Ralph Raico on the Kosovo War

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LeeO Posted: Sun, Jan 30 2011 9:11 PM

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I recently listened to Ralph Raico's excellent 10-part seminar entitled History: The Struggle for Liberty. In one of the lectures he mentions the conflict in Kosovo during the 90s, and that the military intervention by America as part of NATO was justified by a "genocide" committed by Serbians against Albanians. According to Raico, the genocide never occurred, and revisionist history detailing the events can be found online. I searched back through the lectures, but could not find Raico's comment to confirm what he said.

Can anyone here comment on the event, or point me to a good source? It seems like a case where we could learn from history, but the history is so confusing it is difficult to extract a clear lesson.

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Prateek Sanjay replied on Mon, Jan 31 2011 6:35 AM

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I suggest you look up the website of Lord Byron Institute of Balkan Studies. It is quite thorough with the events of the Bosnian War.

The gist of the story is that Albanians are well armed drug dealers, organ thieves, syndicated criminals, and traffickers who started pushing their weight around in a region. The Serbs sent a police force to start dealing with them, but it ended up like Mexico's drug war. Slobodan Milsosevic was not a Serbian nationalist, but a petty opportunist politician who didn't even care for Serbs and he himself stood by while Serbs were killed.

United States wanted to do some Bear Baiting and establish itself in Russia's backyard for any excuse. Because it was run by a Trailer Park President who had no idea what was going on, US decided who was the good and bad guy, sent troops, casually murdered people on both sides, and got a puppet state for a war against Russia in the future. End of story.

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LeeO replied on Mon, Jan 31 2011 2:37 PM

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Thanks for the response!

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LeeO replied on Mon, Jan 31 2011 3:45 PM

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Prateek,

I'm guessing you would agree with this article by James Bissett of the Byron Institute. He writes:

"President Clinton, Prime Minister Blair and other NATO leaders told their citizens that the bombing of Serbia was a humanitarian intervention to stop President Milosevic of Serbia from committing genocide and the ethnic cleansing of the Albanian majority in Kosovo. This of course was not true: forensic times have found some 2000 victims of the Kosovo conflict so far – Serbian and Albanian, civilian and military – who had been killed prior to NATO’s air war in March 1999. Distressing as this figure may be, it is not genocide. Nevertheless, the accusations that genocide took place in Kosovo continue to be accepted without hesitation by the western media.

The claim about ethnic cleansing was also a falsehood. While it is true that several thousand Albanians had been displaced within Kosovo by the armed conflict between the Serb security forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the large-scale exodus of the Albanian population occurred after the bombing started. United Nations figures show that the mass of refugees fled Kosovo after the first bombs began to fall In other words, it was the bombing that caused the flight from Kosovo. Despite the proof of this we continue to hear in the western media that the NATO bombing “stopped ethnic cleansing.”

In reality the bombing of Serbia had nothing to do with genocide or ethnic cleansing. The bombing had everything to do with demonstrating that NATO was still a viable military organization and was needed in Europe. There is ample evidence now to show that the United States and British secret services aided and abetted the KLA in its efforts to use violence to destabilize Kosovo and to create the excuse for NATO intervention."

But how can one reconcile his viewpoint with this article by Damjan Pavlica of the Bosnian Institute? He writes:

"What was happening then in Kosovo was something rather similar to what had happened in Bosnia a few years before. Judging by various independent reports and verdicts of the ICTY, the Serbian army, police and paramilitary units shelled and torched Albanian places, and killed and deported the civilian population en masse. The killing of the inhabitants (mainly women, children and the elderly) of Gornje Obrinje on 26 September 1998 became front-page news in the West. Despite the warnings of the European Union, Miloševic continued his criminal policy. By the beginning of 1999, thousands of Albanian villages had been shelled or burnt down, over 200,000 Albanians displaced, some 70,000 had found refuge in neighbouring states, and nearly 100,000 had sought asylum in the West. After special police units perpetrated a massacre in Racak, Western intervention became inevitable.

