“Kosovo attacks not ethnically motivated”

Yeah right, an Albanian standing on a church's roof and taking down the cross is only a criminal activity. Shame.

Bunch of lies, show me an albanian on roof of church removing a cross, again lies.
serbs are burglirazing serb houses and they balming Albanians. they were stiling electrecity meters, tractors and many other things and were trying to blame albanians in the end we found out that everythingi sbeing stolen by serbs from northern Mitro just so as to blame Albanians.

Here you go, Ahmet. Happy viewing. Is this Albanian urban redecorating or something?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkgHkxIfgBc

By the way, it might help in the future to do your research before you claim it's a lie. You did the same thing with the "show me any medieval church that was destroyed".

what a joke!!!! Sramota!

I was just going to send that link, but you beat me to it Mike.

Hahaha, i've never heard such rubbish. By their own admission the attacks are on RELIGIOUS and CULTURAL sites. If those sites aren't representative of an ethnic group then what is?

So using that logic, if Serbs burn down a few mosques we can say that is not ethnicaly motivated? NO CHANCE. The albanians would be screaming "ethnic cleansing" from the rooftops.

Ahmet - you are living in a dreamworld with absolutely no resemblence to reality. I have heard it all now - Serbs burning Serbian churches....lol. What a sick joke that is.

Maybe he was implying a religious motivation?

What else do the statistics indicate?

Oh for God's sake Ahmet, GET REAL!!! I really do not want to think you are that naive and foolish after I sent that video. I don't know what you think of Serbian Orthodox Church services, but I can tell you that they don't destroy the church they just prayed in. They also don't stand on top of crosses and rip them to the ground. You are really desperate for a response my friend, and the fact that a) you never knew about this, and b) after seeing this you chalk it up to Serbian propaganda, really makes me question your maturity as an adult. For the record, the discussion about medieval churches that we had a few months ago was related to you saying that there were NO medieval churches destroyed, only the so-called "Milosevic" churches. I said nothing about 100s of medieval churches, but 100s of churches period. It's sad you have to discriminate between the two as if one set of churches - still holy sites - are more worthy of destruction. You have poor arguemtnative skills and have once again been duped by something that took less than 10 seconds to find on the internet. Don't make yourself look even more foolish by responsing that it was a staged event by Serbs. You're really grasping here.

Adrian, I have not denied any of these crimes you have posted, nor did I bring up these topics. The focus of the article was Albanian aggression against Serbs. Who cares if it happened in 2004, 2007, or 1999? The point of showing it was that one of your compatriots refuses to see the greater reality in Kosovo. I do not deny what you've shown and I have posted enough comments here condemning Serbian acts of violence and terror against their neighbors. So please try to atone, or at least acknowledge, the sins of your own community for a change.

You know it's really unfortunate that a lot of Albanians have to resort to reverse legitmacy to feel good about themselves. They can't acknowledge a crime committed by them, so they show an equally heinous crime committed against them, as if that negates the whole affair. I'm sick and tired of this tit-for-tat BS and the fact that they will almost always change focus to make themselves look like the vicitms instead of the perpatrators makes them look - well, Milsoevic-esque.

Sorry guys, I stand by my points and I stand by my condemnation.

Addendum: Serbs on this site have done the same thing too: change the subject to blame someone else when responsibility lies in their laps. It's not just Albanians and I apologize to people like Nick and Village-Bey who do not do this. NO ONE has a legitimate right to historical victimization in this region, and the longer we accumulate meticulous research on the crimes committed against our side, but blatantly ignore the other, just perpetuates these one-sided debates and points of view that only get people angry. You cannot ackowledge your history but deny others.

Ahmet said >> "Bunch of lies, show me an albanian on roof of church removing a cross, again lies."

The video can be seen on YOUTUBE, about a million people saw this but not you! Also in the video there are several hundereds of Albanins cheering this idiot while he rips the cross off the room. Go to YOUTUBE and search out Kosovo and see for yourself. Watch the video and then ask yourself how proud do you feel to be an Albanian.

In response to Elshani's statement for crimes since the beginning of this year,
python wrote: "an Albanian standing on a church's roof and taking down the cross is only a criminal activity"
and to prove that Mike provided a video from 2004.

