Dusan T. Batakovic
Institute for Balkan Studies
Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences
Belgrade
KOSOVO-METOHIJA: THE SERBO-ALBANIAN CONFLICT
The history of Kosovo-Metohija, Serbia's southern province, was marked by the
centuries-old ethnic rivalry between the Serbs and the Albanians. In the Middle Ages it
was the center of Serbian state and its civilisation. During the Ottoman domination the
religious factor had a strong impact on the changing demografic structure and the further
development of inter-ethnic conflicts. The stable geopolitical framework, from the 14th
century to early 20th century - framed by the social-religious antagonism ( the Albanians
as Muslims belonged to the privileged layer while the Orthodox Serbs were mostly serfs)
rivalry within the Ottoman Empire - made the existing disputes not only permanent but
almost insurmountable. The uneven levels of national integration in the 19th and 20th
centuries gave fresh impetus to the old religious clashes. In the Kingdom of Serbia
(1912-1918) and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918-1941) those conflicts were transfered into
new rivalry, this time with strong inter-state disputes related to the changed roles : the
ethnic Albanians, former bearers of Ottoman state and religious traditions became a
minority that was strongly antagonistic towards the state ruled by the Serbs, their former
serfs. Finally, the ideological manipulation invoking the national question within
communist Yugoslavia (1945-1991), along with the constantly growing social differences,
came as the final coup to every attempt at establishing inter-ethnic communication
that would be based on individual, instead of on collective rights.
THE MIDDLE AGES: SERBIAN PREDOMINANCE AND INTER-ETHNIC COEXISTENCE
A predominantly Serbian-inhabited area Kosovo-Metohija was the centre of the
Serbian state from the 12th to the 14th centuries. Kosovo, the northern part of
Kosovo-Metohija, was covered by the fortresses and royal courts of the Serbian rulers and
their nobility. The seat of the Serbian Archbishopric (1219) was transfered to Metohija
where the Patriarchate was established during the rule of the Emperor Stefan Dusan (1346).
Metohija itself was covered by a network of monasteries and churches. Most of Metohija's
densely populated villages belonged to the big monasteries built between the 12th and 14th
centuries, most often rulers' endowments, like Gracanica in Kosovo near Pristina,
Bogorodica Ljeviska in Prizren, Decani in the vinicity of Pec or the St. Archangels near
Prizren, among many others. The term Metohija was coined from the Greek word metoh
- meaning church property.
The Albanians, whom the Serbs called Arbanasi, were a cattle-breeding, nomadic
people which unhinderedly raised its large herds on the dark mountains separating
Kosovo-Metohija from Albania. The term Arbanas, just like Vlach, denoted
social status not an ethnic affiliation. Serbian medieval charters described as the
Albanians only the population with a status which was not related to the status of serfs.
The Arbanasi were present only in mountainous regions bordering Albania. There were
no visible inter-ethnic divisions; the overlords from central Albania and Epirus were just
as loyal to their Serbian ruler as were those of his native Rascia: the short-lived
Serbian Empire of Stefan Dusan (1331-1355), which encompassed most of the Balkans, just as
had Byzantium, had universalist pretensions.
ISLAMICIZATION : THE SOCIAL AND ETHNIC STRATIFICATION
The battle of Kosovo in 1389, marked the first step of the final penetration of
the Ottomans which was completed in the mid-15th century. Kosovo-Metohija, as well as the
most of the Balkans, was integrated into the powerful supra-national theocratic state -
the Ottoman Empire. The Christians belonged to the category of the population known as zimmis,
formally protected non-Muslim subjects, who were obliged to accept the new authorities and
pay prescribed taxes. Kosovo-Metohija was located deep inside the Ottoman possessions in
Europe and it resembled typical province where different religious and ethnic communities
coexisted under the surveillance of the centralized administration under the supreme power
of the sultan. The renewal of patriarchal forms of living within the new political and
social framework was characteristic of the Orthodox Serbs in the rural areas of
Kosovo-Metohija. Many Serbs accepted the so-called Vlach (cattle-breeding) status
to avoid serf status, while the Albanians, being cattle-breeding nomads during previous
centuries, continued to live almost autonomously on the mountain areas towards Albania.
There were no major migrations by the Albanian cattle-breeders in the lowlands, or at
least they were negligible, because this meant moving to a less favourable social status.
The Serbs were the first in the Balkans to take advantage of the possibility
provided by the Ottoman system for various non-Islamic communities: to unite religious and
ethnic affiliations through an autonomous, self-governing church organization. Supported
by Mehmed Pasha Sokolovic (Sokollu), an Islamized Serb from Visegrad in Bosnia, the third
vizier at the Porte, the Serbs obtained the restoration of the Patriarchate of Pec.
