aza
Mihailovic. The first to be punished then was Serbia: its bourgeoisie and
peasants were exterminated in the "second stage of the revolution", i.e. in
the "squaring of accounts with the class enemy" -without trial and by
summary procedure, while its youth - conscripted into partisan units, was
decimated at the Sremski Front when it was forced to continually storm the
well-fortified German positions without sufficient weaponry and military
training. With the destruction of its potential classes for resistance - the
bourgeoisie, the wealthy peasant layer and the town youth - Serbia's back
was broken: most of its bourgeoisie and intelligentsia were abroad
(officers, politicians and diplomats), while those who remained in the
country were permanently marginated. The <i>raison d'etre</i> of the communist
Yugoslavia was a carefully set balance of power among the peoples and
minorities of Yugoslavia over a potential threat from Serbian predominance.
The importance which the communist authorities attached to the political and
ethnic affirmation of the ethnic Albanian minority could not be understood
if viewed otherwise.
The numerous Serbs in the party, army and police of Tito's regime were
carefully selected by the criterion of blind obedience and complete devotion
to the leader, and by their readiness to fully subject Serbian interests to
the interests of the CPY. Most of them, through a negative selection of
cadres, were recruited from patriarchal Serbian milieus in Croatia,
Herzegovina and Montenegro or lower classes in Serbia, as lacking commitment
to the national and state traditions of Serbia. Their major task during the
entire period of Tito's reign was to fight against "Serbian nationalism and
chauvinism" which, considering the Serbs were the predominant nation,
constituted the gravest threat to the regime. These Serbs thus mercilessly
destroyed everything even resembling the traditions of the Kingdom of
Yugoslavia and the Kingdom of Serbia. They were forerunners in the
persecution of dignitaries and the clergy of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
Under such circumstances, the communist authorities in Yugoslavia were able
to deal with the ethnic question in keeping with their designs without
fearing for their rule.
The predominance of Serbs in the military units of the new authorities
demanded, for the sake of precaution, that the question of the status of
Kosovo and Metohia be brought up prudently, as the party there - due to
stubborn ethnic-Albanian resistance - had no other followers but Serbs and
Montenegrins (i.e. Serbs who accepted the CPY's ideological precept on the
existence of a separate Montenegrin nation). The decision that Kosovo and
Metohia be annexed to Serbia was made after the abolition of military rule
on July 10,1945, perhaps under the influence of a large-scale ethnic
Albanian resistance towards the new authorities. There is evidence that
owing to mistakes made in the ethnic Albanian uprising in December, 1944,
the Regional Committee of Kosovo and Metohia was replaced after the First
Congress of the CP of Serbia in May 1945, and placed under the direct
subordination of the headquarters in Belgrade, though the decision was soon
repealed after a protest voiced by the ethnic Albanian communists. Under the
1946 Constitution, <i>the Autonomous Re</i>gion of Kosovo-Metohia within the
composition of Serbia was established, though the communists of Kosovo
worked directly under the instructions of the state leadership. Fearing an
outbreak of fresh revolts, the CPY ordered that the officials in Kosovo
suppress the followers of a unification with Albania. Enver Hoxha was
dissatisfied with the attitude of Miladin Popovic, a CPY instructor in
Albania who, upon returning to Kosovo, reneged on his promise that after the
war Kosovo and Metohia would be annexed to Albania. He was assassinated by
followers of the <i>Balli Kombetar</i> in March, 1945, and the assassin - who
committed suicide immediately upon executing the task - had with him a
standard with the inscription "Kosovo united with Albania".<sup>1</sup>
The reasons for deep discontent were not ideological but national in
nature: in the new, communist Yugoslavia, their aspirations for the
annexation of Kosovo, Metohia and western Macedonia to Albania were
betrayed. Nevertheless, international political ambitions called for a
special relationship towards the ethnic Albanian population: the CPY
displayed an open intent to establish domination in Albania. Beyond that
aspiration lay plans for a Balkan federation. Tito nurtured grandiose plans
- to set up a three-member Balkan federation with support from the Bulgarian
leader Georgi Dimitrov, wherein Albania would be one of the three federal
units, with the possibility of Greece entering, if the communist guerrillas
should win there.
