It did not start in the 1980s and it cannot be resolved in the 1990s without some understanding of what happened to both of these nations prior to the advent of the New World Order. Six hundred years ago, Albanians and Serbs were two neighborly Christian peoples who, together, defended their own countries against the Islamic Turkish invasion and lost. The conquest of the medieval Balkan states and their incorporation into the Ottoman Empire set in motion drastic population dislocations and transformations of many ethnic groups, the consequences of which the world is witnessing today.

Because of their geographic location, the most profoundly affected were the Serbs, whose territory, for centuries, was the battle-field between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. In the course of several hundred years the Serbs became dispersed throughout the former Austrian imperial provinces which, in the 20th century, are claimed by several successor states.

Following the death of their great leader Skenderbeg and the fall of their medieval state in 1468, under the Ottoman pressure, most Albanians converted to Islam. Some Serbs, under the same pressure, left their cities and river valleys and withdrew to the mountains of Montenegro and Herzegovina. Other Serbs migrated to the Austro-Hungarian domains which included Krajina, Slavonia and the Pannonian plains of Vojvodina. The greatest Serbian migration from Kosovo to the Austrian-controlled territories took place in 1690, in the wake of the last Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. There they joined the earlier refugees and, like them, became the Habsburg border guards (Granicari) against further Turkish incursion into Central Europe. By the 19th century, as the Ottoman Empire continued to decay, the Serbs started their descent from the Dinaric Mountains back to the plains, thus repopulating Serbia's fertile river valleys which their ancestors had left centuries ago. There, they mounted two major insurrections against their Ottoman rulers, in 1804 and 1815 respectively, which ultimately led to the independence of Serbia and Montenegro and their eventual recognition as fully sovereign Serbian sister-states, at the Congress of Berlin, in 1878.

In 1918, after the collapse of both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, the country of the South Slavs - Yugoslavia - was created from the former provinces of these two antagonistic powers. After 23 years of existence, during WW II, Yugoslavia was dismembered into eleven parts by Hitler, Mussolini and their satellites. Slovenia was divided by Italy and Nazi-occupied Austria; the so-called Independent Sate of Croatia, ruled by the Ustasha Quisling, Ante Pavelich , included Bosnia-Herzegovina, but not Dalmatia, most of which went to Italy; Serbia, reduced to

its smallest post-Ottoman historic nucleus, was subjected to direct German occupation; and
other regions were given to the neighboring Hungary and Bulgaria, both on the side of the Axis.

In pursuit of his ambition to recreate the ancient Roman Empire, Mussolini occupied Albania
in 1939. . Here, it should be pointed out that ancient Illyria (which modern Albanians claim as their ancestral land), was defeated by the Roman legions in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC and became a province of the Roman and later Byzantine Empires. Therefore, quite apart from the open question of the modern Albanians' relationship to ancient Illyrians, the Serbs did not conquer any part of Albania nor did they seize Kosovo from an Albanian or any other existing state. When they came to the Balkans in the 6th and 7th centuries AD, Kosovo was a devastated border province of Byzantium, depopulated by several Barbarian invasions in earlier epochs. Ethnographically speaking, written documents demonstrate that it was overwhelmingly Serbian between the 12th and 17th centuries. As an inducement to collaboration with the Axis powers, Mussolini promised the Albanian Quisling leaders a Greater Albania and gave them all of Kosovo. Tens of thousands of Serbian families were brutalized, killed or ethnically cleansed by expulsion to occupied Serbia and Montenegro.

After WW II, in his grand design to create a Balkan Communist Union, the then Stalinist Tito needed the support of the Albanian Stalinists. He promised Kosovo to their leader, Enver Hoxha, and, to placate him, Tito legally prevented the Serbs from returning to the Province, from which they were evicted by the Fascist Albanian rulers only five years earlier. At the same time, Albanian masses were allowed to move freely into Kosovo from neighboring Albania. Then, after the break between Stalin and Tito, and Enver Hoxha's turn to Stalinism and ultimately Maoism, waves of additional refugees continued to flood into Kosovo from Hoxha's tyranny in Albania. During the last 50 years, these Albanian refugees transformed themselves into permanent immigrant-settlers, most of whom were never required to become naturalized citizens of Serbia or Yugoslavia. One Albanian-born communist politician rose to the position of the one-year term presidency of post-Tito Yugoslavia's Federal Presidium.

While between the two world wars the old Kosovo Albanians and Serbs lived in relative harmony, the decades under Tito changed this relationship. In "The Autonomous Province of Kosovo" which he established, the Serbs who , prior to WW II, were a majority , found themselves outnumbered by the aggressive newcomers, alien in speech and religion. In the name of a cynically one-sided interpretation of proletarian internationalism and a phony policy of "brotherhood and unity", systematic intimidation of the Kosovo Serbs became the order of the day. Serbian churches and mediaeval monasteries were damaged or destroyed, graves desecrated, barns burned, cattle and sheep slaughtered, culminating in beatings and murder of Serbian burghers and villagers. Without any protection from Tito's anti-Serb government, the younger Serbian population left in the tens of thousands for safer places and thus contributed to the deepening of the ethnic imbalance in the Province. Between 1941 and 1997, due to their exceptionally high birth rate (the highest in Europe), two generations of Albanians were born in Kosovo, representing by now over 80% of its inhabitants. Such an explosive birth rate (registered by the UN in most Muslim countries) has created an economic burden which neither the Federal Yugoslav nor the Serbian governments could afford and which the Croats and Slovenes refused to support.

