The Historical Victory of Kosova

As the Kosovars rightfully cheer and jubilate on this historically Great Day, it would be useful to consider and analyze the arguments of the skeptics and the opponents of Kosova’s formal independence.

In a world in disarray, confusion, and moral collapse, we frequently hear all sorts of biased interpretations and unprecedented falsifications of the historical and the philosophical reality.

Kosova’s Formal Independence: a Historical Challenge

Nationalist Serbs and their supporters have been allowed for too long to propagate the reasons of their opposition to Kosova’s secession and formal independence. For them, Kosovo, as they still call it (and they should be left as the only to do so), is the soil of their national heritage and memories. This is true, but as the Serbs admit, it concerns a period before 600 – 700 years!

This is a multifaceted problem; to even imagine to discuss who was in control of a land in a semi-forgotten past, when the land in question is now inhabited by another people, is utterly dangerous for the Mankind. The world would plunge into a marsh of ceaseless wars, if this paranoiac assertion was shared by many political parties and national governments allover the world.

Lebanese would claim the Greek islands and the Libyan coast, Macedonians would require Syria, Egyptians would demand Cyprus, Iranians would try to command Israel, and Turkey would request Algeria. Germans would call for the inclusion of the entire Prussian territory within the present German borders, French would attempt to invade Russia, and British would make an effort to annex France’s northern half. In brief, the international community would disintegrate, and the world order would collapse.

Penalize territorial claims based on terminated historicity

It is high time, particularly after all that happened in Kosova over the past ten years, for the international community to penalize territorial claims based on terminated historicity. International Stability and World Peace are concepts hinging on the fundamental concept of a People, a human society sharing values and traditions and living on a certain territory.

If we accept today that governments and political parties can claim territories occupied by their respective nations in the past, and these territories are not anymore occupied by the same nation, but by another, we risk to trigger an unlimited number of nationalistic wars among almost all the peoples of the world.

Only physical presence on a specific territory, demonstrated permanence of inhabitance and labour at a collective level, and social organization encompassing all the individuals sharing common language, writing, religion, traditions and culture, entitles a people to the right of national sovereignty over a certain territory.

Of course, there may be many different reasons for which a nation may have lost a specific territory. Germany twice lost eastern parts of its traditional territories because of the two German defeats, in 1918 and 1945. Serbia lost Kosova because the Serb population of that area gradually moved to other places.

Perhaps this cannot be easily understood in our times, when people stick to their gigantic urban centers, and think of movement only in terms of trans-ocean vacations. Today, the outright majority of people allover the world imagine that, due to lack of modern technological infrastructure, people in the Antiquity, the Christian and the Islamic Ages did not move much; this is very wrong. And it is particularly erroneous, when it is thought of peoples who lived within a vast empire, because in that case the lack of borders facilitated the movement.

Within the Eastern Roman and the Ottoman empires for many long centuries various peoples moved from places to places; this concerns even more emphatically the Balkan provinces of these imperial institutions, precisely because for various periods smaller states (co)existed in their periphery. These developments along with the various nomadic movements created great mobility.

Yugoslavian Autonomous Province ‘Kosovo’: already a problem!

The fact of the overwhelming Albanian majority in Kosova is not a recent phenomenon. Post-WW II Yugoslavia was a federal socialist state but Kosova was not a federal republic; instead, it was simply an autonomous province. This was already a problem.

The only reason for which Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia were proclaimed as federal republics and Kosova and Voivodina were undeservedly given the inferior status of autonomous province was the Serbian nationalistic and chauvinistic supremacist attitude.

There was never a referendum in 1945 in Kosova to democratically ask the indigenous population what they would prefer to be, a federal republic or an autonomous province.

In fact, already in 1945, Albanians represented larger than three fourths majority in Kosova. When today modern crypto-fascist journalists, analysts, pseudo-academia, and intellectuals play the role of apologists of the racist and fascist Serbian administration, saying that the "problem" in Kosova was the attribution of the status of autonomous province, they seem to forget that through their words, they get unmasked as regards their antidemocratic nature. What they suggest, namely not even to offer the autonomous province status to Kosova, if implemented in 1945, would be an inimical act against the outright majority of a province that was nationally different from the Serbs. This sort of suggestions is the epitome of tyranny and the embodiment of oppression.

These imaginary analysts easily forget that populations living within a circumference are not robots without personality, integrity, rights, and choices. If within a territory the entire population forms one people, one nation, then divisions and secessions are unjustified. The fact that the majority of Kosova’s population was not of Serbian origin changes automatically the data.

