Krstic, Perovic On Serbia & Kosovo
By:
Nikola Olic
Last Updated: 2/27/08 12:22 PM ET
| 969 times read
Turbulent news from Serbia and its troubled southern region of Kosovo has hit many NBA international players close to home. Serbia was once a part of Yugoslavia, a country that, starting with Drazen Petrovic and Vlade Divac, had given the NBA its largest share of international players. And of all NBA players that came from what once was Yugoslavia, many have strong historic ties to Serbia.
"What they are doing is not fair and is not just," explains Nenad Krstic of the New Jersey Nets. "What happened with the United Nations resolution? What about international law? I really don't know why this even needs to be discussed. Kosovo is Serbia. It is a part of our country, it always has been, and it will be forever, as far as I am concerned."
What Krstic was so emotionally reacting to was Kosovo's decision to announce its independence from Serbia. Kosovo is historically significant to Serbia because it hosts many of its most important cultural artifacts, and is the place where Serbia had its nation-defining battle with the Ottoman empire in the late 14th century. One of the countries that was first to officially recognize Kosovo was the United States.
"A lot of injustice was done and a lot of it seems to be dictated by other countries. It is not of course about the people of the United States or any of those countries, it is about their politicians. I think this line of thinking is not smart. A lot of countries are against recognizing Kosovo. A lot of countries support Serbia as a sovereign state. Russia, China, India and many others understand what we are saying."
The bombing of Serbia by NATO forces in 1999 was in reaction to Serbia's actions against the Albanian separatists in Kosovo. While Krstic's hometown is halfway between Kosovo and Serbia's capital of Belgrade, the wave of Serbian refugees caused by the 1999 bombings had an enormous effect on his city of Kraljevo.
"Serbian refugees to the tune of 40,000 came just to my hometown of Kraljevo. We had to build a new bridge in the city because of so many new people and new cars. The city can take 80,000 people - even now a decade later we have more than 100,000. There are a lot of refugees all over Serbia and only 10% of Kosovo are now Serbs, so I think we are incorrectly framing these ethnic problems in Kosovo."
The more we spoke about Kosovo, the more Krstic's disbelief and frustration came to surface. What made the news around the world the last few days were riots in Belgrade, but what preceded those riots were peaceful demonstrations organized to show Serbia's resolve for keeping Kosovo. The protests are now largely over, but Krstic feels more needs to be done.
"Those gatherings were great, but we should not be calming down. That is not what we should be doing. We should be doing things to try to help keep Kosovo ours."
Most prominent in the reporting from the riots were the attacks on various embassies which supported Kosovo's independence. Making rounds in Serbian media were ominous images of flames coming out of the burning American embassy on one of Belgrade's most beautiful boulevards. Krstic has an apartment overlooking the embassy and was not in favor of what his relatives saw happen.
"I don't support people burning an embassy or any other building. That is, after all, ours. It doesn't matter if you are attacking a foreign embassy or foreign businesses, that is not smart. I am for peaceful protests. I loved seeing all those hundreds of thousands of people supporting Serbia, but it made no sense to start destroying things in Belgrade."
If NBA players are all about their routine before a game and keeping things the same day in and day out, an event like this can be a strong disruptive force.
"It is hard. I felt really bad when it all started. The first few days I could not eat, I was very upset. I was kicked out of my routine. I was watching the reports from here, watching how people were celebrating in Kosovo, it was very upsetting."
Things on the NBA's west coast were no different. Being a new Serbian arrival just six months ago, Golden State Warriors rookie center Kosta Perovic has the best understanding of the current political environment in Serbia. That, combined with his life-long love of geography and world politics -- he memorized most world capitals while still in elementary school -- gives Perovic a no-nonsense approach to current events.
"There was a war down there," says Perovic, excited to talk about Kosovo although he just finished another interview on the same topic.
"None of us are very innocent in this. There was a big mess made down there, a big part of it having to do with other countries and their interests. That was a part of our country that was taken away. How would you feel if somebody took out a fifth of your country? How can you take something that defined us as a people?"
Perovic know his history, too. He explains that in 1389, the Turkish empire's expansion into Europe was stopped by Serbia at the Battle of Kosovo, and he repeated the slogan recently heard often in Belgrade: "Kosovo Is Serbia."
Asked if, other than the local media, any of the fellow Golden State Warriors had shown much interest in Serbian happenings, Perovic smiled as if to insinuate that there can only of course be one answer to that question.
"A player that showed real interest was the honorary Serbian in the NBA, Chris Webber. He talked with Vlade Divac on the phone and then asked me more about it."
