Media Bias About Kosovo

On Thursday I posted the following documentary on YouTube:




In it, British reporter Sam Kylie returns to Kosovo (it was filmed and broadcast in 2008, just months before independence was announced) to see what the situation is 9 years after the NATO campaign and the withdrawal of Serb security forces.

I think Kylie is biased in his coverage, however; not necessarily against the Serbs per se, but more against those who reject the idea of Kosovan independence and leaving their Serbian identity to 'integrate' into Kosovo.

I find this troubling. There are several points when Kylie all but ridicules the Serbs who live in their own little enclaves, generally funded by Belgrade. They have their own currency, their own post offices, their own education and legal systems.

What he fails to note, however, is that the Kosovan Albanians don't all want 'independence' in the sense he means it - they want to be part of Albania.

Many of their organisations and political parties are funded by Albania. They use Albanian textbooks, don't learn Serbian in their schools, and live largely separate lives.

Why is it that if 'integration' is so wonderful, the ethnic Albanians never integrated into Serb culture and society, seeing as they were living in Serbia?

This smacks of a huge double standard. The Serbs have had this territory wrenched from them by NATO for resisting a war of separation (albeit brutally); they must now integrate into the culture of the people who took their territory, the people who smash their cultural and religious symbols, the people who destroy their houses and steal their farm equipment; the people who have in many cases brutally driven them from their homes and villages, attacked them, raped them, murdered and mutilated them.

If integration and forgetting cultural, religious, linguistic and ethnic division is as easy as Kylie seems to suggest, why was the onus never on the Albanians to change any of their ways? Why are they also fighting low-level separation campaigns in the district of any country where they comprise an ethnic majority?

In a sense I understand what he is saying; whatever anyone's feelings on the matter, the reality is that Kosovo has a large Albanian majority and is now independent of Serbian control; however, I feel the documentary does not appropriately deal with just what sort of state he is asking the Serbs to abandon their history and identity for, and just where a lot of the backing, funding and resistance to the majority-Serb areas remaining Serbian comes from.

He does deal with the ongoing campaign of violence against the Serb minority, and the attempts of Albanian nationalists to purge the region of any sign of its Serbian past and its importance to Serbian culture.

However, he seems another multiculturalist dreamer; the US and Britain don't want the three majority-Serb provinces of Kosovo which border central Serbia to split from the rest and become part of sovereign Serbia because they want to create a magical, mythical rainbow nation.

We all know how that turned out last time.