Why Do The Serbs And Albanians Hate Each Other?

I hope this in the right place...although maybe it belongs in the 'ethnic conflict' forum? Oh well.

This is not a thread to provoke flaming, it's a serious question. There are Serbs and Albanians at this site, and they hate each other. Serbs hate the Albanians for some reason, and the Albanians hate the Serbs. Call me naive, but I have no idea what the hell happened to make these two countries? hate each other so much. Like Israel and Palastine, really.

So, explain it to me. Without bashing each other, please.

 

I will try to provide some answer to your question, although this topic is very complex and cannot really be described in a single post due to the ethnic variety in that area.

The area today known as Kosovo first belonged to the kingdom of Serbia. After the Ottoman Empire invaded Europe, a coalition of Serbs, Albanians and Bosnians (under the Serbian prince Lazar Hrebeljanovi&#263 were defeated in 1389 by the Turks who occupied the area. The territory remained under the Turkish rule until the Balkan Wars in 1912 when it was reclaimed by the Kingdom of Serbia (so many Serbs consider it as an important historical and cultural part of their country). The region of Kosovo as we know it appeared in 1945 when it was given the status of an authonomous region inside what was then known as Yugoslavia (because of the significant Albanian population who lived there as long as the Serbs).

In the 1980s (during the former Yugoslavia) the first Albanian secessionist movements appeared in the Autonomous Province of Kosovo because of the agreement between Josip Broz Tito and the Turkish foreign minister Mehmet Fuat Köprülü to "encourage" the people of Albanian nationality within Yugoslavia to move to Turkey back in 1953.

During the last 50 years the ethnicity of people living in Kosovo drastically changed. Due to the higher birth rate the Albanians drastically ounumbered the Serbian minority (from 75% in 1950s, to 90% in 1989), furthermore, Serbian population which was more urban tended to move to bigger cities so their numbers decreased in large rural areas. When Slobodan Milosevic came to power in Serbia, he moved to protect the interests of the Serbian minority and efectively annexed the authonomous region of Kosovo and joined it to the Yugoslav Federal Republic of Serbia. By that time a number of small scale clashes ocurred which were instigated by both sides and the tensions between these two nationalities drastically intensified.

Most observers in the region agree that what eventually enabled Albanians to start fighting openly was the brutal policy of Milosevic in 1989 who was a Serbian radical nationalist and as the president of the republic he had the military and the police on his side. Because of that, Kosovo declared its independence in 1990 (as most of the other Yugoslav republics) but was recognised only by Albania. When the war in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina ended, the fighting in Kosovo escalated into a guerrila conflict between the Serbian security forces and the OVK ("Oslobodilačka Vojska Kosova"= "Kosovo Liberation Army"). The western intervention was triggered by the event known as the Račak Massacre (when 40- 45 Albanians were killed).

The situation leading to the conflict was accompanied by tensions provoked from both sides. By the Serbs feeling threatened because of their numerical inferiority in the area which was considered as the "craddle of their state" and Albanians who wanted their independence in the very same area in which they constituted the majority, so I won't go into who is right and who is wrong here.

The conflict itself happened relatively recently so the wounds haven't healed yet. Atrocities were commited by both sides so many Serbs feel that the current state of things is unfair since the Albanians actually gained what they wanted (their independence) while the Albanians justify this by the fact that they were the ones who were initially oppressed.

I hope this explains things a bit, as I said, the situation is much more complex than this, but this is what this forum is for so I'm sure other users will share their view of things and clarify some things better than I have.

 

Serbia's Final Solution to Exterminate all Albanians




Finding a ‘final solution’ to the Albanian ‘obstacle’ that has always undermined Serbia’s overt ambition for absolute control over the southern Balkans has consistently been at the heart of the Serbian expansionist policy.

