Dusan T.Batakovic. The Kosovo Chronicles
Published by PLATO, Beograd 1992.
Translated to English by Dragana Vulicevic
Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTION by Milan St. Protic
PART ONE: HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY
THE KOSOVO AND METOHIA QUESTION
Ethnic Strife and the Communist Rule
The CPY as a section of the Comintern and the realizer of its concept
in dealing with the ethnic question
The CPY's ethnic policy in its struggle for power in the civil war
(1941-1945)
Settling accounts with Serbia and the instrumentalization of Kosovo and
Metohia
Centralism in Yugoslavia and the role of the secret police in Kosovo
and Metohia
Kosovo and Metohia in the transition from the centralist to the federal
model
The epilogue of the communist solution to the ethnic question in
Yugoslavia: the example of Kosovo
Continuity and discontinuity
KOSOVO AND METOHIA: A HISTORICAL SURVEY
The Age of Ascent
The Age of Tribulation
The Age of Migrations
The Age of Oppression
The Age of Restoration
The Age of Communism
PART TWO: THEOCRACY, NATIONALISM, IMPERIALISM
FROM THE SERBIAN REVOLUTION TO THE EASTERN CRISIS: 1804-1875
The Serbian Insurrection and Pasha-Outlaws
Time of Reforms in Turkey
Pogroms in Metohia
Population
Political Action of Serbia
Restoration of Religious and Cultural Life
The Economy
ENTERING THE SPHERE OF EUROPEAN INTEREST
Eastern Crisis and the Serbian-Turkish Wars
The Albanian League
Court-Martial in Pristina
Albanians Under the Sultan's Protection
Activities of the Serbian Government
Flaring of Anarchy
Religious, Educational and Economic Conditions
The Decline in Population
ANARCHY AND GENOCIDE UPON THE SERBS
Serbia's Diplomatic Actions
Austria-Hungary and the Expansion of Anarchy
Failure of Reforms
Young Turk Regime
LIBERATION OF KOSOVO AND METOHIA
Albanian Incursions into Serbia
In World War One
SERBIAN GOVERNMENT AND ESSAD PASHA TOPTANI
PART THREE: RELIGION AND CIVILISATION
KOSOVO AND METOHIA: CLASH OF NATIONS OR CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
FIGURES:
Otoman Vilayets
Serbia 1804-1913
Comunist Yugoslavia: Federal Organization
Settling of Albanian Tribes
AUTHOR: Dusan T. Batakovic (born 1957) is one of the distinguished
Serbian historians. He works in Historical Institute of Serbian Academy of
Sciences and Arts as Research Fellow. Among dozens of articles on Serbian
and Balkan history, he had published several books: Savremenici o Kosovu i
Metohiji 1852-1912 (Contemporaries on Kosovo and Metohia 1852-1912),
Belgrade 1988; Kolubarska bitka (Battle of Kolubara), Belgrade 1989;
Decansko pitanje (The Decani Question), Belgrade 1989; Kosovo i Metohija u
srpskoj istoriji (Kosovo and Metohia in Serbian History), Belgrade 1989
(co-author); Kosovo i Metohija u srpsko-arbanaskim odnosima (Kosovo and
Metohia in Serbo-Albanian Relations), Belgrade 1991; and edited Memoirs of
Gen. P. Draskic, Belgrade 1990 and Portraits by V. Corovic, Belgrade 1990.
This book is the collection of his articles on major topics of history
of Kosovo and Metohia and its recent political consequences.
Dusan T. Batakovic THE KOSOVO CHRONICLES
Izdavac: Knjizara Plato, Beograd, Cika Ljubina 18-20
Za izdavaca Branislav Gojkovic
Urednik Ivan Colovic
Recenzenti: Prof. dr Radovan Samardzic i dr Milan St. Protic
Beograd, 1992.
INDEX 215 THE HISTORY CARDS OF KOSOVO CHRONICLES 219 - 222
QP- Katalogizacija u publikaciji Narodna biblioteka Srbije, Beograd
949.711.5 BATAKOVIC, Dusan T.
[Kosovo Chronicles] The Kosovo Chronicles / Dusan T. Batakovic; prevela
na engleski Dragana Vulicevic.
-Beograd: Knjizara Plato, 1992 | (Beograd: Vojna stamparija).
- 218 Str.; 20 cm.
- (Biblioteka Na tragu)
Tiraz 1000 - Registar. ISBN86-447-0006-5
a) Kosovo i Metohija - Istorija 4986380
INTRODUCTION
by Milan St. Protic
The modern history of Serbia is indeed pregnant with controversial
questions. Probably the most complex one is the history of -- Kosovo and
Metohia. It was only in the last few years that several historiographical
works on Kosovo and Metohia had been written and published. The pioneer in
this field which deals with a particularly important segment of Serbia's
past and present is undoubtedly the author of this book.
This is trully the first serious attempt to cover two centuries of
history of Kosovo and Metohia and to present its complex historical
development in its full. In a series of articles dealing with various
problems of Kosovo and Metohia throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the
author definitely succeeded to make a complete picture of Kosovo and
Metohia's troubled history. It seems appropriate, therefore, to name his
book -- The Kosovo Chronicles.
The diversity of various topics which form the collection most clearly
shows that the author is the master of the subject he chose to write about.
Mr. Batakovic presented himself as a mature historian of the Balkan history
as a whole as much as the sharp analyst of one specific aspect of it.
One cannot but to welcome this book. For two major reasons at least.
First, for its wide-angle approach to the problem. And second, for its
attempt to avoid typical black and white stereotypes.
Kosovo and Metohia undoubtedly belong to the corpus of the Serbian
history. No question about that. It was the cradle and the center of the
medieval Serbian state, it was the region won by the Serbian army from the
Turks in the First Balkan War (1912), it was incorporated in the Serbian
state territory and thus had entered into Yugoslavia in 1918. It was only
after the victory of the Communist Revolution in Yugoslavia that the
question of Kosovo emerged as a separate problem outside and even against
Serbia. That was the moment in which the political position of Kosovo and
Metohia moved away from Serbia and became a problem of Albanian national
rights in the eyes of very many foreign and Yugoslav observers. That crucial
borderline was rightfully pointed out by the author of this volume.
