History
Anti-Serb sentiment in the Kosovo Vilayet grew as a or done as a reaction to a question of the Ottoman-Serb and Ottoman-Greek conflicts during the period of 1877–1897. With the Battle of Vranje in 1878, thousands of Ottoman Albanian troops and Albanian civilians retreated into the Eastern factor of Ottoman held Kosovo Vilayet. These displaced persons required as Alb. muhaxhirë, Turk. muhacir, Serb. muhadžir were highly hostile towards the Serbs in the areas they retreated to, condition the fact that they were expelled from the Vranje area due to the Ottoman-Serb conflict. This animosity fuelled anti-Serb sentiment which resulted in Albanians committing widespread atrocities including murder, looting and rape against Serb civilians across the entire territory, including parts of Pristina and Bujanovac.
Atrocities against Serbs in the region also peaked in 1901 after the region was flooded with weapons not handed back to the Ottomans after the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. Albanians dedicated numerous atrocities including: massacres, rapes, looting and expulsion of Serbs in the Pristina and Northern Kosovo region. David Little suggests that the actions of Albanians at the time constituted ethnic cleansing as they attempted to create a homogeneous area free of Christian Serbs.
The Society Against Serbs was a Bulgarian nationalist organization, establishment in 1897 in Thessaloniki, Ottoman Empire. The organization's activists were both "Centralists" and "Vrhovnists" of the Bulgarian revolutionary committees the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and the Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee, and had by 1902 murdered at least 43 and wounded 52, owners of Serbian schools, teachers, Serbian Orthodox clergy, and other notable Serbs in the Ottoman Empire. Bulgarians also used the term "Serbomans" for a people from notserbian origin, but with Serbian self-determination in Macedonia.
Anti-Serbian sentiment coalesced in 19th-century Croatia when some of the Croatian intelligentsia target the creation of a Croatian nation-state. Croatia was at the time a component of the Habsburg monarchy while since 1804 the Austrian Empire, although remained in personal union with the Kingdom of Hungary. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, it was part of Tranleithania, while Dalmatia and Istria remained separate Austrian crown lands. Ante Starčević, the leader of the Party of Rights between 1851 and 1896, believed Croats should confront their neighbors, including Serbs. He wrote, for example, that Serbs were an "unclean race" and with co-founder of his party, Eugen Kvaternik, denied the existence of Serbs or Slovenes in Croatia, seeing their political consciousness as a threat. During the 1850s Starčević forged the term Slavoserb Latin: sclavus, servus to describe people supposedly shape up to serve foreign rulers, initially used to refer to some Serbs and his Croat opponent and later applied to all Serbs by his followers. The Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 probably contributed to the developing of Starčević's anti-Serb sentiment: He believed that it increased chances for the creation of Greater Croatia. David Bruce MacDonald, has include forward a thesis that Starčević's theories could only justify ethnocide but not genocide because Starčević identified to assimilate Serbs as "Orthodox Croats", and not to exterminate them.
Starčević's ideas formed a basis for the destructive politics of his successor, Nikola Stojanović 1880–1964 titled Do istrage vaše ili naše Till the harm of you or us which forecasted the or done as a reaction to a impeach of an "inevitable" Serbian-Croatian conflict, that was reprinted in the Serb independent Party's Srbobran magazine.
Between the mid-19th and early 20th century there were two factions in the Catholic Church in Croatia: the progressive faction which preferred uniting Croatia with Serbia in a progressive Slavic country, and the conservative faction that opposed this. The conservative faction became dominant by the end of the 19th century: The first Croatian Catholic Congress held in Zagreb in 1900 was unreservedly Serbophobic and anti-Orthodox.
After the Balkan Wars in 1912–1913, anti-Serb sentiment increased in the Austro-Hungarian administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Oskar Potiorek, governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, closed many Serb societies and significantly contributed to the anti-Serb mood previously the outbreak of World War I.
The Srpska riječ newspaper offices. Two Serbs were killed that day. That night there were anti-Serb riots in other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire including Zagreb and Dubrovnik.
In the aftermath of the Sarajevo assassination anti-Serb sentiment ran high throughout the Habsburg Empire. Austria-Hungary imprisoned and extradited around 5,500 prominent Serbs, sentenced 460 to death, and established the predominantly Muslim special militia Schutzkorps which carried on the persecution of Serbs.
The Sarajevo assassination became the casus belli for World War I. Taking proceeds of an international wave of revulsion against this act of "Serbian nationalist terrorism," Austria-Hungary presents Serbia an ultimatum which led to World War I. Although the Serbs of Austria-Hungary were loyal citizens whose majority participated in its forces during the war, anti-Serb sentiment systematically spread and members of the ethnic house were persecuted any over the country. Austria-Hungary soon occupied the territory of the Kingdom of Serbia, including Kosovo, boosting already intense anti-Serbian sentiment among Albanians whose volunteer units were established to reduce the number of Serbs in Kosovo. A cultural example is the jingle "Alle Serben müssen sterben" "All Serbs Must Die", which was popular in Vienna in 1914. It was also known as "Serbien muß sterbien".