This is articulated very clearly in ‘The Expulsion of the Albanians’ memorandum. This revealing document, which represents the ‘bible’ of the uncompromising Serbian colonialist policy, was penned by Vaso Cubrilovic, a Serbian academic and statesman who was a member of the group that plotted the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.The memorandum was presented to the government of Milan Stojadinovic (1935–1939) in Belgrade on 7 March 1937.

Incidentally, this Serbianborn prime minister and academic was one of several Serbian politicians and intellectuals who ardently admired and supported both Hitler and Mussolini.

After criticizing in his memorandum what he calls ‘the slow and cumbersome strategy of gradual colonization’ his country had followed in the past, Cubrilovic puts forward a detailed strategy according to which Serbia would eventually get rid once and for all of the Albanians by deporting them en masse to Turkey and expelling the rest of them to Albania proper. He is confident that only ‘the brute force of an organized state and ‘coercion by the state apparatus’ would ‘make staying intolerable for the Albanians’ in their ancient homeland in Kosova. The ethnically cleansed Albanian lands, he goes on, would then be populated with ‘arrogant, ireascible and merciless’ Montenegrins, who would eventually develop ‘a less local and more broad-minded, Serbian outlook', and Serbian ‘colonists’ from impoverished parts of Serbia.

Only by completely eradicating the Albanian population in Kosova, would Serbia finally consolidate its absolute control over ‘this strategic point’, which, to a large degree, determines ‘the fate of the central Balkans’. Equally important for the Serbs, notes Cubrilovic, is fulfilling the ambition to establish territorial contact with the Macedonian Slavs:

From an ethnic point of view, the Macedonians will only unite with us, if they receive true ethnic support from their Serbian motherland, something which they have lacked to this day. This can only be achieved through the destruction of the Albanian wedge.

Cubrilovic’s 1937 memorandum was followed by other similar and at times more vicious plans proposing even the complete elimination of the Albanian state, an idea first put forward in the London Treaty of 26 April 1915. Such plans were formulated during World War II by several Serbian intellectuals and politicians including Ivan Vukotic, Stevan Moljevic, and
the 1961 Nobel Prize laureate for literature Ivo Andric.

Cubrilovic himself submitted a second memorandum on 3 November 1944, this time entitled ‘The Minority Problem in the New Yugoslavia’, arguing that ‘[t]he democratic federation of Yugoslavia will only achieve peace and ensure its development if it can be made ethnically pure’. As in the first memorandum, Cubrilovic is adamant that the only way to do this is to follow the example of the Third Reich in dealing with the ‘alien element’.

According to Cubrilovic, all minorities in Yugoslavia ‘deserve to lose their right of citizenship’. Cubrilovic believes that the expulsion of ethnic minorities, especially of the Albanians in Kosova, would be carried out efficiently only by the military. In his words, ‘the army must be brought in, even during the war, to cleanse the regions we wish to settle with our own people, doing so in a well-planned but ruthless manner’.

By now Cubrilovic is careful not to give the impression to fellow Slavic nations, especially Croatia, that he has only the interests of Serbia at heart. Although this demagogue is eager to sound more like a ‘Yugoslav’ citizen than someone masterminding Serbian expansionist policy, he makes no secret of his ultimate goal, which is Serbia’s ethnic conquest of Kosova.

Only by completely colonizing all the Albanian lands in the south of the Balkans on behalf of Serbia, Cubrilovic concludes, ‘[are we] to reach our goal of linking Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia’.

Like most other Slavs living in the republics comprising the former Yugoslavia, the Macedonian Slavs were also unhappy with the influence the Serbs wanted to exert in the running of the federation that emerged after the Second World War. Unlike other fellow Slavs, however, the Macedonian Slavs were more inclined to put up with ‘the jailer of the other Yugoslav nations’, as Serbia was often referred to within the federation and internationally, because of the Serbs’ uncompromising stance on the issue of the complete colonization of the Albanian lands south of their border. As far as the Macedonian Slavs are concerned, a Kosova without Albanians would weaken significantly the Albanian community in the Republic of Macedonia. The Macedonians Slavs have never been able to implement any plan to ethnically cleanse the Albanians living in Albanian lands in the Republic of Macedonia on the scale and with the openness pursued for so long by the Serbs. On the other hand, like the Serbs, they have always been eager to denigrate the Albanians and anything Albanian. The official, degrading discourse employed by numerous Serbian leaders, epitomized in the racist remarks of the Serbian prime minister Vladan Djordjevic (1844–1930), who saw the Albanians as ‘pre-humans’, is also present in the rhetoric of some Macedonian Slav and Montenegrin politicians and intellectuals, the main aim of which is to deny Albanians their Illyrian descent and present them as ‘uncivilized’.