From the standpoint of form, this book represents a collection of
articles. It is comprised of two major parts. The first entitled, named
History and Ideology, treats the problem of Kosovo and Metohia, within the
framework of the Yugoslav unified state, during the World War Two and the
Communist rule since 1945. The second Theocracy, Nationalism, Imperialism
deals with the different aspects of the 19th century history of Kosovo and
Metohia until the Yugoslav unification of Yugoslavia.
The second part of Mr. Batakovic's book covers the period in which this
particular area belonged to the state territory of the Ottoman Empire, in
which the ethnic Serbs were subjects of constant pressures and abuses by the
Ottoman administrators and, much more, by ethnic Albanians who, under the
Turkish protection, conducted a real terror over the Serbs. The difference
between the Christian Serbs fighting for their national emancipation against
the oriental Islamic and oppressive regime of the Ottomans. As the Ottoman
system crumbled within itself, its peripheral provinces became areas of
abuse rule of the local population. The local Albanians, also Muslims for
the most part, found the best way to suppress the Serbs by putting
themselves in the service of the Turkish authorities. The author's archival
findings clearly proved what was really happening in Kosovo and Metohia
during the 19th century and what were the true origins of ethnic clashes in
that particular area.
This part of Mr. Batakovic's volume represents, in fact, a
comprehensive history of Kosovo and Metohia during the 19th century,
starting from the First Serbian Insurrection against the Turks (1804) to the
First Balkan War (1912) when, after the victory of the Serbian army, the
region of Kosovo and Metohia had been incorporated in the bulk of the
Serbian state. It is essentially a historical analysis of complex ethnic,
religious and political relations in the triangle Serbs-Turks-Albanians
based on a rather deep archival and documentary research. The author managed
to trace down the roots of these conflicts, their nature and development.
Parallel to this, he gave the historical background for the events which
occurred in the 20th century, when the problem of Kosovo and Metohia reached
its peak in both, crisis and international attention. This segment of book
should serve as a textbook of Kosovo and Metohia's history to everyone who
is interested in this particular field.
Mr. Batakovic's collection of articles contains several synthetical
pieces written on the subject of the history of Kosovo and Metohia. This
region of constant clashes needed to be defined in terms of general
categories. In an attempt to discover the real nature of those conflicts the
author searched for the answer to the following questions: what really lays
in the bottom of centuries long clashes in the history of Kosovo and
Metohia, is that the conflict of religions, nations or civilizations? One
will find the author's answers both original and inspiring. Contradictory
problems need to be thought about. And that is exactly what Mr. Batakovic
has done.
A special attention should be paid to the article entitled "The Kosovo
And Metohia Question - ethnic strife and communist rule". It stands as the
pivotal piece among all other articles in this book. It is at the same time
the most important and the most complex attempt to analyze the situation in
Kosovo in Metohia in the last fifty years, since the communists took over in
Yugoslavia.
This is the first time in Serbian and Yugoslav historiography that
someone tried to look on the Kosovo and Metohia question outside the
framework of political and ideological clich s. The article of Mr. Batakovic
represents a pioneer work in a noncommunist approach to contemporary history
of Kosovo and Metohia. Trying to see the problem in the realm of communist
regime and its policies in Yugoslavia, and in Serbia specifically, the
author found a whole new field of research and reasoning. With strong
foundations in his knowledge of Kosovo and Metohia's history, both distant
and recent, Mr. Batakovic made a successful synthesis of Serbo-Albanian
misunderstandings in Kosovo and Metohia, finding a balance between
contemporary politics and traditional differences between ethnicities living
in this region. His final conclusion that the Titoist politics had been
detrimental to the positive solution of this serious problem seems
persuasive and largely acceptable.
One should appreciate the courage of the author to tackle such a
complicated question of history and politics which touches the very essence
of the present day Serbia and Yugoslavia. Mr. Batakovic's writing should
contribute in clarifying many problems which had been heavily misinterpreted
in recent years, both in Yugoslavia and abroad. Escaping numerous traps of
Marxist historiography and reasoning, the author leads us on the road of new
and modern way of thinking about nationalism and statehood. By combining
historical analysis and archival research with original synthesis, the
author left us with a lot of vastly unknown factography and even more
conclusions and assertations which inspire further work and thoughts.
The author of this volume belongs to the new generation of Serbian
historians. To the generation whose intellectual and professional maturity
presently shows itself in full intensity. It is a general hope that these
young people will drive Serbia out of Marxist dogmas not only in their
intellectual work but also in everyday politics. The book we have before us
is one of those important steps in the direction of modern, non-ideological
view of our past and present.
Milan St. Protic
PART ONE: HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY
THE KOSOVO AND METOHIA QUESTION
Ethnic Strife and the Communist Rule
In the 20th-century history of the two southern regions of Serbia --
Kosovo and Metohia -- there are two periods that are clearly separated by
ideological borders. In the first period (1912-1941), in the Kingdom of
Serbia and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, ethnic issues were mainly dealt with
in keeping with the civic standards of inter-war Europe, notwithstanding the
suffering endured during the war and latent political instability. Compared
to ethnic minorities in other countries, the ethnic Albanian minority in
Kosovo and Metohia, despite its open antagonism towards the state, was not
in an particularly unfavorable position. By Saint-Germain Treaty (1919)
minorities on Serbian territory within borders of 1913 (including Kosovo and
Metohia), were formally excluded from international protection but it was
not particularly used against interests of ethnic Albanians in
Serbia.1
In the second period, commencing with the war (1941-1945) and concluded
after the establishment of communism in Yugoslavia (1945), the question of
Kosovo and Metohia was dealt with in keeping with the Party leadership's
ideological stands regarding the ethnic question. Precisely during this
period solutions were found providing strong impetus to the old ethnic
conflict between Serbs and Albanians, causing deep rifts difficult to
surmount today. Ethnic tension in Kosovo and Metohia thus offers a
paradigmatic example of the ability of the communist rule to completely
change the demographic picture of an area by instrumentalizing existing
ethnic differences.