That is no surprise, as Webber is one of the few American NBA players that has ever visited Serbia, on the tail end of Vlade Divac's NBA career as the Serbian center was officially retiring from professional basketball this summer. Perovic talked with Webber about the protests taking place in Belgrade at the same city square where last summer Chris Webber, Scott Pollard, Gregg Popovich, and others helped celebrate Vlade's career.
"I was all in support of peaceful protests," continues Perovic. "I wanted to show that we are not losing Kosovo and will never get over it. What happened was that a few individuals created chaos. I don't like it that the smaller event gets the headlines, compared with the beautiful big protests that took place in support of Kosovo remaining a part of Serbia."
Perovic has been around political unrest for most of his life. He often says, ironically, that every ten years they have a war. Kosta came to Belgrade because of the war in Croatia, which he saw firsthand. He was then in Belgrade when NATO launched its air strikes and had been there through all three months of the raids, often seeing bombs fall less then a mile from his house.
"If you come from Serbia, you get used to anything much easier. But this is not easy on me, it is not easy to accept any of this. Especially when you watch the news and you see how they separate and darken Kosovo on the map and make it a separate entity. It is sad looking at it. Serbia, with a new shape to it yet once again."
About the Author: NIKOLA OLIC
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Nikola Olic covers the NBA from a global perspective for HOOPSWORLD.COM and HOOPSWORLD The Magazine. He's been covering the NBA for seven seasons and is in his third with the HOOPSWORLD team.
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posted By A Kosovar citizen, 27 February 2008 3:28:59 AM
It’s still incredibly unbelievable how the Serbian people manages seeing itself always as victims. It keeps changing the history and shaping it to fit their colonial interests.
Truth is that “Slavs came to the territories that form modern Kosovo in the VII Century migrations of White Serbs, with the largest influx of migrants in the 630s; although the region was increasingly populated by Slavs since the sixth or even fifth century. These Slavs were Christianized in several waves between the VII and IX Century, with the last wave taking place between 867 and 874. The Slavs assimilated many of the Illyrians, ancestors of today’s Albanians’”.
The truth is that Kosovo was never the cradle of Serbia; in fact it was in the last 100 years a Serb colony. In the much-rumoured Kosovo Battle not only the Serbs’ fought against the Ottoman Empire, other nations of the Balkans also did that, Albanians as well! It is worthy to mention that the outcome of that battle was decided by one man, Vuk Brankovic, who betrayed the coalition army.
“Vuk Brankovic, a Serbian nobleman, portrayed as a traitor in the epics. Before the battle of Kosovo, he was an ally of Lazar Hrebljanovic and was married to one of Lazar’s daughters. According to the Kosovo Battle epics ‘he betrayed King Lazar by abandoning him during the battle’.
“Both armies included some foreign troops: for example, the Serbian force included a small number of troops from the Croatian Ban Ivan Palizna probably as part of the Bosnian contingent, while the Turkish army was helped by the Serbian noble Konstatin Dejanovic. This has led some analysts to describe the armies as coalitions”.
I must tell you that Albanians kept fighting against the Turks for 500 years, while the Serbian vassals accepted the Ottoman rule. After the failure of numerous insurgencies led by Albanians, Ottomans finally gained control over the Balkans and remained there until early 1900’.
Let’s leave that time behind… Serb forces committed atrocities and various crimes over the Albanian population of Kosovo, leading to the forced expulsion of 1 million Albanians from Kosovo in 1999.
Serbs should be realistic and finally understand that they haven’t lost anything. One cannot see itself a loser after losing something it was never his.
posted By Dissident, 27 February 2008 7:10:02 AM
Kosovo’s claim to independent statehood is based on one fact only: The Albanians are the overwhelming majority in Kosovo. They are Muslims in a Christian state to which they don’t want to belong. Yet this argument is convincing only to the willfully ignorant. First, the majority of Kosovo may be Muslim; but the Kosovo Albanians are only a small minority within Serbia as a whole. Kosovo would vote overwhelmingly for independence; Serbia would vote overwhelmingly against. Serbia is a legal entity; Kosovo is not. A Serbian vote trumps a Kosovo one. Second, there is nothing unusual about an overwhelmingly-Muslim inhabited province existing within a state that is overwhelmingly non-Muslim. There are the Muslim Moros who inhabit Mindanao in the Philippines. There is the Xinjiang province in China. There is Kashmir, overwhelmingly Muslim, many of whom live under Indian rule. Russia is replete with provinces in which the population is overwhelmingly Muslim — Tatarstan, Bashkiristan, Dagestan, Chechnya. Northern Cyprus is overwhelmingly Muslim — yet, except for Turkey, no country in the world recognizes it as an independent state. Muslim Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala provinces in Thailand are waging an insurgency to free themselves from Bangkok’s Buddhist rule. And of course, there is the West Bank, yet another Muslim population, subjected to the rule of non-Muslims. In all of these cases, there has been an Islamic insurgency, a war seeking to liberate Muslims from the rule of non-Muslims, and considerable government repression. Yet, Western leaders do not splutter about unsustainable status quos, they do not demand immediate U.N. Security Council action, they do not insist that independence must be granted immediately and they do not threaten to ignore the United Nations and embrace a seceding state.