By demonizing the Albanians relentlessly, the Serbian-led Slavic coalition hoped that the Western powers would in the end allow them to eliminate completely this non-Slavic nation. After all, by getting rid of the Albanian ‘savages’, the Serbs and their fellow Montenegrin and Macedonian Slavs were apparently doing a huge favour to Western Europe. It was imperative that the West should perceive these three allies’ colonization of the Albanian lands as ‘absolutely necessary’ to avoid an ‘imminent danger’ awaiting Europe by the ‘non-European’ Albanians.

To achieve this ambitious task, the Serbian politicians needed something of an ideological footing. The Serbian army and its Slavic mercenaries could not do the job properly unless their brutality was backed up with ‘scholarly’ and ‘scientific’ arguments that ‘justified’ the disintegration, assimilation and finally the elimination of the Albanian nation as a must to safeguard not so much Serbia’s interests but the very future of Western civilization.

Vaso Cubrilovic believed that ‘the expulsion of the Albanians as quickly as possible and resettlement by our colonists’ required ‘close collaboration between the government, private initiative and scholarly institutions’. He was adamant that Serbian intellectuals in particular had a vital role to play in ‘selling’ Serbia’s colonial policy to the Serbian people and, more importantly, to Western Europe as perfectly ‘rational’. In a tone which is both admonishing and inviting, in his 1937 memorandum Cubrilovic drew attention to the fact that Serbian educational and research institutions:

have begun to lose the prestige they once had. . . . Many billions would have been saved in this country, many mistakes would have been avoided in our government policy, including our colonization policy, had the problems been studied seriously and objectively in advance
by competent scholars before they were taken up for solution. Our policy of colonization, likewise, would have acquired a more serious approach, greater continuity and effective application, had the opinions of experts and scholars been sought in advance. To start
with, the Royal Serbian Academy of Sciences and the University of Belgrade ought to take the initiative to organize scientific studies of the whole problem of colonization in our country. This would be feasible for many reasons. At the university we have experts on every
aspect of colonization. Teachers and academicians at the university are independent scholars, less subject to external political influence. They already have good experience in such fields and their scholarly work is a guarantee of objectivity. They should, therefore, take the initiative of setting up a colonization institute, the task of which would
be to pursue colonization studies.

As is obvious from Cubrilovic’s assessment, Serbian academics have always been loyal adherents and nurturers of the Serbian dream of domination of the Balkans. In Cubrilovic’s own words, his scholarly fellow countrymen ‘already have good experience in such fields’. Being a university professor himself, Cubrilovic was, of course, speaking as a well-informed
insider. What Cubrilovic was asking of his colleagues now was that they be much more active and sophisticated during the renewed and wellfunded campaign to present all non-Serbs living in territories ruled by Belgrade, especially the Albanians in Kosova and across Yugoslavia, as racially inferior, cultureless and historyless.

 

A Serbian national Hero, a writer, and former President of Serbia said:

"A lie is a trait of our patriotism" “We [Serbs] lie to deceive ourselves, to console others, we lie for mercy, we lie to fight fear, to encourage ourselves, to hide our and somebody else’s misery. We lie for love and honesty. We lie because of freedom. Lying is a trait of our patriotism and the proof of our innate intelligence. We lie creatively, imaginatively and inventively."

 

Albanians got more than they ever dreamt. Even noone of them got the Haag jail. I think no reason for them to hate serbs now.