Kosovo and Metohia, and entire Yugoslavia for that matter, depended on
the rule of the communist leadership, which cunningly used the manipulation
of ethnic differences to consolidate and maintain power. The national policy
of the Yugoslav communists was an ideological and national negation of the
establishment of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which the Serbs saw as their own
- the heir to the political traditions and democratic institutions of the
Kingdom of Serbia. The Serbs posed the greatest threat for Yugoslav
communists in number and political affiliation: to them, communism was a
foreign ideology viewed slightingly, as a vogue of the small-in-number
deluded youth; but recognized during the war as the gravest threat to
independence and freedom. The communists regarded the Serbs as a nation with
strong politically constructive traditions and a pronounced national
conscience who, spread through the length and breadth of Yugoslav territory,
had learned to conduct foreign policy on their own, without tangible foreign
support, a nation united by a single Orthodox Church - the bearer of an
anti-Soviet mood in the country. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY)
drafted its followers among the Serbs chiefly from the lower social strata
(especially patriarchal communities in Montenegro, Herzegovina, Bosnia and
Vojna Krajina) unestablished in Serbian state and political traditions,
people who in the name of idealistic Yugoslavism and proletarian
internationalism rejected Serbian interests and blindly obeyed the orders of
the Titoist leadership.
The Albanians, a people whose national integration fell a whole century
behind those of the other Balkan nations, remained in communist Yugoslavia
against their will, but found a common interest with the ruling communist
party in an anti-Serbian policy via which to achieve their national goals.
Time was to pass for the backward ethnic Albanian milieu to admit its new
authorities and for the CPY to come to terms with representatives of the
ethnic Albanian minority. The question of Kosovo and Metohia was thus dealt
with in the inter-relation of three gravity centers of political forces -1.
the CPY leadership as the leading factor of might in the country; 2. the
ethnic Albanian national movement which had evident continuity despite the
ideological affiliation of its bearers; 3. Serbian communists who, though
numerically superior in the army, party and politics, as Yugoslavs and
internationalists consistently implemented the Titoist policy. The origin of
this relation can be seen in the chronological sequence of developments of
the CPY's national policy under different political and international
conditions.
1 R. Rajovic, Autonomija Kosova. Politicko-pravna studija, Beograd
1985, pp. 100-105.
The CPY as a section of the Comintern and the realizer of its concept
in dealing with the ethnic question
There is evident continuity in the CPY's policy in dealing with the
position of ethnic minorities which shows that, despite individual
aberrations due to the position of communist Yugoslavia in foreign policy,
basic political principles, outlined in party programs and resolutions in
the inter-war period, were consistently implemented. The CPY coordinated its
program of solutions to the ethnic question in the multi-ethnic Kingdom of
Yugoslavia with the general stands of the Third International (Comintern),
within the framework of which it acted as a separate section, as its work
was prohibited in the country.
The Comintern was an important lever of Soviet foreign policy. The
Comintern's attitude towards the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was determined by the
Soviet policy towards the "Versailles system" of states created under
imperialistic peace accords" after World War I, in which enemies of the
Bolshevik regime - Great Britain and France - were dominant. The Fifth
Congress of the Comintern (1924) abandoned the principle of a federal
restructuring of states, created as a cordon sanitaire primarily as a
defense against the "proletariat revolution" and a struggle against the
Soviet Union, with the explanation that "western imperialists" were
preparing an assault on the "first country of socialism". The new political
platform's starting point was to break up the cordon surrounding the Soviet
Union by singling out and rendering independent the oppressed nations among
those states in the enemy camp, including the Kingdom of Yugoslavia - the
right of Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia to separation was emphasized, and a
special resolution stressed the need to aid the movements of the oppressed
nations for the formation of their independent states and "for the
liberation of the Albanians". The policy of the Yugoslav authorities had
some effect on the Comintern's stand towards Yugoslavia: the royal
authorities had failed to recognize the new Soviet state and provided
shelter to a large number of Russian emigrants and White Guard military
units in the 20s, including the troops of General Vrangel, while Russian
societies frequently greeted their patron, King Aleksandar Karadjordjevic
(related to the Romanov dynasty through his sister Jelena and his
Montenegrin aunts), as the new Slavic tsar.
The CPY, and the Comintern, advocated the stand that the state of
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was an unnatural creation which cannot be
regarded as a homogeneous national state (comprising three tribes which make
up a nation) with a few ethnic minorities, but a state wherein the ruling
class of one (Serbian) nation was oppressing the other nations. The thesis
on a Greater Serbian bourgeoisie and Greater Serbian hegemony owed much to
the theses of the Austro-Hungarian public opinion prior to and during World
War I, whereby the Greater Serbian threat posed a chief obstacle to the
stabilization of political conditions in the Balkans. Similar stands, only
with a more pronounced ideological component, can be found in the works of
Austro-Marxists whence such stereotypes were taken and constructed into the
views of the Third International regarding the ethnic question in the
Balkans.1
The policy to break up Kingdom of Yugoslavia culminated in the
decisions of the CPY's Fourth Congress, held in Dresden in 1928. The
statement that about one-third of the Albanian nation had remained under the
rule of the Greater Serbian bourgeoisie, which was implementing the same
oppressive regime" against it as in Macedonia, was supplemented by the stand
that its liberation and unification with Albania can be achieved only in a
joint struggle with the CPY. With regard to this, support was extended to
the Kosovo Committee, an organization of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and
Metohia who, aided by the Albanian government and Mussolini, raided Yugoslav
territory with the aim of winning the annexation of Kosovo, Metohia and
western Macedonia to Albania. Tens of thousands of Serbian colonists -
chiefly volunteers in World War I and indigent families from Montenegro,
Vojna Krajina and Dalmatia, were sealed by the party press as servants of
the Greater Serbian policy, although the land they were allotted was not
taken from ethnic Albanians. Similar stands were reitered at the Fourth
National Conference of the CPY held in Ljubljana in 1934, which stressed the
assessment that the Yugoslav kingdom was nothing but the "occupation of
Croatia, Dalmatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo and
Bosnia-Herzegovina by Serbian troops" and that it was thus imperative to
execute the "persecution of Serbian Chetniks from Croatia, Dalmatia,
Slovenia, Vojvodina, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo". Renouncing
these regions any Serbian character at all, the CPY believed that these
provinces should be organized as separate federal units within the frame of
a future communist Yugoslavia. The stand to break up Yugoslavia was changed
in 1935, when the Comintern established a new course of struggle of the
"national front" against the danger looming from Nazism and Fascism in
Europe.2 The CPY abandoned its decision on the annexation of
Kosovo and Metohia to Albania in 1940, at the Fifth National Conference in
Zagreb, at a time when Albania had been under Italian occupation for a year,
but even then, the "colonialist methods of the Serbian bourgeoisie" were
condemned and the need for the creation of a separate republic of Kosovo
emphasized - "the ethnic problem can be resolved by the forming of a free
labor-peasant republic of Kosovo after the Greater Serbian fascist and
imperialist regime is overthrown".3 By demonizing Serbian
domination in Yugoslavia, Yugoslav communists distinguished less and less
the bourgeoisie from the people - thus the idea to form a separate party for
Serbia was abandoned, although party organizations for the other Yugoslav
provinces were formed. Maintaining such a stand, the CPY received Nazi
Germany's attack on Yugoslavia in April, 1941.
