Post by Fender on Jan 8, 2008 22:32:50 GMT -5
Nazis Love America
Posted by Julia under Republican Riot
A hackneyed December article in The San Francisco Chronicle read:
[F]ew places on Earth are more pro-United States than Kosovo. A boulevard in Pristina is named after Bill Clinton, a larger-than-life poster of him waving to passers-by. Pictures of President Bush graced campaign promos in this month’s provincial election. U.S. flags flutter everywhere.
As usual, the writer never questions whom that love is coming from and what it’s for. But keep his ubiquitous observation about Kosovo in mind as you read on.
In his Christmas Eve article “German Fascism is Conquering Kosovo,” Trumpet editor-in-chief Gerald Flurry illuminates how the Nazi heritage of Kosovo lives on, with the U.S. as its chief sponsor:
What is happening in Kosovo reaches far beyond the Balkans. It is so shocking that the nations of this world would be paralyzed with fear if they truly understood! Shamefully, America is its chief architect.
…
History shows that Serbia is no threat to Europe or America, but Germany has routinely been a dangerous threat to Europe and the world!
…
Kosovar Albanians and even the kla received direct support from Germany. There are 600,000 Albanians in Germany. In the late 1990s many of the kla guerrillas left their families behind in Germany to fight against the Serbs in a civil war that the German-supported Albanians started. Is that German democracy, or German fascism?
…
Germany recognized Kosovo’s government-in-exile when nobody else did. The kla guerrillas didn‘t just happen. They were essentially raised up and directly supported by Germany — the powerhouse of Europe.
All of Germany’s actions in this Yugoslav war have been blatant and brutal fascism. We can call it democratic if we choose to do so, but that doesn’t make it true.
…
Stratfor issued this most alarming report in 1998: “Serbian Radio in Belgrade on September 22 broadcast a scathing commentary charging Germany with ‘warmongering’ and warning Europe against the alleged rebirth of German fascism” (Sept. 25, 1998). Call the Serbs what you like, but that is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia!
…
Questioning Europe’s silence on Germany’s behavior, commentator Milika Sundic said, ‘It is difficult to comprehend and accept that Europe has become Germany’s slave.’ Sundic went on to claim that ‘Germany contributed the most to the breakdown of the former Yugoslavia,’ and that ‘Serbia has known for some time that Germany was behind the [kla] terrorism in [Kosovo].’” Who can present any evidence to refute these powerful words? Was the German-supported kla a band of freedom fighters, or were they terrorists? The truth is, they were German-supported terrorists — used to achieve Germany‘s fascist goals.
…
The Germans want to control Europe. To do so, they must gain control of the Balkans, where their fiercest enemy is the Serbs. For the most part, the Serbs have been silenced, and will be silenced further when Kosovo declares independence.
We are going to pay the supreme penalty for such a dangerously misguided foreign policy. America today continues in its tradition of supporting Germany and Europe’s efforts to conquer Kosovo! Germany had all of nato fighting for its cause, and it seems nobody wants to even discuss how it all began.
Is it so hard to understand why the Serbs are enraged? Their country has been systematically destroyed– primarily by Germany. What country would not fight against such an outrage? Does any nation really see the Serbs’ point of view?
Looking deeper into Kosovo’s own Nazi underpinnings, and in addition to the deadly ethnic supremacy that Albanians have in common with WWII Germans, here is paragraph from a Philadelphia Bulletin article titled “On the Wrong Side in Kosovo,” by Joseph Puder of the Interfaith Taskforce for America and Israel:
The [Albanian] “Skanderbeg” SS division…partook in the rounding up of Jews who were sent to their death in Bergen Belsen and other Nazi death camps. Bedri Pejjani, a Kosovo Muslim was appointed by the Nazis to rule occupied Kosovo and set out to establish a greater Islamic state in the region with the blessing and support of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler’s protégé and friend.