The escalation of violence against civilians and the ethnic-cleansing operations conducted by the Serbian forces were the immediate cause of the NATO bombing of FRY in March 1999, which is why it was termed a ‘humanitarian intervention’. But after NATO’s initial raids Miloševic did not stop - on the contrary, he intensified the crimes in Kosovo. Many state and public bodies participated in ‘cleansing’ the southern Serbian province of its population. Yugoslav army trucks and Serbian Railways trains were used to deport the population to the Macedonian and Albanian borders, the municipal services were used to remove corpses from the streets, and the Serbian police executed civilians and secretly transported their bodies to central Serbia using refrigerator trucks. The organisation and extent of the persecution following the start of the NATO bombing shocked the world."

Eleven years after the bombing, each side (pro-Albanian and pro-Serbian) is convinced the other is evil and completely wrong. Where are the facts in this mess of extreme bias and accusations of "propaganda" on the part of the Western and Serbian media?

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LeeO replied on Mon, Jan 31 2011 6:50 PM

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I found Raico's thoughts on the conflict, in a speech he gave at a 2007 conference of the Future of Freedom Foundation:

       "Our foreign wars are always accompanied by a barrage of official lies. The wars in the
Middle East are obvious examples. Now the people who bring us into those wars hardly manage
to keep a straight face in their deception. They lie to us in our faces, lies that can be nailed to the
few clicks on your computer, checked on the Internet. We now tend to forget about Bill Clinton’s
war on Serbia back in 1999. It’s really disheartening how every President makes you nostalgic for
the last one. I mean, now, with Ashcroft and Gonzalez, can you imagine we’re nostalgic for Janet
Reno? The pretext for killing thousands of Serbians and destroying the country’s infrastructure
was that the Serbian Government was committing massive massacres, even genocide, in Kosovo, a
province of Serbia. What was actually happening was that the Serbian Government was dealing
harshly, as the Union did with the South, for instance, in our Civil War, with an insurrection by
the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army. The aim of the KLA was to drive the Serbians from Kosovo
Province of Serbia, ancient province, make it totally Albanian.

     How did we get involved in these people’s problems? The KLA had not succeeded in
taking over Kosovo until the U.S. Air Force came to their aid. The Serbian genocide against the
Kosovo Albanians turned out to be another lie, another lie. After the war, forensic teams scoured
Kosovo; they were able to find only about 2,000 bodies in multiple graves, they could not tell
whether the bodies were of Serbs or Albanians, whether they were fighters or civilians, and under
what circumstances they had been killed. So much for genocide, which everybody throws around
nowadays.

     In modern times there has been really just one demonstrated genocide, as far as I’m
concerned. Genocide doesn’t mean mass killings; a lot of governments do mass killings. There
was one attempt to annihilate and exterminate a whole people. Since the KLA victory in Kosovo,
virtually all the remaining non-Albanians, the Serbs, the Gypsies, a few Jews, even the Turks, who
were Muslims, have been ethnically cleansed under the indifferent eyes of the NATO
peacekeepers. We have peacekeepers there, too. Hundreds of Christian churches, monasteries,
and shrines have been demolished by the Muslim Albanians, and Kosovo is effectively
independent of Serbia, but that was forgotten when the United States Government proceeded to
its next crusades."

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Merlin replied on Tue, Feb 1 2011 1:40 AM

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I live 30 miles form the border and let me tell you what we saw: Serbian forces went village to village and raped, killed and generally massacred the Albanian population (as they have done every now and then since 1912). After it became clear that this was not the ‘usual’ punitive expedition by Serbs, the Kosovars had to flee en masse to Albania and Macedonia.

Now, I find Raico’s lecture series wonderful, but his comments on the Kosovo war (as I commented in that audio file) are the result of a very poorly informed picture acquired from a quick glance on the internet (and fueled by what I perceive to an excessive religious feeling of his). If anyone doubts that there was genocide in Kosovo, let him travel there and see it with his own eyes that the males-to-females ratio is abnormally high. I’m sick of self-appointed experts who read a few articles and purport to know all about some conflict, especially one sickening as the Kosovo war.