1 K. Cavoski, KPJ i kosovsko pitanje, in: Kosovo i Metohija u srpskoj
istoriji, Beograd 1988, pp. 361-381. Cf documents in: Istorijski arhiv
Komunisticke partije Jugoslavije, Beograd 1949, vol. I-II, passim;
Komunisticka internacionala, Gornji Milanovac 1982, vol. VIII, passim.
2 K, Cavoski, op. cit., pp. 365-369.
3 V. Djuretic, Kosovo i Metohija u Jugoslaviji, in: Kosovo i Metohija u
srpskoj istoriji, p. 321
The CPY's ethnic policy in its struggle for power in the civil war
(1941-1945)
The Kosovo and Metohia question was raised again when the flames of war
spread on April 6,1941, throughout Yugoslavia: its army was forced to
unconditional capitulation 11 days later and its territory divided among
Hitler's allies. Owing to their loyalty to old allies France and Great
Britain, and for fomenting a putsch on March 27, 1941 (thereby practically
canceling any agreement with the Axis powers), the Serbs were punished as
the Third Reich's chief enemy in the Balkans by a division of the Serbian
territories: most of Kosovo along with Metohia, western Macedonia and
fringing areas of Montenegro were allotted to Albania, which had been under
Italian occupation for two years. Bulgaria was given a small part of Kosovo,
while its northern parts entered the composition of Serbia where a German
protectorate was established. Under a decree by King Vittorio Emmanuele,
dated August 12, 1941, Greater Albania was founded. An Albanian voluntary
militia numbering 5,000 men - Vulnetari - was set up in Kosovo and Metohia
to assist the Italian forces in maintaining order, but which carried out
surprise attacks on the Serbian population on its own.
Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and Metohia, who were declared by Italian
and communist propagandas as victims of Greater Serbian hegemony, received,
besides the right to hoist their own flag, the right to open schools in
their mother tongue. The patriarchal and tribal ethnic Albanian society in
Metohia and Kosovo, accustomed to extreme subordination and absolute
submission to the local land holders, received the new order wholeheartedly.
The destruction of the Yugoslav state, which they never took as their own,
was received with vindictive ardor. In the first few months of the
occupation, some ten thousand colonist houses were burned in night raids and
their owners and families expelled. Colonist estates were ploughed afresh in
order that every trace of Serbian presence be eradicated and in the event of
their return, to render difficult the recognition of their estates. The
destruction of colonist villages according to a plan was to help show
international commissions after the war, when new borders would be drawn,
that Serbs never lived there. An ethnic Albanian leader from Kosovo,
Ferat-bey Draga, said that the "time has come to exterminate the Serbs ...
there will be no Serbs under the Kosovo sun".1 Orthodox churches
were burnt and destroyed and graveyards desecrated. Ethnic Albanians sought
to eradicate every trace of Serbian presence in these areas. During the war,
some 100,000 colonists and indigenous Serbs fled for Serbia and Montenegro
ahead of Albanian terror, and some 10,000 were killed.2 Along
with this, under a plan of the Italian government, adopted before the
occupation of Yugoslavia, began an extensive settlement of Albanians from
Albania on the estates of the expelled colonists. Their number is roughly
estimated at 80,000-100,000; the first postwar estimate put it at about
75,000.3
The insurrection against the occupier in mid-May, 1941, was raised by
Serbian officers under the command of Colonel Draza Mihailovic, who
organized the Chetnik (guerrilla) movement throughout Yugoslavia: his
troops, organized throughout the country, were proclaimed by the government
in exile the Yugoslav army in the homeland, and he was made general and
minister of war. Two weeks after Hitler's assault on the Soviet Union,
Yugoslav communists stirred up an uprising at Moscow's call, which, under
the mask of a people's liberation struggle, was in fact a movement for a
revolutionary shift of power. After initial talks with Mihailovic's
Chetniks, Tito's Partisans set out on a long and bloody civil war. Although
there were several collaborationist regimes in the country with strong
military formations, the Partisans - the military force of the CPY, saw the
Chetniks as their arch-enemy who incorporated the state and political
continuity of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
In the civil war that ensued, Kosovo and Metohia assumed a secondary
role. The Chetnik movement, organized into two Kosovo corps (about 1,500
men), operated in mountainous regions on the outskirts of Kosovo and
Metohia. Cooperation between the occupational Italian forces and the
Albanian voluntary gendarmery left no room for their stronger military
engagement and protection of the Serbian population. The persecuted Serbs
sought refuge in occupied Serbia, where they were received first by the
commissariat administration and then a special refugees commissariat under
the regime of General Milan Nedic.4
Metohia, which was settled by primarily Montenegrin colonists, had many
followers of the CPY, though at the outbreak of the war its membership
comprised a mere 270, including some two dozen ethnic Albanians. Even though
the CPY condemned in numerous declarations prior to the war the Greater
Serbian policy of the bourgeoisie and called during the war on the ethnic
Albanian population to rise together with the colonists and Serbian natives
for the creation of a "new, justice society", the response was negligible. A
party leader, Ali Shukria, tried in 1941 to justify this reaction by saying
that the mere name Yugoslavia provoked unanimous indignation among the
ethnic Albanians. Clashes between Partisan and Chetnik formations on the one
hand and the ethnic Albanian gendarmery on the other showed that ethnic
Albanians saw in both of them only Serbs, their age-old enemies.5
The number of ethnic Albanians mustered in partisan units in Kosovo and
Metohia was extremely low, numbering only several dozen. Individual units
were named after prominent ethnic Albanian communists (Zeinel Aidmi, Emin
Duraku), and then after distinguished leaders of the secessionist movement
against Serbia and Yugoslavia (Bairam Cum); agitations among the population
constantly stressed that after the war, the ethnic Albanians would win their
rights, labeling the prewar policy as fascist and maleficent. However,
winning over ethnic Albanians for the restoration of Yugoslavia under a
communist leadership was slow, since among the ethnic Albanian members of
the CPY most had hoped that Kosovo and Metohia would remain in the
composition of Albania after the war.