Though not always a reliable memoirist, Enver Hoxha claimed that in
summer, 1946, Tito had accepted in principle his proposal for Kosovo and
Metohia to be annexed to Albania, with the qualification that the time was
not yet ripe, "as the Serbs would not understand us" and that, within the
context of the plan for a Balkan federation, Tito had said, "We have agreed
on the creation of a Balkan federation. The new Yugoslavia can serve as an
example and experience towards that aim. I am referring to this since we are
discussing Kosovo. With the creation of a Balkan federation, the question of
Kosovo's annexation to Albania would be easily resolved within its
framework."<sup>2</sup> The fact that plans for the ceding of Kosovo and
Metohia to Albania truly existed is evident from the report of talks
conducted in Moscow, 1947, between E. Kardelj, Tito's chief advisor for
constitutional and ideological questions, and Stalin, when the former
explicitly stated that once the Yugoslav-Albanian community was
consolidated, Kosovo would be ceded to Albania.<sup>3</sup> Owing to the
plans for a Balkan federation and fears that a revolution might break out in
Albania - that power may be seized by a faction inclined towards life in
union with Yugoslavia, the settlement of Albanian immigrants in Kosovo,
Metohia and western Macedonia was not stopped after relations were broken
off with the CPA, thus an additional 40,000 Albanians established permanent
residence there from 1948-1956.<sup>4</sup>
Tito abandoned the idea of a Balkan federation because Stalin objected
to it. <i>The Information Bureau</i> of the <i>Cominform</i> adopted a resolution in July,
1948, which marked a radical break with the Soviet Union and its satellites
and the commencement of Tito's independent course, tightly girdled by
pro-Soviet regimes. The centralization of power in Yugoslavia was
conditional on the threat of a Soviet invasion, thus support was sought
again among Serbian communist cadres. When the threat of a Soviet
intervention was waning, Tito set out on an extensive reconstruction of the
country's social and state organization, wherein the strengthening of
federal units (the autonomy of Kosovo and Metohia was enlarged under the
1963 Constitution) was vital in order for him to maintain power.
In order to comprehend Tito's political stands on a solution to the
ethnic questions in the Balkans and Yugoslavia, it is important to learn of
his basic ideological and national commitments. Shaped during the
Austro-Hungarian period, he viewed the Serbian issue with the typical bias
of the Austro-Hungarian press on the Greater Serbian threat, which was in
the interwar period supplemented by Croatia's view of the struggle against
Greater Serbian hegemony. As far as Tito was concerned, "Versailles
Yugoslavia was born in Corfu, London and Paris... the most typical country
of national oppression in Europe" in which the "Croats, Slovenes and
Montenegrins were subordinate, and the Macedonians, Albanians and others
enslaved and without any rights".<sup>5</sup> He spoke of the prewar
authorities disparagingly, "A handful of petty hegemonic Greater Serbs,
headed by a king, ruled Yugoslavia for 22 years in their greed for wealth,
setting up a regime of gendarmes and prisons, a regime of social and
national enslavement".<sup>6</sup> The federalization of Yugoslavia, in
which only Serbia had two provinces (Vojvodina and Kosovo and Metohia)
showed that the breaking up of Serbian territory was the ultimate objective
of Yugoslavia's communist leadership, <i>inner</i> Serbia (without the provinces)
was slightly bigger than the Serbia set up by Hitler's Germany after its
occupation of Yugoslavia. The CPY provided the state and ideological bases
for the creation of new nations (first the Montenegrin nation from an
ethnically pure Serbian population, the Macedonian nation - where some
200,000 Serbs in western and northern Macedonia were forcibly assimilated,
and the Moslem nation - on a religious basis - from a mainly Serbian
population, who declared themselves as Serbs in the first few censuses
conducted after the war), in order to lay the foundations for the
constitution of Kosovo and Metohia into another Albanian state in the
Balkans as the final decision to the constitutional decisions of
1974.<sup>7</sup>
Ideologically shaped as a supporter of the Comintern, Tito remained all
his life a victim to the stand that Yugoslavia could survive only if the
threat of the Greater Serbian hegemony in the new social and communist
system was decisively and forever dispelled. His fierce struggle with the
Chetniks, the defenders of the old regime who advocated a reorganization of
Yugoslavia wherein a large federal Serbian unit would be created, could only
further consolidate his commitments. The model of Austria-Hungary, which was
bound together by the Habsburg dynasty, and strong suspicions of the Serbs
as the disorderly factor in the Balkans, were transplanted in a new shape to
Yugoslavia, where the state was based on a communist regime. An observation
by a British historian, A. J. P. Taylor, on the occasion of Tito's death in
1980, that the "last Habsburg" had passed away, has proved far-sighted and
historiographically justified.