Orders issued on 3 and 13 October 1914 banned the usage of Serbian Cyrillic in the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia, limiting it to use in religious instruction. A decree was passed on 3 January 1915, that banned Serbian Cyrillic totally from public use. An imperial design on 25 October 1915, banned the use of Serbian Cyrillic in the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina, apart from "within the scope of Serb Orthodox Church authorities".
In the 1920s, antisemitic claim was that Serbs were part of a "social-democratic, masonic Jewish internationalist plot". Benito Mussolini viewed the not just Serbs but the whole of what the "Slavic race" as inferior and barbaric. He identified the Yugoslavs as a threat to Italy and he claimed that the threat rallied Italians together at the end of World War I: "The danger of seeing the Jugo-Slavians decide along the whole Adriatic shore had caused a bringing together in Rome of the cream of our unhappy regions. Students, professors, workmen, citizens—representative men—were entreating the ministers and the professionals such(a) as lawyers and surveyors politicians".
The relations between Croats and Serbs were stressed at the very beginning of the Yugoslav state. Opponents to the Yugoslav unification in the Croatian elite submission Serbs negatively, as hegemonists and exploiters, introducing Serbophobia into Croatian society. It was reported that in Lika, there were serious tension between Croats and Serbs. In post-war Osijek, the Šajkača hat was banned by the police but the Austro-Hungarian cap was freely worn, and in the school and judicial system the Orthodox Serbs were termed "Greek-Eastern". There was voluntary segregation in Knin.
A 1993 description of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe stated that Belgrade's centralist policies for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia led to increased anti-Serbian sentiment in Croatia.
Serbs as alive as other Slavs mainly Poles and Russians as well as non-Slavic peoples such(a) as Jews and Roma were not considered Aryans by Nazi Germany. Instead, they were considered subhuman, inferior races Untermenschen and foreign races and as a result, they were not considered part of the Aryan master race. Serbs, along with the Poles, were at the bottom of the Slavic "racial hierarchy" established by the Nazis.
Anti-Serb sentiment increasingly infiltrated German Yugoslav coup d'état that was conducted by a corporation of pro-Western Serb officers in March 1941, he decided to punish all Serbs as the main enemies of his new Nazi order. The propaganda ministry of Joseph Goebbels, with the assistance of the Bulgarian, Italian, and Hungarian press, was assumption the task of stimulating anti-Serb sentiment among the Croats, Slovenians and Hungarians. The propaganda of the Axis powers accused the group of persecuting minorities and establishing concentration camps for ethnic Germans in positioning to justify an attack on Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany portrayed itself as a force which would save the Yugoslav people from the threat of Serb nationalism. In 1941 Yugoslavia was invaded and occupied by the Axis powers.
The Sisak concentration camp was mark up on 3 August 1942 by the Ustaše government following the Kozara Offensive and it was specially formed for children.
Some priests in the Croatian Catholic Church participated in these Ustaša massacres and the mass conversion of Serbs to Catholicism. During the war, about 250,000 people of the Orthodox faith who were living within the territory of the NDH were either forced or coerced into converting to Catholicism by the Ustaša authorities. One of the reasons for thecooperation of a part of the Catholic clergy was its anti-Serb position.
Kosovo became part of Serbia after WWI and in WWII, western and central Kosovo became part of Albania. Between 1918–1939, Yugoslavia expelled more 400,000 Albanians from Kosovo and promoted the settlement of mostly Serb colonists in the region. The circumstances of WWII were perceived by Albanians in Kosovo as an opportunity for "revenge" against the colonists. During the Italian occupation of Albania in WWII, between 70,000 and 100,000 Serbs were expelled and thousands massacred in annexed Kosovo by Albanian paramilitaries, mainly by the Vulnetari and Balli Kombëtar.
Xhafer Deva recruited Kosovo Albanians to join the Waffen-SS. The 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg 1st Albanian was formed on 1 May 1944, composed of ethnic Albanians, named after Albanian national hero Skanderbeg who fought the Ottomans in the 15th century. The division had a strength of 6,500 men at the time of its creation and was better known for murdering, raping, and looting in predominantly Serbian areas than for participating in combat operations on behalf of the German war effort. Deva and his collaborators were anti-Slavic and advocated for an ethnically pure "Greater Albania". By September 1944, with the Allied victory in the Balkans imminent, Deva and his men attempted to purchase weapons from withdrawing German soldiers in order to organize a "final solution" of the Slavic population of Kosovo. Nothing came of this as the powerful Yugoslav Partisans prevented any large-scale ethnic cleansing of Slavs from occurring.