A key aspect of this story comes from historian Carl Savich, in an item titled Kosovo’s Nazi Past: The Untold Story:
Kosovo-Metohija was made a part of a Greater Albania by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini…Albanian-settled areas of the Balkans — Kosovo-Metohija, western Macedonia, southern Montenegro — were incorporated in a Greater Albania…The Greater Albania nationalist movement formed the Balli Kombetar, the Albanian Kosovo Committee, and the Skanderbeg Nazi SS Division, two-thirds of whose members were Kosovar Albanian Muslims.
With that in mind, here are some snippets of Kosovo today:
Albanian Nazi party insignia on Pristina wall, 2006
(photo by Russell Gordon)
Nazi SS Division Skanderbeg arm patch, showing national flag of Albania. The same arm patch is worn today by the Kosovo Protection Corps. (Carl Savich)
(Photo of the owner of Kosovo’s Hitler cafe)
(photo by Ed Alexander)
The Balli Kombetar is still active today. Check out its June briefing (emphasis added):
National Guard “Balli Kombetar” - Briefing
The National Guard “Balli Kombetar”…retreated all of it’s soldiers in the year 2000, that were stationed in all of the military structures of UCK (KLA).
Hoping that our cause would be solved on the basis that 3 years later the population would have decided for it’s own fate:
Having analyzed that the situation that has been created, leads only towards the partitioning of Kosova and the loss of the national identity:
The National Guard has announced the general mobilization of all the soldiers and Commanders that had been sworn in during the wars that evolved in Kosova, Presheva Valley and Ilirida.
We thank our brothers in Albania that have opened their doors for us to start the preparation of the military formations, which will stay vigilent towards the situation that is nearing a collapse. All of those that will walk over the blood of the Martyrs should know that a good day is not awaiting them.
We invite the population to be vigilent at a time when their politicians are trying to blind them before another partition of Kosova, just like it has been partitioned a thousand times.
We ask that NATO, and especially USA as our most beloved ally, do not allow another war to erupt that would not please anyone. We are for peace and tolerance, but not 1 millimeter of the Albanian lands will be given away, and there will be uninterupted war until the will of all of those who have fallen for a free and democratic Albania is completed.
To the Serbs that are being recalled into their own Guards, we say to them from our Albanian lands, that they will be met with the nozzle of the gun. This will be proven if those who are responsable for the protection of the territorial integrity, allow their entry into Kosova.
We invite the electronic and newspaper medias to transmit this Briefing for the sake of correctly informing the People. Those medias that are interested, and have correct and objective information, can attend in the military exercises that are taking place in the free mountains of Kosova. The Guard will inform you in time through your own means when and who can attend these exercises as soon as the decision has been made by the strategic group with it’s center in Tirana.
Commander of the National Guard
Flamur Kokollari
Historian Savich describes one of the roles of the Balli Kombetar in WWII:
Christopher Simpson, in Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War, noted that relatively few [Albanian] Jews were captured and killed but “not for lack of trying by the Balli Kombetar organization and the Albanian SS” which had orchestrated “a series of anti-Semitic purges that rounded up about 800 people, the majority of whom were deported and murdered.”
In a separate item, Savich introduces us to an American attorney named Frank Wisner who “had represented the financial interests of wealthy Albanian refugees who had been members of the Nazi-fascist collaborative group, the Balli Kombetar.” After WWII Wisner was behind rescue missions of Albanian Nazis from Kosovo and in 1948 was in charge of recruiting Albanian Nazis for the CIA for an operation against Albania’s Soviet-aligned dictator Enver Hoxha. While it’s well known, and from an intelligence standpoint often necessary, that the U.S. used Nazis against the Soviets, we see that Wisner was uniquely qualified and connected to do the job. Wisner killed himself in 1965. In 2005 President Bush appointed his son, Frank Wisner, Jr., to be the U.S. envoy to Kosovo. Wisner Jr. has been a loud and clear voice behind the sabotaging of Albanian-Serbian talks, stating from the get-go that independence must be the end goal of any new talks.
Indeed, the fingerprints of the Nazi-connected are all over today’s Kosovo. Recall a quote from Chris Deliso:
In 1996, BND Chief Geiger’s deputy, Rainer Kesselring, the son of the Nazi Luftwaffe general responsible for the bombing of Belgrade in 1941 that left 17,000 dead, oversaw…training of Albanian recruits [for the KLA] at a Turkish military base near Izmir.