Moreover, Kosovo has hardly made an even remotely plausible case for its having earned independence. First, for all the talk of “Kosovars” and “Kosovans,” the residents of Kosovo identify themselves as either Serb or as Albanian; the languages they speak is either Serbian or Albanian. Creating a second Albanian state in Europe makes no sense whatsoever. It doesn’t govern itself. It is a ward of various international bodies. Economically, it is a basket case, and lives off vast handouts. Kosovo is an example of an ethnic minority grabbing a piece of territory, permitting unrestricted immigration by its co-nationals from a neighboring state, ethnically cleansing the territory of all other groups and thereby creating an artificial overwhelming ethnic majority, and then demanding that these actions be rewarded by the bestowal of independent statehood.
The West’s entire approach to Kosovo has been marked by sordid dishonesty and bad faith, supporting national self-determination and the right to secession in one place and territorial integrity in another, cheering on ethnic cleansing by one ethnic group and demanding war crimes trials for another, trumpeting the virtues of majority rule when it’s convenient to do so and threatening to impose sanctions and penalties on majorities when that’s convenient. For the Americans, Kosovo is nothing more than the hinterland of a giant military base, a key presence in the eastern Mediterranean should Greece or Turkey prove unreliable. As for the duly grateful Albanians, they are expected to repay their benefactors by agreeing to be cannon fodder in future imperial wars. For the Europeans, Kosovo is an opportunity to show the world that Europe counts for something and to conduct various pointless social experiments in multiculturalism and multiconfessionalism — particularly pointless since Kosovo will be one of the most ethnically homogeneous places in Europe.
posted By Nic, 27 February 2008 7:41:00 AM
Guys, Drazen Petrovic was from CROATIA.... please remember the olympics '92 final in Barcelona against the real Dream team.
Nic
posted By Nicholas Thompson, 27 February 2008 9:40:18 AM
The fact that Perovic was ethnically cleansed from Croatia during the war and then bombed in Belgrade makes him very much a victim.
There seems to be this bizarre view in the U.S. that only Croats and Muslims were victims of the breakup of Yugoslavia. More than 250,000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed in Augsut 1995 by the Croat army in a matter of days - the largest single act of ethnic cleansing in the war. Many of those Croat generals are today charged with war crimes and are in the Hague. Both Croat leader Tudjman and Bosnian leader Izetbegovic would have been indicted for war crimes, as was Milosevic, but they spared their people the shame and died before charges could be laid.
posted By A Kosovar citizen, 28 February 2008 3:14:20 AM
I can see that the topic has awakened some interest.
First of all, it should be stopped seeing Kosovo as a Muslim state, because it is not so. I am a Catholic and I never had any problem with that. Contrary it is a secular and youngest state in the world, like it or not.
We should never forget who committed the most terrible crimes against the mankind in the XX Century and genocide… we should NEVER forget the genocide in Srebrenica, Gorazde, Sarajevo, Zvornik, Foca, Zepa, bombing of Zagreb, destruction of Dubrovnik, crimes against civilians in Recak, Likoshan, Qirez, mass expulsion of more than 1 million Kosovars in 1999, kidnapping of late Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, killings and complete destruction of Vukovar, killing of more than 13.000 Kosovo Albanians, people burned in stoves of power plants in Serbia, those murdered in Kosovo and buried in Serbia…/Please forgive me for falling short to mention other places and victims/.
Therefore I have a suggestion for the Serb people: Open your eyes and stop pretending to be victims, it is overdue!
posted By Toni Kukoc, 28 February 2008 7:44:06 PM
Serbia is a terrorist state who has murdered tens of thousands of innocents over the last twenty years . They have shot down american planes and commited many attrocities . They are paying for it now . So S@#$ Marko Jaric Vlade Divac and any of these other marginal b list players
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