I agree that the motives behind NATO where all but altruistic (where was the west in 1913?), yet one must only rejoice when, once in a while, imperial interest coincide with national self-determination.

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Prateek Sanjay replied on Tue, Feb 1 2011 4:48 AM

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I didn't want to play the false equivalence card, but yes, bad things are done by both sides.

It's just that there was one side that was clearly doing the most depraved things and still does, and the other side, being as immoral as most human beings are, did deeply wrongful things that largely do not match in proportion to what the other side id.

I do feel inclined to think that the Serbs are among the most demonized and unfairly represented ethnicity these days, Serbian wrongdoings aside, because Serbs have had to face hatred and punitive retaliation from Croats, Albanians, Bosnians, Russians, Turks, and whatnot. That they were strong or ruthless enough to fight back is enough to give them a wicked image (perhaps rightly so), but hearing the various sides of the story has made me feel that genocidal ethnonationalism is not and has never been present in these peoples.

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Merlin replied on Tue, Feb 1 2011 5:17 AM

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I will agree to a point, because the Serbs where the de facto rulers of Yugoslavia, and it was them who ‘had’ to stop the secessionists, hence the ball was is their field. Also relatively few Serbs have remained outside the borders of Former Yugoslavia (after the Slovenian and Croatian secessions), while many more minorities had remained within Former Yugoslavia. Perhaps if the positions had been reversed, ex. if there was a Serbian breakaway minority in an Albanian or Croatian state, perhaps Albanian and Croatians too would have acted the horror that the Serbs did.

 Actually I know of pretty horrid stories of atrocities committed by Bosnians, Croatians and Albanians on Serbs, but the numbers are degrees of magnitude apart .

 The facts are that due to historic accident or what-have-you, it was mostly the Serbs who committed atrocities on others, and not vice versa. I’m afraid that no “what-ifs” can erase that fact.

 PS: These debates have no consequence, as some want them to, on current events, but are ‘merely’ moral considerations. The Serbs do have a strong point when they ask why Kosovo was allowed to leave, while northern Kosovo, almost 100% Serbian, is not allowed to join Serbia. Serbian massacres or not, it is their right to leave or join whichever government they see fit to.

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LeeO replied on Tue, Feb 1 2011 3:52 PM

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I live 30 miles form the border and let me tell you what we saw: Serbian forces went village to village and raped, killed and generally massacred the Albanian population (as they have done every now and then since 1912). After it became clear that this was not the ‘usual’ punitive expedition by Serbs, the Kosovars had to flee en masse to Albania and Macedonia

Thank you for the first-hand insight. If I may ask, where were you exactly? Thirty miles from which border?

Now, I find Raico’s lecture series wonderful, but his comments on the Kosovo war (as I commented in that audio file) are the result of a very poorly informed picture acquired from a quick glance on the internet (and fueled by what I perceive to an excessive religious feeling of his).

Where can I listen to your comment? Is it in one of the lectures?

When it comes to all sorts of issues, it seems that there are many people out there with a "poorly informed picture acquired from a quick glance on the internet" as well as people blinded by "excessive religous feeling." And often the "religion" has nothing to do with God. When you speak of Raico, are you referring to his Christianity or to his strong dislike for the State and American foreign policy?

I’m sick of self-appointed experts who read a few articles and purport to know all about some conflict, especially one sickening as the Kosovo war.

Unfortunately, I have fancied myself such an "expert" in the past, although not on issues of war and genocide.

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Merlin replied on Tue, Feb 1 2011 4:56 PM

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Thank you for the first-hand insight. If I may ask, where were you exactly? Thirty miles from which border?

I live in Albania, and I’m referring to our border with Kosovo. Back in 1999 during the war more than a million Albanian Kosovars fled the Serbia forces into Albania, and every single family I know housed them (my family didn’t, no room to spare). These people had endured massacres since 1913, yet they flee en masse this one time. I have no doubt at all that their experience must have been terrible even beyond what they were willing to admit. 

When you speak of Raico, are you referring to his Christianity or to his strong dislike for the State and American foreign policy?