Even UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari [original family name Adolfsen], who accepted superfluous bribes to include full independence as part of his proposal for Kosovo’s final status, has some Nazi skeletons in his closet. During Ahtisaari’s presidency in Finland, writes Savich, his government intended to bankroll a monument to members of the Finnish Waffen SS volunteer division Wiking:
The memorial would consist of a small monument or plaque erected by Ahtisaari’s Finnish government at a burial site in southern Ukraine where the remains of 150 Finnish Nazi Waffen SS volunteers are buried.
Finland’s Jewish groups protested to President Martti Ahtisaari because his government was subsidizing or financing the project. Gideon Bolotowsky, a Finnish Jewish leader, accused Ahtisaari of financing Nazism.
Bolotowsky told Reuters: “They (the government) are giving money to a Nazi cause. They did not fight for Finland. …It is a mistake of the government.”
What is remarkable is that Ahtisaari’s government defended this honoring of Finnish Nazi SS war criminals. In a May 10, 1999 Reuters news story, it was reported:
“Officials defended the plan to commemorate the SS men, saying it would be a gesture of remembrance rather than approval.
‘All governments erect monuments or plaques to their war dead,’ said Heikki Hakala, executive director of the Society for Remembrance of the War Dead. ‘This (momument) would be to honour the fallen soldiers, not for any particular deed…’
An official at the ministry of education, which donated 500,000 markka ($91,000) to the society, said the government saw nothing wrong with the plan as there was no evidence the Finnish SS battalion was involved in any Nazi atrocities.”
In 1958, the Finnish government completely exonerated the Nazi SS volunteers and gave them full “combatant rights”.
…
Samuels asked Martti Ahtisaari to use his influence with the government to “desist from this act of historical revisionism.’’
Martti Ahtisaari and his government defended the plan…The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal held all Waffen SS members to be guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Why doesn’t Ahtisaari know this?…This supporter and financier of Nazi war criminals and of genocide is deciding the future status of Kosovo? The irony is unbelievable.
Further revealing the fascist foundations of today’s KKKosovo was a 1999 article by the New York Times’ Christopher Hedges, in Foreign Affairs Magazine:
The KLA splits down a bizarre ideological divide, with hints of fascism on one side and whiffs of communism on the other. The former faction is led by the sons and grandsons of rightist Albanian fighters — either the heirs of those who fought in the World War II fascist militias and the Skanderbeg volunteer SS division raised by the Nazis, or the descendants of the rightist Albanian kacak rebels who rose up against the Serbs 80 years ago. Although never much of a fighting force, the Skanderbeg division took part in the shameful roundup and deportation of the province’s few hundred Jews during the Holocaust. The division’s remnants fought Tito’s Partisans at the end of the war, leaving thousands of ethnic Albanians dead. The decision by KLA commanders to dress their police in black fatigues and order their fighters to salute with a clenched fist to the forehead has led many to worry about these fascist antecedents. Following such criticism, the salute has been changed to the traditional open-palm salute common in the U.S. Army.
The second KLA faction, comprising most of the KLA leaders in exile, are old Stalinists who were once bankrolled by the xenophobic Enver Hoxha, the dictator of Albania who died in 1985. This group led a militant separatist movement that was really about integration with Hoxha’s Albania. Most of these leaders were students at Pristina University after 1974, when Belgrade granted the province autonomy. Freed from Yugoslav oversight, the university imported thousands of textbooks from Albania, all carefully edited by Hoxha’s Stalinist regime, along with at least a dozen militant Albanian professors. Along with its degree programs, Pristina University began to quietly school young Kosovar leaders in the art of revolution. Not only did a huge percentage of the KLA leadership come out of the university, but so, ominously, did the ethnic Albanian leadership in neighboring Macedonia.
