Date: June 20, 1996
Author: Valentina Krčmar, Thornhill, Ontario
Addressed to: Letters to the Editor, The European
View the Original Letter: krcmar book 3_Part4_Part159.pdf
About This Letter
In this letter published on June 20, 1996, Valentina Krčmar responds to the article “Kosovo on the Brink” in The European. Her words are urgent and prophetic, written years before the Kosovo War would erupt into full-scale violence. Drawing from her witness to Serbian aggression in Croatia and Bosnia, Krčmar warns that the same pattern of ethnic persecution was unfolding again — this time in Kosovo.
Her tone is resolute, shaped by painful familiarity:
“In the very familiar way following the recent pattern of Serbian cruelty, the Albanians in Kosovo are completely denied their rights. Their children are regularly killed, squashed, and tortured, their women raped, and their men persecuted in every imaginable way.”
Krčmar’s language is stark and unsparing. She draws a direct line between Belgrade’s systematic brutality in the early 1990s and the escalating repression of Kosovo’s Albanian population under Slobodan Milošević’s regime.
“As Belgrade’s attitude and actions mirror those seen earlier in Vukovar and Bosnia, the world should remember these ominous words — ‘Never again.’”
She uses Vukovar and Bosnia as moral signposts — sites of horror that should have awakened the world’s conscience but instead became precedents for further inaction. Her warning carries both sorrow and defiance:
“How many more times must we see the same tragedy before someone acts?”
Krčmar closes her letter not with anger, but with a somber plea — that the international community recognize the unfolding crisis in time to prevent another catastrophe. Her message is prophetic: three years later, Kosovo would indeed descend into war, with the same atrocities she described repeated on a massive scale.
Through this letter, Krčmar once again positions herself as a voice of moral foresight — a witness who, having seen the cycle of denial and violence before, demanded that the world learn from its own silence.