In this instance I’m just finding fault with his ‘Christian’ view that, Serbs being Christians and Kosovars somewhat Muslim, the US intervention was especially abortive. He clearly states this in the lecture to the point of seeing some sporadic attacks on Serbian churches as the real crime of the war (never mind genocide and all, the Serbs need only repent and are Christian Europe shall forgive all!)

 I found this comment especially hard to swallow, above all form a libertarian.

Sorry about the comment, I couldn't find it. Perhaps it wasn't approved after all.  

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LeeO replied on Tue, Feb 1 2011 7:17 PM

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Thanks for the clarification, Merlin. I cannot imagine living through such a horrible ordeal.

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Bardhyl N. Salihu replied on Sun, Feb 20 2011 7:55 PM

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LeeO,

I'm an Albanian libertarian and I come from Kosovo. Let me tell you a bit about the place and what happened there.

Kosovo was part of Albania, which was along with Serbia and the majority of Balkans occupied by the Ottoman Empire. This lasted until in 1912 when the Ottoman Empire started dissolving (becoming the Republic of Turkey that we know today), the Serbian State moved in to fulfill the vacuum and occupy Albanian lands. This ended up with the occupation of Kosovo as well as other parts of modern-day Macedonia. Since 1913 up until when the Serbian State was de-facto ousted from the territory of Kosovo in 1999, Serbian police, military and even civilian forces committed numerous atrocities against Albanians (who comprise by the way around 92% of the population). Killings, massacres, oppression, discrimination, refusal to allow Albanians have schools, refusal to have private properties intact, and what not.

Since Albanians never really had a government, they were always bound to use private guerrilla forces to counter the terror of the Serbian State and such forces emerged from time to time with little success. The mother State, Albania, was largelly ruled as a Monarchy by a person who didn't really care about the fate of Albanians outside the territory, and this became even worse when the cruel, socialist Enver Hoxha came in power in 1944. After WWII, Serbian oppression in Kosovo continued and was only reduced slightly in the 70s when Kosovo, then under a Yugoslavian Serbia, where given a nominal autonomy.

This, however, didn't last long and ethnic tensions were fueled in Yugoslavia, each Republic wanting to secede from the "union." The Serbs wanted to secede as well, but with a trick under the sleeve. What was the trick? They wanted the so-called Greater Serbia. Not pure secession within the existing boundaries, but a secession and expansion. So for example, when Slovenia declared independence they started a war with them over their territories in the south. But since Slovenians were pretty well armed and experienced, the war lasted only a couple of days and Serbs failed to achieve their chavunistic goal. Then it was the turn of Croatia to declared independence, which was again attacked by the State of Serbia in order to occupy the eastern part of Croatia called Krajina. Then Bosnia declared independence and they were attacked by the State of Serbia in order to occupy the part of Bosnia with the majority of Serbs and call it Republika Srpska.

Then Kosovo declared independence but nothing happened. Why? Because there was a peace initiative in Kosovo, to attempt through diplomacy, to secede from Serbia. Serbs didn't care, they simply allowed Albanians to "act" as if they are independent while continuing the same scale of oppression and hatred towards Albanians. Finally, some Albanians decided that you can't talk to the beast and that the only way to defend their rights and secede from Serbia was to fight a guerrilla war against the State of Serbia. This started in lat 1996 and continued until the liberation in 1999. During this war, Serbs committed the worst atrocities one can ever imagime. People couldn't believe that after WWII, in Europe(!), things like this can happen. 15,000 people were murdered, massacred, wounded, among them children, pregnant women and old people. This finally lead to the foreign intervention of NATO which stopped the genocide and drew the Serb forces out.

Now I myself, who went through this as a 9-year-old, and had to escape the capital Prishtina in trains which are reminiscent of Schindler's List (1993), am opposed to foreign intervention on libertarian grounds. But you must understand that this theory of non-interventionism is not axiomatic, it doesn't always hold true. In the case of Iraq War it does, perfectly makes sense. In the case of Kosovo War, if it wasn't for the NATO intervention I wouldn't be writing this here. They saved our lives, allowed us to get back to our homes. They stopped a terrible genocide whose goal was the ethnic cleansing of over 90% of the whole population of Kosovo.