It certainly goes a long way to explain the seemingly flippant nickname of one of the six escapees in an August prison break. Lirim Jakupi, a leader of the Albanian National Army and tasked with destabilizing Macedonia, goes by the title “Commander Nazi.” The escapee has since been captured (after a shootout with Macedonian police).
I’ll close with a 1993 article from the Daily Telegraph, titled “Albanians and Afghans fight for the heirs to Bosnia’s SS past”:
“Documents!” shouted a man in a beret with an insignia in green arabic script outside the U.N. house in Bosnian mountain town of Fojnica. He was hostile and demanded our presence at the police station. Later the police chief apologised, but made clear that authority had passed to the men with the koranic texts hanging from their fatigues.
Last summer Muslim and Croat leaders in Fojnica asked the U.N. to declare it a “zone of peace”. Since then war has ravaged the town, bringing murder, mayhem and exile to at least half its original population of 12000. Different, and alien forces are now in charge — some of the toughest in the Bosnian Muslim army.
These are the men of the Handzar division. “We do everything with the knife, and we always fight on the frontline,” a Handzar told one U.N. officer. Up to 6000 strong, the Handzar division glories in a fascist culture. They see themselves as the heirs of the SS Handzar division, formed by Bosnian Muslims in 1943 to fight for the Nazis. Their spiritual model was Mohammed Amin al-Hussein, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who sided with Hitler. According to U.N. officers, surprisingly few of those in charge of the Handzars in Fojnica seem to speak good Serbo-Croatian. “Many of them are Albanian, whether from Kosovo (the Serb province where Albanians are the majority) or from Albania itself.”
They are trained and led by veterans from Afghanistan and Pakistan, say U.N. sources. The strong presence of native Albanians is an ominous sign. It could mean the seeds of war are spreading south via Kosovo and into Albania, thence to the Albanians of Macedonia. Pakistani fundamentalists are known to have had a strong hand in providing arms and a small weapons industry for the Bosnian Muslims.
Hardline elements of the Bosnian army, like the Handzar, appear to have the backing of an increasingly extreme leadership in Sarajevo represented by Mr Ejup Ganic, foreign minister, Mr Haris Silajdzic [note: Silajdzic is currently still in power in Bosnia], prime minister and Mr Enver Hadjihasanovic, the new army chief.
…
More significant is the nature of the Handzars, and the influences of the Albanians in their command, and the support from Pakistan. These suggest, politically and militarily, the war in Bosnia has spread — under the dozing eyes of the West.
How stunning is it that — as Andy Wilcoxson writes in his forthcoming book about the Milosevic trial — “In spite of the flagrant illegality of Bosnia’s secession from Yugoslavia, the European Community recognized Bosnian independence on April 6, 1992 — the 51st anniversary of Hitler’s attack on Belgrade. The United States followed suit, recognizing Bosnian secession the very next day.”
My recent post “How America Enables Fascists in the Balkans” drew out the ways that the “former” Axis powers — with Allied assistance — stoked the conflicts in both Kosovo and Bosnia. It’s worth adding a few final points about the Bosnia leg of it. Again from Deliso:
The weapons had come via Sudan. This confirmed that the African country, run by the radical National Islamic Front and then hosting Osama bin Laden, was playing a major role in the Bosnian jihad. At the same time, the discovery also “implicated members of the Slovenian secret service and indirectly the Austrian Ministry of Interior…both Slovenian security agents and the Austrian Ministry of Interior were providing funds for the Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic in Sarjevo.” Austria’s long historical relations with Bosnia included the annexation of the province from the Ottoman Empire by the Austro-Hapsburg Empire in the dying days of both poweers, in 1908, a move that provoked Serbia and Turkey and indirectly led to the First World War.
Please note that Slovenia has just taken over the rotating presidency of the EU and is putting a quick solution to Kosovo as its top priority, as last week’s headlines read: “Slovenia to force Kosovo back to top of EU agenda”
And Austria has just announced that it will take a leading role in recognizing a unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo:
“We will not sit in the first rows and look at what others are doing,” [Chancellor Alfred] Gusenbauer said….He added that Austria will “certainly be among those who will have a clear attitude on the issue and who will show the way forward.”