In the Communist Party of Albania (CPA), which was formed from various
factions on February 8, 1941, under the supervision of Yugoslav instructors
(Miladin Popovic and Dusan Mugosa), were numerous followers of a Greater
Albania under communist rule. Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxha had
taken the first step towards an accord for the creation of a Greater Albania
after the war with a short-lasting agreement reached on August 2,1943, in
the village of Mukaj with representatives of the Balli Kombetar, a very
active organization in Kosovo.6 Miladin Popovic held a similar
stand, proposing that ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and Metohia be placed
under the command of the Chief Staff of Albania and that Metohia come under
the organization of the CPA.7 Such aspirations attained their
fullest expression in a declaration issued on January 2, 1944 in the village
of Bunaj (Bujan), in a conference attended by 49 political representatives
of the ethnic Albanian and Yugoslav partisan units (43 ethnic Albanians, 1
Moslem and 7 Serbs present):
"Kosovo and Metohia is an area mostly inhabited by ethnic Albanians,
who have always wished to become united with Albania. We, therefore, feel it
our duty to point to the road that is to be followed by the ethnic Albanian
people in the realization of their wishes. The only way for the Kosovo and
Metohia ethnic Albanians to unite with Albania is through a common struggle
with the other peoples of Yugoslavia against the invader and his lackeys. It
is the only way of winning freedom, when all the peoples, including ethnic
Albanians, will be able to make their options with a right to
self-determination, including secession. The guarantee for it is the
National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia and the National Liberation Army of
Albania, with which it is closely linked."8
The decisions reached in Bunaj, under which the name Metohia was
replaced by an Albanian term Rrafshe Dukadjini, were contrary to a
declaration by a grand communist assembly held in Jajce in late November,
1943 AVNOJ (the National Antifascist Liberation Council of Yugoslavia -
NALCY) at which it was decided that a new, communist Yugoslavia, headed by
Tito as partisan marshal, be established on a federal principle whereby "all
peoples ... will be fully free and equal", and the ethnic groups guaranteed
all the rights of an ethnic minority.9 In his instructions to the
communist leaders in Kosovo and Montenegro, Tito rejected the decisions
reached in Bunaj, believing that they raised issues which should be dealt
with after the war: he realized only too well that his movement would have
lost many followers if he had upheld the demands of the ethnic Albanians, as
he had proclaimed in principle the restoration of Yugoslavia within its
prewar borders. In conditions when the war was not yet over and the
establishment of a communist system uncertain, the decision not to touch the
borders of Yugoslavia was the only possible solution.
The hostility of ethnic Albanians towards Yugoslav partisans did not
wane, despite efforts by party activists to win over fresh adherents. The
membership of the ethnic Albanian Balli Kombetar increased and their
national solidarity proved to be stronger than ideological divisions. After
the capitulation of Italy, the German occupational authorities encouraged
aspirations towards the creation of an ethnic Albania, thus on September 19,
1943, the Second Albanian League was founded on the model of its predecessor
- the First Albanian League (1878), advocating fiercer clashes with the
Serbs in Kosovo and Metohia, and a separate SS-Division Scenderbey was set
up from the local Albanian forces.
A delegate of the partisan Supreme Command, Svetozar Vukmanovic Tempo,
sent in 1943 to reorganize the partisan units in Kosovo, Metohia and
Macedonia, informed of "powerful chauvinist hatred between the ethnic
Albanians and Serbs ... The extent of the Albanian chauvinist animosity
towards the Serbs is evident from the fact that one of our [partisan] units,
comprising ethnic Albanians, was surrounded by 2,000 armed ethnic Albanian
peasants, and after several hours of fighting the latter recognized that the
unit comprised ethnic Albanians. They dispersed, leaving the Italians in the
lurch".10 Fresh partisan units, set up in September and October
1943, operated outside Kosovo and Metohia, with not more than 800 men in
five battalions. The unit was reorganized in the summer and fall of 1944,
but the number of ethnic Albanians remained the same.
A large-scale revolt of the Balli Kombetar followers and Albanian units
mustered into partisan formations (November-December, 1944), which broke out
after the retreat of the German troops and the establishment of communist
rule (the liberation of Kosovo was assisted at Tito's request by two
brigades of ethnic Albanian partisans) was thus not unexpected. The revolt
was crushed when additional troops were brought in, and military rule was
set up in Kosovo and Metohia from February to May, 1945. A leading ethnic
Albanian communist from Kosovo maintained contact with the outlaws. He was
soon discovered, but A. Rankovic, Tito's closest associate at the time,
assessed that his execution would stir up a fresh revolt, thus he was
appointed minister in the Serbian governament.11 Initial
concessions heralding a lenient attitude towards ethnic Albanians in Kosovo
and Metohia were made immediately after the new authorities were
established: the settlement of at least 75,000 colonists from Albania was
tacitly legalized, and a special decree issued on March 16, 1945, forbade
about 60,000 Serbs settled in the inter-war period from returning to their
estates.12
The conflict between the CPY and the ethnic Albanians during the war
was of ideological and state character. The CPY could not allow the fascist
forces in Kosovo to create a Greater Albania and thus disrupt the state
integrality of the newly established communist Yugoslavia. Most ethnic
Albanians continued to support the Balli Kombetar and its solution to the
ethnic question. Albanian communists on both sides had hoped that the
triumph of communism would bring quicker unification to all Albanians into a
single state; thus communist Yugoslavia was regarded as the continuation of
the Kingdom.