Mike, that video is from 2004, not this year so it doesn't belong in this discussion. But since you decided to bring it up, I guess its only fair to note that those that burned churches in Kosova during March 2004, had their own more than capable and eager colleagues in Serbia. Here's some facts for you:

Belgrade - the burning of the Bajrakli Mosque, March 2004:
http://www.b92.net/galerija/pics/2004/03/2568570740594da19196a589121333.jpg
http://www.b92.net/galerija/pics/2004/03/199373786140594db58204e189047553.jpg
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=en&article_id=199567

According to HRW: "The failure of Serbian authorities to respond promptly and properly to the arson attack on the mosque is underlined by the fact that, a year and a half after the incident, only one person has been tried in connection with the fire and one has been indicted ... None of the criminal charges brought by the police involved incitement to ethnic or racial hatred"
http://hrw.org/reports/2005/serbia1005/index.htm

- In 13 April 2004, historic Ottoman gravestones in the Kalemegdan citadel in Belgrade were smashed with sledgehammers, as a "patriotic" act, by order of Col. Dragan Nikolic, the officer in charge of protecting these monuments as the Military Museum's curator:
http://www.danas.co.yu/20040413/kultura1.html#1

- Nish: March 17, 2004: The burning of Islam Aga Mosque.
Around 10 p.m., demonstrators marched toward the Islam Aga mosque and set it on fire, chanting “Kill, kill Shiptar!” According to the Mufti of Nish, when he called the police, the person at the other end of the line said “We know the mosque is burning, and it should be burning.” Police allowed the crowd to block fire fighters access to the mosque, leaving them unable to extinguish the fire ... The municipal prosecutor in Nis indicted eleven individuals ... But the indictment failed to consider the attack as an attempt to incite religious hatred ... The indictment treated the mosque simply as “property”.

- Novi Sad:
- On the evening of 17 March, a crowd of about a thousand youths smashed the windows of the Islamic community center in Novi Sad, and removed the flag of Vojvodina from the Vojvodina Legislature, and burned it.

- The following day, youths in Novi Sad stoned a Hungarian-language theater and some 15 other buildings, mainly Albanian-owned bakeries and pastry shops.

- Between March 17-19, 2004: Roma and Ashkali settlements were attacked in Novi Sad. So much for all the love of the Roma by the Serbs.

- In May 3, 2004, the Adventist Church in Novi Sad was attacked. Buildings belonging to the Adventist Church are the most frequently targeted religious sites in Serbia. Between January and June 2005, church representatives registered eight incidents ... In one case, an Adventist priest was attacked.

- Backa Palanka, March 28, 2004: Three Religious Shrines and Slovak Cultural and Publishing Society were vandalized.

- Djurdjevo, February 14, 2004 & April 9, 2004: Ruthenian Cultural-Artistic Society was vandalized.

- According to HRW, "Minorities frequently complain that police tolerate ongoing aggressive acts by Serbian ultra-nationalists ... Nearly five years after the removal of Milosevic from power in October 2000, Serbia still has a long way to go before ultra-nationalism is eradicated from police service and from the Serbian society as a whole ... Minorities are still grossly underrepresented among the police personnel"

http://hrw.org/reports/2005/serbia1005/8.htm#_Toc115505943

The article says that the MAJORITY of the attacks were not ethnically motivated. So some were.

Due to the number of exiled Serbs there are quite a few churches that are no longer adequately protected by a surrounding Serb population and that are easy targets for copper thieves, etc. But much ethnic violence in Kosovo has both ethnic and economic motives - you cannot separate that strictly. This includes some Albanian cops looking the other way when a church is robbed by Albanians.

Finally there is the KPC. If a thief takes a few things and destroys a few things I suspect this will be classified as just criminal.

To summarize, I encourage the B92 journalists not just to copy press releases but also to study the underlying facts to see whether the statistics are lying.

Well Adrian, seeing as how we are bearing our souls here, let me point out that while the video was taken from the 2004 riots, and while the article talks about crimes committed this year, your colleague refused to believe such an act in 2004 took place. To be fair, my posting of the video was meant more so to inform him of what he regarded as a "lie", rather than try to paint a picture of what is going on now with what happened then. Did it happen this year? No. Regardless, such an act did occur, and it's sad that some of your colleagues still refuse to believe it.

Mike,
First of all i was right about medieval churches because they were not over 100 churches as you guys were claiming but it was baout 18, which some were badly damaged and some had minor damages. We are long done on that one, and I was right . Now you are showing me a loink that I can not tell whether this guys are serbs, Albanians, or this recording may have taken place anywhere in western or eastern europe. Just becasue the writting on top of screen it says so it proves nothing. It could be serbs gathered for mass and decided to shot a movies and make it look like they are albanians sourrounding a church.