1 Ibid.
2 E. Hoxha, <i>Titist�t: Sh�nime historike,</i> Tirane 1982, p. 260-261. In
the book <i>Sh�minet mbi Kinen,</i> Tiran� 1981, Hoxha gave a different version of
Tito's reply: the Greater Serbian reaction could not comprehend a demand for
the annexation of Kosovo and other parts of Yugoslavia to Albania" (<i>Z�ri i
popullit,</i> 17. 05. 1981. The official interpreter of these talks Josip
Gjerdja claimed that there was talk of a Balkan federation, in which Greece
would be included in the event of the victory of the communist movement, but
said that the annexation of Kosovo to Albania was not discussed. (<i>Danas,</i>
March 3,1987)
3 V. Djuretic, <i>Kosovo u Jugoslaviji,</i> pp.; Further documentation in:
<i>Kosovo. Past and Present.</i> Belgrade 1989, passim.
4 Cf. P. Zivancevic, <i>Emigranti. Naseljavanje Kosova i Metohije iz
Albanij</i>e, Beograd 1989, passim.
5 J. B. Tito, <i>Nacionalno pitanje u svetlosti NOB</i>, Zagreb 1945, p. 5.
6 J. B. Tito, <i>Temelji demokratije novog tipa,</i> Beograd 1948, p. 28.
7 S. K. Pavlowitch, <i>The Improbable Survivor. Yugoslavia and its
Problems,</i> London 1988, pp. 34-47. Cf. N. Beloff, <i>Tito's Flawed Legacy,</i>
London 1980; K. Cavoski, <i>Tito - tehnologija vlasti,</i> Beograd 1990.
<b>Centralism in Yugoslavia and the role of the secret police in Kosovo
and Metohia</b>
In the centralist stage of communist Yugoslavia (1945-1966), for
purposes of consolidating and maintaining power, the new regime implemented
a particular policy of internal repression which was stepped up after ties
with Moscow were broken in 1948. The structure of the CPY remained the same
as well as its policy in dealing with the ethnic question. The affirmation
of the Albanian minority group remained a major task of the party in Kosovo
and Metohia. A. Rankovic informed in 1949, that there were many
discrepancies and mistakes in the party's work, though he set out that
"ethnic Albanians in the Autonomous Region of Kosovo-Metohia, who had been
oppressed in the old Yugoslavia, have now been completely guaranteed a free
political and cultural life and development and an equal participation in
all the bodies of the popular authorities. After the liberation, they
acquired their first primary schools - 453 primary schools, 29 high schools
and 3 advanced schools. Studying from textbooks in their native tongue, some
64,000 ethnic Albanian children have so far received an education and about
106,000 ethnic Albanian adults in Kosovo and Metohia have learned to read
and write".<sup>1</sup>
The international political threat, ideological disintegration within
the country and the infiltration of demolition teams stepped up the work of
the <i>State Security Service</i> (SSS), which supervised ideological orthodoxy
throughout the country, including Kosovo and Metohia. Fearing the enemies of
socialism, the secret police brutally settled accounts with ideological
adversaries among the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes alike. The large number of
Serbs who declared themselves for the 1948 Informburo Resolution (they
upheld Stalin's call to overthrow Tito's regime) were convicted to years in
prison in the island of Goli Otok (the Yugoslav GULAG), which serves to
prove that the SSS, headed by Aleksandar Rankovic, operated as an
ideological police and not a service that advanced from Serbian positions as
might be deduced by the number of Serbian cadres in it: until 1966, Serbs in
the state security comprised 58.3% of the cadres, 60.8% in the militia and
23.5% in the total population; Montenegrins made up 28.3% of the cadres in
the security service, 7.9% in the militia and 3.9% of the total population;
ethnic Albanians comprised 13.3% in the state security, 31.3% in the militia
and 64.9% in the total population.<sup>2 </sup>Absolute loyalty to the
security service, Tito and the party leadership was never questioned, and
its chief Rankovic remained loyal to Tito even after his replacement in 1966
(contemporaries testified that Rankovic believed a mistake had been made and
that the great leader would realize this one day; he awaited rehabilitation
his entire life).