 

A fair and objective analysis by a Croat. Excellent!

One remark: the Racak incident that triggered NATO bombing was staged by Americans, it is proven to be a hoax by numerous foreign independent forensics. But it's too late now. USA did not bomb Serbia because they cared so much for Albanians (which they had never before politically encountered in a serious manner). They bombed Serbia in order to lay their foot on this part of Europe, which happens to be a traditional Russian area of influence (and push the Russkies out), to establish a powerful military base (the largest US base in the world, outside US soil), to help Clinton with the Lewinski case at the time (1999), to give something to US weapons industry to work with, to test new weapons (tons and tons of depleted uranium was dumped over Serbia, including tons of forbidden cluster bombs which kill people even now), to flex muscles in front of the entire world, and, last but not least, to enjoy the dirty narcotics and human trafficking money which they were paid with by Albanian "lobby" (mafia in fact).

 

13th Monkey, that was a good post which explains things well.

Now how come they both can't shake hands and be friends again? What is so wrong with letting bygones be bygones?

 

This history goes way, way back and no one is innocent. (Has anyone been innocent since Lucy chucked that first bone at her husband and they were both chucked out of the Garden of Africa?).

The problem here is Serbs, Croats and Kosavar Muslims or Albanians do not learn from history, they see history as a passion play that can be constantly be re-written in blood.

But then they are us, only more raw about it.

 

so serbs are the blood thirsty people who have a bigger population so more blood to "sacrifice"?

 

Interesting fact about serbia

 

What a huge pile of nonsense from a radical Bosnian website.

 

The answer is easy.

The first are Christs the second - Muslims.

 

The events leading to the declaration of independence of Kosovo occurred recently and the generation which lived through them is pretty much active in the public life of the region. They experienced the fighting from the first hand and they are unwilling to simply forget the oppression and the atrocities which occurred (whether they are Albanians or Serbians). Their way of thinking automatically projects itself on younger generations who are very much influenced by their seniors. The conflicts here were extremely bloody, that's something which normal people do not consider when they think about modern Europe where everything can be solved with dialogues and its tendency to unite all its nations.

Furthermore, there's the question of refugees. Although Albanians constitute a vast majority of the population, there are many Serbs living there who are culturally and politically tied to their homeland of Serbia and do not want to belong to a state called "Kosovo".

The independence of Kosovo is a fact, and my personal oppinion is that it was rightly given to the people living there. Nevertheless, the Serbian minority should also be seriously considered. People living in any country should be able to go about their daily business without fearing for their lives and should be given time to start associate themselves with their new national identity (or have the opportunity to openly nurture their old one). The incidents between those two nations (whether they are some football fans supporting different clubs associated with their nationalities, or some politicians participating in a debate and trying to gain supporters with their radical views) still occur on daily basis. Some people even say that Kosovo should be divided between Albania and Serbia, because if you look at the majority of the posts concerning that topic, most people identify themselves as Serbians or Albanians, not people of Kosovo.

In my personal oppinion (and I'm not saying I'm right), I think that people should be given time to work and rebuild their country in order to improve their living conditions. In other words, to be "forced" to interract while doing some everyday things, like providing for their families (I strongly believe that's the main concern of people of moderate political views living in the poorest area of Europe). They simply need time to move on. Because, let's be honest, most radical ideas come from those who have time to devise them and are comfortably sitting in their chairs posting here.

 

Is it? O, dear... Nice to have double standards, huh?

So, if it's ok to give Serbian territory of Kosovo to an ethnic group than makes a majority there, why shouldn't it be ok to give Croatian territory of Krajina to Serbs? Or is the very mention of this idea too painful to you?

Man, I am bloody sick of double standards and hypocrisy.

 

There are no double standards here, and as I explained to you already in the other thread, that possibility was seriously considered. What's controversial here is that the Serbian minority was not oppressed in any way at the beginning of the war. They started it by expelling the Croats who lived there as well. This idea is not panful for me at all, it's a topic that I am more than willing to debate about.