Sieg Heil
Posted by Julia under Republican Riot
A hackneyed December article in The San Francisco Chronicle read:
[F]ew places on Earth are more pro-United States than Kosovo. A boulevard in Pristina is named after Bill Clinton, a larger-than-life poster of him waving to passers-by. Pictures of President Bush graced campaign promos in this month’s provincial election. U.S. flags flutter everywhere.
As usual, the writer never questions whom that love is coming from and what it’s for. But keep his ubiquitous observation about Kosovo in mind as you read on.
In his Christmas Eve article “German Fascism is Conquering Kosovo,” Trumpet editor-in-chief Gerald Flurry illuminates how the Nazi heritage of Kosovo lives on, with the U.S. as its chief sponsor:
What is happening in Kosovo reaches far beyond the Balkans. It is so shocking that the nations of this world would be paralyzed with fear if they truly understood! Shamefully, America is its chief architect.
…
History shows that Serbia is no threat to Europe or America, but Germany has routinely been a dangerous threat to Europe and the world!
…
Kosovar Albanians and even the kla received direct support from Germany. There are 600,000 Albanians in Germany. In the late 1990s many of the kla guerrillas left their families behind in Germany to fight against the Serbs in a civil war that the German-supported Albanians started. Is that German democracy, or German fascism?
…
Germany recognized Kosovo’s government-in-exile when nobody else did. The kla guerrillas didn‘t just happen. They were essentially raised up and directly supported by Germany — the powerhouse of Europe.
All of Germany’s actions in this Yugoslav war have been blatant and brutal fascism. We can call it democratic if we choose to do so, but that doesn’t make it true.
…
Stratfor issued this most alarming report in 1998: “Serbian Radio in Belgrade on September 22 broadcast a scathing commentary charging Germany with ‘warmongering’ and warning Europe against the alleged rebirth of German fascism” (Sept. 25, 1998). Call the Serbs what you like, but that is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia!
…
Questioning Europe’s silence on Germany’s behavior, commentator Milika Sundic said, ‘It is difficult to comprehend and accept that Europe has become Germany’s slave.’ Sundic went on to claim that ‘Germany contributed the most to the breakdown of the former Yugoslavia,’ and that ‘Serbia has known for some time that Germany was behind the [kla] terrorism in [Kosovo].’” Who can present any evidence to refute these powerful words? Was the German-supported kla a band of freedom fighters, or were they terrorists? The truth is, they were German-supported terrorists — used to achieve Germany‘s fascist goals.
…
The Germans want to control Europe. To do so, they must gain control of the Balkans, where their fiercest enemy is the Serbs. For the most part, the Serbs have been silenced, and will be silenced further when Kosovo declares independence.
We are going to pay the supreme penalty for such a dangerously misguided foreign policy. America today continues in its tradition of supporting Germany and Europe’s efforts to conquer Kosovo! Germany had all of nato fighting for its cause, and it seems nobody wants to even discuss how it all began.
Is it so hard to understand why the Serbs are enraged? Their country has been systematically destroyed– primarily by Germany. What country would not fight against such an outrage? Does any nation really see the Serbs’ point of view?
Looking deeper into Kosovo’s own Nazi underpinnings, and in addition to the deadly ethnic supremacy that Albanians have in common with WWII Germans, here is paragraph from a Philadelphia Bulletin article titled “On the Wrong Side in Kosovo,” by Joseph Puder of the Interfaith Taskforce for America and Israel:
The [Albanian] “Skanderbeg” SS division…partook in the rounding up of Jews who were sent to their death in Bergen Belsen and other Nazi death camps. Bedri Pejjani, a Kosovo Muslim was appointed by the Nazis to rule occupied Kosovo and set out to establish a greater Islamic state in the region with the blessing and support of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler’s protégé and friend.