1 H. Bajrami, Izvestaj Konstantina Plavsica Tasi Dinicu, ministru
unutrasnjih poslova u Nedicevoj vladi oktobra 1943, o kosovsko-mitrovackom
srezu, Godisnjak arhiva Kosova XIV-XV (1978-1979), p. 313
2 S. Milosevic, Izbeglice i preseljenici na teritoriji okupirane
Jugoslavije 1941-1945, Beograd 1981, p.56-104.
3 V. Djuretic, op. cit., p. 323-325
4 Documents published in R. V. Petrovic, Zavera protiv Srba, Beograd
1990, pp. 137-175, 353-358.
5 Dj. Slijepcevic, Srpsko-arbanaski odnosi kroz vekove sa posebnim
osvrtom na novije vreme, Himelstir 19832, pp. 307-336, 3437-455.
6 The agreement with the CPA was short-lived and the Balli Kombetar
(set up in 1942) entered into cooperation with the German occupational
forces after the capitulation of Italy (1943)
7 Zbornik dokumenata i podataka o narodnooslobodilackom ratu
jugoslovenskih naroda, vol. VII, t. 1, Belgrade 1952, pp. 338-339.
8 A. N. Dragnich and S. Todorovich, The Saga of Kosovo. Focus on
Serbian-Albanian Relations, Boulder Colorado 1984, pp. 143.
9 Prvo i drugo zasedanje AVNOJ-a, Beograd 1953, pp. 227-228.
10 Zbornik dokumenata, vol. X, t. 2, p. 153.
11 S. Djakovic, Sukobi na Kosovu, Beograd 1986, pp. 227-228.
12 V. Djuretic, op. cit. p.
Settling accounts with Serbia and the instrumentalization of Kosovo and
Metohia
However, the ethnic Albanians, both nationalists and communists, failed
to properly assess the CPY's intentions. The question of Kosovo and Metohia
was an important point of support in the CPY's plan to square accounts with
Serbia. The squaring of accounts, outlined in party programs, could start
only with the achievement of full communist domination. Serbia's conduct
during the war provided additional strength to the party's stands: a country
with bourgeois traditions and small peasant landholders, devoted to
politically constructive institutions and the dynasty, leaned towards the
Chetnik movement of Draza Mihailovic. After failing in Serbia in 1941, the
small-in-number communists transferred the weight of their operations to
Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro and the Military Frontier (Krajina) in
Croatia, where the entire Serbian population rose against large-scale terror
wrought by the Ustashas (the authorities of fascist Croatia). Cunningly
manipulating the indigent Serbian hilly population who, void of developed
state and political traditions, cherished a devotion to the cult of "mother
Russia" and patriarchal egalitarianism, the communists managed - by calling
on the authority of Moscow - to win over many of them who had fallen in
numerous Chetnik formations after the capitulation of Italy.
The communists won the bloody civil war, in which ethnic and religious
divisions were the chief instigators of massacres, owing to crucial aid from
the Soviet troops which, in agreement with Tito, crossed over to Yugoslav
territory in the fall of 1944, and helped bring the communists to power and
defeat the Yugoslav army in the homeland - the Chetnik movement of Draza
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 raison d'etre 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, the Autonomous Region 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 Balli Kombetar 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".1
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."2 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.3 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 1948-1956.4
Tito abandoned the idea of a Balkan federation because Stalin objected
to it. The Information Bureau of the Cominform 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".5 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".6 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, inner 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
1974.7
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, Titist t: Sh nime historike, Tirane 1982, p. 260-261. In
the book Sh minet mbi Kinen, 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" (Z ri i
popullit, 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. (Danas,
March 3,1987)
3 V. Djuretic, Kosovo u Jugoslaviji, pp.; Further documentation in:
Kosovo. Past and Present. Belgrade 1989, passim.
4 Cf. P. Zivancevic, Emigranti. Naseljavanje Kosova i Metohije iz
Albanije, Beograd 1989, passim.
5 J. B. Tito, Nacionalno pitanje u svetlosti NOB, Zagreb 1945, p. 5.
6 J. B. Tito, Temelji demokratije novog tipa, Beograd 1948, p. 28.
7 S. K. Pavlowitch, The Improbable Survivor. Yugoslavia and its
Problems, London 1988, pp. 34-47. Cf. N. Beloff, Tito's Flawed Legacy,
London 1980; K. Cavoski, Tito - tehnologija vlasti, Beograd 1990.
Centralism in Yugoslavia and the role of the secret police in Kosovo
and Metohia
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".1
The international political threat, ideological disintegration within
the country and the infiltration of demolition teams stepped up the work of
the State Security Service (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.2 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 Prizren Trial (1956), agents of a spy demolition
team, linked with the emigrants and secret Albanian police (Sigurimi), 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.3
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, Izabrani govori i clanci, Beograd 1951, pp. 184-185.
2 Intervju, 04. 09. 1978. Cf. Kosovski cvor. Dresiti ili seci? Izvestaj
nezavisne komisije, Beograd 1990, pp. 18-19.
3 V. Djuretic, Der politisch-historische Hintergrund Der Tragœdie
der Serben aus Kosovo und Metohija in der periode nach dem Zweiten
Weltkrieg, in: Kosovska bitka 1389. godine i njene posledice, Beograd 1991,
pp. 413-433; Cf. Lj. Bulatovic, Prizrenski proces, Beograd 1988.