Reestablishment of the Serbian Orthodox Church in 1557, whose first patriarch was the
brother of vizier Mehmed Pasha the Orthodox monk Makarije Sokolovic, marked a beginning of
a strong religious renaissance of the Serbian millet. The regrouping of the
Orthodox Serbs into single religious organization was followed by the revival of old cults
and the renewal of churches and monasteries - especially in Kosovo-Metohija which remained
the centre of the Patriarchate. The growing religious intolerance from the late 16th
century, provoked a series of popular revolts against the Ottomans in the 16th and 17th
centuries, led mostly by the church dignitaries in various areas in Herzegovina,
Montenegro and Banat.
From the early 16th century the gradual process of Islamicization of the
Albanians, which was the most intense in the regions in vicinity of Kosovo-Metohija, among
the powerful tribes in northern and central Albania was also underway. By converting to
Islam, which acquired larger proportions in the late 16th and early 17th century, the
Albanians gradually become part of the ruling class with distinct social and political
privileges. The growth of the number of Islamicized Albanians holding the highest posts at
the Porte, produced a similar process in Kosovo-Metohija. A layer of the Albanians
appeared as the local officials in local administration instead of Turks or Arabs. The
Serbs and Albanians, being now divided by religion, gradually became members of two
opposed social and political groups.
The Serbo-Albanian conflict broke out during the Holy League's war against the
Ottoman Empire (1683-1690). The Orthodox Serbs joined the Habsburg troops as a separate
Christian militia. The Albanians, with the exception of the brave Roman Catholic Klimenti
(Kelmendi) tribe, as Muslims, took the side of the sultan's army against the
Christians. Defeated by the Habsburg troops, a considerable number of Serbs, fearing
vengeance and reprisals, led by the Patriarch Arsenije III Crnojevic, withdrew from
Kosovo-Metohija but also from the other parts of Serbia to the neighbouring Habsburg
Empire, to the region of today's Vojvodina. The next Austro-Ottoman war provoked another
migration of the Serbs in 1739, led again by the patriarch Arsenije IV
Jovanovic-Sakabenda. The lands abandoned by the Serbs were gradually settled by Muslim
Albanian nomads who, unlike the Serbs, did not have the same feudal obligations towards
the Porte.
The settlement of the Muslim Albanians proceeded at a slow pace because the
number of Orthodox Serbs who had stayed or who returned after the reprisals had diminished
and the situation calmed down, was still considerable. This settlement took place in
uneven waves: upon the seizure of the land, fellow tribesmen were brought in to protect
the vast space needed for their big herds. The social aspect played an important role:
like everywhere else cattle-breeders were in constant conflict with peasants. This was
additionally supported by the religious dimension: due only to the fact that he was a
Muslim, an Albanian cattle-breeder could, without being punished, persecute and rob a
Christian, a Serbian peasant. The new wars with the Habsburg Empire during the 18th
century and the weakening of the central authorities in Constantinople stimulated the
growth of anarchy which prior to the 19th century acquired large proportions.
A process of social mimicry was underway: in order to protect themselves from
attacks by the growing number of Muslim outlaws, the Orthodox Serbs accepted the outer
characteristics of the Muslim Albanian population. The Orthodox Serbs were obliged to
accept the national costumes and language f Muslim Albanians in public communication,
while they used their own language only within their families. Less resistant Orthodox
Serbs converted to Islam and afterwards, through marriages, entered Albanian clans. They
were called Arnautasi: the first generations secretly celebrated Christian holidays
and retained their old surnames and customs. It is only after several generations that
they finally assimilated into the new ethnic milieu.
The religious difference between the Serbs and the Albanians in Kosovo-Metohija
became a sharp line of division during the era of nationalism. The social reality was also
reflected on the level of religious affiliations: many Muslim Albanians in Kosovo-Metohija
considered that Islam was the religion of a free people, while Christianity, especially
Orthodox Christianity, was the religion of slaves. The reflection of such beliefs among
the Albanians was noticed by European consuls even a whole century later, at the beginning
of the 20th century. For the Muslim Albanians, who bore strong hallmark of the syncretist
traditions of the bektashi order, religion was only a means for social promotion:
much stronger was the ethnic identity derived from the common tribal and patriarchal
tradition.
NATIONALISM: RELIGION, POLITICAL CULTURE AND NATIONAL INTEGRATION
The dawn of nationalism in the Balkans was announced by the Serbian uprising in
1804. Die Serbische revolution as Leopold von Ranke called it, was characterized by
the desire for the creation of a national state based on the small farmer's estate and on
a democratic order derived from social background. By having stirred all the Balkan
Christians, the Serbian revolution initiated an irreconcilable conflict with the Ottoman
rule which the Balkan Muslims, primarily the Albanians and the Bosnian Muslims, were the
first to defend.
The old religious conflict acquired a new explosive charge called nationalism.
Kosovo-Metohija was ruled by renegade Albanian pashas who, like the conservative Muslim
beys in Bosnia, wanted to preserve a status quo which would guarantee their privileges.
