THE UNTOLD STORY UNKNOWN TO THE WEST (3)

The Origins of Ethnic Cleansing

in the Balkans

by 

Zhivko B. Damyanovich

World War II, the Interim Occupation, and afterwards (to the present)

After Yugoslavia’s capitulation on April 21, 1941, and the Kosovo-Metohia region’s occupation by Bulgarian and Italian forces, the Albanians - many of whom gladly collaborated with the Axis and served as auxiliaries (“balilas”) in the police and the army - were given a free hand in establishing a full-fledged reign of terror including the intimidation, jailing and eviction of all Serbs and Montenegrins with little or no notice. This was a full -scale campaign of ethnic cleansing, carefully hidden and covered up afterwards by the postwar government of Josip Broz Tito in the name of “Communist Brotherhood and Unity.” The larger public was never allowed to find out the truth about what happened there during 1941-45. There were no foreign reporters to photograph the wretched Christian refugees (including old, crippled and sick people, nursing mothers, and pregnant women), to chronicle their sufferings, or to record the tales of beating, torture, and starvation at the hands of the Albanians. Serbia had to take in most of those who were lucky enough to reach her, despite the severe war shortages of all goods and the great influx of other refugees who barely escaped with their lives from Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina. 

In those years, dark and obscure beyond all measure - everyone had reason to close their consciences and memories to the evils happening - very few Albanians initially joined the Yugoslav Resistance movement, from either Albania (occupied by Italy) or Kosovo-Metohia. It was only after the tide of the war had turned and the outcome was no longer in doubt that any significant numbers of Albanian people entered the ranks of the Yugoslav and Albanian partisans and took to the mountains and forests of the area, aiming to recapture power. The Albanian partisans’ numbers and strength soared after the Italian capitulation in 1943, helping Albania to be very generously treated by the West as an innocent victim of fascist aggression, and even more so by the Communists - particularly Tito - as a proletarian state of the Eastern Bloc.

During the final phases of World War II, the Soviets under Stalin conceived a very subtle strategy by which to bring all of the Balkans under their direct control. They pressed Yugoslavia to unite with Bulgaria, or at least to incorporate Albania (with Kosovo!) into their body politic as a seventh republic in addition to the other six comprising the Yugoslav Federation. It seemed that this scheme was well on the way to becoming reality although it was a closely-guarded secret known only at the highest levels. The well -known Yugoslav dissident Milovan ilas, who from 1943 to 1954 was Tito’s second-in -command, publicised the plan only after having fallen into disfavour; the exposure of the plot provided yet another pretext for sending him back to jail. [In postwar Yugoslavia, with shortages of practically everything (for two years I had not even one pair of socks in spite of my being a notable state official), people wondered why, in spite of not receiving any foreign aid whatsoever, their state was actually helping Albania in the latter’s construction of naval docks, harbours, roads and railroads as well as supplying it with Soviet -made tanks, artillery, and ammunition.]

To foil Stalin’s plans, Tito instead chose a middle way: allay the Albanians’ fears of reprisals by their Serb and Montenegrin victims on the one hand, while at the same time securing for Serbia her “national cradle” within her internal jurisdiction. He resisted all attempts by his subordinates to follow the examples of Czechoslovakia and Poland in expelling their ethnic German minorities. [The Czechs expelled all the “Volksdeutscher” from the former Sudetenland; the Poles reshaped their country by trading away an area on their eastern frontier claimed by the Russians in return for the right to permanently annex German Silesia as well as Pomerania (including the cities of Breslau and Stettin - they became Wroclaw and Szczecin) and expel the entire German population thereof. The ethnic Albanians of Kosovo- Metohia had very strong reason to fear such a fate after all the atrocities they were guilty of in World War II.] Instead, led by his “ideology” of “communist solidarity” and the desire to practically demonstrate “proletarian largesse” in the treatment of ethnic minorities regardless of their past misdeeds, Tito pardoned all of Yugoslavia’s enemies for their crimes (as the Regent Alexander did on behalf of his father King Peter I of the Kingdom of Croats, Serbs, and Slovens in 1918) and reaffirmed equal rights for all. To prevent reprisals against the ethnic Hungarian population (fairly numerous but not assembled in compact communities) in Yugoslav territory to the north of the Danube river, he created an “Autonomous Province of Vojvodina” within Serbia’s confines; similarly, for the sake of the ethnic Albanians, he gave the same status to Kosovo-Metohia. Thus, while the fertile, well-developed, and agriculturally rich Vojvodina now had to feed the entire Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, Kosovo- Metohia became a serious liability to Serbia on account of its poverty and backwardness.

