First published on 17th February 2008 in Buzzle, AfroArticles and American Chronicle Excerpt: It would be better for Serbia to be the first country to recognize Kosova; otherwise, 2008 Serbia will soon look like 1991 Yugoslavia, because Voivodina and Sanjak will be the next to secede.

1. The Historical Victory of Kosova
As the Kosovars rightfully cheer and jubilate on this historically Great Day, it
would be useful to consider and analyze the arguments of the skeptics and
the opponents of Kosova’s formal independence.
In a world in disarray, confusion, and moral collapse, we frequently hear all
sorts of biased interpretations and unprecedented falsifications of the
historical and the philosophical reality.
Kosova’s Formal Independence: a Historical Challenge
Nationalist Serbs and their supporters have been allowed for too long to
propagate the reasons of their opposition to Kosova’s secession and formal
independence. For them, Kosovo, as they still call it (and they should be left
the only to do so), is the soil of their national heritage and memories. This is
true, but as the Serbs admit, it concerns a period before 600 – 700 years!
This is a multifaceted problem; to even imagine discussing who was in
control of a land in a semi-forgotten past is utterly dangerous for the Mankind
– particularly when the land in question is now inhabited by another people.
The world would plunge into the hell of ceaseless wars, if this paranoiac
assertion was shared by many political parties and national governments all
over the world.
Lebanese would claim the Greek islands and the Libyan coast, Macedonians

2. would require Syria, Egyptians would demand Cyprus, Iranians would
pretend to have historical rights to occupy Israel, whereas Turkey would
request Algeria. Germans would call for the inclusion of the entire Prussian
territory within the present German borders, French would attempt to invade
Russia, and British would make an effort to annex France’s northern half. In
brief, the international community would disintegrate, and the world order
would collapse.
Penalize territorial claims based on terminated historicity
Particularly after all that happened in Kosova over the past ten years, it is
high time for the international community to penalize territorial claims based
on terminated historicity. International stability and world peace are concepts
hinging on the fundamental concept of a people or a human society sharing
values and traditions and living on a certain territory.
If we accept today that governments and political parties can claim territories
occupied by their respective ancestral nations in the past, while these
territories are not anymore occupied by the same nation, but by another, we
risk triggering an unlimited number of nationalistic wars among almost all
the nations of the world.
Only physical presence on a specific territory, demonstrated permanence of
inhabitance and labour at a collective level, as well as social organization
encompassing all the individuals sharing common origin, language, writing,
religion, traditions and culture, entitles a nation to the right of national
sovereignty over a certain territory.
Of course, there may be many different reasons for which a nation may have
lost a specific territory. Germany twice lost eastern parts of its traditional
territories because of the two German defeats, in 1918 and 1945. Serbia lost
Kosova because the Serb population of that area gradually moved to other
places.
Perhaps this cannot be easily understood in our times, when people stick to
their gigantic urban centers, and think of movement only in terms of trans-
ocean vacations. Today, the outright majority of people all over the world
imagine that, due to lack of modern technological infrastructure, people in the
Antiquity, the Christian and the Islamic Ages did not move much; this is very
wrong. This thought or imagination is particularly erroneous, when it
concerns historical peoples who lived within a vast empire, because in that
case the lack of borders facilitated the movement.
Within the Eastern Roman and the Ottoman empires for many long centuries
various peoples moved from place to place; this concerns even more
emphatically the Balkan provinces of these imperial institutions, precisely

3. because for various periods smaller states (co)existed in their periphery. These
developments along with the various nomadic movements created great
mobility.
Yugoslavian Autonomous Province ‘Kosovo’: already a problem!
The fact of the overwhelming Albanian majority in Kosova is not a recent
phenomenon. Post-WW II Yugoslavia was a federal socialist state but Kosova
was not a federal republic; instead, it was simply an autonomous province.
This was already a problem.
The only reason for which Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia,
and Slovenia were proclaimed as federal republics and Kosova and
Voivodina were undeservedly given the inferior status of autonomous
province was the Serbian nationalistic and chauvinistic supremacist attitude.
There was never a referendum in 1945 in Kosova to democratically ask the
indigenous population what they would prefer to be, a federal republic or an
autonomous province.
In fact, already in 1945, Albanians represented larger than three fourths
majority in Kosova. When today modern crypto-fascist journalists, analysts,
pseudo-academia, and intellectuals play the role of apologists of the racist and
fascist Serbian administration, saying that the "problem" in Kosova was the
attribution of the status of autonomous province, they seem to forget that
through their words, they get unmasked as regards their antidemocratic
nature. What they suggest, namely not even to offer the autonomous province
status to Kosova, if implemented in 1945, would be an outrageous act against
the outright majority of a province that was nationally different from the
Serbs. This sort of suggestions is the epitome of tyranny and the embodiment
of oppression.
These imaginary analysts easily forget that populations living within a
circumference are not robots without personality, integrity, rights, and
cultural choices. If within a territory the entire population forms one people,
i.e. one nation, then divisions and secessions are unjustified. The fact that the
majority of Kosova’s population was not of Serbian origin changes
automatically the data.
I will publish here a one-paragraph sample of this absurd approach that
reflects so well the biased criteria of the racists, the nationalists, and the
crypto-fascists of our days. In this excerpt, the author supposedly expresses a
rejection of earlier articles of mine about Kosova’s formal independence and
international recognition (http://blogs.tol.org/conflicts/2008/02/01/from-
conflict-resolution-to-reintegration/):