Struggling for their preservation, both the Islamicized Albanians and the Bosnian Muslims
persecuted the rebellious Orthodox Serbs. Simultaneously, they came into open conflict
with the reform-oriented sultans who saw the salvation of the Ottoman Empire in its
Europeanization.
Supported by Slavic and Orthodox brethern from the Russian Empire, the Serbs in
Serbia gradually acquired internationally recognized autonomy (1830); slowly but surely
they progressed towards the establishment of an independent state according to the French
nation-state (L'Etat nation) model. Serbian nationalism was secularized, derived
from a mixture of German Volk cultural matrix (the common language and the popular
tradition) and jacobine experiences, whose aim was to overcome the religious differences,
with clear desires for liberal solutions coming from the population's social homogeneity.
Kosovo and Metohia, like many other Serbian lands, remained under Ottoman rule.
For the purpose of achieving full liberation, during the 1860's various plans were being
made in Serbia by statesman Ilija Garasanin and Prince Mihailo Obrenovic for a general
insurrection by the Balkan Christians, and even for the creation of some kind of Balkan
federation: these plans also counted, without much certainty, on the cooperation of the
Albanians, of both the Muslim and Catholic religion in northern Albania.
Except for a certain kind of ethnic solidarity, Albanian nationalism developed
under unfavourable circumstances: the tribal organization and the religious and social
divisions ensured the domination of conservative layers of beys and tribal chiefs.
Defending their old privileges, the Albanians, just like the Bosnian Muslims, became, in
the declining Ottoman Empire, an obstacle to its modernization. Shaped by the Islamic
civilizational framework the Muslim Albanians (around 70% of the entire population), were
unable to successfully coordinate their privileges with the needs of modern nations. Until
the Eastern Crisis (1875-1878), the Albanians moved around in a vicious circle between
general loyalty to the Ottoman Empire and the defense of their local interests which meant
resisting the central authorities' measures. The beginning of the Albanian national
integration was therefore not based on cultural unity nor on liberal European-type
principles.
Albanian nationalism was of an ethnic nature, but clearly burdened by
conservative Islamic traditions. Simultaneously, this nationalism was more than half a
century behind the other Balkan nations in defining its aspirations. The Albanians,
similarly to other belated nations (verspätete nation), when confronted with rival
nationalisms, sought foreign support and advocated radical solutions. In Kosovo-Metohija
and in western Macedonia, where the Serbs and the Albanians were intermingled, with the
system falling apart and with the growing social stagnation, it was anarchy that reigned:
there the Christians were the principal victims and the Muslims were their persecutors.
The wars Serbia and Montenegro supported by the Russian Empire waged against
Turkey (1876-1878) resulted in the defeat of Albanian troops and the migration, either
voluntarily or forcibly, of Albanians from the liberated territories in southeast Serbia.
Unwilling to live in a Christian-ruled state, the Muslim Albanians settled in Metohija and
Kosovo where they took their revenge on the local Serbs for the estates they had lost in
Serbia.
The Albanian League (1878-1881), formed on the eve of the Congress of Berlin,
on the periphery of the Albanian ethnic space, in Prizren, called for a resolution of the
national question within the frameworks of the Ottoman Empire: it was conservative Muslim
groups that prevailed in the League's leadership and paramilitary forces. Dissatisfied
with the Porte's concessions to the European powers, the League tried to sever all ties
with Constantinople; in order to prevent further international complications, the sultan
Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) ordered military action and destroyed the entire Albanian
movement.
The internationalization of the Albanian question began and, until the Balkan
wars (1912-1913), it had two compatible directions. First of all, it was characterized by
a renewed loyalty to the Porte due to the proclaimed pan-Islamic policy in order to
encourage the Albanian Muslims to stifle Christian movements which were endangering the
Ottoman empire's internal security. The persecution of and violence against the Serbs in
Kosovo-Metohija and in Macedonia were an integral part of the pan-Islamic policy of sultan
Abdühamid II. The result was at least 60,000 expelled Serbs from Old Serbia (vilayet
of Kosovo). Refugees from Old Serbia and Macedonia sent a memorandum to the Conference of
the Hague in 1899, but their complaints about systematic discrimination perpetrated by
Muslim Albanians were not officially discussed.
Secondly, the Albanians, especially Roman Catholics sought foreign support from
those Powers which, in their desire to dominate the Balkans, could help Albanian
aspirations. While Italy's activities among the Albanians were based on establishing
influence among their Roman Catholics in the northern region and in the cities along the
Adriatic coast, Austria-Hungary had more ambitious plans. After the occupation of
Bosnia-Herzegovina (1878), the Dual Monarchy planned to penetrate further into the
Balkans, towards the bay of Salonika. For Vienna the Albanians in Kosovo-Metohija and
western Macedonia were a bridge towards the Vardar river valley. It was to be the first
step in the German policy of Drang nach Osten.
