Hitchens on Kosova (with back-up from Leon Trotsky)
by Will, 25 February 2008
Forget all the nonsense that you may have heard about Kosovo being “the Jerusalem” of Serbia. It may contain some beautiful and ancient Serbian and Serbian Orthodox cultural sites, but it is much more like Serbia’s West Bank or Gaza, with a sweltering, penned-up, subject population who were for generations treated as if they were human refuse in the land of their own birth. Nobody who has spent any time in the territory, as I did during and after the eviction of the Serb militias, can believe for a single second that any Kosovar would ever again submit to rule from Belgrade. It’s over.But how did it begin? In fact, Kosova has never been recognized internationally as part of Serbia. It was only ever recognized as part of Yugoslavia, and with the liquidation of that state Serbian claims upon its territory became null and void. A little history here is necessary.
Monday 25 February 2008 at 4:28
Hitchens never misses an opportunity to smear and defame Israel. Here he accuses Israel of treating the population of the West Bank and Gaza strip as if they were human refuse. Yet until the homicide bombings of the Second Intifada, which took over 1000 Israeli lives, both these areas were thriving and prospering, with free movement of people and goods within these disputed territories and between the territories and Israel itself. Arabs in East Jerusalem have the same rights to social security and health that Israeli citizens are entitled to, while the West Bank and Gaza Strip are ruled in accordance with Jordanian and Egyptian Law and under the humanitarian provisions of the Geneva convention.
The residents of the territories enjoy greater individual rights than those accorded in any independent Arab country. The only thing they are not allowed to do is to murder Jews; when they do, Israel imposes checkpoints and barriers to stop the killers; if and when they stop, Israel lifts the restrictions.
Monday 25 February 2008 at 9:33
Hitchens never misses an opportunity to smear and defame Israel.
Here ya go.
Tuesday 26 February 2008 at 0:41
I’d like to think Melanie Phillips will read Hitch after her latest outburst:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/521441/is-this-crazy-or-is-this-crazy.thtml
Wrong in so many ways.
Tuesday 26 February 2008 at 0:46
Melanie Phillips is a harpy and ignorant fool.
And a racist.
Tuesday 26 February 2008 at 8:25
Vile racist troll … there’s so much wrong with that load of whining, self-serving, mendacious trash you don’t know where to start.
can Scotland be far behind?
If Scots want independence, that’s up to us–although indications are that a majority favour continuing the current constitutional arrangements. The secession could also be in the other direction–residents of Northumberland and Cumbria deciding to follow Berwick in favouring incorporation into Scotland.
Wednesday 27 February 2008 at 12:35
Concise summary written for The Guardian — the case for Kosova’s independence, by the author and historian Noel Malcolm.
“‘Kosovo is Serbia’, ‘Ask any historian’ read the unlikely placards, waved by angry Serb demonstrators in Brussels on Sunday. This is rather flattering for historians: we don’t often get asked to adjudicate. It does not, however, follow that any historian would agree, not least because historians do not use this sort of eternal present tense.
History, for the Serbs, started in the early 7th century, when they settled in the Balkans. Their power base was outside Kosovo, which they fully conquered in the early 13th, so the claim that Kosovo was the ‘cradle’ of the Serbs is untrue.
What is true is that they ruled Kosovo for about 250 years, until the final Ottoman takeover in the mid-15th century. Churches and monasteries remain from that period, but there is no more continuity between the medieval Serbian state and today’s Serbia than there is between the Byzantine Empire and Greece.
Kosovo remained Ottoman territory until it was conquered by Serbian forces in 1912. Serbs would say ‘liberated’; but even their own estimates put the Orthodox Serb population at less than 25%. The majority population was Albanian, and did not welcome Serb rule, so ‘conquered’ seems the right word.
But legally, Kosovo was not incorporated into the Serbian kingdom in 1912; it remained occupied territory until some time after 1918. Then, finally, it was incorporated, not into a Serbian state, but into a Yugoslav one. And with one big interruption (the second world war) it remained part of some sort of Yugoslav state until June 2006.
Until the destruction of the old federal Yugoslavia by Milosevic, Kosovo had a dual status. It was called a part of Serbia; but it was also called a unit of the federation. In all practical ways, the latter sense prevailed: Kosovo had its own parliament and government, and was directly represented at the federal level, alongside Serbia. It was, in fact, one of the eight units of the federal system.
Almost all the other units have now become independent states. Historically, the independence of Kosovo just completes that process. Therefore, Kosovo has become an ex-Yugoslav state, as any historian could tell you.”
Wednesday 27 February 2008 at 15:35
Thanks Will & Hakmao,
Noel Malcolm shows the difference between history (letting the facts speak) and polemic (fitting the facts to your point of view).
Hang your head in shame, Polemelanie!
Friday 14 March 2008 at 7:03
I think Obertron 5000 has anger management problems.
Saturday 15 March 2008 at 10:16
He seems to give a shit doesn’t he?