A key aspect of this story comes from historian Carl Savich, in an item titled Kosovo’s Nazi Past: The Untold Story:
Kosovo-Metohija was made a part of a Greater Albania by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini…Albanian-settled areas of the Balkans — Kosovo-Metohija, western Macedonia, southern Montenegro — were incorporated in a Greater Albania…The Greater Albania nationalist movement formed the Balli Kombetar, the Albanian Kosovo Committee, and the Skanderbeg Nazi SS Division, two-thirds of whose members were Kosovar Albanian Muslims.
With that in mind, here are some snippets of Kosovo today:
Albanian Nazi party insignia on Pristina wall, 2006
(photo by Russell Gordon)
Nazi SS Division Skanderbeg arm patch, showing national flag of Albania. The same arm patch is worn today by the Kosovo Protection Corps. (Carl Savich)
(Photo of the owner of Kosovo’s Hitler cafe)
(photo by Ed Alexander)
The Balli Kombetar is still active today. Check out its June briefing (emphasis added):
National Guard “Balli Kombetar” - Briefing
The National Guard “Balli Kombetar”…retreated all of it’s soldiers in the year 2000, that were stationed in all of the military structures of UCK (KLA).
Hoping that our cause would be solved on the basis that 3 years later the population would have decided for it’s own fate:
Having analyzed that the situation that has been created, leads only towards the partitioning of Kosova and the loss of the national identity:
The National Guard has announced the general mobilization of all the soldiers and Commanders that had been sworn in during the wars that evolved in Kosova, Presheva Valley and Ilirida.
We thank our brothers in Albania that have opened their doors for us to start the preparation of the military formations, which will stay vigilent towards the situation that is nearing a collapse. All of those that will walk over the blood of the Martyrs should know that a good day is not awaiting them.
We invite the population to be vigilent at a time when their politicians are trying to blind them before another partition of Kosova, just like it has been partitioned a thousand times.
We ask that NATO, and especially USA as our most beloved ally, do not allow another war to erupt that would not please anyone. We are for peace and tolerance, but not 1 millimeter of the Albanian lands will be given away, and there will be uninterupted war until the will of all of those who have fallen for a free and democratic Albania is completed.
To the Serbs that are being recalled into their own Guards, we say to them from our Albanian lands, that they will be met with the nozzle of the gun. This will be proven if those who are responsable for the protection of the territorial integrity, allow their entry into Kosova.
We invite the electronic and newspaper medias to transmit this Briefing for the sake of correctly informing the People. Those medias that are interested, and have correct and objective information, can attend in the military exercises that are taking place in the free mountains of Kosova. The Guard will inform you in time through your own means when and who can attend these exercises as soon as the decision has been made by the strategic group with it’s center in Tirana.
Commander of the National Guard
Flamur Kokollari
Historian Savich describes one of the roles of the Balli Kombetar in WWII:
Christopher Simpson, in Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War, noted that relatively few [Albanian] Jews were captured and killed but “not for lack of trying by the Balli Kombetar organization and the Albanian SS” which had orchestrated “a series of anti-Semitic purges that rounded up about 800 people, the majority of whom were deported and murdered.”
In a separate item, Savich introduces us to an American attorney named Frank Wisner who “had represented the financial interests of wealthy Albanian refugees who had been members of the Nazi-fascist collaborative group, the Balli Kombetar.” After WWII Wisner was behind rescue missions of Albanian Nazis from Kosovo and in 1948 was in charge of recruiting Albanian Nazis for the CIA for an operation against Albania’s Soviet-aligned dictator Enver Hoxha. While it’s well known, and from an intelligence standpoint often necessary, that the U.S. used Nazis against the Soviets, we see that Wisner was uniquely qualified and connected to do the job. Wisner killed himself in 1965. In 2005 President Bush appointed his son, Frank Wisner, Jr., to be the U.S. envoy to Kosovo. Wisner Jr. has been a loud and clear voice behind the sabotaging of Albanian-Serbian talks, stating from the get-go that independence must be the end goal of any new talks.
Indeed, the fingerprints of the Nazi-connected are all over today’s Kosovo. Recall a quote from Chris Deliso:
In 1996, BND Chief Geiger’s deputy, Rainer Kesselring, the son of the Nazi Luftwaffe general responsible for the bombing of Belgrade in 1941 that left 17,000 dead, oversaw…training of Albanian recruits [for the KLA] at a Turkish military base near Izmir.