The slowness of the Albanians national integration was favourable to a broad
action by the Dual Monarchy: the Albanian élite, divided among three religious
communities, just like the nation itself, consisted of people of unequal social statuses
speaking different dialects. In order to overcome the existing differences, Vienna
launched important cultural initiatives: books about Albanian history were printed and
distributed, national coats-of-arms were invented and various grammars were written in
order to create a unified Albanian language. The Latin script, supplemented with new
letters for non-resounding sounds, was envisaged as the common script. The most important
cultural initiative was the Illyrian theory about the Albanians' origin. The theory about
the Albanians' alleged Illyrian origin was launched from the cabinets of Viennese and
German scientists where, until then, it only had the form of a narrow scientific debate,
and it was skilfully propagated in a simplified form. According to this theory, for which
reliable scientific evidence has not been found to the present day, the Albanians are the
oldest nation in Europe created through a mixture of pre-Roman Illyrian and Pelasgian
tribes from an Aryan flock (Volksschwarm). Thus, a auestionable scientific thesis
about the ethno-genesis of a nation was turned into the mythological basis for national
integration, which in time, became the main pillar of the Albanians' modern national
identity.
The way in which Vienna used the Albanian national movement against the
"Greater Serbian danger" in its conflict with the Serbian movement for
unification, was similar to the way in which Russia tried to manipulate the Serbian
question, during the Serbian revolution, in its wars with Turkey. But the results were
different. The Serbs successfully got rid of Russia's tutelage creating, with many
difficulties, a modern parliamentary state (1888-1894,1903-1914) that conducted its own
independent national policy; the Albanians got from Vienna an important framework for
further cultural emancipation but its price was a permanent rivalry with Serbia and
Montenegro. Although deeply distrustful towards the Albanian movement, both Serbian
kingdoms tried, on several occasions, to establish cooperation with the Albanian
leadership and to resolve mutual disputes without the interference of the Great Powers.
The support to the Albanian insurrections against the Young Turk pan-Ottoman policy
(1910-1912), prior to the liberation of Kosovo (1912), were obvious expressions of such
efforts.
Albania's joining in the chain of states which tried, after the first Balkan
war (1912), under the patronage of Austria-Hungary, to break the independence of Serbia
and Montenegro, strengthened Serbia's old aspirations to get access to the sea on the
northern Albanian coast, and somewhat later, also to prevent the creation of a fully or
partially independent Albania which would easily fell under foreign influence: the obvious
examples are the agreements with Essad-pasha Toptani on a real union with Serbia (1915)
and the support to Mark Gjoni (1920) for a separate Republic of the Mirdites in the Roman
Catholic north of Albania.
SERBO-ALBANIAN RELATIONS WITHIN THE ITALIAN-YUGOSLAV RIVALRY
Following First World War, the role of the protector of Albania and of global
Albanian interests was taken over by a new regional power - Italy. Rome continued with its
old practice of stirring Serbo-Albanian conflicts, now as a function of the conflict with
the newly established Kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes (renamed Kingdom of Yugoslavia
in 1929) over dominance of the eastern Adriatic coast. Kosovo-Metohija was an unquiet
border province where Albanian outlaws (kaçaks) and activists of the "Kosovo
committee", an organization of emigrants which, in its struggle for a "Greater
Albania", was financed by the Italian government operated. In Yugoslavia, like in
pre-war Serbia, the ethnic Albanians were a minority that was antagonistic towards the
state ruled by their former serfs. The Kosovo beys who led the ethnic Albanians, agreed
with Belgrade on their privileges neglecting the fact that their kinsmen were not
guaranteed adequate minority rights.
Belgrade responded with twofold measures: on the internal level, it carried out
a recolonization of Serbs in Kosovo in order to restore the demographic structure
disrupted in the last decades of Ottoman rule and tried to establish security by severe
military and police means in the region bordering on Albania; for this reason the
colonists were the victims of retaliation carried out by ethnic Albanian outlaws. On the
foreign level, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia reacted by actively interfering in the internal
political clashes in Albania and by helping to organize the liquidation of the most
prominent ethnic Albanian emigrants from Kosovo like Bairam Curri and Hasan Prishtina, but
without the strength to have a decisive influence on Tirana.
The conflict with Italy and the Albanian movement controlled by Rome, gained
fresh impetus with the approach of the Second World War. Under Mussolini's patronage,
Albanian emigrants from Kosovo-Metohija, the pro-Bulgarian IMRO movement and the Croatian
Ustashi forces, coordinated their actions against Yugoslav kingdom. The Yugoslav
government's intention to avert the growing danger for the stability of its southwestern
borders by the massive migration of the Albanian and Turkish populations from Kosovo and
from Macedonia to Turkey (1938), was never carried out because of unsettled financial
terms with Ankara.