Furthermore, Yugoslavia was divided according to its republican borders, I don't see what gave the right to Milosevic to annex Kosovo when it was an authonomous region within Yugoslavia, which had its own representative in the Yugoslav government (along with other republics). Should Vojvodina go to Croatia or Hungary than? There are significant minorities of these nations living there. What you need to understand is that if a portion of Serbians live in an area, that doesn't authomatically make it the territory of Serbia. Hitler started the WW2 when he moved to "protect" German minorities in Poland and Chekoslovakia

In any case, I think we've already debated about that issue in another thread.

 

Should I remind you what the very idea of an independent Croatia meant to Serbs living there? Two words: total annihilation. That's what Croats did to Serbs in Croatia in WW2, while wearing nazi uniforms, pretending to be greater nazis than the nazis themselves. Even Germans were disgusted by horrible crimes committed by Croats, some of which were unknown to man before. At least the nazis used gas to kill, they did not torture, cut babies' ears and fingers, force fathers to dig graves for their sons and then kill the sons in cold blood in front of the fathers or vice versa, break bones and skulls to people with wooden hammers, etc...

This is why Serbs took arms: to defend themselves from another genocide.

Kosovo was an autonomous province within SERBIA, and a part of Yugoslavia as such. The very fact Kosoo had a vote in the presidium of Yugoslavia does not change the fact it was an autonomous province within Serbia.

Vojvodina to Croatia? ON what basis? Ante Pavelic's? Come on, you gotta be kidding. I am glad our government responded with a counter law suit against Croatia, which is to reopen the WW2 Croatian war crimes, one of the worst in history.

Serbia must reopen the Jasenovac death camp story and present it to the world!

 

Serbs,unfortunetly for them,are loosers now.
Albanians,fortunately for them,are winners now.
But,as Churchill said,Balkanas are always pregnant by war...

 

The13thMonkey's overview seems reasonable to me, and consistent with what I have heard from other sources.

It is basically an ego issue on both sides, but the Kosovars had the moral highground because Milosevic was attempting to exterminate them. And because they did not have equal representation.

Virtually all of the Serbian Posts on here are consistent...they basically view the Kosovars as pets or serfs IMO. Not as equals. Independence was necessary for that reason alone.

 

Depends on who us is. Western Europe solves these issues peacefully these days.
examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig_Plebiscite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_referendum,_1944

 

I think this is the Balkan problem in a nutshell. A lot of people down there live in the past and have generation old scores they feel they have to settle. The whole "two generations ago your forefathers killed some of my family so now I am justified in killing your family" attitude is alive and well. Savages.

 

you dont know the best part. they *serbs religiously celebrate a military loss from the 1300's

 

I know. I must have heard that story a hundred times when I did my tours down there. It is simply incredible that some people can carry a grudge for 700 years.

 

You try to "remind" me of something in every post of yours by simply mentioning crimes allegedly committed by other nations without any proof whatsoever. You neither give any arguments to your opinions nor do you contribute to this debate.
You've derailed this subject from the relations between Serbs and Albanians to the relations between Serbs and every other nation in former Yugoslavia, and not surprisingly, you are persistent to see the Serbs as the victims in every conflict despite the fact that each and every one of these conflicts in the 90s was started by them. Did the Serbs face "total annihilation" in Bosnia as well? You deliberately demonize other nations and refuse to take responsibility for the actions of your own country. This is the third time you've mentioned Jasenovac while answering my posts and you keep acting sanctimoniously as if Croatia is denying it or something. Jasenovac is a historical fact, but you should bare something else in mind too, we still don't know how many people died and what actually happened, so your accusations hold no ground. Jasenovac is being investigated by the Simon Wiesental Center, teams from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and investigators from both Croatia and Serbia. None of them can say anything for certain and the number of casulties drastically vary according to each source. The above text looks like a propaganda pamphlet, and a very bad one at that. Many Croatians who opposed the nazi regime died there as well. Why didn't you mention them too? There was a poster here who posted a link to the site who describes similar crimes committed by Serbians, yet you dismissed it as being the product of radical propaganda and continued to pin similar atrocities to others? In other words, others did it but the Serbs were saints? Every source describing Serbian crimes is propaganda, and every source describing Serbian casulties tells the truth? Stop exaggerating.
I already explained to you the situation in Croatia as it was at the beginning of the 90s, and as it is now. And as a person who lives there I'm talking from my own experience. Historical evidence and history in general cannot be changed just because you don't like it as it is. We can start the debate all over again if you want, but we already did that in another thread so no need to leave that one in hope that all the arguments I presented there will not be mentioned here as well. Besides, I'll repeat this again, this is the thread about relations between Albanians and Serbs.