Even UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari [original family name Adolfsen], who accepted superfluous bribes to include full independence as part of his proposal for Kosovo’s final status, has some Nazi skeletons in his closet. During Ahtisaari’s presidency in Finland, writes Savich, his government intended to bankroll a monument to members of the Finnish Waffen SS volunteer division Wiking:
The memorial would consist of a small monument or plaque erected by Ahtisaari’s Finnish government at a burial site in southern Ukraine where the remains of 150 Finnish Nazi Waffen SS volunteers are buried.
Finland’s Jewish groups protested to President Martti Ahtisaari because his government was subsidizing or financing the project. Gideon Bolotowsky, a Finnish Jewish leader, accused Ahtisaari of financing Nazism.
Bolotowsky told Reuters: “They (the government) are giving money to a Nazi cause. They did not fight for Finland. …It is a mistake of the government.”
What is remarkable is that Ahtisaari’s government defended this honoring of Finnish Nazi SS war criminals. In a May 10, 1999 Reuters news story, it was reported:
“Officials defended the plan to commemorate the SS men, saying it would be a gesture of remembrance rather than approval.
‘All governments erect monuments or plaques to their war dead,’ said Heikki Hakala, executive director of the Society for Remembrance of the War Dead. ‘This (momument) would be to honour the fallen soldiers, not for any particular deed…’
An official at the ministry of education, which donated 500,000 markka ($91,000) to the society, said the government saw nothing wrong with the plan as there was no evidence the Finnish SS battalion was involved in any Nazi atrocities.”
In 1958, the Finnish government completely exonerated the Nazi SS volunteers and gave them full “combatant rights”.
…
Samuels asked Martti Ahtisaari to use his influence with the government to “desist from this act of historical revisionism.’’
Martti Ahtisaari and his government defended the plan…The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal held all Waffen SS members to be guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Why doesn’t Ahtisaari know this?…This supporter and financier of Nazi war criminals and of genocide is deciding the future status of Kosovo? The irony is unbelievable.
Further revealing the fascist foundations of today’s KKKosovo was a 1999 article by the New York Times’ Christopher Hedges, in Foreign Affairs Magazine:
The KLA splits down a bizarre ideological divide, with hints of fascism on one side and whiffs of communism on the other. The former faction is led by the sons and grandsons of rightist Albanian fighters — either the heirs of those who fought in the World War II fascist militias and the Skanderbeg volunteer SS division raised by the Nazis, or the descendants of the rightist Albanian kacak rebels who rose up against the Serbs 80 years ago. Although never much of a fighting force, the Skanderbeg division took part in the shameful roundup and deportation of the province’s few hundred Jews during the Holocaust. The division’s remnants fought Tito’s Partisans at the end of the war, leaving thousands of ethnic Albanians dead. The decision by KLA commanders to dress their police in black fatigues and order their fighters to salute with a clenched fist to the forehead has led many to worry about these fascist antecedents. Following such criticism, the salute has been changed to the traditional open-palm salute common in the U.S. Army.
The second KLA faction, comprising most of the KLA leaders in exile, are old Stalinists who were once bankrolled by the xenophobic Enver Hoxha, the dictator of Albania who died in 1985. This group led a militant separatist movement that was really about integration with Hoxha’s Albania. Most of these leaders were students at Pristina University after 1974, when Belgrade granted the province autonomy. Freed from Yugoslav oversight, the university imported thousands of textbooks from Albania, all carefully edited by Hoxha’s Stalinist regime, along with at least a dozen militant Albanian professors. Along with its degree programs, Pristina University began to quietly school young Kosovar leaders in the art of revolution. Not only did a huge percentage of the KLA leadership come out of the university, but so, ominously, did the ethnic Albanian leadership in neighboring Macedonia.
It certainly goes a long way to explain the seemingly flippant nickname of one of the six escapees in an August prison break. Lirim Jakupi, a leader of the Albanian National Army and tasked with destabilizing Macedonia, goes by the title “Commander Nazi.” The escapee has since been captured (after a shootout with Macedonian police).