The Second World War brought about radical solutions marked by a totalitarian
ideology: after Yugoslavia's defeat in the April war of 1941, its territories were granted
to a number of satellite pro-Nazi states. Kosovo and part of western Macedonia were
annexed, as compensation, to Albania which was from 1939 under Italian occupation. The
consequence was the merciless persecution of around 100,000 Serbs, mostly colonists, while
over ten thousand of the others were the victims of the punitive actions of various
Albanian militias. In the same period, around 75,000 people moved to Kosovo from Albania.
New persecutions of the Serbs followed the capitulation of Italy (1943), when Kosovo fell
under the direct control of the Third Reich. The ethnic Albanians' revanchism was
stimulated by the creation of the "Second Albanian League"; the special SS
"Skenderbeg" division carried out a new wave of violence against the Serbian
civilian population.
THE FAILURE OF IDEOLOGICAL RECONCILIATION
The attempt to achieve a historical reconciliation of the Serbs and Albanians
within the framework of the new social project - Soviet-type communism - proved to be
impossible: the geopolitical realities remained unchanged, while the old rivalry over
territories only acquired a new ideological framework. Realpolitik forced communist ruler
J.B.Tito to preserve Yugoslavia's integrity in order to become its legal successor.
Simultaneously, he had to take into account the feelings of the Serbs, the communists and
partisans who constituted the majority of his forces. The ethnic Albanian rebellion
against communist Yugoslavia at the beginning of 1945 intensified the need for
Kosovo-Metohija to remain part of Serbia, within the new Soviet type federal system.
Nevertheless, as a concession to communist Albania, a special decree (March 6, 1945)
banned the return of Serbian colonists to Kosovo-Metohija. A similar decision, as a
concession to communist Bulgaria, was also adopted in regard to the Serbs colonized in
Macedonia.
The project of a Balkan federation which, apart from Yugoslavia and Albania,
was also to include Bulgaria, and where Kosovo would, in accordance with Tito's idea,
belong to Albania, had a twofold meaning. For the Yugoslav communists this represented the
realization of the old desires of Yugoslavia to dominate Albania, and for J.B.Tito it was
the achievement of his personal ambition to become the ruler of the Balkans reshaped into
a Balkan federation under his rule; for communist leader of Albania Enver Hohxa this was
an attempt to achieve Kosovo's annexation to Albania through mutual agreement between
communist "brethern". The severance of relations with Albania in 1948, done as
part of Yugoslavia's conflict with the Cominform, stopped the second wave of the
immigration of ethnic Albanians into Yugoslavia favoured by the Tito's government in order
to obtain further influence on Albania. The number of those immigrants has not been
precisely determined to the present day.
TITOIST MANIPULATION WITH NATIONAL RIVARLIES
With decisive support from Moscow, Yugoslavia was reconstructed as a communist
federation along the Soviet model and on Leninist principles of federalism. Decreeting new
nations immediately after 1945 - first the Macedonians (by using linguistic criteria) and
Montenegrins (by state tradition), and then also the Bosnian Moslems by religious criteria
(1968, and finally in 1971) - was aimed at the establishment of an ethnic balance in the
new federation as opposed to the political and military domination of the Serbs in the
Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The new, communist leader of Yugoslavia, J. B. Tito, was
persistently speaking about inter-republican boundaries being merely lines on a granite
column that are bonding nations and minorities. In an interview with the Paris "Le
Monde" in 1971 the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas (one of the founders of the
Montenegrin nation) did, however, confess that the division of Serbs in five out of the
six republics was aimed at diminishing the "centralism and hegemonies of the
Serbs", as one of the main "obstacles" to the establishment of communism.
In communist Yugoslavia, the Serbo-Albanian conflicts were only part of the
complex concept for resolving the national question which was carried out in phases and in
the name of "brotherhood and unity" by Josip Broz Tito. Being a Croat, brought
up in the Habsburg milieu marked by the fear of "the Greater Serbian danger" and
on Lenin's teaching that the nationalism of big nations is more dangerous than the
nationalism of smaller ones, Tito was consistent in stifling any manifestion of "the
Greater Serbian hegemony" which, according to the communists, was personified in the
regimes of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The first two decades of bureaucratic centralism
(1945-1966) were necessary for the communist leadership to avoid the debate on genocide
perpetrated against the Serbs during the civil war. The centralism also aimed to
consolidate communist power: during that period Tito relied on Serbian cadres (Aleksandar
Rankovic) with whom he emerged victorious from the civil war. Among the victims of the State
security service (UDBA), headed by Rankovic, as ideological enemies there were Serbs
and ethnic Albanians alike. Together with ethnic Albanians who were persecuted for
supporting former "Balli Kombetar" nationalist forces (actions of confiscating
guns), the Kosovo-Metohija Serbs, especially Orthodox priests, were constantly arrested
and monastic properties destroyed or confiscated. The biggest Orthodox church in Metohia,
built in Djakovica in the1920s was demolished in 1950, and in its place a monument for
Kosovo-Metohija partisans was erected.
