Taken from Koha.

“Serbian historian Olivera Milosavlević has written a long paper on Serbian-Albanian relations, you can read her full response below.

Already in the second half of the XNUMXth century, the negative stereotype for Albanians has been expressed in a series of books by Serbian authors without any special scientific editing. The most widespread was, of course, the one about the hatred towards the Serbs, writes the Serbian historian Olivera Milosavlević, KultPlus broadcasts the article in Vjekkomb.

Read the full text of the Serbian historian Olivera Milosavlević, which is taken from a long work on Serbian-Albanian relations:

“With the aggressive policy of the Serbian government towards the Arbanians, such relations have been created on the western border of Serbia that in the near future it is difficult to expect peace and a stable situation […] our press, in a disastrous race to help a policy of referred and executed in a disgusting way, for months and years (has) spread tendentious thoughts about the Arbanians […]

Even today, this is the only means by which the chauvinist press creates in the Serbian people the hatred towards the “savage” Arnauts, hiding, like viper’s feet of savagery, what the Serbian people have done to them. […] Balkanicus and dr. Vladan [Gjorgjevic] have written a whole book with a clear desire to suppress this miserable arban people and prove their incapacity for a cultured and national life. […] in order to prove that that people, as a race, has no meaning for a cultured and independent life, they present everything that exists in the primitivism of that people, not as an expression of the level of history in which they find themselves and through which other peoples have also passed, but as an expression of their racial incapacity for cultural development in general. […]

Balkanicus’ zeal for the underestimation of the Arban people as a race goes as far as attributing the historical role of Skenderbeu to his origin from the Serbian Vojislava” (Dimitrije Tucović [1914] 1980:17-44).

It cannot be denied that today the Albanians are considered the biggest “enemies” of the Serbs. If we can easily explain this with the current political events and with the description of their “character” by the improper media, it is necessary to more seriously analyze the reasons for their contempt that, sometimes openly and sometimes secretly, are exhibited throughout the XNUMXth century.

Contemporary intellectuals write about Albanians mainly within the stereotype of their “born” hatred of Serbs and desire for their destruction, which is a product of their dominant “traits”, “primitivism” and “robbery”. The old authors, however, have insisted on one more element. They have tried, among other things, to prove that the inability of Albanians for an independent state life is again a consequence of their “character” traits.

They claimed that the Albanian tribes do not need a state nor the ability to constitute their own nation. Therefore, in accordance with the state-political needs of Serbia, they have seen the solution in the tribal colonizing influences which, with the inclusion of the Albanians and their territories in the Serbian state, would enable their training for a civilized life. In this sense, the classification of derogatory stereotypes for Albanians can be done in this way: “Albanians hate Serbs”: they have specific properties in “character” from which this hatred derives; the Albanians have been converted to a large extent, the so-called urbanized Serbs, which also explain the two previous “properties”. With these contemporary assessments, those that have varied throughout the century for the Albanians who did not constitute the nation and who do not have the civilizing ability to organize an independent state, and the product of the last stereotype is also the argument that Skënderbeu is Serbian.

With the Albanian name, from the mid-eighties, the words “genocide”, “oppression”, “plunder”, “rape” were used in particular, so every mention of national minorities in political and private speeches has a negative connotation. After the book about Kosovo by the author Dimitrije Bogdanović from 1985 and his frequent interviews that same year, writing about Albanians by Serbian intellectuals was only acceptable if it was written in the direction of witnessing the “planned genocide” against the Serbs, where Bogdanovic himself was soon surpassed in the negative charge towards the object of analysis.

Bogdanovic has reactivated the old argument that the placement of Albanians in Serbian lands from the XNUMXth century to our time has left “bloody traces of violence in the historical consciousness of the Serbian people”, while he elaborated with examples of individual oppression, looting, massacres and “the expulsion of the Serbs from their land”, as well as with arguments that the basis of the expulsion of the Albanians should be sought in their Islamization followed by assimilation and “brutal violence”.

Thus, according to him, the Serbian people have become a victim, not only of an element, but also of a “plan for its physical destruction”. The spread of such a negative picture in an entire nation is done through the assessment of the Albanian political movement as “aggressive, conquering, revanchist, conservative and nationalist”, whose goals are to destroy the Serbian people “with the help of murders, expulsion , the erasure of historical consciousness”, and “appropriate the Serbian land” with the plan to “break and surround the Serbian people”.

According to Bogdanović, the thesis about the Illyrian origin of Albanians is racist because it defines their agrarian right to the territories. In addition, speaking about the migration of Serbs in the Balkans, for the time he marks as the prehistory of the Albanians, he mentions the ancestors of the Albanians without defining who they were (Bogdanović [1985] 1990:29–31,139,154,318–325,443–445) .

For Radovan Samarxic, the “Arbanians” have been expanding since the 1989th century, while the Turks are the ones who “threw” the Serbs “as a destructive wedge into their old homeland”. According to him, the Albanians oppressed the Serbian people with “murder, looting, the burning of entire villages, the theft of land and violent Islamization” (Samarxhiq, 123,253:1989). Even for Marko Mladenovic, often present in public, genocide and apartheid in Kosovo are not debatable, and the story about the Illyrian origin is “archaeological fog” in order to claim their right to the “alleged homeland of the prehistoric ancestors of the Albanians today”. He emphasizes that there were no Albanians in Kosovo until the 63th century, and that they were not a majority until the Second World War. “The persecution of Serbs from Kosovo and Metohia extends from the undisciplined to the ballistics, that is, from Islam to extreme nationalism” (Mladenovic, 69:XNUMX-XNUMX).