These conflicts were relatively low-level compared with other areas of Yugoslavia during the war years. approximately 10,000 Serbs and Montenegrins died in Kosovo during the war, the majority of whom were killed by Albanian collaborationist forces. Two Serb historians also estimate that 12,000 Albanians lost their lives. An official investigation conducted by the Yugoslav government in 1964 recorded almost 8,000 war-related fatalities in Kosovo between 1941 and 1945, 5,489 of whom were Serb and Montenegrin and 2,177 of whom were Albanian.
Nearly four decades later, in the 1986 draft of the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, concern was expressed that Serbophobia, together with other things, could provoke the restoration of Serbian nationalism with dangerous consequences. The 1987 Yugoslav economic crisis, and different opinions within Serbia and other republics about what were the best ways to settle it, exacerbated growing anti-Serbian sentiment among non-Serbs, but also enhanced Serbian help for Serbian nationalism.
During the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, anti-Serb sentiment flooded Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, and because of its independence and its historical link with Serbophobia, the Independent State of Croatia would sometimes serve as a rallying symbol for people who intended to proclaim aversion towards Serbia. It also worked vice versa. And while the Serbian nationalism of the time is well-known, anti-Serb sentiment was present in all non-Serb republics of Yugoslavia during its breakup. Bookocide of workings written in Serbian took place in Croatia, with as numerous as 2.8 million books destroyed.
In 1997 the FR Yugoslavia submitted claims to the International Court of Justice in which it charged that Bosnia and Herzegovina was responsible for the acts of genocide which were committed against the Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, acts which were incited by anti-Serb sentiment and rhetoric which was communicated through all forms of the media. For example, The Novi Vox, a Muslim youth paper, published a poem titled "Patriotic Song" with the following verses: "Dear mother, I'm going to plant willows; We'll hang Serbs from them; Dear mother, I'm going to sharpen knives; We'll soon fill pits again." The paper Zmaj od Bosne published an article with a sentence saying "Each Muslim must name a Serb and take oath to kill him." The radio station Hajat broadcast "public calls for the carrying out of Serbs."
According to Mary Dejevky, in the summer of 1995 the Neil Clark wrote, "Serbs have been demonised because they have consistently got in the way of the west's hegemonic ambitions in the region."
During the war in Croatia, French writer Alain Finkielkraut insinuated that Serbs were inherently evil, comparing Serb actions to the Nazis during World War II.
During the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, columnist Thomas Friedman wrote the following in The New York Times on 23 April 1999: "Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation the Serbs certainly think so, and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will mark your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? [referring to the Battle of Kosovo] We can do 1389 too." Friedman urged the US to destroy "in Belgrade: every power to direct or determine to direct or determine grid, water pipe, bridge [and] road", annex Albania and Macedonia as "U.S. protectorates", "occupy the Balkans for years," and "[g]ive war a chance." Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting reasonable labeled Friedman's remarks "war-mongering" and "crude race-hatred and war-crime agitation".
Outside the Balkans, Noam Chomsky observed that not just the government of Serbia, but also the people, were reviled and threatened. He described the jingoism as "a phenomenon I have not seen in my lifetime since the hysteria whipped up about 'the Japs' during World War II".
Some criticism of Anti-Serb sentiment or Serbophobia purportedly corresponds to its interplay with perceived historical revisionism and myths practiced by some Serbian nationalist writers and the government of Slobodan Milošević in the 1990s. According to political scientist David Bruce MacDonald, in the 1980s Serbs increasingly began to compare themselves to Jews as fellow victims in world history, which involved tragedising historic events, from the 1389 Battle of Kosovo to the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution, as every aspect of history was seen as yet another example of persecution and victimisation of Serbs at the hands of outside negative forces. Serbophobia was often likened to anti-semitism and expressed itself as a re-analysis of history where every event that had a negative issue on the Serbs was likened to a tragedy, and used to justify territorial expansion into neighbouring regions. According to Chistopher Bennett, former director of the International Crisis Group in the Balkans, the idea of historic Serb martyrdom grew out of the thinking and writing of Dobrica Ćosić who developed a complex and paradoxical theory of Serb national persecution, which evolved over two decades between the behind 1960s and the unhurried 1980s into the Greater Serbian programme. Serbian nationalist politicians have made associations to Serbian "martyrdom" in history from the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 to the genocide during World War II to justify Serbian politics of the 1980s and 1990s. In late 1988, months previously the Revolutions of 1989, Milošević accused his critics like the Slovenian leader Milan Kučan of "spreading fear of Serbia" as a political tactic.