Now it's fine by me when people use the case of Kosovo War to express their views on non-interventionism, but it's totally irresponsible and non-academic to distort the facts so blatantly the way Ralph Raico did. To just go, as my friend Merlin said, and find something in the internet and then think you have discovered something makes me want to reconsider my belief in the knowledge that I have gained from the so-called "revisionists" associated with LvMI. 

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Caley McKibbin replied on Sun, Feb 20 2011 11:05 PM

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I worked for the Red Cross (for free) with the refugees on the military base next to my house.  These were normal people forced into homelessness en masse.

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Bardhyl N. Salihu replied on Mon, Feb 21 2011 7:48 AM

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Yes Caley, around 1 million Albanians (total population was around 1.9 million then) were forced out of Kosovo as refugees, mainly into Macedonia and Albania, but also into Montenegro. They then used different channels to emigrate abroad in different European countries as well as U.S. I have friends who settled in U.S. when the war was over. Me and my family were offered the same chance during our stay in Macedonia but we opted to return home instead.

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Ricky James Moore II replied on Mon, Feb 21 2011 8:05 AM

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Perhaps someone should contact Professor Raico about it. I know he is usually pretty meticulous about his sources. Let him know what you think and see what he has to say.

Anyways, 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' aren't even real things; just crap made up by the Leftists after WW2 as imaginary super-crimes they could paint their opposition with. Just because the Serbian government was screwing over a minority group does not mean it was some secret plan to exterminate the Albanians. It just means politics as usual. Nor does it mean that the Albanian 'resistance fighters' weren't thuggish criminals; most rebel armies are.

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Bardhyl N. Salihu replied on Mon, Feb 21 2011 9:49 AM

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Genocide and ethnic cleansing aren't real things? Welcome to life. Genocide is the systematic killing of people; ethnic cleansing is genocide with the intent to kill or displace an ethnic group from a territory. This is exactly what the Serbian government had in mind, as I said earlier, in order to realize their plan of Great Serbia. There's nothing secret about it, Serbs have openly come forward about this plan. You have the case of Vasa Cubrilovic, a professor of history and head of department at the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences Institute for Balkan Studies who in 1937 came up with a paper titled "The Expulsion of Albanians." It was an open, hostile plan to expel Albanians from their homes and lands where they have been living for centuries. I'm sure Himmler and Eichman took notes and got inspired for the Final Solution. Later when the WWII started, an extreme right-wing, nationalist movement leader by the name of Draza Mihajlovic (who by the way got the Legion of Merit award in U.S.) who led the Cetniks issued 7 instructions (Serbian: Instrukcije) to his unit which can be found here. Then Operation Horshoe, the goal of which was to expel Albanians in one direction by pressing from three diferent sides (in a way forming a down-side horseshoe) in order to send them to Albania. These are three things that quickly sprang to my mind; the literature is endless. For more see the work of the brilliant Canadian historian Dr. Robert Elsie here. Then Vojislav Seselj, a person for whom no adjective is sufficient to describe his evil, openly stated (while he was member of the Serbian parliament) numerous times that his goal as well as that of his Serbian Radical Party was to establish Greater Serbia at the expense of every other ethnic community within those territories that he wanted Serbia to have (even Slobodan Milosevic, our Hitler, said Seselj was "the personification of violence and primitivism.")

Sure the Albanian rebels (under the Kosovo Liberation Army) did some things which are regrettable. But there is a fundamental and decisive difference between a guerrilla force and a State army: the guerrilla force is largely uncoordinated, doesn't have a clear command-chain (if there is one at all), and individuals comprising it largelly act on their own will. I remember my teacher (who participated in war) telling the class that the guerrilla radio was announcing that his unit was fighting bravely against the enemy while he was playing football with his unit. This wasn't propaganda, it was a lack of coordination. The "supreme command" didn't know what other units in different parts of Kosovo were doing. So while guerrilla fighters who did bad things should be held responsible, the blame can't be laid on all the guerrilla activities as is the case with the State army. A State force, on the other hand, is systematic, orders can be traced back to higher levels of command (up to commander-in-chief), works with a plan, and in this case was the much stronger party militiarily. Our guerrilla forces couldn't even committ atrocities because where they operated Serb civilians were not present (Serbs were only 4% of the population back then anyway). 