According to these intellectuals, the use of children for political purposes is not contested either. The difference lies only in the direction of their use. While Bogdanović sees the exploitation of Albanian children in “inciting” them to attack Serbian children (Bogdanović [1985] 1990:312), Mladenović sees it in exploiting them to achieve numerical dominance over Albanians (Mladenović, 1989: 86).

Atanasije Jevtiq says that the goal of the Albanians in Kosovo has long been this: “As much land, as many children and as many weapons”, emphasizing in particular “that Albanian children have not only been “manipulated, but deeply are filled with hatred for everything that is Serbian and Christian in Kosovo and Metohija”, attributing this to parents, teachers, “primitive tribal spirit” and “Muslim spirit” (Jevtiq, 1992:542-544).

While, according to Bogdanović, the Albanians were a tool in the hands of the Turks, according to Nikola Samardžić, they were a tool in the hands of the Roman Curia, which “counted on people with weak religion, who break their word, and whom it, without much trouble, he would turn them into Catholics”. Giving his own characteristics for the Albanians, Samarxhiq mentions the “wild nature of the Albanians”, “fantastic power for reproduction”, “inhuman hatred”, “bloody orgies” (N. Samarxhiq, 1990:56, 60).

Otherwise, during the 90s, Miodrag Jovicic’s writing in the summary of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Serbia about Serbs and Albanians in the XNUMXth century was paradigmatic. Albanians are there “arnauts”, cruel and robbers, with a tendency to violence “in the blood”. Even for Jovicic, Islamization is responsible for why the Albanians have gained from the Turks “carte blanche to terrorize the Serbian population with cruelty, robbery and looting”.

Accepting the thesis that with tradition and the accumulation of experience certain biological and national predispositions are created, he emphasizes that all layers of the Albanian population “violence has entered their blood, but also hatred towards the Serbian population, which is guilty of being alive” . The analysis of historical events such as “debt repayment” has come more directly to the fore here. Although he admits that the Albanians in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia “were not fans of the regime”, Jovicic states that “they have not even come close to adequately paying off their debts to the Serbian population during the Turkish occupation”. In the same style of deserved and undeserved history is the finding that, considering the experiences from the past, “Albanian minorities in Serbia, simply put, did not deserve their autonomy”.

On the contrary, it (the Albanian minority) “according to different opinions” should have been “placed in a special quarantine” in 1945 where it would be forced to provide evidence that it is ready for civilized coexistence, and then they are given autonomy.

Albanians are the “blood enemies of Serbia and the Serbs”, they are carriers of “chauvinism and aggressive racism”, which testifies to the “impossibility of creating conditions for normal coexistence of members of different ethnicities in Kosovo and Metohija”. They feel “deep hatred towards Serbia and the Serbs”, and their “genocidal behavior” is a “century-old work”. The author sees the solution to this problem in the change of the existing ethnic picture of the province with the return of the expelled, with new population and suspension of the existing autonomy at certain times (Jovicic, 1991a:138–139,143–146,151–153).

Contemporary authors write about the “historical inferiority of Albanians” (Dragić Kijuk, 1992: 411); for the “open genocide against the Serbian people”, for which during the 1992th century “looting, murder, rape and kidnapping of women who later converted to Islam” were used (Batakovic, 453a:1991); for the ethnic and religious intolerance towards the Serbs which was “at the foundation of all Albanian movements” (Batakovic, 38:1992); for the “aggressive and destructive uproar towards everything that was Serbian”, as it has always been “their behavior, occupying and appropriating” (Jevtiq, 542:XNUMX).

Referring to the centuries-old history of “Serbo-Albanian” relations, today it is said that “the wild and aggressive appearance of Albanian nationalism and separatism regularly occurs when the demographic balance is disturbed”, which is in the nature of “primitive tribal organization” (Glushçeviq, 1992: 620), and that the Albanians in the persecution of the Serbs have been “more radical and cruel than others: they have used the most brutal means, according to their own Mohammedan-Turkish and fascist-ballistic tradition” (Qosiq, 1992a:64).

Already in the second half of the 1864th century, the negative stereotype for Albanians has been expressed in a number of books by Serbian authors without any special scientific editing. The most extensive was, of course, the one about the hatred towards the Serbs. Even Haxhi Serafim Ristiq mentioned the Albanians as “the worst enemies of the Christian religion and the blackest torturers of the desert youth” (Ristiq, 40:1903), while Radosavljevic Bdin, with a broad patriotic disposition, counting the means that all the enemies of the Serbs (neighbors) use in the joint work to destroy the Serbs, for the Albanians it is written that they used “knives, powder and bullets” (Bdin, 15:XNUMX).

Haxhi-Vasilević assessed the Arnauts as “the most ardent opponents of the Serbs” (Haxhi-Vasilević, 1906:61), “the enemies of the Serbs” (Haxhi-Vasilević, 1909a:2), saying that “the Serbs assess the Arnauts as their biggest enemies and they characterize them with these words: “(Haxhi-Vasilevic, 1913a:143).

(Olivera Milosavlević (1951-2015) was a Serbian historian and lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. She is known for her critical approach to contemporary Serbian historiography and the breaking of national myths spread in history books. The above text is the first part of a long work by Milosavlević on Serbo-Albanian relations).”