In Kosovo and Metohia and the neighboring areas, the secret police on
several occasions discovered that ethnic Albanian officials were making
contact with the leadership of communist Albania, but they were never
arrested or convicted because the party leadership believed this would repel
the small-in-number ethnic Albanian communists from the CPY. Thus, as
generally proposed by Rankovic, instead of being put to trial, they were
awarded ministerial posts in the Serbian or federal government: from these
posts contact with Albania was impossible and the precious ethnic Albanian
cadres remained intact. The SSS in Kosovo and Metohia persecuted remnants of
Ballist formations and infiltrated agents from Albania for years, not as
Albanians but dangerous ideological enemies who were working in team with
Enver Hoxha's Albania and the headquarters in Moscow. The armed resistance
of outlaws and their aides proved that large quantities of war material were
in private possession, thus an extensive operation for the collection of
these weapons was carried out in winter 1955/56. Both Serbs and ethnic
Albanians suffered equally, though larger quantities of weaponry were found
with the ethnic Albanians. The fact that the persecution was not carried out
on a national basis (the SSS did not implement it in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Croatia and Montenegro) is evident from numerous complaints lodged by
dignitaries of the Serbian Orthodox Church about the abuses of the secret
police. The SSS kept arresting and harassing Serbian monks and priests, and
with its knowledge a monumental Orthodox church was demolished in Djakovica
in 1950, in order that a monument to the partisans of Kosovo be erected in
its place.
Since the SSS operatives in Kosovo were recruited mainly from the ranks
of Serbs and Montenegrins, special care was taken to include a certain
number of ethnic Albanians in every operative unit, and wherever they were
in the minority, ethnic Albanian cadres were entrusted with the management
of these units. At the <i>Prizren Trial</i> (1956), agents of a spy demolition
team, linked with the emigrants and secret Albanian police <i>(Sigurimi),</i> were
forbidden from revealing the high-ranking ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and
Metohia who were involved in the organization of these teams, although
conclusive evidence had been unearthed.<sup>3</sup>
The freezing of ethnic strife in the centralist period was the effect
of the purely ideological character of the SSS as the system's defender.
Therefore, no large-scale demographic or political changes took place in
Kosovo and Metohia. The birth-rate remained high with both the Serbs and
ethnic Albanians. The ethnic Albanian milieu took advantage of the
20-year-long respite to entrust the leadership of its national movement, in
keeping with the new circumstances, to the ethnic Albanian communist
power-holders rather than to organizations of fascist inclination. It is
important to note that the character of the still backward ethnic Albanian
community essentially remained the same: its adjustment to communism was not
reflected in social stratification but in a new patron of their national
interests.
1 A. Rankovic, <i>Izabrani govori i clanci,</i> Beograd 1951, pp. 184-185.
2 <i>Intervju,</i> 04. 09. 1978. Cf. <i>Kosovski cvor. Dresiti ili seci? Izvestaj
nezavisne komisije,</i> Beograd 1990, pp. 18-19.
3 V. Djuretic, <i>Der politisch-historische Hintergrund Der Tragœdie
der Serben aus Kosovo und Metohija in der periode nach dem Zweiten
Weltkrieg,</i> in: <i>Kosovska bitka 1389. godine i njene posledice,</i> Beograd 1991,
pp. 413-433; Cf. Lj. Bulatovic, <i>Prizrenski proces,</i> Beograd 1988.
<b>Kosovo and Metohia in the transition from the centralist to the federal
model</b>
The inter-party squaring of accounts, which ended with the replacement
of A. Rankovic and his associates at the Fourth Plenum held in the Brioni
islands (1966), marked a fresh consolidation of Tito's personal power which
had been threatened by the omnipotent <i>State Security Service.</i> Tito purged
the SSS of cadres loyal to Rankovic and initiated the country's further
decentralization. By rousing national differences and strengthening the
federal authority of each republic, Tito reestablished his sacrosanct rule.