The decentralization based on the plans of Tito's closest associates, Edvard
Kardelj - a Slovene, author of almost all the Yugoslav constitutions, and Vladimir Bakaric
- a Croat, aimed at strengthening the competencies of the federal units, led to the
renewal of nationalisms. The creation of the national-communism formulated by
Edvard Kardelj as party ideology was directly promoted by Tito himself. National
communism made republican and provincial parties the bearers of the national and state
sovereignty. National homogenization was imposed, a process that in Kosovo-Metohija took
the direction of creating a national state of the Muslim Albanians. Endeavors to create
nation-states in areas marked by republican (and in the case of Kosovo-Metohija also
provincial) boundaries, was also the beginning of the ethnic and religious discrimination
of minority nations within the federal (provincial) entities.
National-communism which emerged in Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia nad Kosovo in
thelate 1960's and early 1970's was supoported by Tito in order to preserve his undisputed
authority challenged by the reform-orientated 'liberals' in Serbia. In the last phase of
Tito's rule, marked by the (con)federal Constitution of 1974, he became, similar to Leonid
Brezhnev in the USSR, the main obstacle to any further liberal evolution of the system.
As Tito's only legacy there remained the common, but ideological army, and the
bulky party-bureaucratic apparatus, divided along republican and provincial borders. Those
borders, although allegedly administrative, increasingly resembled the borders of
self-sufficient, covertly rival national states, linked from the inside only by the iron
authority of the charismatic leader. The important cohesive element on the international
plane was a common fear of a potential Soviet invasion.
Within such a context, Kosovo-Metohija had an important role: first it was an
autonomous region (1946 Constitution), then an autonomous province within
Serbia (1963 Constitution) and finally an autonomous province only formally linked with
Serbia (Constitutional amendments 1968-1971 and 1974 Constitution), with competencies that
were hardly any different from those of the republics (the Leninist principle concerning
the right to self-determination was reserved for republics only). Kosovo owed the change
of its status within the federation not to the freely expressed will of the people of
Serbia, Serbs and ethnic Albanians alike, but exclusively to the ideological concepts of a
narrow circle of national-communist hardliners around Tito.
During the period of centralism when Albania was, until 1961, part of the
Soviet bloc hostile towards Yugoslavia, Tito relied on the Serbs in Kosovo who represented
the guarantee of Yugoslavia's integrity. After the reconciliation with Moscow (1955) and
the gradual normalization of relations with Albania (1971), Tito favoured the ethnic
Albanians in Kosovo-Metohija in a way which, after the Constitutional amendments, they
understood not only as a possibility for national emancipation but above all as a long
awaited opportunity for a historical revenge against the Serbs.
The ideological and national model of the Kosovo-Metohija ethnic Albanians was
inspired by the Stalinist ethno-communism of Enver Hoxha, imbued with the old national
intolerance towards the Serbs. The erasing of the name of Metohija, as a Serbian Orthodox
term, from the name of the autonomous province (autumn 1968), symbolically indicated the
political direction of the ethnic Albanian communist nomenklatura in Kosovo. The
discrimination on an ethnic basis was followed by a series of successive administrative
and physical pressures which resulted in the quiet, but forced emigration of a tens of
thousands of Serbs from Kosovo-Metohija; a process which many knew about, but very few
dared publicly to mention fearing being sentenced to prison for obstructing the official
ideology of "brotherhood and unity". As the process of forced migration
proceeded, the land of the expelled Serbs if not sold to local ethnic Albanians was
officially given to emigrants from Albania. The conflict with the Serbs beside national
had strong social causes: Kosovo-Metohija remained a primarily peasant environment where
the society was organized on the basis of tribal traditions, with a significant Islamic
impact. Ethnic Albanian society, marked by the highest birth-rate in Europe, chiefly
agrarian, needed more and more land.
From the end of Second World War until Tito's death in 1980, the number of
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo tripled (undoubtedly also thanks to a large number of
immigrants, a number that has still not be definitely determined). The systematic
Albanization of the province of Kosovo in the administration, the judiciary and the police
(Serbian officials were often replaced by incompetent but ethnic Albanian cadres) was
followed by introducing the ethnic principle and ethnic quotas everywhere, including
University where the number of places set for Serbs was to correspond to their percentage
in the province's population. Money from Serbian and federal state funds (one million
dollars a day in the early 1980's) was used by local Albanian nomenklatura not for
encouraging economic development but for constructing prestigious state institutions. The
uncontrolled growth of the population gave additional social stimuli to the intolerant
nationalism of the numerous young and educated ethnic Albanians bound to Kosovo by the
language barrier. Growing social discontent was transferred into national frustration.
