According to Slobodan Milosevic and his expert witnesses, Greater Serbia is a “myth” created by Austria-Hungary, subsequently taken over by “clero-Fascists, Nazis, Communists and finally by globalists”. On the other hand, Greater Albania is a “real threat” to the stability of the region and even wider… despite the conclusions of the International Crisis Group that this idea is supported by “the minority, not the majority of Albanians.”


In their effort to refute the report of the International Crisis Group and its claim that the majority of Albanians does not support the Greater Albania ideology, Slobodan Milosevic and his defense expert witness Slavenko Terzic relied on a strange ally: the so-called Albanian National Unification Front. Terzic claimed that this was a “very serious organization” and quoted from the memorandum of the Front in which the International Crisis Group is accused of “lying when it says that Greater Albania is not a view shared by the majority of the Albanian people.” The same memorandum makes the claim that as many as 82.5 percent of the Albanians that have taken part in the poll favor the national unification.

The International Crisis Group report on the influence of pan-Albanism was tendered in the course of the cross-examination by prosecutor Geoffrey Nice, who criticized the defense expert witness for having failed to include it in the material he had analyzed as he prepared his historical expert report on the recent history of Kosovo. Since Terzic said he had not read the report but that he did not agree with it, the prosecutor gave him two days to study it and to indicate the views he disagreed with today as the trial continued.

Having read the report, Terzic said today that he did not agree with the conclusion reached by the International Crisis Group that pan-Albanism was “a minority, rather than a majority ideology.” According to him, this ideology enjoys “mass support”, both in Albania and in Kosovo and the International Crisis Group report is in his view a “projection of Greater Albania” which in itself represents a threat to the stability in the region.

On the other hand, Terzic claims that he does not know “a single serious Serbian intellectual and SANU member who advocates the idea of Greater Serbia.” He first gave this reply when the prosecutor read to him a passage from a book by Ivan Stambolic in which the author refers to the “dismay” of Academy member Vaso Cubrilovic over the fact that some of the “immortals” (i.e. SANU members) “are poring over maps, trying to find at least one goat path linking Belgrade and Karlovac, passing through exclusively Serb territories.” When Milosevic repeated the same quote in his re-direct examination, Terzic said today that he had “never seen or heard of a meeting where maps had been discussed” at the Academy, where he is a scientific adviser.

After Terzic, Milosevic called to the witness stand a professor from Novi Sad and an Academy member, Cedomir Popov. At the beginning of his testimony, Professor Popov spoke about the “Greater Serbia myth.” According to him, this myth hails from the time of the Habsburg Monarchy, when “every form of manifestation of the Serb cultural and spiritual identity or of Serb ethnic affiliation was painted as a conspiracy to create Greater Serbia.” Popov added that, after the Habsburgs, the campaign against the ostensible danger of Greater Serbia was taken up by the “clero-Fascists, Nazis, Communists…” and today it is waged by “globalists”.

Cedomir Popov’s testimony will continue next Wednesday.

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