With 52 crimes per 2 mil inhabitants, Kosova is a pretty peaceful place. By comparison in 2005, for the same number of people, Finland had 56 crimes, US - 85, while Russia a whooping 403!
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita


Mike, you seem to have realized in your addendum that the issue here is presenting a video from 2004 in a news article that talks only about this year. This is not an argument, this is demagogy.

But if you want to talk about 2004 let's put things into perspective. What happened in the riots of March 2004, was an incident where things got out of hands in a couple of days, where neither NATO, the intl police or KPC could control the mob. Similar things - burning of religious sites, attack on minorities - happened in Serbia too in the space of those days, although in a lesser scale. But it was after all, only a matter of few days. Kosova politicians across the board condemned the riots, and they worked to reverse the damages. You could not deny that Kosova govt paid out of Kosova's budget to rebuild Serb houses and churches, and has been working to accommodate the Serbian minority. You can not also equate what happened in a space of a few days, by the mob, to the repression of Albanians as a whole by the STATE of Serbia prior to June 99. This recent Serb-Albanian conflict has been going at least since 1981 - that's 26 years. Two and a half decades where the Serbian state continually escalated the repression of the Albanians, by first purging them from the Communist Party and since Milosevic in 1989, by removing them wholesale from their jobs, denying them education, health care, representation, suppressing their culture, closing down their newspapers, tv and radio stations and on and on and on, and resulting in a most brutal police state. By 1995, human rights groups had estimated that nearly 75% of the adult population of Kosova had been called at least once in the so called "informative talks" by the police, that were nothing but police interrogations sometimes resulting in torture, sometimes people went missing without a trace. Police harassment on the street of Albanians was an everyday occurrence.
So think about that also when you talk about what happened in 2004 and try to link it out of the blue with a police report about crimes in Kosova for this year.


Mike: "You know it's really unfortunate that a lot of Albanians have to resort to reverse legitmacy to feel good about themselves. They can't acknowledge a crime committed by them, so they show an equally heinous crime committed against them,"

Please be fair. I have personally condemned them as many others have in this site. It's all here, please read the last post on this thread from June 17, 2007:
http://www.b92.net/eng/news/comments.php?nav_id=41860

Well Adrian, seeing as how we are bearing our souls here, let me point out that while the video was taken from the 2004 riots, and while the article talks about crimes committed this year, your colleague refused to believe such an act in 2004 took place. To be fair, my posting of the video was meant more so to inform him of what he regarded as a "lie", rather than try to paint a picture of what is going on now with what happened then. Did it happen this year? No. Regardless, such an act did occur, and it's sad that some of your colleagues still refuse to believe it.

Bunch of lies, show me an albanian on roof of church removing a cross, again lies.
serbs are burglirazing serb houses and they balming Albanians. they were stiling electrecity meters, tractors and many other things and were trying to blame albanians in the end we found out that everythingi sbeing stolen by serbs from northern Mitro just so as to blame Albanians.

what a joke!!!! Sramota!

Yeah right, an Albanian standing on a church's roof and taking down the cross is only a criminal activity. Shame.

Hahaha, i've never heard such rubbish. By their own admission the attacks are on RELIGIOUS and CULTURAL sites. If those sites aren't representative of an ethnic group then what is?

So using that logic, if Serbs burn down a few mosques we can say that is not ethnicaly motivated? NO CHANCE. The albanians would be screaming "ethnic cleansing" from the rooftops.

Maybe he was implying a religious motivation?

Here you go, Ahmet. Happy viewing. Is this Albanian urban redecorating or something?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkgHkxIfgBc

By the way, it might help in the future to do your research before you claim it's a lie. You did the same thing with the "show me any medieval church that was destroyed".

I was just going to send that link, but you beat me to it Mike.

What else do the statistics indicate?

Ahmet said >> "Bunch of lies, show me an albanian on roof of church removing a cross, again lies."

The video can be seen on YOUTUBE, about a million people saw this but not you! Also in the video there are several hundereds of Albanins cheering this idiot while he rips the cross off the room. Go to YOUTUBE and search out Kosovo and see for yourself. Watch the video and then ask yourself how proud do you feel to be an Albanian.

In response to Elshani's statement for crimes since the beginning of this year,
python wrote: "an Albanian standing on a church's roof and taking down the cross is only a criminal activity"
and to prove that Mike provided a video from 2004.