Attempts to nullify the Serbian genocide and ethnic cleansing by pointing to a few Serb civilians that KLA forces killed or those who were displaced due to a war that their State carried out is akin to Nazis complaining that Jews responded back to their Final Solution.

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Ricky James Moore II replied on Mon, Feb 21 2011 9:55 AM

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Genocide is a contentless 'political crime' made up by leftists to demonize people. It doesn't mean anything and never has. The Reds started it so they could ignore class-war mass murder and wax about the massive guilt of these even right-wing racists.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried101.html

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William replied on Mon, Feb 21 2011 11:59 AM

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If anyone doubts that there was genocide in Kosovo, let him travel there and see it with his own eyes that the males-to-females ratio is abnormally high. I’m sick of self-appointed experts who read a few articles and purport to know all about some conflict, especially one sickening as the Kosovo war.

This is a pitfall of libertarian historians.  At times they seem a little to eager too do a revisionist history before being very intimite with the subject.

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Bardhyl N. Salihu replied on Mon, Feb 21 2011 12:03 PM

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Well, first I'm not even sure what you claim is right (that lefties invented this "contentless" concept). But even if it's true, it doesn't mean that no genocide can ever occur. It's kinda like saying leftists invented the idea of exploitation, therefore exploitation is a contentless concept. While exploitation may not occur in the manner in which leftists suggested, it does nevertheless occur in different forms. You're committing the fallacy of Reductio ad Hitlerum.

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Bardhyl N. Salihu replied on Mon, Feb 21 2011 12:06 PM

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William:

If anyone doubts that there was genocide in Kosovo, let him travel there and see it with his own eyes that the males-to-females ratio is abnormally high. I’m sick of self-appointed experts who read a few articles and purport to know all about some conflict, especially one sickening as the Kosovo war.

This is a pitfall of libertarian historians.  At times they seem a little to eager too do a revisionist history before being very intimite with the subject.

I strongly agree. I can sense this on a daily basis, e.g. with the likes of Jeff Tucker who sometimes remind me of teenagers going through puberty who rebelliously and hastingly negate everything against their mantra with contempt as if they know better without a single doubt.

P.S. Probably also why non-libertarians are a bit wary of people like this. I think we can't built a strong case, especially in fields such as history, if we just go smashing everything everybody else said and try to impose our "revisionist" (read: holy) views on what is right without a deep analysis. Robert Higgs is probably an exception because his works are always carefully and modestly written.

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Ricky James Moore II replied on Mon, Feb 21 2011 1:43 PM

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I think libertarians are usually good on finding records other people missed or never looked for, but they definitely need to be taken with a grain of salt. They really ideologize things (see the argument over Pinochet a while back) and have trouble seeing things outside of the government vs. everyone else paradigm. Government is a really powerful force in history, but it's pretty inept; by emphasizing it so much they are making the same mistake the mainstream historians do by making history nothing but battles and kings and laws.

It's also good to read non-mainstream historians outside of the libertarian circles; I particularly like Carlyle's history of the French Revolution and David Irving.

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William replied on Mon, Feb 21 2011 1:50 PM

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I also think part of the issue is it is very modern and very Western, and when it gets out of the environment it thrives in, it tends to fall flat on it's face.

Some really quick examples:  It's views (almost any view) of feudalism usually strike me as odd, and why some at Mises.org chose to glorify Spanish economists over the the Caliphite culture seems odd and a bit out of place.

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William replied on Mon, Feb 21 2011 1:52 PM

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I mean it is obvious that these are not experts/scholars on Byzantium, Persia or whatever so why bother looking for them on much analysis on the issues.

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Ricky James Moore II replied on Mon, Feb 21 2011 1:55 PM

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William:

I mean it is obvious that these are not experts/scholars on Byzantium, Persia or whatever so why bother looking for them on much analysis on the issues.