Balkan war of words
From Mr Marko Gasic Sir: Walking into my local newsagent's, I noticed a commotion in a corner. Some- thing was cooking inside The Spectator. What an altercation!
Poor old John Laughland, it appeared, was being crucified for implying that those beastly Serbs were real human beings, with feelings and churches. A desperate-looking Dr Noel Malcolm was trying to pull the wool over everybody's eyes with his denial that US Defence Secretary Cohen had been trying exactly the same tactic himself in raising the possibility that the Serbians, presumably for relaxation while being bom- barded by Nato, might have simultaneously been bumping off 100,000 Albanians. The desperate doctor had been joined by a self-proclaimed 'Balkan expert', the Indepen- dent's Marcus Tanner (Letters, 8 January), who was equally busily serving up the British Journalist's equivalent of fast food: lots of quantity, but a complete lack of substance. There was, for example, that usual nutty concoction: the employment-in-Kosovo appetiser. This contained some very old chestnuts, like the one about Albanian pro- fessionals losing their jobs for not signing 'loyalty oaths'. Wrong country, Mr T. In Tudjman's prewar Croatia, Serbs had lost their jobs for refusing to pledge loyalty to that then non-existent state. In Kosovo, Albanians didn't so much lose their jobs as leave them, ordered to leave en masse, not by their employers, but as part of the sys- tematic boycott of state institutions organ- ised by the ethnic Albanian leaders. For their part, employers will take a dim view of employees who leave work and never come back, whether that be in Koso- vo or Kent. Employees can certainly expect the sack for such behaviour; or for arbitrar- ily writing out new job descriptions for themselves. Tanner's 'loyalty oaths' don't come into it. And, incidentally, could he quote these to us? Verbatim, please, with source, so we can see what on earth the man is referring to. Mr Tanner also refers movingly to poor conditions inside 'schools that the Albani- ans had to set up'. What does he mean? The Albanians didn't have to set anything LT. Why didn't they just carry on studying like everybody else? Serbia's dozens of national groups (including Albanians) all have the right to study their common cur- riculum in their own language (and, addi- tionally, to learn about their own national culture). Was it so bad that the Albanians were also expected to keep to the multi- ethnic state curriculum just like everyone else in the multi-ethnic republic? Was the state's insistence on that multi-ethnic cur- riculum really sufficient reason for educa- tional ethnic apartheid to be declared by extremist Albanian nationalist leaders? Schools they had to set up. What bilge!
And there was more: 'the police invari- ably set upon children carrying books'. Not even once, but invariably? Only in Christ- mas pantos, Mr T. Then came the most offensive fruit of Mr Tanner's febrile imagi- nation, a real Big Whopper: namely, his claim that he 'would turn on the news and hear the Kosovo Albanians described night after night as vermin'. Now, I hate to rat on Mr Tanner but I have to say that he is serv- ing up codswallop. The idea that any post- war European broadcaster, still less one in a multinational state, would ever so describe a significant group of its own view- ers! Surely people can't swallow this. However, certain people nowadays are predisposed to do just that: nothing like a liberal dose of anti-Serbian arsenic to whet their now perverted appetites, I suppose. Sadly, I looked at some equally thin Tanner gruel. What was being cooked up here? 'Thousands of men and women killed or tortured over the last 20 years for having the wrong name and religion'. Since for half that period Kosovo's Albanians com- pletely controlled Kosovo's legislature, executive, judiciary and police personnel from top to bottom, I would like to think that Mr T. is obliquely referring to the con- sequent suffering of the Serbians of this Serbian province under Albanian oppres- sion — before 1989 and from June 1999. Somehow, given his previous partiality, I doubt it.
Marko Gasic mail@markogasic.idps.co.uk
Previous page