Kosovo and Metohia in the transition from the centralist to the federal
model
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 State Security Service. 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 Kosmet 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 Prizren Trial 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.1
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".2 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".3
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.4
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, Ko je trazio republiku Kosovo, Beograd 1987, passim. 24
2 Ibid., pp. 120-121
3 Ibid, pp. 150-78-93.
4 R. Stojanovic, Jugoslavija, nacije i politika, Beograd 1988.
The epilogue of the communist solution to the ethnic question in
Yugoslavia: the example of Kosovo
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.1 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 2
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 3 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 4
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 ships in
Yugoslavia, particularly in Croatia and Slovenia was so great and deafening
that it decisively affected the homogenization of the Serbian people around
the new power holders
The raising of the Serbian question in Yugoslavia had the entire
country seething, which soon proved to exceed ideological differences and
shades in the interpretation of Tito's way ', disputes between advocates of
socialism with a human face ' and adherents of the dogmatic line The
ideological screen suddenly collapsed, forbidden political subjects
inundated the press, reexaminations of the interpretations of contemporary
history began, justifications of the existing organization, showing that the
national question was being opened anew on which depended the survival of
the country's present political, ideological and state organization
Serbia found itself in a paradoxical situation, to have its national
interests saved by the communist party - the chief culprit of all its
troubles The process of the growth of the communist leadership into the
patron of the mother nation's national interests had been implemented under
Tito's rule since the late 60's by all the leaderships except the Serbian
one When, because of the conflicts in Kosovo and Metohia, this took place in
Serbia, processes instigated by the detante, Perestroika and Glasnost, which
heralded the advent of the post-communist epoch, were already under way in
Europe. What had not been possible during Tito's reign was being implemented
by Serbian communists seven years since his death: in the still communist
Southeastern and Eastern Europe, political wills and national aspirations
could only be expressed through the communist party. Communism emerged as a
protector of the national interests of the Serbs at a time when, ahead of
growing democratic processes in the entire international public, it must
have appeared anachronous. Thanks to the dangerous identification of the
people and leadership, Serbia, due to measures implemented by the communists
in their protection of the endangered national and human rights of Serbs and
the state territory in Kosovo and Metohia, was soon branded in the
international public opinion as a state of undemocratic and aggressive
communist repression.
The situation in Kosovo continued to deteriorate. Clashes between the
police and ethnic Albanian secessionists did not stop, while the province
institutions, from the police and judiciary, to finances and the economy,
were still controlled by the local ethnic Albanian bureaucracy which,
supported by the other Yugoslav national-communist lites (particularly
Slovenian and Croatian), resisted the demands of "inner Serbia". The
measures undertaken by the new Serbian authorities in Kosovo again proved to
be a neocommunist delusion on the possibility of an ideological partnership
to overcome the existing national conflicts, and that police and economic
measures can stop a strong national movement in which all ideological
differences began to disappear. The former Marxists and Leninists of Enver
Hoxha's type began to adapt to the new political trends in the Eastern and
Southeastern European countries which were paved by the Soviet Perestroika
and Glasnost, endeavoring to win the sympathies of the foreign public by
advocating reforms in socialism and presenting the nationalist conflict in
the light of a struggle for human rights. Every new ethnic Albanian
leadership, appointed with approval from Belgrade, proved unfit to curb and
disinclined to condemn the nationalist movement of its people. Subversions
in Serbia's northern Vojvodina province and in Montenegro, which returned to
its Serbian identity, were directly provoked by the Kosovo and Metohia
question, and the new balance of political forces in the party helped Serbia
retrieve its say in the matter concerning its provinces. The congruity of
these events nearing the 600th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo (1989),
the Serbs' main national holiday, consolidated the authority of the new
leadership in Serbia in which the people, unaccustomed to differences in
political opinion, gave priority to the saving of national territory. With
the disintegration of the Titoist order in Yugoslavia fresh uprisings broke
out in Kosovo and Metohia followed by bloody clashes with the police,
strikes and diversions which, after an attempt by the communist assembly in
Kosovo, in which ethnic
Albanians predominated, resulted in the abolition of the state of
Kosovo and the introduction of a state of emergency, after the proclamation
of the Albanian state of Kosovo in during 1990.
The failure of the Serbian communists in late eighties to comprehend
the extent of the international repercussions of the ethnic strife in
Yugoslavia, and pretentious in the worst Titoistic manner, incapacitated an
active communication of Serbia with the centers of political and economic
power in the world. Due to a negative view of "Serbia's Bolshevik
repression", the aggressive and Orientally brutal ethnic Albanian national
movement in Kosovo and Metohia was able to present its goals as an authentic
and pacific movement of an unusually numerous ethnic minority (it accounts
for 15-20% of Serbia's population) which is striving to realize its
legitimate human and social rights. However, open support extended to the
Democratic Alliance of Kosovo (a party which rallies ethnic Albanians in
Kosovo) by the new communist leader of Albania, Ramiz Aliu (both before and
after the first democratic elections in Albania), with considerable
participation by agents of the Albanian secret service Sigurimi in the
organization of strikes and armed conflicts (some 200-400 Albanian agents
were infiltrated into Yugoslavia in 1990 alone), clearly reveals that a
centuries-long ethnic, national and inter-state conflict cannot be justified
by ideological differences or a human rights struggle. The fact that the
ethnic Albanian question in Kosovo and Metohia is not in reality an issue of
ideological differences and human rights is evident from the stands of
Serbian opposition parties which are waging a bitter struggle with the
former communists and present socialists for the democratization of the
country. They are all willing to negotiate with the leadership of the ethnic
Albanian national movement about all controversial issues except the one on
which the ethnic Albanian side insists: the change of the state borders of
Serbia and Yugoslavia.5 The ethnic Albanians' refusal to take
part in the December 1990 multi-party elections and be registered in the
regular Yugoslav census (April 1991) shows the unwillingness of their
leadership to find a democratic solution.
