It was a short-lived guerrilla movement that rose up against Slobodan Milosevic’s régime, first to fight for independence from an apartheid-like system, and later as a defence against mass murder and ethnic-cleansing. The KLA was always thoroughly secular and in no way resembled a Balkan Hamas or Hezbollah.
Its leaders also distinguished themselves from their Bosnian counterparts when they flatly refused assistance from Arabic mujahideen who wanted to fight a holy war there against Serbs. Albanians don’t fight religious wars, not against themselves, and not against others.
There has been no fighting or even tension between Muslim and Christian Albanians, only between Serbs and Albanians.
The danger in Kosovo isn’t that international peace keepers are nurturing a jihad state. Rather, a premature withdrawal may lead to a resumption of the fighting between Serbs and Albanians that they moved in to stop in the first place.
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Kosovo is deep rooted clan society, arranged and forced marriages is common along with gruesome blood feuds. If one could make some parallel it would be mafia structures in Sicily but I doubt that it is a common interpretation of what’s feels and is European.
It was a short-lived guerrilla movement that rose up against Slobodan Milosevic’s régime, first to fight for independence from an apartheid-like system, and later as a defence against mass murder and ethnic-cleansing.
Well KLA did appear on the scene when Tito parted from the Yugoslavian project, that is long before Milosevic. The albanization of Kosovo have been a project long before KLA was created the 1974 autonomy didn’t come from thin air. The militarization of the project have probably much more to do with Tito’s death than Milosevic.
In Yugoslavia Kosovo had record population growth rate, Serb and other ethnic groups share on steady decline over the decades. Serbs did almost keep up in absolute numbers, that they did not have “normal” growth was due to lower birthrates and exodus of Serbs from Kosovo.
One resemblance with Islamic countries is the steady decline of minority ethnicities and religions, there for some reason some parts of the world where multiculturalism don’t thrive.
Kosovo face enormous problems, to just keep up they need a steady economic growth rate about 5%, to improve it should be around 7%. This is not any new Monaco, Hong Kong, Singapore and so on. Poor education, poor infrastructure, insufficient rule of law, pre-industrial social structures is just some of the problems. If the steady population growth continue Kosovo will have doubled its population in 30-40 years (and there is already a water problem with its present population) and then is already a significant part of its Kosovars in working age living abroad. And then one hasn’t even touched the European problem of Kosovo as an drug, trafficking and criminal hub in Europe.
The socialist modernization didn’t succeed in will the neo-liberal do it.
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