It is worth noting what for fifty years could only be whispered in secret: the strong conviction that Tito was extremely suspicious of the Serbs. The very fact that Serbia was the largest, strongest, and best -developed of the Yugoslav republics; that the Serbs had managed to not only liberate themselves from the Turkish yoke but also to resist the Austro -Hungarian Empire for an extended period of time and finally to help in its downfall - resulting in freedom for other South Slav peoples; that they had been the first to reject the Tripartite Pact of March 25, 1941, and thus expose themselves to the full fury of the Nazi Germans; that during the Axis occupation, Serbia was the first to resist, temporarily free part of its territory, and then form the core of the Yugoslav partisan movement, and finally to be able to claim rightly what no other nation conquered by the Nazis and Fascists could do - the liberation of their country by themselves: all these things were enough to cause Stalin, the Cominform leaders, and consequently, Tito himself to look upon Serb nationalism as a threat to proletarian internationalism and (in Tito’s case, to his) communist rule.

Unfortunately for the Serbian people, Tito became the darling of the West (and of the Serbs equally) for not giving in to Stalin; they therefore ignored his internal policies. He thus was able to openly attack the Serbian people for extreme nationalism “harmful to the common cause” and to national harmony, using every opportunity to denounce it as chauvinism and ambition for national hegemony. In order to destroy its supposed roots, he had all of his opponents within the partisan movement declared “ etnik” (monarchist) traitors; as soon as hostilities ended in Yugoslavia, broad swathes of Serbian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian territory were systematically and brutally cleansed of “ etnik bandits” along with many rural families implicated as their accomplices by his security forces, including the army. Furthermore, when he delineated the borders of the six “peoples’ republics”, Serbia, as the largest, most populous and liberal thereof, was forced to include two strong ethnic minorities both known for their ignominious treatment of Serbs during the Nazi Occupation: the Hungarians (Magyars) in Vojvodina and the Albanians in Kosovo- Metohia. To make matters worse, both of these territories were given full autonomy from Belgrade. They were indisputably within Serb boundaries; however, the Serbian authority over them was severely weakened. [In contrast, all other formerly autonomous districts (from the earlier Kingdom of Yugoslavia, before World War II) - Istria, Krajina, East Slavonia, and Dalmatia (all having had self-governing privileges, and all but Istria including substantial Serb minorities) - had their autonomy totally taken away and were put under Croatian rule.] Finally, to punish Serbia for having efficiently kept much of her territory relatively free of Communist influence during the occupation, immediately after entering Belgrade in triumph in October 1944, Tito ordered the full mobilization of all Serbian men of military age and sent them virtually untrained and unarmed into the front-line of the offensive launched at that time against well-fortified German and Ustaša (Croat Nazi collaborators) positions on the “Srem” front. These raw recruits suffered terrible losses in return for virtually no territorial gain: it was like a summary execution of these youths, with the difference being that it was enemy bullets which mowed them down. The casualties were never publicized; ilas (who was also responsible for this unnecessary massacre), in his book “The Revolutionary War,” estimated that between 18,000 and 20,000 young men lost their lives.

[The tragedy of the Bohemian village of Lidice, which the Nazis wiped off the face of the earth in retaliation for the assassination of the Deputy head of the SS [SchŸtz-Staffel] Reinhard Heydrich by Czech partisans, which resulted in the slaughter of 5,000 Czechs by the Germans, is well known to the West. I however wonder how many people in the West know about the 7,000 men (including high-school boys) executed in three days of October 1941 in Kragujevac (35,000 inhabitants at the time), with another 5,000 being similarly shot two days later in Kraljevo (then a community of 19,000), in retaliation for the lives of a few German soldiers (killed by Communist partisans)? It was due to atrocities like these (and more of the same threatened by the Nazis) that the Serb population did its best to keep the Communists out of their region as much as possible.]