In those aspirations, ethnic Albanian communists from Kosovo emerged as
important allies, blazing the trail with their criticism of the abuses of
the secret police. The assembly of <i>Kosmet</i> reached the decision that owing to
the SSS's manipulation with the conclusive evidence against high-ranking
ethnic Albanian officials (the so called Djakovica Group, lead by Fadil
Hoxha and Xhavid Nimani, made up of communists from Kosovo and Albania which
in the postwar development lead the party's organization in Kosovo) all acts
pertaining to the <i>Prizren Trial</i> be destroyed; the proceedings were stopped,
and an emigrant from Albania was appointed chief of police in Kosovo.
In discussions on the constitutional changes, stress was laid on the
enlargement of the autonomy of Kosovo: the demands of the ethnic Albanian
communists ranged more or less openly from the demand for the status of
republic to the right to sovereignty and self-determination, including
secession. Kosovo was not granted the status of a separate federal unit
owing to the balance of forces in the party, but the Albanian minority was
granted extensive concessions: the name Metohia was removed from the name of
the province owing to its Serbo-Orthodox connotation, and the ethnic
Albanians were allowed to freely hoist their flag; the province's autonomy
was considerably enlarged under the 1968 and 1971 constitutional amendments,
while most of the federal funds for development went to Kosovo and
Metohia.<sup>1</sup>
The new political course in Kosovo and Metohia emboldened the
nationalists and advocates of a unification with Albania. The fall of
Rankovic was interpreted as the defeat of the Greater Serbian forces within
the party. The demonstrations of the ethnic Albanian students in Pristina
and several other towns in late November, 1968, in which Greater Albanian
slogans were heard, were hushed up in public, though they heralded a more
aggressive stand of the ethnic Albanian movement in Kosovo and Metohia. Only
two high-ranking officials in the Serbian party, the writer Dobrica Cosic
and the historian Jovan Marjanovic, had the courage to warn of the
increasing ethnic Albanian nationalism. Cosic openly warned:
"We can no longer ignore the extent to which the conviction of the
strained relations between ethnic Albanians and Serbs has spread in Serbia,
the threat felt by the Serbs and Montenegrins, the pressures to move out,
the systematic removal of Serbs and Montenegrins from high positions, the
aspirations of experts to leave Kosovo, the unequal treatment in courts and
disregard for the law and bribery in the name of ethnic
affiliation".<sup>2</sup> Both critics of the situation in Kosovo were
severely reprehended by both Serbian and ethnic Albanian communists, and
they were replaced from their positions. This was the first case where, in
keeping with the new ethnic policy and the decentralization of the communist
party, Albanian nationalism and Greater Albanian claims were deliberately
neglected owing to continual pressure on Serbia, in keeping with the stands
of a necessary balance between the federal units in Yugoslavia. The new
concept of a decentralized state demanded a change in relations within the
party. Control could no longer be exerted over Serbia through a centralized
ideological police but out-voting and pressure within the party's Central
Committee. The role of Kosovo was of particular importance since, as a
militant ethnic group in the territory of Serbia, it could be effectively
used as a means of state and party pressure on Serbia. Precisely for these
reasons further changes in the state organization strove to transfer the
model of the federalization of Yugoslavia onto Serbia - thus the Serbian
party was federalized. The framework of relations, established in Serbia and
Yugoslavia under the 1968 and 1971 amendments, testifies to the need of the
highest priest of Yugoslav politics for the strongest and most consistent
political milieu in Yugoslavia - Serbia - to be controlled, by manipulating
the deep-rooted fears inherited from the Austro-Hungarian and inter-war
periods, and the young and violent ethnic Albanian movement from the
professed Greater Serbian threat. Threats of the professed Greater Serbian
danger were a suitable excuse for turning the official federal units of the
then centralized Yugoslavia into national and state feuds between the
communist power-wielders.
The ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo, demographically continually
increasing (from 1961-1971, it rose by 42% compared to the Serbian
population which increased by 0.7%, the Montenegrin population which dropped
by 16% and the ethnic Turkish one which fell by 53%) despite evident
advancement in terms of education and culture which lead to romantic pathos
and an uncritical approach in the interpretation of history and culture, was
still a backward peasant milieu where the local dignitaries were obeyed
without question. The national and political interests of the Albanian
minority coincided with the interests of the party for the first time. Their
alliance was particularly strengthened by an ideological threat imperilling
Tito, i.e. the new reform-oriented communist leadership in Serbia which
introduced certain western standards in the economy, endeavored to establish
control throughout the republic and to bring the cadre-ruled party down to
the masses. The new organization of political rule in the country was
conducive to the liberalization of the economy, thus decision-making was
gradually shifted from the party to the economy. The loss of financial and
economic power according to the Serbian model jeopardized the communist
party's power throughout Yugoslavia. A follower of the Marxist and Leninist
concept of a party, Tito saw his position shaken by the re-organized
inter-party relations, a danger perhaps greater than even the police
omnipotence during the period of centralist rule. By instigating constant
sources of instability - national tensions in Yugoslavia - Tito strove to
prove the unfeasibility of Serbia's new political course. Tito saw the
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and Metohia and the nationalist leadership in
Croatia as dealing the hardest blows in the destruction of the new
ideological adversaries - the "liberals" in Serbia.
By instigating nationalist movements in the country, Tito strove to
create conditions in which he would again emerge as the supreme arbiter in
internal conflicts. His support to the Croatian leadership had as its goal
to create a counter-weight to the Serbian leadership. The long-term conflict
between the Serbs and the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo was used as additional
pressure on Serbia. Fearing Serbia's economic supremacy, a coalition was
created between the leaderships of Kosovo and Croatia, and the Croatian
press wrote about a secret emigration of ethnic Albanians to Turkey (from
1953-1956 the emigrants were mainly ethnic Turks while the number of ethnic
Albanians was negligible). By replacing the Serbian and Croatian leaderships
(for the sake of "symmetry") with men who owed their power solely to his
grace, Tito again became the indisputable master of the country. In the plan
to re-establish a protectorate over Serbia, the lifetime dictator decisively
upheld the ethnic Albanian communists in Kosovo and Metohia. Relations with
Albania (which was openly hostile towards Yugoslavia since 1948), were
normalized at the request of Yugoslavia in 1971. One-way cooperation between
Kosovo and Albania was established, which, due to the language barrier,
remained confined to the southern Serbian province. Some 240 university
professors and teachers from Albania, then the last hard-core Stalinist
ideological bastion, indundated the University in Pristina (founded in
1970), and scientific and educational institutions opened by the Yugoslav
state in order to speed up the cultural emancipation of the Albanian
minority. However, cooperation with Albania was used most for the purpose of
ideological indoctrination - among the professors from Albania were many
Albanian secret service agents, and textbooks imported from Tirana
propagated the "Greater Albania" idea, condemned "Titoistic revisionism",
instigating 19th-century national romanticism but only in the ideological
prism of Enver Hoxha's "Marxism-Leninism". A warning to the local leadership
by Hasan Kaleshi, a reputable Orientalist from Pristina, that leading
historians in Kosovo were "obviously falsifying history" and had a "directly
negative effect on young historians, the detrimental consequences of which
may not be apparent today, but will in the future become more and more
evident", was interpreted as "national treason".<sup>3</sup>
The confederal Constitution of 1974 legalized the transformation of
Kosovo's autonomy (initiated by the 1968 and 1971 constitutional amendments)
into virtually an independent state directly linked to the federation
without any ties with Serbia. Consequently, this rounded off Tito's vision
of national equality with careful supervision over Serbia and Serbs
throughout Yugoslavia. Turning Yugoslavia into a confederal country
according to Tito's model, whereby the republican borders had become a
framework for the creation of homogeneous national states, rendered the
Serbs a culturally isolated and politically unprotected minority group,
especially in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The loose community of six
republics and two provinces was held together only by Tito's authoritarian
rule.
