Byzantine Blog

• Sign #10:  Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija has suddenly become a “southern Balkan province,” as if Balkan peninsula is a state, a phantasmagorical “renegade province” (no-man's-land), or simply “South-European province.”
• Sign #9:  Speaking of war between insurgent terrorist KLA (UCK) and Serbian army in Kosovo, the article uses terms like “Serbian crackdown,” “Serbian ethnic cleansing,” or “violent crackdown by Serbian/Milosevic forces.”
• Sign #8:  NATO aggression and 78-day bombardment of Serbia (with Kosovo) is reduced in scope and severity to “Kosovo mission” (suggesting NATO bombed part of Serbia - Kosovo and Metohija - only, and rained flowers instead of missiles and cluster bombs on Serbia), and justified as “a mission aimed to put an end to/halt Serbian crackdown,” most often within a single sentence.
• Sign #7:  KLA (UCK), Albanian Muslim terrorist organization with ties to Bin Laden's Al Qaeda and well known jihadist groups in the Middle East, which started the war in Serbia and keeps terrorizing Kosovo is never mentioned.
• Sign #6:  Somewhere along the li(n)es, the article mentions the long ago refuted falsehood that Serbs have killed 10,000 Albanians during Kosovo war. At the same time, it provides no link to a credible study or analysis that backs the allegation up.
• Sign #5:  In patronizing tone, it threatens Serbs with isolation, telling them they will either accept Kosovo independence and “improve their prospects” for entering the European Union, or “slide back” into isolation and, generally, suffer consequences for trying to keep their borders intact.
• Sign #4:  Members of the Serbian government refusing to sign the amputation of 15% of their country's sovereign territory are denounced as “nationalists,” and/or compared to the late President Milosevic.
• Sign #3:  Granting independence to southern Serbian province of Kosovo is treated as a fete-accompli, a mere formality and a reflection of “reality.” According to Albanian lobbyists, all that is needed to redraw the borders of any state in the world is to have a city, an area or a part of the territory predominantly inhabited by a different (foreign) ethnic group that desires to secede.
• Sign #2:  Serbia's (and, therefore, Kosovo's) constitutive nation, Serbs, are treated as a “minority” in their own state, while one of its minorities, Albanians, are spoken of as a “majority,” so the issue of hijacking part of one's state is presented as a democratic one: majority's rule over minority.

• #1 sign you are being brainwashed by an Albanian lobbyist:
  The results of the flood of illegal immigrants from neighboring Albania on the one hand, and ethnic cleansing of Serbs from their own province of Kosovo on the other, are accepted as a legal, valid road to secession, so the article doesn't mention what is really going on in the “postwar” Kosovo. It doesn't mention any of the:
  - 3,200 Serbs killed,
  - 2,000 Serbs abducted and presumed dead,
  - 350,000 expelled Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, Turks, Egyptians, Gorans and other non-Albanians,
  - 150 destroyed Christian churches,
  - 200 desecrated and destroyed Christian graveyards,
  - or daily assaults on remaining churches, monasteries, clergy, and generally all of the remaining non-Albanian residents in Kosovo.

(Cartoons by Nikola Otas)