Mike, that video is from 2004, not this year so it doesn't belong in this discussion. But since you decided to bring it up, I guess its only fair to note that those that burned churches in Kosova during March 2004, had their own more than capable and eager colleagues in Serbia. Here's some facts for you:

Belgrade - the burning of the Bajrakli Mosque, March 2004:
http://www.b92.net/galerija/pics/2004/03/2568570740594da19196a589121333.jpg
http://www.b92.net/galerija/pics/2004/03/199373786140594db58204e189047553.jpg
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=en&article_id=199567

According to HRW: "The failure of Serbian authorities to respond promptly and properly to the arson attack on the mosque is underlined by the fact that, a year and a half after the incident, only one person has been tried in connection with the fire and one has been indicted ... None of the criminal charges brought by the police involved incitement to ethnic or racial hatred"
http://hrw.org/reports/2005/serbia1005/index.htm

- In 13 April 2004, historic Ottoman gravestones in the Kalemegdan citadel in Belgrade were smashed with sledgehammers, as a "patriotic" act, by order of Col. Dragan Nikolic, the officer in charge of protecting these monuments as the Military Museum's curator:
http://www.danas.co.yu/20040413/kultura1.html#1

- Nish: March 17, 2004: The burning of Islam Aga Mosque.
Around 10 p.m., demonstrators marched toward the Islam Aga mosque and set it on fire, chanting “Kill, kill Shiptar!” According to the Mufti of Nish, when he called the police, the person at the other end of the line said “We know the mosque is burning, and it should be burning.” Police allowed the crowd to block fire fighters access to the mosque, leaving them unable to extinguish the fire ... The municipal prosecutor in Nis indicted eleven individuals ... But the indictment failed to consider the attack as an attempt to incite religious hatred ... The indictment treated the mosque simply as “property”.

- Novi Sad:
- On the evening of 17 March, a crowd of about a thousand youths smashed the windows of the Islamic community center in Novi Sad, and removed the flag of Vojvodina from the Vojvodina Legislature, and burned it.

- The following day, youths in Novi Sad stoned a Hungarian-language theater and some 15 other buildings, mainly Albanian-owned bakeries and pastry shops.

- Between March 17-19, 2004: Roma and Ashkali settlements were attacked in Novi Sad. So much for all the love of the Roma by the Serbs.

- In May 3, 2004, the Adventist Church in Novi Sad was attacked. Buildings belonging to the Adventist Church are the most frequently targeted religious sites in Serbia. Between January and June 2005, church representatives registered eight incidents ... In one case, an Adventist priest was attacked.

- Backa Palanka, March 28, 2004: Three Religious Shrines and Slovak Cultural and Publishing Society were vandalized.

- Djurdjevo, February 14, 2004 & April 9, 2004: Ruthenian Cultural-Artistic Society was vandalized.

- According to HRW, "Minorities frequently complain that police tolerate ongoing aggressive acts by Serbian ultra-nationalists ... Nearly five years after the removal of Milosevic from power in October 2000, Serbia still has a long way to go before ultra-nationalism is eradicated from police service and from the Serbian society as a whole ... Minorities are still grossly underrepresented among the police personnel"

http://hrw.org/reports/2005/serbia1005/8.htm#_Toc115505943

Mike,
First of all i was right about medieval churches because they were not over 100 churches as you guys were claiming but it was baout 18, which some were badly damaged and some had minor damages. We are long done on that one, and I was right . Now you are showing me a loink that I can not tell whether this guys are serbs, Albanians, or this recording may have taken place anywhere in western or eastern europe. Just becasue the writting on top of screen it says so it proves nothing. It could be serbs gathered for mass and decided to shot a movies and make it look like they are albanians sourrounding a church.

The article says that the MAJORITY of the attacks were not ethnically motivated. So some were.

Due to the number of exiled Serbs there are quite a few churches that are no longer adequately protected by a surrounding Serb population and that are easy targets for copper thieves, etc. But much ethnic violence in Kosovo has both ethnic and economic motives - you cannot separate that strictly. This includes some Albanian cops looking the other way when a church is robbed by Albanians.

Finally there is the KPC. If a thief takes a few things and destroys a few things I suspect this will be classified as just criminal.

To summarize, I encourage the B92 journalists not just to copy press releases but also to study the underlying facts to see whether the statistics are lying.

Ahmet - you are living in a dreamworld with absolutely no resemblence to reality. I have heard it all now - Serbs burning Serbian churches....lol. What a sick joke that is.

