[kcc-news] KosovaTaskForce: KosovaTaskForce: Religion's at the root of Balkan evil

[Kosova Task Force, USA]

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Kosova Task Force, USA
Action Alert
4/26/99



NEW YORK - Serbia¹s savagery in Kosovo has finally exposed one of Europe¹s
darkest and dirtiest secrets: the long racial and religious war against the
Muslims of the Balkans.

Hatred of Muslims is the 1990¹s version of the anti-Semitism of the 1930¹s that
led to the extermination of Europe¹s Jews. Just as many Europeans were overtly
or secretly happy during the Nazi era to be rid of the Jews, so today, some
modern Europeans actively or tacitly support the latest campaign by Serbia¹s
Muslim-hating racist regime to impose a `final solution¹ to the `problem' of the
Balkan Muslims.

After the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1912, hundreds of
thousands of Muslim Turks were slaughtered or driven out. At the end of
Turkish-Greek war 1920-1928, 400,000 Turks were expelled from the Balkans;
simultaneously, one million Greeks were driven from Aegean Turkey. From
1912-1928, large numbers of Slav and Albanian Muslims were expelled from Bosnia,
Kosovo, and Serbia. Today, there are almost 2 million people of Bosnian descent
and some 1 million of Albanian origin living in Turkey.

These vast expulsions still left some Turks, and millions of native Balkan
Muslims, the descendants of Serbs, Albanians, Greeks, and Bulgarians who had
voluntarily converted to Islam in the 15-16th Centuries to escape fierce
religious persecution by the Catholic or Orthodox Churches, or to avoid a head
tax on Christians levied by the Ottomans.

Today, there are some 10 million Muslims in the Balkans: nearly 3 million
nominal Muslims in Albania; 2.3 million in Kosovo and Sanjak; 2 million in
Bosnia; 2 million in Bulgaria; 180,000 in Greece; and 600-700,000 Muslim
Albanians in Macedonia.

In the 1980¹s, Bulgaria expelled 300,000 Muslim citizens and forced the
remaining Muslims to Slavicize their names and adopt Orthodox Christianity. A
few years later, Serbia began attempts to exterminate or drive out Bosnia¹s
Muslims.

France and Britain, nervous over their own large Muslim minorities, and
traditionally anti-Muslim because of their colonial past, thwarted US efforts to
halt ethnic warfare against Bosnia¹s Muslims.

Greece, Bulgaria, and Macedonia gave the Serbs economic and diplomatic support.
The west¹s tacit approval, or ineffectual opposition, to this ethnic-religious
warfare opened the way for Serbia¹s `final solution¹ in Kosovo.

Today, there is wide support among Orthodox nations of Eastern Europe for
Serbia¹s merciless campaign to eradicate its Muslim and Catholic Albanian
minority. What we are seeing is not just a war over land, it is an eruption of
the most vicious medieval hatred against non-Slavs and non-Orthodox people,
encouraged and enflamed by demagogue Slobodan Milosevic and some extremist
elements of the Orthodox clergy. Slavs in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Russia, and,
sadly, some Greeks, are cheering on this massive pogrom, just as Europe¹s
Catholic right applauded Germany¹s `purification¹ of Jews from their midst.

Serb propaganda paints Albanians and Muslims as `dirty, violent Turks,¹ who
`breed like rabbits,¹ `run drugs,¹ and flood Slav lands with their alien
offspring, the vanguard of a vast `Islamic horde about to invade Christian
Europe.¹ Orthodox priests preach revenge for events 500 years past, even urging
a new crusade to `liberate Constantinople (modern Istanbul) from the Turks¹
Milosevic began the horrors of ethnic warfare, vowing, a decade ago, `we will
send all the Muslims back to  Mecca.¹

Ironically, Albania was always renowned for religious toleration. Muslims drank
and celebrated Christmas and Easter; Catholics often observed Ramadan; Muslim,
Orthodox, and Catholic Albanians mixed freely and without the slightest rancor.
Every member of Albania¹s small Jewish community was hidden from the Nazis and
Italian fascists.

Yet the easy-going, unreligious Albanians and other Balkan Muslims now are
paying a terrible price for long past centuries of religious and racial hatred.
They have become scapegoats for the frustrations, economic ruin, and low
self-esteem of the failed, only semi-Europeanized nations of the darkest
Balkans.

Copyright: Eric Margolis, 1999

Circulated with permission.

====================================
Kosova Task Force, USA
730 W. Lake St., Suite 156
Chicago, IL 60661, USA
Phone: 312-829-0087
Fax: 312-829-0089
Email: kosova at justiceforall.org
Internet: http://www.justiceforall.org
====================================

The following organizations constitute the Kosova Task Force, USA: 
Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, American Muslim Council,
Balkan Muslim Association, Council of Islamic Organizations of Chicago,
Council of Islamic Organizations of Michigan, Council on American
Islamic Relations (CAIR), Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA),
Islamic Council of New England, Islamic Medical Association, Islamic
Shura Council of Southern California, Islamic Society of Greater
Houston, Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Majlis Shura New York,
The Ministry of Imam W.D. Muhammad, Muslim Students Association of US
and Canada, The National Community.


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