Early on the morning of April 6, 1941, on the Serbian Orthodox Easter Sunday of that year, the German Luftwaffe (without any declaration of war!) bombed Belgrade (as savagely as they did to Coventry, England) with 25,000 Yugoslav casualties; on April 16, 1944, Allied B- 24 “Liberator” bombers, on Tito’s alleged request, repeatedly bombed Belgrade pulverising thousands of buildings into rubble which buried a large but never-recorded number of victims. That same date was again Orthodox Easter Sunday - a very strange coincidence indeed!

Furthermore, although Tito retained Belgrade as the capital of the “Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia” in a calculated move to placate Serb anger at what he had caused to happen on the Srem front, a good number of postwar measures (direct as well as secret) were enacted against the Serb population in Serbia proper. This was felt first through the forceful promotion of the Latin alphabet: all federal institutions (all of which were/are headquartered in Belgrade) as well as most of the offices of the republic governments of Serbia and Montenegro were provided only with Latin-alphabet typewriters. [Serbs and Montenegrins traditionally use the Cyrillic alphabet.] Also, every member of the Communist Party was strongly advised to use only the Latin alphabet whenever possible. Almost at the same time, in spite of official laws guaranteeing religious freedom, Orthodox Christians faced systematic discrimination by Communist officials - who were otherwise very tolerant of Islam and Roman Catholicism. What’s more, all cities of the Vojvodina that had a substantial Hungarian minority (e.g., Subotica, Novi Sad, Sombor, Senta) also had to have Hungarian names for their streets.

Harder for the Serbs to bear were the arbitrary levies against the larger and richer peasant families who were compelled to turn over unreasonably high quotas of their products at outrageously low prices. [It should be borne in mind that northern Serbia and Vojvodina have traditionally been Yugoslavia’s “bread-basket” producing the bulk of the nation’s food- staples.] Even Milovan ilas acknowledged that these measures amounted to legalized confiscation. Furthermore, both Serbia and Vojvodina were particularly hurt by the forcible collectivization of peasant holdings, especially intensified following the rupture of relations between Yugoslavia and the rest of the Eastern Bloc (Cominform) countries in 1948. This policy was especially targeted at the best peasants having the most fertile land, who were the most resistant to being subdued into the brute servitude of the “working proletariat” in the cities: their holdings were forcibly loaned out to cošperatives with the poor and unproductive elements therein assuming commanding positions. It is hard to describe all the harm done by such ridiculous measures, often brutally enforced, including arbitrary surtaxes and the quotas mentioned earlier requisitioned at absurdly low prices which within a short time forced the best farmers to give their land “voluntarily” either to the “Peasant Workers’ Cošperatives” or to the state itself in order to get into the lower-quota brackets and thus reduce their exposure to various forms of mistreatment and even downright persecution in their own country! Finally, many people - primarily Serbs and Montenegrins - who were favourably inclined towards Stalin and Russia for their help in the Serbian liberation (also due to Russia’s helping them earlier in World War I) were imprisoned and subjected to all sorts of degradation by their former Party “comrades.”

At any rate, in the new Yugoslavia of 1945 all ethnic minorities were given equal status with the majority Slavic population. Old grievances and wounds had to be forcibly effaced and magnanimously forgotten - let bygones be bygones! Or was enough truly enough? By a special decree in late 1944, kept secret throughout the period of Tito’s rule and known only at the highest levels, the Serb and Montenegrin refugees from Kosovo-Metohia were forbidden to return to their homes! Why? No one knew and nobody dared to ask if by chance the existence of such an order was acknowledged. In that way, the Albanians - now the majority population in Kosovo -Metohia - were further aided in gaining the upper hand in the region resulting in the direst consequences for the remaining Serb population in their own home-country!  

So, since Tito had so frivolously given full autonomy to Kosovo-Metohia, the Albanian authorities, aided by the remoteness of the region, bad communications and public unawareness, took advantage of the autonomy to continue purging the region of the remaining ethnic Serb and Montenegrin population. First covertly, then more aggressively and violently, the Albanians in control redoubled their anti-Serb policies with the distinct goal of forcing all non- Albanians to flee in fear, leaving everything behind. Every means was used including slaughtering of Serb livestock; damaging and/or destroying Serbian crops, fruit trees and vineyards as well as other forms of attack upon Serb property including arson; mugging, maiming, and even the murdering of Serb children and other defenceless people (including the old) if caught singly or in small numbers.