The new leadership in inner Serbia, entirely dependent on Tito, watched
silently Kosovo's growing political independence. The atmosphere of neglect
and yielding to the environment's lowest instincts completely neutralized
economic trends in Serbia, while a small group of opposition-oriented
intellectuals in Belgrade, which, owing to its cosmopolitan nature, Tito
regarded as the "hotbed of hostility", tried to bring up taboos such as
political relations and national strife. Critical remarks on the draft
Constitution of 1974 arrived from Belgrade, particularly from the Faculty of
Law, indicating that such an order would reduce Serbia to a subordinate
position and be a source for fresh national conflicts. The critics of the
draft were severely reprimanded and then either discharged, convicted or
isolated. The ideologists of Titoism, Croatian and Slovenian communists,
carefully watched every move in science and culture, never failing to point
out any ideological deviations in Belgrade.<sup>4</sup>
Comprehensive and systematic Albanization in Kosovo and Metohia,
bolstered by the top, gained fresh impetus: the University in Pristina
enrolled an ever increasing number of students in order to produce cadres
capable of replacing Serbian officials in the administration, judiciary,
schools and science, while the federation's funds for the development of
Kosovo were increasing by geometric progression: since the early 70's, some
70% of all the federation's funds for underdeveloped regions were allocated
to Kosovo (most of the funds were provided by inner Serbia), attaining the
figure of around a million dollars a day in the early 80's. A vast part of
foreign credits were also targeted towards Kosovo. The hastily educated
cadres proved incapable and inexpert in managing the economy, while the
local political bureaucracy strove to redirect a large part of the
federation's money to finance megalomaniac projects that were to openly
display the ethnic Albanians' national domination in Kosovo and Metohia.
Demographic explosion - the highest birth rate in Europe (an average
6.9-member family) plus 30 students per 1,000 citizens, rendered all
financial measures insufficient. Kosovo remained a primarily peasant
environment where society was organized on the basis of tribal traditions,
strongly influenced by the Islamic concept of society. Chiefly agrarian,
with large families, the ethnic Albanian community craved land. The conflict
with the Serbs had social besides national causes: hunger for land for the
ever growing peasant population. Another feature of the Albanian milieu was
the large percentage of young people educated at faculties of the humanities
where they were directly indoctrinated with the national romantic rapture
orchestrated from Tirana. A large number of students and academic citizens,
most of them without a chance of finding a job, were, owing to the language
barrier, bound to Kosovo, and thus transposed their personal discontent into
national frustration. The low level of education among the intelligentsia in
Kosovo and Metohia had created a particular sort of semi-intellectuals
capable of taking in only a limited number of ideas, restricted by the
national horizon and ideological model of Albania, an extremely uncritical
provenance. The growing number of ethnic Albanian peasants acquired land by
persecuting Serbs with the authorities' blessing, and the disproportionate
number of semi-intellectuals saw themselves in the persecution of Serbs as
executors of the mission - national unification of all Albanians.
As a community relentless to itself (blood feuds were still above than
the law), ethnic Albanians attacked the Serbs with specific brutality. By
taking over all bodies of authority, the Albanian minority began their
planned suppression accompanied by various forms of psychological and
physical pressures. State coercion became hard to bear as the state had
become Albanian. Outvoting the Albanian language in official use, the
creation of typically state institutions, such as a national library and
academy of sciences, along with the judiciary, police and administration,
showed that a surrogate national state had been created in which the Serbs
felt as the persecuted ethnic minority without any protection from Serbia.
Tens of thousands of emigrants sought refuge in Serbia proper; even peasants
were forced to emigrate, selling off their lands to ethnic Albanians
(usually for next to nothing), while the authorities settled the abandoned
lands with many-membered emigrant families from Albania.
Serbian communists in whose hands was the fate of the republic made
feeble and pathetic attempts in the late 70's to improve within the
framework of the existing system the position of Serbs in Kosovo. The nature
of their rule, which emanated from the capricious benevolence of Tito, and
the limited personal traits of Serbia's leading communists, resulted in
their aspirations going no further than inter-party red-tape memorandums
(1977). Unable and unwilling to bring the convenient stagnation of Serbia
under their rule, the Serbian communists reduced their concern for their
fellow citizens in Kosovo and Metohia to sporadic disputes with ideological
like-minded person from other republics, believing that, being in the
minority in such discourses, incapacitated any further action.
