No Chronicles Magazine
CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE SERBIAN REVOLUTION, by Srdja Trifkovic
A paper presented at The Rockford Institute’s conference to mark
the bicentennial of the First Serbian Uprising, Chicago, February 21, 2004
"The First Serbian Uprising is a misleading term, because (1) there had been many Serbian uprisings against the Turks before 1804; and (2) what happened between 1804 and 1813 may have begun as an “uprising” but soon evolved into a revolutionary war of national liberation, of social and political emancipation of the Serbian nation. In that sense, Ranke’s term revolution is more appropriate.
When Eugene of Savoy marched into Serbia in the aftermath of the Turkish collapse at the gates of Vienna, tens of thousands of Serbs rose in arms and flocked to his banner. The uprising—for that’s what it was—cleared the way for Eugene’s advance in Serbia itself and provided the recruits for his army as it headed east into Bulgaria. But when the French stabbed the Habsburgs in the back on the Rhine, the Austrians retreated back to the Sava and the great Serbian exodus of 1690 began. Forty thousand families—mostly from Kosovo, Metohija, and Rashka—headed north, fearful of Ottoman retribution. Their homes and their lands were taken over by Muslims, mostly from the barren hills of northern Albania.
A pattern was thus established that would be repeated, in one form or another, for the ensuing three centuries: A great power uses the Serbs for its ends and then discards them, or else, worse still, supports their enemies for reasons geopolitical. (...)"
KOSOVO: FIVE CENTURIES OF STRIFE AND ETHNIC CLEANSING, by Srdja Trifkovic
"Since March 17 over thirty Serbs were killed in Kosovo by rioting Albanians, hundreds were wounded, and thousands expelled from their homes. In many cases their homes were set on fire, their livestock killed, and their property looted. Two-dozen Christian churches and monasteries were also gutted or dynamited, thus nearly completing the work started in the immediate aftermath of NATO’s occupation in 1999 when over a hundred shrines were destroyed.
“Kristallnacht is under way in Kosovo,” an official of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission to Kosovo (UNMIK) says, “a pogrom against Serbs: churches are on fire and people are being attacked for no other reason than their ethnic background.” Things must be out of control if even UN administrators and NATO officers, who usually deny or minimize Albanian crimes, now admit that we are witnessing a coordinated, premeditated campaign of ethnic cleansing.
The campaign has a simple objective: to expel the remaining Serbs from the province, in addition to a quarter of a million already expelled since the end of the war five years ago. It was no longer possible for the “international community” to remain in denial because its own personnel have been attacked by Albanian mobs forcing their way through UNMIK checkpoints into enclaves inhabited by the few remaining Serbs. (...)"
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