I’ll close with a 1993 article from the Daily Telegraph, titled “Albanians and Afghans fight for the heirs to Bosnia’s SS past”:
“Documents!” shouted a man in a beret with an insignia in green arabic script outside the U.N. house in Bosnian mountain town of Fojnica. He was hostile and demanded our presence at the police station. Later the police chief apologised, but made clear that authority had passed to the men with the koranic texts hanging from their fatigues.
Last summer Muslim and Croat leaders in Fojnica asked the U.N. to declare it a “zone of peace”. Since then war has ravaged the town, bringing murder, mayhem and exile to at least half its original population of 12000. Different, and alien forces are now in charge — some of the toughest in the Bosnian Muslim army.
These are the men of the Handzar division. “We do everything with the knife, and we always fight on the frontline,” a Handzar told one U.N. officer. Up to 6000 strong, the Handzar division glories in a fascist culture. They see themselves as the heirs of the SS Handzar division, formed by Bosnian Muslims in 1943 to fight for the Nazis. Their spiritual model was Mohammed Amin al-Hussein, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who sided with Hitler. According to U.N. officers, surprisingly few of those in charge of the Handzars in Fojnica seem to speak good Serbo-Croatian. “Many of them are Albanian, whether from Kosovo (the Serb province where Albanians are the majority) or from Albania itself.”
They are trained and led by veterans from Afghanistan and Pakistan, say U.N. sources. The strong presence of native Albanians is an ominous sign. It could mean the seeds of war are spreading south via Kosovo and into Albania, thence to the Albanians of Macedonia. Pakistani fundamentalists are known to have had a strong hand in providing arms and a small weapons industry for the Bosnian Muslims.
Hardline elements of the Bosnian army, like the Handzar, appear to have the backing of an increasingly extreme leadership in Sarajevo represented by Mr Ejup Ganic, foreign minister, Mr Haris Silajdzic [note: Silajdzic is currently still in power in Bosnia], prime minister and Mr Enver Hadjihasanovic, the new army chief.
…
More significant is the nature of the Handzars, and the influences of the Albanians in their command, and the support from Pakistan. These suggest, politically and militarily, the war in Bosnia has spread — under the dozing eyes of the West.
How stunning is it that — as Andy Wilcoxson writes in his forthcoming book about the Milosevic trial — “In spite of the flagrant illegality of Bosnia’s secession from Yugoslavia, the European Community recognized Bosnian independence on April 6, 1992 — the 51st anniversary of Hitler’s attack on Belgrade. The United States followed suit, recognizing Bosnian secession the very next day.”
My recent post “How America Enables Fascists in the Balkans” drew out the ways that the “former” Axis powers — with Allied assistance — stoked the conflicts in both Kosovo and Bosnia. It’s worth adding a few final points about the Bosnia leg of it. Again from Deliso:
The weapons had come via Sudan. This confirmed that the African country, run by the radical National Islamic Front and then hosting Osama bin Laden, was playing a major role in the Bosnian jihad. At the same time, the discovery also “implicated members of the Slovenian secret service and indirectly the Austrian Ministry of Interior…both Slovenian security agents and the Austrian Ministry of Interior were providing funds for the Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic in Sarjevo.” Austria’s long historical relations with Bosnia included the annexation of the province from the Ottoman Empire by the Austro-Hapsburg Empire in the dying days of both poweers, in 1908, a move that provoked Serbia and Turkey and indirectly led to the First World War.
Please note that Slovenia has just taken over the rotating presidency of the EU and is putting a quick solution to Kosovo as its top priority, as last week’s headlines read: “Slovenia to force Kosovo back to top of EU agenda”
And Austria has just announced that it will take a leading role in recognizing a unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo:
“We will not sit in the first rows and look at what others are doing,” [Chancellor Alfred] Gusenbauer said….He added that Austria will “certainly be among those who will have a clear attitude on the issue and who will show the way forward.”
Sieg Heil