1 M. Misovic, <i>Ko je trazio republiku Kosovo,</i> Beograd 1987, passim. 24
2 Ibid., pp. 120-121
3 Ibid, pp. 150-78-93.
4 R. Stojanovic, <i>Jugoslavija, nacije i politika,</i> Beograd 1988.
<b>The epilogue of the communist solution to the ethnic question in
Yugoslavia: the example of Kosovo</b>
Until Tito's death (1980), the varying balance of the nationality
contrasts in Kosovo and Metohia was maintained mainly owing to the
inviolability of his power. Fresh large-scale demonstrations a year after
Tito's death, when it was assessed that conditions for winning a republic
(which by the Leninist formula has the right to self-determination,
including secession), revealed the substance of the national movement in
Kosovo: the annexation of Kosovo to Albania: cheers for Enver Hoxha, the
return to the Marxism and Leninism of the Albanian type, the creation of the
"Socialist Republic of Kosovo". Dozens of secret ethnic Albanian
organizations for the liberation of Kosovo and its unification with Albania,
composed chiefly of students, were ideologically linked to the Stalinist
regime of Enver Hoxha.<sup>1</sup> The extent to which the ethnic Albanian
intelligentsia in Kosovo and Metohia owed its views about the world to
dogmatic Marxism imported from Tirana became apparent. It attained absurd
limits in the theory of "Albanianism" as the sole national religion (Enver
Hoxha forbade the work of all religious communities in 1966) which sought
its roots in the remote past - in the need to show that Albanians are of
Illyrian descent and thus the oldest and only "indigenous" people in the
Balkans - therefore natives, compared to the Slavs who were settlers and
intruders on Albanian soil. Thus a cabinet and scientific question on the
origin of the Albanians was reduced to a powerful means of national
homogenization <sup>2</sup>
After bloody clashes between demonstrators and the police in the 1981
uprising, the Federal authorities condemned the entire movement using
typically communist vocabulary -, counter revolutionary The usual procedure
of replacing the leadership, making ideological purges and adopting new
programs produced no tangible results <sup>3</sup> The demonstrations
continued in waves, many young people suffered in clashes with the police,
but the balance of forces in Kosovo remained the same the emigration of
Serbs, of which the press wrote more freely did not stop, instead, it gained
fresh impetus, and delegations of Serbs in quest of protection paid frequent
visits to the federal parliament The party and state leaderships promised to
provide protection when the delegations lodged complaints of abuses,
physical persecution, usurpation of estates, language and national
discrimination before court, rape on a national basis and the desecration of
graves, but failed to undertake efficient steps
Discontent in Serbia and among Serbs elsewhere in Yugoslavia in creased
particularly after support was extended to the Kosovo leadership by the
Croatian, Slovenian and some Bosnian communists Tito s successors (the
collective presidency) were insignificant politicians loyal to the narrow
interests of their federal units Incapable of coping with the subtle
frisking of the national and Yugoslav, and surprised by the ethnic Albanian
uprising in Kosovo and Metohia, they failed to further conceal the essence
of the problem and undertake decisive steps in Kosovo fear from the re
emergence of Serbian nationalism and chauvinism , displayed through open
support offered to the ethnic Albanian national movement in Kosovo and
Metohia, revealed the main cause of the whole dispute the inequality of the
Serbian nation in the Yugoslav federation Despite official condemnations,
the support offered by the Slovenian, Croatian and Moslem part of the
Bosnian leadership to the Albanian minority in Kosovo could not be concealed
for long the skillfully concealed inequality of the Serbian people in
confederal Yugoslavia became an issue on which the state and ideological
foundations of Tito's Yugoslavia began to crumble As a reaction, the
national integration of Serbs, halted in 1918 and checked in 1945, rose
again in the mid-80's into a widespread national movement demanding that the
1974 Constitution be changed, as the people did not wish to reconcile to the
tacit support extended by the federal party bodies and republican
leaderships to the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo <sup>4</sup>
The blockade of the system in Yugoslavia did not allow for the
intervention of the leadership of Serbia in the federation thus a subversion
was carried out within the Serbian communist party (1988), in which a
dogmatic trend assessed that by playing the card of wounded national pride
and obvious discrimination, it would win power and maintain it by changing
the 1974 Constitution The Kosovo frustration of Serbs, wisely
instrumentalized in conflicts of the local political oligarchy in Serbia,
soon became the legitimation of the new authorities lead by Slobodan
Milosevic The pressure on Serbia from all the federal and republican
institutions was so strong that the new leader was greeted as a savior a
mythical hero who would retrieve equality in Yugoslavia for the Serbs and
bring again Kosovo and Metohia, by hook or by crook, under the sovereignty
of Serbia The demonization of the new authorities in Serbia, accused of
"Bolshevism", "Great Serbianism", Stalinism and of having aspirations
towards hegemony in the media of all the other communist leader s