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Ever since Kosovo declared itself independent from Serbia, with under 25% of the world’s nations recognizing it as such, travel articles started popping up, to give Westerners a sense of the world’s “newest country,” as the travel writers puzzlingly refer to the province. One from early August appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and caught the eye of reader Goran, particularly this paragraph:
But, once you come to terms with its aesthetic dowdiness, Pristina is quite engaging, not least for its peculiarities. Its central library, for example, looks like a spaceship from a 1970s alien B-movie, with domes of various shapes. There are mobile phone shops called Nazi. And one of Pristina’s main drags is Bill Clinton Boulevard, named after the then-US president who ordered air strikes against Serbia to punish it for its ethnic-cleansing policies in Kosovo in 1999.
“This is a peculiarity??” Goran marveled. “And a primary reason to visit Pristina?? Not sure that the marketing team of Nazi Telecom thought through their branding strategy…or perhaps they did.”
Indeed they may have thought it through fine, given that Kosovo also hosts a Hitler diner and its civilian Nazi organization Balli Kombetar is still in business. And of course who can forget Kosovo’s “Commander Nazi.” I’m not sure if the writer knows how apropos it is that Bill Clinton’s name follows in the same breath as the shop’s name “Nazi”, given that in the ’90s Clinton did what hadn’t been done since Hitler did it in 1941: bomb Belgrade. As well, before Bill Clinton’s America became the Albanians’ sponsor, Adolf Hitler was their sponsor, delivering them the land that today we re-deliver to them (after they lost it by being on the losing side of WWII). Here is the short version of Kosovo’s Nazi heritage.
Another sentence of note from the above-excerpted article is this: “Tensions rose in the 1980s and full-scale conflict broke out in 1996 when, under former president Slobodan Milosevic, Serbian forces tried to rid Kosovo of its majority Albanian population.”
This line reflects the current trend among the parade of mainstream writers in which they dredge up all the long-debunked myths surrounding the Balkan wars. In some articles, the Bosnian war dead is back up from under 100,000 to not merely the inflated 200,000-250,000 figure, but now that Karadzic is captured we’re hearing a “300,000″ — all Muslim dead, of course. (Do I hear 400,000? Anyone? Maybe 350,000?) The 1998-99 military operation in Kosovo, meanwhile, that over the years was scaled down from “genocide” to “ethnic cleansing” and then to is now back to “ethnic cleansing” and even back to “genocide” according to some U.S. government spokesmen.
Another bizarre paragraph from another travel-to-Greater-Kosovo article, from the San Francisco Chronicle in May:
Albania offers melange of weirdness and charm
(Berati, Albania) — …Past the homes, a giant red mosque stands proudly as a symbol of Albania’s history of religious tolerance.
[Insert screeching-stop sound effect.] A red mosque in a Muslim country is a “symbol of religious tolerance”?? Would that be because the mosque across the street from it is blue? And not far down the road there may be an orange one that’s also permissible? Oh, and have you seen the mosque yet? Yes? What about the mosque?
Really, to be a travel writer one has to be almost as stupid as the travelers who act on their recommendations. Back to the weirdness and charm:
…God bless America: Due to the U.S. support of neighboring Kosovo and its ethnic Albanian population against the Serbs, Americans are quite popular in Albania. U.S. flags hang from shops and houses, and people on the street shake your hand and thank you. It’s always nice not to have to pretend you’re Canadian.
My rule for traveling in countries that are irritated with America is to never hide by claiming to be Canadian. But if, god forbid, I ever found myself in Greater Albania and someone extended their hand or thanks to me because I’m an American, I would promptly inform them that I’m Canadian.
Or Jamaican.
Meanwhile, to the Wall St. Journal — in its bottomless servility to the Islamic dollar and the Bush administration — Kosovo is already a country:
Europe’s Unlikely Charmer By STAN SESSER, June 27, 2008
The newest nation on earth is Kosovo, the war-ravaged region of the former Yugoslavia. There may not be more than two decent hotels in the whole country, but today it is the rarest of destinations, a relatively affordable paradise nearly free of tourists and offering a first-hand view of history in the making.
…
Most Kosovars will look at you warily — until you tell them you are from the U.S., which led the bombing of the rampaging [defending] Serbian forces in 1999. Pristina, the capital, has a Bill Clinton Street and a Robert Dole Street…Hotel Victory…has a replica of the Statue of Liberty on its roof.
…
WHAT TO SEE: Besides the spectacular mountains, there are three “must sees”: the cultural capital of Prizren and two Serbian Orthodox monasteries, the Peja Patriarchate near the town of Peja [this would be the Pec Patriarchate in the cleansed, Serb-free town of Pec, now Albanized to “Peja” and infiltrated by Wahhabies, who have established an orientation camp and mosque for Muslim warriors], and the Visoki Decani Monastery near the town of Decan, both in the west…[D]rive south from Prizren for about an hour to the village of Brod, home to the small Goran ethnic minority…Pristina itself, beyond its statues of Kosovar heroes, has a big outdoor pool in Germia Park in the city’s north end, and a pleasant restaurant and hiking trails.
As the writer uses the victor’s justice version of the names in the stolen lands (though for some reason he still uses “Kosovo” instead of “Kosova” since we’re still playing Charades), a reader would have no idea that when he visits the Goran community, he is visiting a people and a place under siege, who are undergoing a cultural genocide and being forced out of the province via a very deliberate, orchestrated Albanian policy of intimidation and economic choking-out — their only relief provided by Serbian Red Cross and NATO.
And of course there’s no consideration for the fact that the statues of “Kosovar heroes” killed Serbian and other civilians just for fun, making the sight of them traumatic for those remnants of Kosovo society that are supposed to make the place appear
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