If that is an autonomous province than Serbia had no right to annex it. Why did Serbia choose to keep three representative votes in the Yugoslav government? Every republic had 1 vote in order to preserve the federal character of the state, why should Serbia have 3? Not only did you annex both Kosovo and Vojvodina, but you also decided to keep their seats in the government and claim them as your own, gaining an unfair advantage (majority in the presidium). The principle was simple: one representative for each republic, if Kosovo and Vojvodina are parts of Serbia, why did you need 3 representatives acting for one single republic?

I'm sure you would very much like to present this example of mine as some Croatian tendency for expansionism, but let's repeat your own words, on what basis did the Serbs claim Croatian Krajina than? That territory never belonged to Serbia in its entire history.

Many European countries had puppet regimes during the WW2, one of them was Serbia as well. The first armed resistance in Europe against the nazi regime was organized in Croatia near the city of Sisak. It was the first partisan unit in Yugoslavia. As in most of these countries, their inhabitants fought both for the nazis and against them.

Now I would like to ask you to return to the original topic of this thread and to invite you to continue the other thread if you are interested to talk about the relations between the Croats and the Serbs, so that we could avoid further flaiming since the author of this thread asked us to do just that.

 

Your posts are no different than mine, only the essence of them is on the opposite side. I don't deny crimes committed by Serbian individuals, Serbia extradited 45 of her citizens to the Hague tribunal, there were crimes in the past as well, as there are crimes in every war. But I am tired of listening to crap about Serbia being guilty for this, Serbia being guilty for that, while all of you deliberately forget misdeeds of your own kin.. You have your arguments, I have mine. You have your reasons, I have mine. The truth is somewhere in between.

Milosevic annexed Kosovo to score political points by trying to portray himself as a savior of Serbian people. He was the greatest deception ever to appear in the history of Serbia. He brought us nothing but misery and pain.
But Albanians did not have the right to undermine the constitutional order by seeking independence and chanting "Kosovo is a republic" for nearly 20 years before Milosevic ever appeared. Albanians created Milosevic.

Kosovo was not a vote for Serbia, it was a vote for destabilizing Serbia. Vojvodina was a vote for Serbia, but why split Serbian territory into 3 parts in the first place? Serbs created Yugoslavia, Serbs consisted more than a half of all Yugoslav population, and had only one or two votes out of 8 in the presidium? You call that fair representation?

Anyway, that's not the reason at all. Behavior of Albanians in Kosovo, many of which were only illegal aliens without documents who ran over the Yugoslav border and settled in Kosovo to seek better life than the one Enver Xozxa provided them, was the main reason why Milosevic cracked down on Kosovo. They had everything down there, yet they were always dissatisfied. And now, they are doing the same thing in Macedonia as well. Montenegro and Greece are next. You know that as well.

Neither did Kosovo ever belong to Albanians, yet you stated they should have it. So, if you can discuss my land, I can discuss your land as well. The reasons are identical.

Links?

Putting Serbs and Croats on the same side in WW2 is an insult.

 

Serbia Radical Party, the biggest party in Serbia and thousands of Serbs burn the Israeli flag in the center of belgrade

bigots are all brothers under the skin