbs, who had died of various causes, including through combat. As in the case of Iraq, the West fabricated a story for economic and strategic gain.
The reason why Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic stripped Kosovo of its autonomy in 1989 is hardly told in the West. Far from having been an oppressed people, it was the Albanian majority which, since 1974, had been employing acts of violence against Kosovo’s ethnic minorities: Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, Croats, Ashkalis and Goranis – the latter two are Muslim groups.
Tito’s ill-conceived 1974 constitution, which decentralised Yugoslavia, handed sole power in the running of Kosovo to Albanian communists, who subsequently enacted a policy of ethnic cleansing against the non-Albanian population. As Nora Beloff, the renowned Balkan expert and former British diplomat, put it: “Life had become increasingly insecure for the rapidly diminished Serb population, whom the Albanians were resolved to drive out of Kosovo… I visited Kosovo several times and saw for myself that the Serbs still living in Kosovo were harassed and terrified, and had no recourse to legal protection for themselves or their families.”
By having torn Kosovo away from Serbia and then masterminded its independence, the West has created a cancerous state. Modern Kosovo is the most intolerant country in Europe. Since 1999, more than 200,000 Serbs and Gypsies have been ethnically cleansed by the Albanian authorities. In 2004, a pogrom was initiated by Pristina against the non-Albanian communities of Kosovo, with the use of 50,000 Albanians – many drawn from the previously listed terrorist organisation the Kosovo Liberation Army, now renamed the Kosovo Protection Corps – which resulted in thousands of Serbs and Gypsies fleeing to Serbia and countless Serbian cultural sites being destroyed. For instance, the destruction of the Church of the Holy Virgin of Ljeviska in Prizen by Albanian mobs was described by UNESCO, the cultural section of the UN, as “an unpardonable act of vandalism against one of the most important medieval monuments in the Balkans”.
The ethnic cleansing of Kosovo’s non-Albanian communities has been perpetrated in full view of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo. Referring to the 2004 pogrom, a UNMIK official said: “Kristallnacht is underway in Kosovo. What is happening in Kosovo must unfortunately be described as a pogrom against the Serbs: churches are on fire and people are being attacked for no other reason than their ethnic background.”
Former UNMIK spokesman Derek Chappell commented: “This is a very large, comprehensive uprising. Wherever there is a Serbian population, there is Albanian action against them. These are well-organised extremists leading these attacks.”
Since Belgrade lost control of Kosovo, it has become a major exporter of drugs, prostitution and guns to western Europe. According to the Home Office, more than 70 per cent of the sex trade in London alone is run by Kosovan Albanians. Further, British narcotics police refer to Kosovo as the “Republic of Heroin”.
Organised crime in Kosovo continues to be run by former KLA personnel, who also occupy senior positions in the Kosovan government. Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, who is publicly courted by Western countries including the US and Britain, is one of the most dangerous individuals in Europe. In the early 1990s, he founded the infamous Drenica Group, which continues to be the most powerful criminal organisation in the Balkans dealing in cocaine and heroin smuggling and human trafficking.
Perhaps most worryingly, Kosovo has become a transit route and safe haven for international jihadists and is showing increasing signs of Islamic fundamentalism among its Albanian population. The Saudi Arabian government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars, through organisations such as the Saudi Red Crescent Society, in building Wahhabi mosques and madrassas in the former Serbian province.
With a growing Wahhabist influence in Kosovo, the country has become a magnet for al Qaida and a staging post for Islamic terrorist attacks in western Europe and beyond. Links exist between the Madrid and London bombings and Kosovo. UNMIK officials have testified to this in an investigation by Christopher Deliso, the experienced Balkans journalist.
An American special police investigator revealed that: “Islamist-sympathising officials are increasingly being inserted into the bureaucracy and they are the ones deciding who gets to own what, who will go free in court cases.”
And Michael Stephen Harrison, the former British UNMIK field co-ordinator for protection of minorities, has commented in relation to counter-intelligence information concerning known Islamic terrorists that: “The Kosovo department of justice won’t act because the people inside the institution are from the ‘other side’.”
Little is mentioned of the malignant nature of Kosovo by Western governments, because drawing attention to this would call into question the entire rationale behind Nato’s intervention. As Deliso says: “The West heavily backed the KLA during the Nato bombing, despite the presence of Mujahedin in its ranks, and for Western publics to suspect that this cause has been muddled up with an Islamist one would amount to a public relations disaster for both Clinton era political veterans.”
The global fight against Islamic terrorism and organised crime has been dealt a major blow by Kosovo’s independence. Europe’s towns and cities are now more at risk to these perils because of this development. Ironically, the West has brought this situation on itself. However, it is ordinary people who are paying the price.