I will publish here an one paragraph sample of this absurd approach that reflects so well the biased approach of the racists, the nationalists, and the crypto-fascists of our days. In this excerpt, the author supposedly expresses a rejection of earlier articles of mine about Kosova’s formal independence and international recognition (http://blogs.tol.org/conflicts/2008/02/01/from-conflict-resolution-to-reintegration/):

"In Megalommatis’ American Chronicle piece, there’s no substantiation of his claim that "Kosova" has as much a right to independence as the former Yugo republics. Kosovo was in fact part of the Serb republic in Yugoslavia and never a republic itself. In 1989, Kosovo’s autonomy status within Serbia was changed because of the increased Albanian nationalist mayhem during the years of the dictator Tito’s enforced autonomy (1974-89). If one checks back to 1988, there was a consensus among the former Yugo republics that the situation in Kosovo worsened because of the autonomy granted to it. Autonomy or not, it was never a republic separate from Serbia".

The absence of the most basic concepts of humanism, democracy, freedom, national sovereignty, and Human Rights is evident in this text.

What ‘substantiation’ is needed for the proclamation of a national independence, except the determined expression of the will of the outright majority of a province’s population, which constitutes another nation than that inhabiting other provinces of the same country?

Independent states do not exist for the …. states, but for the peoples. There is no other legitimacy than the will of the people. And there is nothing higher and loftier than the verdict of a referendum for national independence. And there cannot be any justification in hindering an expressed national will.

The argument according to which, in the same way Serbs are a minority within Kosova, the Kosovars are a minority within Serbia, is useless and meaningless. Serbia does not consist in any value; states do not represent a value in and by themselves. The Serb people (and viewed diachronically the Serb nation) have the same value as any people (or nation) allover the world. There are no peoples more valuable, more determinant, and more respected than others.

Serbia did not exist forever. Created before 203 years, it represented a certain political will of some Serb groups that fought against the Ottoman Empire, and at the same time it was the flagrant desire of the French and the Russians, both enemies of the Sultan.

One has to differentiate always the History of the Peoples (or the Nations) from the History of the States, the Governments, the Administrations.

Kosova as part of the Serbian Kingdom: already a problem!

My opponent makes an arbitrary sentence; "Kosovo was in fact part of the Serb republic in Yugoslavia and never a republic itself".

But he fails dramatically to properly substantiate this historical truth; yet, this would automatically unveil his entire hypocrisy and duplicity. How and when Kosova became ‘part of the Serb republic’, and before that ‘part of the kingdom of Yugoslavia’ (between the two world wars), and even earlier ‘part of the Serbian kingdom’?

Did Kosova belong to Serbia since the Neolithic when both, Serbs and Albanians, had not yet been invented?

Did Kosova belong to Serbia since the times of the dinosaurs?

Although the racist, rancorous, and even rapacious attitude of the Serbs against the Kosovars could eventually give good examples to the dinosaurs, we know very well that Kosova became part of Serbia just before less than 100 years, during the First Balkan War in 1912.

In fact, long before Kosova was part of the Serb republic in Yugoslavia, part of the kingdom of Yugoslavia, and part of the Serbian kingdom, Kosova belonged to the Ottoman Empire. And when the armies of the Serbian Kingdom, as an ally of Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria, attacked the Ottoman Empire and invaded the Ottoman territory that corresponds to today’s independent Kosova, they encountered a population that was already in its majority Albanian Kosovar.

My opponent seems to viciously forget that military invasion does not generate ‘de jure’ situations, and does not consist in any sort of legitimacy. The invading Serbian armies did not arrange any referendum to offer their dictatorial, anti-democratic, anti-Islamic, and racist state an elementary legitimacy over the new territories.

The only legitimacy the Serbian kingdom may have got is the irrelevant Treaty of London (30 May 1913) that was the result of the Anglo-French, anti-Ottoman hysteria. All that the treaty specified remained unknown and indifferent to the Kosovar Albanian people, who had no reason to separate themselves from the Ottoman Empire.

If the Treaty of London was accepted in Kosova by means of a valid referendum, this would consist in a corroboration of the events. Such reconfirmation was never expressed, and as it is known, the Serb militarists never bothered to consult the Albanian majority of Kosova that they viewed as ‘Untermenschen’ in a purely racist way.

Today, with the disreputable and shameful London Treaty tore up, the peoples of the Balkans start taking revenge, claiming what has always been theirs, and asserting their inalienable rights.

The falsification of the historical reality in the 19th and 20th centuries Balkans takes now an end. In a forthcoming article, we will refute falsifications of moral and philosophical order that have been recently propagated against Kosova.

Today, we enter a New Era for the Balkans, Europe, and the World. The Sun of a New Order of Moral World rises for all the oppressed and deprived peoples allover the world.

It would be better for Serbia to be the first country to recognize Kosova; otherwise, 2008 Serbia will soon look like 1991 Yugoslavia, and Voivodina and Sanjak will be the next to secede.