Oh for God's sake Ahmet, GET REAL!!! I really do not want to think you are that naive and foolish after I sent that video. I don't know what you think of Serbian Orthodox Church services, but I can tell you that they don't destroy the church they just prayed in. They also don't stand on top of crosses and rip them to the ground. You are really desperate for a response my friend, and the fact that a) you never knew about this, and b) after seeing this you chalk it up to Serbian propaganda, really makes me question your maturity as an adult. For the record, the discussion about medieval churches that we had a few months ago was related to you saying that there were NO medieval churches destroyed, only the so-called "Milosevic" churches. I said nothing about 100s of medieval churches, but 100s of churches period. It's sad you have to discriminate between the two as if one set of churches - still holy sites - are more worthy of destruction. You have poor arguemtnative skills and have once again been duped by something that took less than 10 seconds to find on the internet. Don't make yourself look even more foolish by responsing that it was a staged event by Serbs. You're really grasping here.

Adrian, I have not denied any of these crimes you have posted, nor did I bring up these topics. The focus of the article was Albanian aggression against Serbs. Who cares if it happened in 2004, 2007, or 1999? The point of showing it was that one of your compatriots refuses to see the greater reality in Kosovo. I do not deny what you've shown and I have posted enough comments here condemning Serbian acts of violence and terror against their neighbors. So please try to atone, or at least acknowledge, the sins of your own community for a change.

You know it's really unfortunate that a lot of Albanians have to resort to reverse legitmacy to feel good about themselves. They can't acknowledge a crime committed by them, so they show an equally heinous crime committed against them, as if that negates the whole affair. I'm sick and tired of this tit-for-tat BS and the fact that they will almost always change focus to make themselves look like the vicitms instead of the perpatrators makes them look - well, Milsoevic-esque.

Sorry guys, I stand by my points and I stand by my condemnation.

Addendum: Serbs on this site have done the same thing too: change the subject to blame someone else when responsibility lies in their laps. It's not just Albanians and I apologize to people like Nick and Village-Bey who do not do this. NO ONE has a legitimate right to historical victimization in this region, and the longer we accumulate meticulous research on the crimes committed against our side, but blatantly ignore the other, just perpetuates these one-sided debates and points of view that only get people angry. You cannot ackowledge your history but deny others.

With 52 crimes per 2 mil inhabitants, Kosova is a pretty peaceful place. By comparison in 2005, for the same number of people, Finland had 56 crimes, US - 85, while Russia a whooping 403!
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita


Mike, you seem to have realized in your addendum that the issue here is presenting a video from 2004 in a news article that talks only about this year. This is not an argument, this is demagogy.

But if you want to talk about 2004 let's put things into perspective. What happened in the riots of March 2004, was an incident where things got out of hands in a couple of days, where neither NATO, the intl police or KPC could control the mob. Similar things - burning of religious sites, attack on minorities - happened in Serbia too in the space of those days, although in a lesser scale. But it was after all, only a matter of few days. Kosova politicians across the board condemned the riots, and they worked to reverse the damages. You could not deny that Kosova govt paid out of Kosova's budget to rebuild Serb houses and churches, and has been working to accommodate the Serbian minority. You can not also equate what happened in a space of a few days, by the mob, to the repression of Albanians as a whole by the STATE of Serbia prior to June 99. This recent Serb-Albanian conflict has been going at least since 1981 - that's 26 years. Two and a half decades where the Serbian state continually escalated the repression of the Albanians, by first purging them from the Communist Party and since Milosevic in 1989, by removing them wholesale from their jobs, denying them education, health care, representation, suppressing their culture, closing down their newspapers, tv and radio stations and on and on and on, and resulting in a most brutal police state. By 1995, human rights groups had estimated that nearly 75% of the adult population of Kosova had been called at least once in the so called "informative talks" by the police, that were nothing but police interrogations sometimes resulting in torture, sometimes people went missing without a trace. Police harassment on the street of Albanians was an everyday occurrence.
So think about that also when you talk about what happened in 2004 and try to link it out of the blue with a police report about crimes in Kosova for this year.


Mike: "You know it's really unfortunate that a lot of Albanians have to resort to reverse legitmacy to feel good about themselves. They can't acknowledge a crime committed by them, so they show an equally heinous crime committed against them,"

Please be fair. I have personally condemned them as many others have in this site. It's all here, please read the last post on this thread from June 17, 2007:
http://www.b92.net/eng/news/comments.php?nav_id=41860