All of these actions were exacerbated by Tito’s former war-comrade Fadilj Hoxha (pronounced as if written “Hodge-a”), an Albanian, who was given overall command over much of the state machinery in Kosovo. This namesake of the extra -tyrannical Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha (the worst of Stalin’s puppets) helped aggravate matters by having the Albanian border poorly supervised, thus actually encouraging (albeit secretly) a steady flow of illegal immigrants from Albania proper, who then settled the land from which Serbs had been evicted. Meanwhile, the Serb authorities in Belgrade, muzzled by Tito, turned a blind eye to all the evil happenings there. [As said earlier, any news or rumours about what was taking place was systematically suppressed by the higher authorities (both federal and republic), with anyone who dared to report anything being summarily denounced and silenced by arrest, imprisonment, and political liquidation.] Finally, as if to add more fuel to the fire, these authorities tacitly endorsed that part of Sharia (Islamic law) authorizing polygamy (up to four wives per husband) - one more tactic used by the Albanians to boost their population. 

The reader will have hopefully realized by now that throughout the period 1941 -1989, the Slav (Serb and Montenegrin) population in the Kosovo-Metohia region (as well as throughout the rest of the country, as seen earlier) came to be treated as evil aggressors and interlopers usurping the place, rights, and privileges of the supposedly native ethnic Albanian inhabitants. The Slavs in other words were there to oppress the others regardless of the centuries-long struggle against the Turkish yoke and in spite of all of Slavic traditions and history manifested through the remnants of relics, books, and other artifacts both current and old. All this was going on within their own republic and country of Serbia, in the heart of their ancient empire, against the backdrop of their ceaseless struggle to survive the most horrible persecutions and privations unleashed by their sworn enemies in the hope of one day being free on their ancestral land. Just as the dawn of freedom was shedding its light of better days to come, they - as victims of an alien ideology, inimical and unacceptable to them - were now forced to renounce their religion, disavow their rich heritage, accept that their former masters were once again to lord it over them and resign themselves to being second-class citizens in their own country! Is there any other country in the world where the people after whom it is named possess fewer rights, privileges, and opportunities than their minority brethren? As difficult as it may be to believe, such has been the case.

Thus, it is in this way that the Slavic component (Serbs and Montenegrins counted together) of the population of Kosovo-Metohia shrunk from about 44% in 1944 to 10% in 1998-9; all the more so when one realizes that Tito’s anti-Serb policies remained in full effect for almost a full decade following his death in 1980. It was only in 1988, when the Serbs were about to commemorate the six- hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, that the true state of affairs was exposed when Fadilj Hoxha was overheard silencing a Serb’s complaint about his daughter having been raped by Albanians with the words: “Serbian women are good only for brothels!” [This was on top of a fateful witnessing by the current Serbian dictator Slobodan Milo š evi around that time of a protest by Serbs in Priš tina (capital town of Kosovo- Metohia) being brutally beaten back by Albanian-Kosovar police forces, when he pledged to those unlucky demonstrators, “You’ll never be beaten back again!” It was these incidents, among others, which he used as his springboard for power as well as for revoking Kosovo-Metohia’s autonomy, provoking the other republics in turn to think about his being a danger to them: hence the break up of Yugoslavia (instigated in part as well as blessed and generously helped by the West!) and all the attendant evils of that catastrophe, be it in Bosnia, Croatia, or elsewhere in that former country.] 

These events became too much even for the Communist “Brotherhood.” People suddenly got angry and the old repressed animosities revived. The Serbian authorities in Belgrade came reluctantly to their senses and under strong public pressure started to investigate. An endless story of horrifying discrimination, crime, harassment and other wrongdoings emerged. What had been previously dismissed out of hand as fabrications and “reactionary” defamation by “rabid” Serb nationalists turned out to be factually true.

It is in this light that one must judge what has been - and is - happening in Kosovo these days. As one views the columns of Albanian refugees fleeing Serb reprisals (and NATO bombs) now that Serbian rage and frustration about earlier wrongs have found an outlet, one should bear in mind that the Serbs never wanted this state of affairs to happen; particularly considering their generosity in giving the Albanian Kosovars such unrestrained authority in the Serbs’ own home region! Simply put, “don’t do unto others as you would have them not do unto you!”

