Authored by Petar Horvatic. Translated by Petrit Latifi
This brilliant article by Croatian publicist Petar Horvatovics gives a new insight to Serbian atrocities against Albanians, Bosniaks, Croatians, Germans and other groups through out history.
“Not only Croats were the only target of the Chetniks and the Serbian army, but also all the peoples who lived in the territory that sick minds imagined as Greater Serbia. Because of this, throughout the 20th century, in addition to Croats, other peoples were systematically and intentionally killed and persecuted: Albanians, Montenegrins, Bosniaks, Muslims, Germans and others…
The Chetniks were the right-hand man (“elta units”) of the Serbian army in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, just as they were the right-hand man of the JNA in the Homeland War. It was the Chetniks who committed the greatest mass crimes in all the Serbian wars of the 20th century, although the Serbian army (as well as the Serbian JNA) also burned, raped, killed, and ethnically cleansed large areas in their campaigns…
The truth about the mass crimes committed by the Serbian army against civilians and prisoners of war is a constant that has accompanied all Serbian wars over the past 100 years or more. These crimes were repeated in every war waged by Serbia: the Balkan Wars, World War I, World War II (Chetniks and partisan units with a large proportion of Serbs, witnesses Simo Dubajić, Kulen Vakuf and Đoko Jovanić, the uprising in Srb, the killings in Gračac by the 6th Lika, the units that entered Zagreb in 1945, etc.), the Homeland War in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the most recent one in Kosovo.
Most often, the main targets of the Serbian army or their paramilitary units were civilians, women, children, the elderly, property, villages…
The international press and other institutions of the time reported on the crimes of the Serbian and Montenegrin armies during the occupation of Albanian settlements in the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913. The Carnegie Foundation wrote: “Houses and entire villages were turned into ashes, the unarmed and innocent population was massacred en masse, incredible acts of violence, robbery and brutality of every kind — these are the means that the Serbo-Montenegrin army used and still uses , with the aim of completely changing the ethnic character of the areas inhabited exclusively by Albanians”.
This last bold is very important: the Serbian army commits mass crimes in order to change the ethnic image in favor of the Serbs. They simply kill other nations on the way, such as Albanians, Croats, Muslims and others, and Skopje in the Balkan Wars, Montenegrins and Albanian settlements in World War I when the Serbian army fled to the Mediterranean, Srb, Grahovo, Rama, Goražde, Foča and Drvara II. World War II, so Prijedor, Vukovar, Srebrenica and Škabrnja – they are simply connected things into one whole.
And not at all accidental – the intention is ethnic cleansing to the point of actual genocide.
This report already gives the essence of the answer to the question from the title of the text: all these crimes were carried out only with the aim of creating a Greater Serbia that would be “cleansed” of all non-Serb population . And after that, Serbian official diplomacy denies these crimes or over time even attributes them to the victims of Serbian violence. In this way, he further demonizes the “enemy” side, which is an obstacle to the creation of an ethnically pure Greater Serbia, and over time, through cunning diplomacy, he tries to establish such a situation or further increase the guilt of the victims through the systematic marketing of megalomaniac myths both to his own people and to the international community.
Bloody orgies of the Serbian army in Skopje and Kumanovo
The Catholic Archbishop of Skopje, Lazar Medja, was appalled by the crimes of Serbia and wrote that their army in numerous non-Serb villages in Kumanovo and Skopje burned houses and the people in them, and children were killed with bayonets because there was no need to waste ammunition on them. The war correspondent of Kievskaya Mysl (Kievskaya Mysl) from the Balkans, Lav Trotsky (yes, the famous Lav Trotsky in person), reports the testimony of a Serbian soldier that many villages in the vicinity of Kumanovo were burning, and that this scene was repeated all the way to Skopje.
And only Skopje was the place of bloody orgies of the Serbian army, when they slaughtered Albanians on bridges for days and threw red from the blood of innocent people into the Vardar. (just as in Goražde and Foča in 1941, slaughtering on bridges and throwing the dead into the river, they also slaughtered five nuns of the Drina martyrs).
In Skopje, groups of drunken soldiers broke into houses at night and kidnapped and slaughtered them, and numerous cases of rape of women and girls were recorded. Killed Albanians were often not buried, because the ground was frozen during the winter, so the corpses were thrown into wells. 38 wells full of Albanian corpses were counted. The archbishop of Skopje, the same Lazar Mjeda (Lazer Mjeda), reports that behind the city fortress there was a large ditch into which more than a hundred Albanian corpses were thrown and that in Kisela Voda there is a pit that is a mass grave of 80 Albanians.
The Viennese publicist Leo Freundlich, who published collected reports on Serbian war crimes from the European press in the book Albanian Golgotha, states that massacres have been committed one after another since the Serbian army crossed the border and occupied the lands inhabited by Albanians. He concludes that the crimes of the Serbian army and Chetnik detachments were mainly directed against Muslims and Catholics in the newly conquered areas.
Serbian diplomacy and the falsification of history tried to put these things on the back burner or even turn events to their advantage, so they declared the killed Albanians to be violent people who killed Serbs. A similar pattern occurred in World War I, and after it, when the Serbian army brutally cracked down and killed those it considered opponents of Greater Serbia until 1923 in Sandžak and 1925 in Montenegro. The same was true in World War II, not to mention the Homeland War.
The question remains: what are Croatian historians, with honorable exceptions, and Croatian diplomacy doing to present these horrors, which are part of an organized campaign and plan of the state of Serbia, to the world public?
Nothing.
A typical example of the perfidy of Serbian politics and the naivety of Croatian politics from the pen of Miroslav Krleža, based on the meeting between Nikola Pašić and Fran Supil, before the creation of Yugoslavia:
* This is how Miroslav Krleža described the meeting between Fran Supil and Nikola Pašić in 1915 during World War I in Niš: “And so Baja (Pašić’s note) stands incredibly indifferent to everything that has been gnawing at and devouring Fran Supil for his entire life. He listens to Baja Supila talking about some kind of nebulous Serbo-Croatian unity, about some kind of even nebulous Yugoslavism, thinking about that Austro-Croat who found himself before him as a shipwrecked man without a ship and without a flag.
And what is this black-and-yellow Yugoslavism of his again? That’s what his Austria invented for him again! That Yugoslavia of his! What kind of Yugo-Slavonians? What kind of Šokci? Wouldn’t they want to convert us to Catholicism like that Swabian Štroc from Đakovo? The romantic, adventurer and cursed dreamer Supila stands before Baja, before the prime minister of a Balkan sovereign state, feeling that he is standing before the enemy.”
And when Supilo asked Pašić about Dalmatia and its fate, this typical politician of Serbia, Belgrade bazaar and strategist of Greater Serbia allegedly replied: “Dalmatia? I haven’t heard of that name.”
Nothing needs to be added to this – Pašić and his followers still pretend that the Croatian name does not exist. They confirm its existence only out of necessity or in their pragmatism, waiting for a new opportunity, just like in 1991, and many times before…”
Reference
Balkan Academia 