4. "In Megalommatis’ American Chronicle piece, there’s no substantiation of his
claim that "Kosova" has as much a right to independence as the former Yugo
republics. Kosovo was in fact part of the Serb republic in Yugoslavia and
never a republic itself. In 1989, Kosovo’s autonomy status within Serbia was
changed because of the increased Albanian nationalist mayhem during the
years of the dictator Tito’s enforced autonomy (1974-89). If one checks back to
1988, there was a consensus among the former Yugo republics that the
situation in Kosovo worsened because of the autonomy granted to it.
Autonomy or not, it was never a republic separate from Serbia".
The absence of the most basic concepts of humanism, democracy, freedom,
national sovereignty, and Human Rights is evident in this text.
What ‘substantiation’ is needed for the proclamation of a national
independence, except the determined expression of the will of the outright
majority of a province’s population, which constitutes another nation than
that inhabiting other provinces of the same country?
Independent states do not exist for the …. states, but for the peoples. There is
no other legitimacy than the will of the people. And there is nothing higher
and loftier than the verdict of a referendum for national independence. And
there cannot be any justification in hindering an expressed national will.
The argument according to which, in the same way Serbs are a minority
within Kosova, the Kosovars are a minority within Serbia, is useless and
meaningless. Serbia does not consist in any value; states do not represent a
value in and by themselves. The Serb people (and viewed diachronically the
Serb nation) have the same value as any people (or nation) all over the world.
There are no peoples more valuable, more determinant, and more respected
than others.
Serbia did not exist forever. Created before 203 years, it represented a certain
political will of some Serb groups that fought against the Ottoman Empire,
and at the same time it was the flagrant desire of the French and the Russians,
both enemies of the Sultan.
One has to differentiate always the History of the Peoples (or the Nations)
from the History of the States, the Governments, the Administrations.
Kosova as part of the Serbian Kingdom: already a problem!
My opponent makes an arbitrary sentence; "Kosovo was in fact part of the
Serb republic in Yugoslavia and never a republic itself".
But he fails dramatically to properly substantiate this historical truth; yet, this
would automatically unveil his entire hypocrisy and duplicity. How and

5. when Kosova became ‘part of the Serb republic’, and before that ‘part of the
kingdom of Yugoslavia’ (between the two world wars), and even earlier ‘part
of the Serbian kingdom’?
Did Kosova belong to Serbia since the Neolithic when both, Serbs and
Albanians, had not yet been invented?
Did Kosova belong to Serbia since the times of the dinosaurs?
Although the racist, rancorous, and even rapacious attitude of the Serbs
against the Kosovars could eventually give good examples to the dinosaurs,
we know very well that Kosova became part of Serbia just before less than 100
years, during the First Balkan War in 1912.
In fact, long before Kosova was part of the Serb republic in Yugoslavia, part of
the kingdom of Yugoslavia, and part of the Serbian kingdom, Kosova
belonged to the Ottoman Empire. And when the armies of the Serbian
Kingdom, as an ally of Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria, attacked the
Ottoman Empire and invaded the Ottoman territory that corresponds to
today’s independent Kosova, they encountered a population that was already
in its majority Albanian Kosovar.
My opponent seems to viciously forget that military invasion does not
generate ‘de jure’ situations, and does not consist in any sort of legitimacy.
The invading Serbian armies did not arrange any referendum to offer their
dictatorial, anti-democratic, anti-Islamic, and racist state an elementary
legitimacy over the new territories.
The only legitimacy that the Serbian kingdom may have got is the irrelevant
Treaty of London (30 May 1913) that was the result of the Anglo-French, anti-
Ottoman hysteria. All that the treaty specified remained unknown and
indifferent to the Kosovar Albanian people, who had no reason to separate
themselves from the Ottoman Empire.
If the Treaty of London was accepted in Kosova by means of a valid
referendum, this would consist in a corroboration of the events. Such
reconfirmation was never expressed, and as it is known, the Serb militarists
never bothered to consult the Albanian majority of Kosova that they viewed
as ‘Untermenschen’ in a purely racist way.
Today, with the disreputable and shameful London Treaty tore up, the
peoples of the Balkans start taking revenge, claiming what has always been
theirs, and asserting their inalienable rights.
The falsification of the historical reality in the 19th and 20th centuries Balkans
takes now an end. In a forthcoming article, we will refute falsifications of

6. moral and philosophical order that have been recently propagated against
Kosova.
Today, we enter a New Era for the Balkans, Europe, and the World. The sun
of a new order of moral world rises for all the oppressed and deprived
peoples all over the world.
It would be better for Serbia to be the first country to recognize Kosova;
otherwise, 2008 Serbia will soon look like 1991 Yugoslavia, because Voivodina
and Sanjak will be the next to secede.
By Prof. Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
Published: 2/17/2008