Ето и един постинг взет от soc.culture.bulgaria
Thext cleaned by Frau Dr. Professor Galina Sneider:
(Easier to read this way)
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A Final Solution (The New Republic)
0n June 12, 1990, one of the most important Serbian intellectuals
of the twentieth century was laid to rest in Belgrade. His name was
Vasa Cubrilovic, and his funeral was attended by a who\'s who of
Serbian academia and politics. The dean of Belgrade University\'s
College of Philosophy and a member of the Serbian presidency,
who spoke on behalf of Slobodan Milosevic\'s government, gave
eulogies. \"The work that he left behind marks him as one of the
giants of our era\" said one official. \"He was a man of understanding
and negotiation. \"The front-page obituary in the state-run newspaper
Borba said Cubrilovic\'s \"name will be noted in history as one of
the most important people of this country.\" President Slobodan
Milosevic couldn\'t attend the funeral, but he did send a telegram to
Cubrilovic\'s family.
Who was Vasa Cubrilovic to receive all these honors?
Born in 1897, Cubrilovic was a 17-year-old member of the Serbian
nationalist group that staged the 1914 assassination of Archduke
Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Spared execution because of his age,
Cubrilovic spent World War I in prison and then returned to
Belgrade to study and work in the government of what was then the
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. By the 1930s, he was a
professor of history at Belgrade University, where he taught for 40
years, eventually becoming the head of his department and later the
director of the prestigious Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences
Institute for Balkan Studies. In that time, he assembled a body of
historical research on Serbian political thought that has been hailed
even by American academics. And Cubrilovic was the author of
vicious plans to rid Yugoslavia of the Kosovar Albanians.
Cubrilovic first presented his ideas to the Serbian Cultural Club,
an organization of Belgrade intellectuals. On March 7,1937, he
submitted \"The Expulsion of the Albanians\" to the government as
a secret memorandum. \"From 1918 onwards it was the task of our
present state to destroy the remainder of the Albanian triangle
[Kosova]. It did not do this, Cubrilovic wrote. \"The only way
and the only means to cope with them is the brute force of an
organized state.\" Cubrilovic suggested that Albania and Turkey
would be the best places to ship Kosovar Albanians. But, if Tirana
objected to the deportation, \"the Albanian Government should be
informed that we shall stop at nothing to achieve our final solution
to this question.\" Cubrilovic explained that \"to bring about the
relocation of a whole population, the first prerequisite is the
creation of the suitable psychosis.\' This, he said, .can be created
in many ways\' \"including bribing and threatening the Albanian
clergy, propaganda, and \"coercion by the state apparatus,\" a
concept he explained at length:
The law must be enforced to the letter so as to make staying
intolerable for the Albanians: fines, and imprisonment, the
ruthless application of all police dispositions, such as the
prohibition of smuggling, cutting forests, damaging agriculture,
leaving dogs unchained, compulsory labor and any other
measure that an experienced police force can contrive.
From the Economic aspect: The refusal to recognize the old
land deeds,... requisitioning of all state and communal pastures,
... the withdrawal of permits to exercise a profession, dismissal
from the state, private and communal offices, etc., will hasten
the process of their removal.... When it comes to religion the
Albanians are very touchy, therefore they must be harassed on
this score, too. This can be achieved through ill-treatment of
their clergy, the destruction of their clergy, the destruction of their
cemeteries, the prohibition of polygamy, and especially the
inflexible application of the law compelling girls to attend
elementary schools, wherever they are.... We should distribute
weapons to our colonists, as need be.... In particular, a tide
of Montenegrins should be launched from the mountain pastures
in order to create a large-scale conflict with the Albanians in
[Kosova]. This conflict should be prepared by means of our
trusted people. It should be encouraged and this can be done
more easily since, in fact, Albanians have revolted, while the
whole affair should be presented as a conflict between clans
and, if need be, ascribed to economic reasons. Finally, local
riots can be incited. These will be bloodily suppressed with
the most effective means.... There remains one more means,
which Serbia employed with great practical effect after 1878,
that is, by secretly burning down villages and city quarters.
\"My first thought when I read [Cubrilovic\'s 1937 memo],\" says
Charles Jelavich, a professor emeritus of history at Indiana
University and an acquaintance of Cubrilovies since 1949,
\"was, my God, I think Milosevic read this and said, \"I\'m going
to implement this plan.\" Still, some Slavic studies scholars
and former acquaintances of Cubrilovic argue that, in light
of what was happening in Europe and Russia in the 30\'s, this
ghastly vision was not as extreme as it sounds today. \"I think
most of these things should be put in the proper context,\" says
Bosko Spasojevic of the Open Society Institute in Budapest,
who was once a teaching assistant at Belgrade University,
where he knew Cubrilovic. \"At that time in Europe things like
this were solved in very radical, cruel ways\" Indeed,
Cubrilovic wrote: \"The world today has grown used to things
much worse than this, and it should not be a cause for concern.