Again, let it be made abundantly clear that I don’t sanction or condone any terror, murder, harassment, or “ethnic cleansing” of any sort any more - or less - than I could ever sanction what NATO is now doing to Yugoslavia.

Let everyone judge according to his or her conscience.

THE ORIGINS OF ETHNIC CLEANSING IN THE BALKANS - Summary

Due to the length of this essay, summarizing the main points may be helpful:

1. The Kosovar Albanians came from Albania to the Kosovo-Metohia region as intruders when most of the original Slavic (Serb and Montenegrin) population - who had lived there for up to ten centuries - migrated under the threat of utter extermination due to their (at the time) unsupported fight for freedom from Turkish oppression.

2. The new Albanian settlers - for the most part Muslims, who were therefore trusted by the ruling Ottoman authorities - actively assisted the Turks in the stifling of the remaining Slavs.

3. During the time of direst hardship for the Serbian Army in its 1915 retreat (from the Bulgarian, Austro-Hungarian, and German armies), Albanians living on the route of withdrawal across the Albanian mountains had no compassion for the exhausted Serbian soldiers (a whole third of whom perished during the march) but seized every opportunity to mug, rob and kill any

stragglers. 4. The Kosovar Albanians actively joined with Bulgarian and Austro-Hungarian occupation forces in severe persecution and harassment of ethnic Slavs during World War I;

5. Yet, these Albanians were not molested by the Yugoslav authorities in the slightest following World War I.

6. During the Italian occupation of Kosovo-Metohia of 1941-43 and the extension of that occupation by German and Bulgarian forces in 1943-45, the Kosovar Albanians systematically engaged in a sustained and well-organized campaign of ethnic cleansing unknown to the West, displacing a considerable number of Serb and Montenegrin families.

7. Immediately after the liberation of Serbia in 1944, the communist government of Josip Broz Tito enacted a secret order forbidding all those Serbs and Montenegrins who had been expelled or who had fled during the war-years to return to their homes in Kosovo-Metohia! This was a monstrous act against the Serbian people perpetrated by their own government (under a virulently - though covertly - anti-Serb president) in order to conform to an alien, unethical and forcibly imposed ideology never accepted by the Serbs.

8. The Kosovar Albanians on the other hand readily accepted the communists as their liberators and claimed all the legally proclaimed prerogatives of a distinct and compact minority in their own right.

9. Not only were the leaders and those other Kosovar Albanians who were guilty of innumerable atrocities committed during the war-years pardoned and left unpunished; they were treated as the unfortunate victims of Fascism, and thus compensated by being granted full autonomy to handle their own affairs regardless of the weakened remnants of the Orthodox-Christian Serbs and Montenegrins. All of this was enforced within and under the auspices of “The People’s Republic of Serbia”!!!

10. The Kosovars used this unexpected generosity as a further springboard for promoting their nationalist aspirations. First covertly and timidly, then progressively becoming much more blatant and violent, they attacked Slav property and people using all sorts of misdeeds including arson, rape and murder (especially of children, the weak, and the old).

11. These same Kosovar Albanian authorities secretly permitted - even encouraged - illegal immigration of Albanians fleeing the brutal regime of Enver Hoxha as well as the pitifully wretched living conditions there. In this way, the ethnic imbalance already existing continued to get progressively worse.

12. The population policies of the postwar Yugoslav government were very benign to the Islamic custom of polygamy, resulting in a proliferation of children but also of penurious families living in ever-worsening conditions which all the outpouring of Serbian aid could not counteract. This is a factor readily and deliberately overlooked in stressing the overall compactness of the ethnic Albanian population of the region nowadays.

13. Throughout the time of Tito’s government and beyond (1945-1988), a steady exodus of Serb refugees fled Kosovo-Metohia, intimidated and terrified into doing so by those same Kosovar-Albanian authorities while the muzzled Serbian authorities in Belgrade turned a blind eye. Scared for their lives, they reluctantly left their homes and everything else so dear to them, gnashing their teeth while forced into suppressing their resentment and need for justice, hoping to return in better days.

That’s the untold story, unknown to the West.