Today, Kosovo Albanians are tendentiously depicted as victims of Serbian oppression. Yet, quite rightly, they have Albanian schools, newspapers, and other media and, in Pristina, the largest Albanian University anywhere, built and supported mostly by Serbian tax-payers Moreover, the Kosovo Albanian demagogues, with the help from the Albanians abroad and their anti-Serbian international sponsors, are inflaming and manipulating the Kosovo Albanian masses as well as the uninformed or misinformed public opinion of the Western world . Similarly, until 1980, Yugoslav Communists encouraged Albanian nationalism which they now punish, and punished Serbian nationalism, which they now encourage, for the sake of keeping and perpetuating the Communist monopoly on power.

.Most international (humanitarian) organizations are presenting the Kosovo issue as a one-sided violation of human rights by the Serbian authorities and rarely report the violations and acts of terrorism against non-Albanian ethnic groups (Gypsies, Circassians, Greeks and Serbs) by organized units of Albanian militants and terrorists financed and armed by oil-rich Islamic expansionists (especially Iranians and Saudis) and their Euro-American friends. The global press and media have made much of the overwhelming Albanian majority in Kosovo, without ever explaining how and when it came about. It did not happen by Serbia's annexation of Albanian territory, since historically, Kosovo was never part of Albania. For most Serbs Kosovo remains an integral part of their country. For centuries, prior to the Ottoman Turkish conquest, it was the Serbs' heartland where their medieval rulers built great churches and monasteries, decorated with beautiful pre-Renaissance frescoes, recognized as international art treasures. Here were fought the great battles against the Islamic invaders in 1389 and 1448. In a word, the roots of the Serbian national identity and their greatest and most sacred cultural heritage are in Kosovo, which is to the Serbs what Jerusalem is to the Jews.

This century has seen many population movements caused by the collapse of empires, ideological and religious persecutions as well as poverty. Many of these mass migrations created heavy concentrations of refugee-immigrants in foreign countries where, after several decades, they reproduced new generations and became a majority in certain regions. (Cuban refugees in Florida, Mexicans in California, North African, Near Eastern and Bosnian immigrants in certain centers of Western Europe). Are such "majorities" entitled to "independence" merely because they happen to constitute homogeneous ethnic or cultural islands in their host countries ? Such complex moral and political questions , too often exploited by the media and the arms merchants, call instead for compassion, diplomacy, tact and wisdom, and, above all, for some knowledge of the history that created these problems.

The Serbs, most of whom dislike Milosevic, are not unsympathetic to the plight of the Albanians with whom they share similar past and present predicaments. The Serbs know well that during the Ottoman centuries, the Albanians suffered a cultural transformation of monumental proportions. They lost most of their European cultural heritage, including their Christian tradition, much of their original language and socio-economic institutions and became an isolated residue of the Ottoman world in Europe. They themselves, like their Serbian neighbors, rebelled against the Turks several times. Early in this century, however, Islamized Albanians were used by the withdrawing imperial Turks against Balkan Christians (Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians and Macedonian Slavs) and memories of their misdeeds are not yet forgotten.. More recently, no matter how reluctantly, they served Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Today they are being manipulated not only by their own "reformed" ex-Communists, but also by the Saudi, Turkish, German, Italian, American and other foreign powers, primarily interested in Albania's "military real-estate", particularly along its underdeveloped but oil-rich coast. Whether the Albanians will benefit from the New World Order remains to be seen.

There is no easy solution for the Kosovo problem which literally calls for the patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon, both, alas, in short supply on all sides. The most realistic and balanced "solution", relatively fair to both sides, may require:

• determination of citizenship of the Kosovo Albanians who, in large numbers, crossed the open border into Yugoslavia especially under Hoxha and Tito;
  
  
• partitioning of the Province which would yield an equitable portion of territory to the Kosovo Albanians and most of Kosovo's Serbian cultural monuments to the Serbs;

• detaching a part of Kosovo from Yugoslavia, in accordance with a border- correcting agreement to be negotiated between Albania and Yugoslavia;
  
  
• creating an internationally recognized boundary, based on the US-Mexican model. which, would control and prevent further influx of unauthorized Albanians into Serbian territory;
  
  
• voluntary population exchanges with equivalent property compensation to the affected parties, assisted and supervised by the international financial and humanitarian organizations.
  

Regardless of the fact that the members of the so-called "Contact Group" and other involved powers do not have identical interests or intentions, and despite the US insistence that its Imperial Will always be done, the local protagonists and antagonists, locked in this explosive conflict, may refuse to oblige their Western sponsors by disregarding their physical threats and disobeying their pious sermons. Suspicious of double-crossings or secret deals, they may unexpectedly decide to act in their own (possibly misperceived) self interests, and suddenly slip from under everyone's rational control. In other words, events on the ground may outrun diplomatic plans and decisions made in the Chanceries, whether they are biased and one-sided, as they have been, or impartial and balanced, as they should be.