At a time when Germany can expel tens of thousands of Jews
and Russia can shift millions of people from one part of the
continent to another, the shifting of a few hundred thousand
Albanians will not lead to the outbreak of a world war.\"
Although parts of Cubrilovic\'s plan were put into effect during
the 30\'s, World War II temporarily interrupted any mass
deportation. But, after Soviet troops liberated Belgrade in
late 1944, Cubrilovic, who spent part of the war in a German
prison camp, submitted another plan to Yugoslavia\'s new
Communist leader, Josip Broz Tito. This second document,
\"The Minority Problem in the New Yugoslavia,\" advocated
the expulsion of not just Kosovar Albanians but all of Yugoslavia\'s
minorities. \"Yugoslavia can achieve peace and ensure development
only if it becomes ethnically pure\" he wrote. The army should
\"systematically and without mercy cleanse the minorities of
these regions, which we want to settle with our own national
element.\" He advocated taking advantage of the war chaos to
help \"ethnically conquer\" Kosova: \"That which in peaceful times
takes decades and centuries in time of war will be accomplished
in a matter of months and years.\" He also called for concentration
camps, the development of a complicated government bureaucracy
to conduct ethnic cleansing, and stressed that \"[t]he hatred and
irresistible wish of our masses to do away with minorities must
be utilized in a constructive way,\" for \"[i]t may be that we might
never again have such an opportunity in order to make our state
ethnically pure.\"
It tells you something about the sincerity of Tito\'s \"brotherhood
and unity\" slogan that he invited Cubrilovic to serve as a federal
minister from 1945 to 1951. During this period, the Tito government
did send tens of thousands of Albanians to Turkey and, according
to some estimates, executed tens of thousands more.
Yet some say that, by the time of his death in 1990, Cubrilovic
had mellowed and no longer believed in the brutal solutions he
had once advocated. \"I think he was afraid of what [post-Tito
nationalism] would unleash, \" says Norman Cigar, who is
completing a study of the infamous 1986 Memorandum of the
Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the intellectuals\' manifesto
that became the inspiration for Milosevic-era Serbian nationalism.
\"He was dead against the memo\' \"says Cigar. \"He said it was
going to lead to bloodshed \" However, at the same time Cubrilovic
was predicting that the memorandum would break up Yugoslavia,
he also threatened that blood would be spilled if Kosovar
Albanians sought independence.
Whatever intellectual shifts he may have gone through at the
end of his life, Cubrilovic had created an ideological monster
he could no longer control. Shortly after his death, The Collected
Historical Studies by Vasa Cubrilovic was trotted out by nationalist
Serbs to bolster the case for the wars that Milosevic later launched.
Confronted today with more than half a million deportees and reports
of unspeakable violence, many in the West wonder at the lack of
dissent among Serbian intellectuals. But, as Cubrilovic\'s work shows,
the historical rationale for ethnic cleansing has been provided by
some of the most respected academics in Serbia. The present
generation of Belgrade scholars is hardly different. As Miranda
Vickers, the author of Between Serb and Albanian, puts it,
\"The more educated the Serbs are, the more nationalist they become.\"
During the Milosevic era, Dusan Batakovic, a Belgrade University
historian, has emerged as the leading advocate for the minority
Serb population in Kosova. Like many nationalist writers, though,
his scholarship seems clouded by a wildly chauvinistic reading
of Serbian history. He notes that the Kosovar Albanian intelligentsia
consists of \"semi-intellectuals capable of taking in only a limited
number of ideas. \" He writes that during World War II some
100,000 Albanians immigrated to Kosova under a secret Italian
resettlement policy. (The Axis powers occupied Albania during
the war.) In Kosova: A Short History, however, Noel Malcolm
exposes this assertion as \"pure fantasy.\" He writes, \"No evidence
of any such mass migration during the war can be found in any
of the documents of the occupying powers\'
Writing about the deportation of Kosovars to Turkey in theories,
Batakovic insists that mainly ethnic Mirks were sent and that the
number of Albanians was \"negligible. \" He fails to mention that,
before the deportation, Albanians were coerced into declaring
themselves as Turks (the number of \"Turks\" in Kosova increased
by 2,500 percent in six years). Today, this spurious \"researcher\"
is a widely respected historian, and it is said he will likely
follow in Cubrilovic\'s footsteps and be named director of the
Institute for Balkan Studies.
Yet Cubrilovic\'s true legacy may be what is now happening in
Kosova the enactment of his decades-old blueprint for ethnic
cleansing through Milosevic\'s meticulously planned Operation
Horseshoe. \"NATO didn\'t realize that this \'Cubrilovic syndrome
of the 1930s was still active in the 1990s, says Vickers. \"But the
Serbs have always said, \"We don\'t want Albanians living with
us\". There\'s no hypocrisy on their part.\"
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