They were educated on school manuals imported from Albania, imbued with nationalist
mythology and hate towards Yugoslavia. The theory of the Albanians as descents of
Illyrians, the oldest people in the Balkans and therefore natives in Kosovo, became a
simplified political program of national discrimination: all the non-Albanian population
were considered as intruders on indigenous Albanian soil.
The unanimous requests of the Albanian minority for the creation of a republic
of Kosovo (with the right to self-determination, including secession), set out in 1981,
only a year after Tito's death, disrupted the sensitive political balance in the federal
leadership. The attempt to hush up the Albanian question in Kosovo with a classical
communist purge and with spectacular but inadequate measures (actions by the federal
military and police forces, chiefly from Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina), ordered by
Stane Dolanc (a Slovene, head of State Security Service), failed. Together with visible
attempts to minimize the problem of the forced emigration of the Kosovo Serbs, these
measures resulted in the deep frustration of the whole Serbian nation in the years that
followed.
The Serbs gradually started to realize that the Titoist order was based on the
national inequality of the Serbs in Yugoslavia. The attempts by Serbian communists to
resolve the question of Serbia's competencies over the provinces in agreement with the
other republican leaderships from 1977 upto the early 1980's (the so-called Blue book),
in order to protect the Serbs in Kosovo more efficiently, were openly rejected. The
intransigence of the national-communist nomenclatures in the federal leadership created
dangerous tensions that were hard to control: the Kosovo Serbs started self-organizing on
a wide front.
The Serbs' growing national frustration was skilfully used, after a party coup
in 1987, by Slobodan Milosevic, the new leader of the Serbian communists: instead of party
forums he used populist methods, taking over from the Serbian Orthodox Church and the
liberal intelligentsia the role of the protector of national interests. Thus, the
protection of the endangered Serbs in Kosovo became a means of political manipulation.
Milosevic's intention to renew the weary communist party on the basis of new national
ideals (as did the national-communist in other republics more than a decade earlier), was
opposite to the movement in Eastern Europe where an irreversible process of communism's
demise by means of nationalism was launched. At that moment, for most of the Serbs,
preoccupied by the Kosovo question, the interests of the nation were more important than
the democratic changes in Eastern Europe, especially since Milosevic had created the
semblance of the freedom of the media where former historical and ideological taboos were
freely discussed. Democracy in Serbia was blocked by the unresolved national question:
practice has once again confirmed the theoretical axiom that these two ideologies,
nationalism and democracy exclude each other.
The ethnic Albanians held to their radical stands: they responded with a
relentless series of strikes and demonstrations aware of the fact that the abolition of
the autonomy based on the 1974 Constitution, meant, in fact, the abolition of all elements
of Kosovo statehood. Their actions only strengthened Milosevic positions as the Serb
national leader. The polarization within the republican leaderships in regard to the
Kosovo issue became public. The support of Slovenia and later on Croatia to the Albanian
requests definitely cemented Milosevic's charisma. The results were the limitation of
autonomy, unrest and brutal police repression in Kosovo: thus, an old dispute over whether
Kosovo is or is not part of Serbia, became seemingly ideological: Serbia, thanks to
Milosevic, acquired the dangerous image of "the last bastion of communism in
Europe", while the Albanians, because of their resistance, which mostly had a passive
form, gained the hero's wreath of an "oppressed nation" exposed to
"apartheid" in its search for democracy and human rights.
The secessionist movement of the Albanians in Kosovo, derived from the logic of
the Titoist order and based on ethnic intolerance, led to the homogenization of the Serbs
in Yugoslavia, directly producing Milosevic. This, in accordance with the domino effect,
resulted in the homogenization of the other Yugoslav nations. In a country with such
mixture of various nations, due to the inability of the communist and post-communist
leaderships to place democratic principles above narrow national interests, ethnic
mobilisation directly led to the civil war. In that sense, the disintegration of
Yugoslavia is the revenge of Tito's "zombis", the revenge of the negative
selection of cadres and of a wrongly conducted national policy.
THE BALANCE OF INTOLERANCE
After the civil war and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Serbo-Albanian
conflict lost its Titoist dimension: once again, it became Serbia's internal question,
despite the demands of the self-proclaimed Republic of Kosovo to be recognized as
independent through the gradual internationalization of the Kosovo question, within a
global solution for the war and the ethnic conflicts in former Yugoslavia. During the
early 1990's, Milosevic, the hard-line communist leader of Serbia, and Ibragim Rugova the
undisputed leader of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, leader of Democratic League of Kosovo
were helping each other with their extreme nationalist positions. If the ethnic Albanians
were to give up their refusal to recognize Serbian sovereignty, with their votes the
democratic opposition in Serbia would easily take over power. On the other hand, while
Milosevic is in power, and police repression continue, Rugova can still hope for the
internationalization of the Kosovo question. Without Milosevic's regime, even the last
doubt that Kosovo will remain exclusively Serbia's internal affair, would be eliminated.
