Palestine owes Kosovo, not the other way around

Ruben Avxhiu

The last thing I want to hear today when Kosovo and Israel establish diplomatic relations is the fate of "Palestine".

Kosovo owes nothing to the Palestinians. On the contrary, it is the Palestinians who must apologize to Kosovo for their unnecessary and immoral support for Milosevic and the burning Serbian nationalism in the Balkans.

From the very long list of shameful actions of the Palestinians, I am highlighting only one. He flagrant me. The invitation of the founder and historical leader of the Palestinian Authority Yasser Arafat for Slobodan Milosevic to spend Christmas in Bethlehem.

What makes this invitation more scandalous is its date, December 1999.

Not since the early 1990s, when you could find excuses for not knowing the facts well. The invitation came four and a half years after the Srebrenica massacre, when nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys, some still minors, were shot with cold blood, for no reason other than the desire to extinguish the Bosnian seed.

8,000 captives, unarmed, defenseless, miserable civilians, who with their families were sheltered in a town that the UN had called safe. They were killed one by one cruelly. Without any military objective or political gain. Simply pure hatred.

I am not passing to Albanians yet. Over 200,000 girls and women raped in Bosnia. I do not know if Israeli soldiers ever raped an Arab girl. They would be immediately punished by justice in their own country. Serbian rapists were and remain heroes in Serbia. The rape operation was massive. Lots of soldiers have been forced by their officers to take part in the rape. The world should have gone crazy. But it did not happen.

Shortly afterward, violence broke out in Kosovo. Just read the names of the children of the Jashari Family who were massacred in their home. Not somewhere demonstrating in the squares and holding political slogans. In their house.

Kosovo was filled with mass graves. More than a thousand civilian bodies were loaded onto trucks by the Serbian army to hide the crimes from history when they saw that the war with NATO was lost. They hid them in Serbia in graves that do not tell them where they are.

Hundreds of mosques, tekkes, and several Catholic churches and monasteries were destroyed by Serbs in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia. Mass deportations of the Kosovo Albanian population, rape of Albanian girls and women, burning of documents, public ridicule, insults, destruction of Albanian homes and property.

All this does not touch the heart of the Palestinian leaders. Neither when the blood was fresh, nor 10 years later, when the fog of war had dissipated.

What should the Albanians think when they saw that Israel sheltered a group of families expelled from Serbia, while the Palestinian Authority invited the perpetrator to celebrate Christmas with them? At the time, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman stated that if Milosevic really came for Christmas, Israel would arrest him and send him to The Hague. What a contrast!

Even Greece, which has historical relations with Serbia, refused to veto - just one veto was enough for NATO not to intervene in Kosovo.

There were plenty of Serbophiles who criticized NATO but acknowledged that Milosevic was a criminal. Military intervention from outside simply did not seem right to them.

But not Arafat. Not the Palestinians. They could not pretend to see the other side. You do not want to say a kind word to the victims, okay, you have your worries. You have your problem to solve and you have to do your political calculations. Do you need Russian help, or where do I know. It would not occur to me to tell Arafat and his people why he is not talking about Kosovo.

But instead, to go to the other extreme ?! The time has come for you, from all the political figures of the world, to invite this criminal who has been burning the Balkans for 9 years for his plan of a Greater Serbia. What did Milosevic ever do for Arafat to become his friend after all these tragedies? What a cold and heartless ignorance of the sufferings of not one but a few non-Serb peoples who suffered at his hands. What ignorance for the remaining Muslims in Sandzak and Presevo, etc. throughout Serbia, second-class citizens, under a dictatorial regime like that of Milosevic.

What an irony for this mockery of the suffering of a people, where there were many young people named "Arafat", where solidarity with Palestine, lived naturally, sincerely, not for a political account, but rather simply by human impulse.

Where was the Palestinian revolt against this Arafat invitation? Where was the call for solidarity with other people seeking independence?

Where is the apology for this insulting act for the suffering of all Muslims in the Balkans, from a deceptive political clique that has been milking the Muslim world for billions of dollars a year for decades, without bringing any real change to its people?

We are surprised that the Palestinian Authority publicly condemned the declaration of independence in Kosovo. The man who replaced Arafat was one of the first to visit Serbia and denounce Kosovo's independence as against international law. He could have done it from his office in the Palestinian territories, but it is not as offensive to Albanians as when he made the statement from Belgrade.

Almost 20 years after the war, "Palestine", already a member of UNESCO, gave the key vote for Kosovo not to become a member. A year ago, the Palestinians were not even in UNESCO. Voted and entered. After entering, the first important vote they had was not to let Kosovo enter as well. The irony was that Serbia almost completely copied the argument that Israel had used a year ago not to allow Palestinians to enter.

So the lessons about who belongs to Jerusalem and who does not belong, where the Kosovo embassy should be located, or if it should recognize that Palestine is not being recognized, have zero importance for me and should have zero importance for Kosovo.

This new republic in Europe is the most miserable land on the continent and still bears the bloody promise of neighboring Serbia that if one-day international circumstances change he will return to finish the job he was forcibly cut off in 1999. Task number one of Kosovo's leaders must be the survival of its people.

Kosovo really owes nothing to other peoples, much less to the Palestinians.