The geopolitical realities shows that every attempt at achieving the Kosovo
ethnic Albanians' goals (an independent state or unification of Kosovo with Albania) would
inevitably cause a broader Balkan war with unforeseeable consequences. An independent
Republic of Kosovo would mean changing the stable inter-state Balkan borders established
way back in the 1912-1913 wars. The right to self-determination, which the ethnic
Albanians refer to when rejecting even the very thought of remaining under sovereignty of
Serbia, is not envisaged by international law for national minorities, no matter how large
their percentage may be compared to the country's overall population.
Today, the ethnic Albanians account for 18 percent of the overall population of
Serbia and 16 percent of the whole of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia . That is the
same percentage of the Serbs and other non-Albanians in Kosovo. Secession of Kosovo would
represent yet another dangerous fragmentation accompanied by a war in which there would be
no winner. On the other hand, after the experiences with the self-determination of the
nations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which turned into a bloody inter-ethnic war with hundreds
of thousands of killed and displaced persons, it is unlikely that the international
community would tolerate yet another such attempt. The restoration of Kosovo's autonomy in
accordance with the 1974 Constitution is also unacceptable for Serbia: that autonomy based
on anachronous communist formulae practically excluded Kosovo-Metohija from Serbian
sovereignity and was used primarly for the silent "ethnic cleansing" of the
Kosovo Serbs.
After mistakes on both sides - the attempts of the ethnic Albanians to resolve
the Kosovo question without the participation of the Serbs, and the efforts of the Serbs
to resolve the same problem without consulting the will of the ethnic Albanians, the only
possible solution appears to be the opening of a dialogue. After mutual concessions -
first of all the Albanians' recognition of Serbia's sovereignty over Kosovo and
afterwards, adequate concessions by the Serbian side concerning the form of Kosovo's
autonomy (education, culture, science, the media,the economy), following the gradual
establishment of a mutual trust, democratic dialogue should be conducted there where other
minorities, like the ethnic Hungarians, are also represented - in the parliament of
Serbia.
ANNEXES:
Graph. 1 THE POPULATION OF KOSOVO-METOHIJA
| nationality |
1948 |
1953 |
1961 |
1971 |
1981 |
| Albanians |
498.242 |
524.559 |
646.168 |
916.168 |
1.226.736 |
| Serbs |
171.911 |
189.869 |
227.016 |
228.264 |
209.497 |
| Montenigrins |
28.050 |
31.343 |
37.588 |
31.555 |
27.028 |
| Turks |
1.315 |
34.343 |
25.764 |
12.244 |
12.513 |
| Muslims |
9.679 |
6.241 |
8.026 |
26.357 |
58.562 |
| Gypsies |
11.230 |
11.904 |
3.202 |
14.593 |
34.126 |
| Others |
7.393 |
9.642 |
15.787 |
14.512 |
15.978 |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
| Total |
727.820 |
808.141 |
963.988 |
1.243.693 |
1.584.440 |
Graph. 2 MIGRATIONS OF THE KOSOVO-METOHIJA'S SERBS
| No |
District |
Number of
Serbian Families
1918-1941 |
Number of
Serbian Families
March 1991 |
Percent |
| 1 |
Vitina |
480 |
75 |
15,83 % |
| 2 |
Vucitrn |
700 |
83 |
11,85 % |
| 3 |
Glogovac |
407 |
0 |
0,00 % |
| 4 |
Gnjilane |
304 |
30 |
9,86 % |
| 5 |
Decane |
938 |
59 |
6,28 % |
| 6 |
Djakovica |
2.079 |
94 |
4,52 % |
| 7 |
Istok |
1.000 |
119 |
11,90 % |
| 8 |
Kacanik |
86 |
4 |
4,65 % |
| 9 |
Klina |
652 |
86 |
13,19 % |
| 10 |
Kosovo polje |
384 |
36 |
9,37 % |
| 11 |
Kosov. Kamenica |
212 |
39 |
18,39% |
| 12 |
Lipljan |
555 |
121 |
21,80% |
| 13 |
Malisevo |
380 |
1 |
0,26% |
| 14 |
Obilic |
319 |
70 |
21,94% |
| 15 |
Orahovac |
310 |
12 |
3,87% |
| 16 |
Podujevo |
1.566 |
163 |
10,40% |
| 17 |
Pec |
1.441 |
159 |
11,03% |
| 18 |
Pristina |
336 |
82 |
24,40% |
| 19 |
Srbica |
531 |
0 |
0,00% |
| 20 |
Suva Reka |
173 |
0 |
0,00% |
| 21 |
Kos.Mitrovica |
171 |
26 |
15,20% |
| 22 |
Urosevac |
633 |
104 |
16,42% |
| 23 |
Stimlje |
69 |
3 |
4,34% |
| 24 |
Prizren |
266 |
15 |
5,64% |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
Total |
14.055 |
1.371 |
9,75% |
Document compiled by Dr S D Stein