1 S. Hasani, Kosovo. Istine i zablude, Zagreb 1985, p, 175
2 Cf Albanians and their territories Tirana 1985
3 Sta i kako dalje na Kosovu. Dalja drustveno politicka aktivnost SSRNJ
u realizaciji politicke platforme za akciju SKJ u razvoju socijalistickog
samoupravljana, bratstva i jedinstva i zajednistva na Kosovu Beograd 1985,
Cf documents on Serbian complaints in Noc oporih reci. Kompletan stenogram o
svemu sto se govorilo na zboru u Kosovu Polju u noci izmedju 24. i 25.
aprila 1987. Specijalno izdanje Borba, maj 1987.
4 K. Magnusson The Serbian Reaction Kosovo and Ethnic Mobilization
Among the Serbs Nordic Journal of Soviet & East European Studies vol. 4
3 (1987) pp. 3 30, A Dragnich, The Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia The Omen of
the Upsurge of Serbian Nationalism in East European Quarterly vol. XXIII No
2 (1989) pp. 183 198, Cf A. Jeftic, Od Kosova do Jadovna Beograd 1988; idem,
Stradanja Srba na Kosovu i Metohiji od 1941 do 1990, Pristina 1990; R
Stojanovic, Ziveti s genocidom, Hronika kosovskog bescasca, Beograd 1989; A
Djilas (ed.), Srpsko pitanje, Beograd 1991
5 Demokratija, 3. 08. 1990.
Continuity and discontinuity
Ethnic intolerance between the Albanians and Serbs, deepened by
centuries of confrontation, was expressed through religious intolerance
(Albanians as Moslems and Serbs as Christians in the Ottoman Empire),
acquiring at the turn of the 20th century vague contours of a national
conflict. Unequal degrees of national integration provoked additional
tensions in the old conflict: while the Serbs conceived the renewal of their
state in the 1804 national revolution, and gained independence in 1878
(Serbia and Montenegro), the Albanians were the last in Europe to begin an
organized national movement in 1878 through a small in number national
elite, but even then with deep social and religious differences which were
not surmounted, not even after the proclamation of the Albanian state in
1912, nor in the interwar period. The national integration of the Serbs,
though incomplete, stopped in 1918 with the creation of the Kingdom of
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, in which the majority of Serbs lived in one
state and conceded their national ideology to institutions of Yugoslav
character. Discontinuity in the development of the Serbian national
movement, deepened during the 1941-1945 war, turned under communist rule
into a 50-year-old vacuum whose effects on the protection of primary
national interests proved almost fatal. The Albanian national integration
had continuity, as opposed to the Serbian one. The young, aggressive and
expansive national movement, closed within itself, developed without a
standstill, regardless of whether it was lead by feudal lords, outlaws,
foreign patrons, Albanian or Yugoslav communists. In a society which
harmoniously accepted both in Albania and Yugoslavia the ideological monism
of xenophobic isolation which suited its internal tribal structure and a
certain intolerance that was racial as well as ethnic. After receiving
political asylum in France, the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare pithily
explained the nature of the internal resistance of the Albanian society to
all ideological challenges. "Communism has not really penetrated into the
depths of Albanian society. The Albanians are, as it were, racists: they
consider those who do not share their moral customs amoral, as the classic
Greeks considered other peoples Barbarians. This racism probably played a
role in the Albanian resistance to socialism."1 From this
perspective, the depth of the conflict and the mutual misunderstanding of
Serbs and Albanians is shown in brighter light. However, it is important to
note that in this centuries-old conflict to which their seems no end, in the
second half of the 20th century Albanians in Kosovo and Metohia won crucial
support from Yugoslav communists to the detriment of Serbs.
1 Ismail Kadare Interview in Le Monde, 26. 10. 1990. 34
PART ONE: HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY
KOSOVO AND METOHIA
A HISTORICAL SURVEY
In the thousand year long-history of Serbs, Kosovo and Metohia were for
many centuries the state center and chief religious stronghold, the
heartland of their culture and springwell of its historical traditions. For
a people who lived longer under foreign rule than in their own state, Kosovo
and Metohia are the foundations on which national and state identity were
preserved in times of tribulation and founded in times of freedom .
The Serbian national ideology which emerged out of Kosovo's
tribulations and Kosovo's suffering (wherein the 1389 St. Vitus Day Battle
in Kosovo polje occupies the central place), are the pillars of that grand
edifice that constitutes the Serbian national pantheon. When it is said that
without Kosovo there can be no Serbia or Serbian nation, it's not only the
revived 19th century national romanticism: that implies more than just the
territory which is covered with telling monuments of its culture and
civilization, more than just a feeling of hard won national and state
independence: Kosovo and Metohia are considered the key to the identity of
the Serbs. It is no wonder, then, that the many turning-points in Serbian
history took place in the and around Kosovo and Metohia. When the Serbs on
other Balkan lands fought to preserve their religious freedoms and national
rights, their banners bore as their beacon the Kosovo idea embodied in the
Kosovo covenant which was woven into folk legend and upheld in uprisings
against alien domination. The Kosovo covenant - the choice of freedom in the
celestial empire instead of humiliation and slavery in the temporal world -
although irrational as a collective consciousness, is still the one
permanent connective tissue that imbues the Serbs with the feeling of
national entity and lends meaning to its join efforts.1
1 Cf. D. Slijepcevic, Srpsko-arbanaski odnosi kroz vekove posebnim
osvrtom na novije vreme, (Himelstir 1983); D. Bogdanovic, Knjiga o Kosovu,
Beograd 1985; Zaduzbine Kosova, (Prizren-Beograd 1987); Kosovo i Metohija u
srpskoj istoriji, (Beograd 1989);German translation: Kosovo und Metochien in
der serbishen Geschichte, (Lausanne 1989); Kosovo. Proslost i sadasnjost,
Beograd 1989 English translation: Kosovo. Past and present, (Belgrade 1989).
R. Mihaljcic, The Battle of Kosovo in History and in Popular Tradition,
(Belgrade 1989).
The Age of Ascent
Kosovo and Metohia, land lying in the heart of the Balkans where viutal
trade routes had crossed since ancient times, was settled by Slav tribes
between the 7th and 10th centuries. The Serbian medieval state, which under
the Nemanjic dynasty (12th to 14th century) grew into a major power in the
Balkan peninsula, developed in the nearby mountain regions, in Raska (with
Bosnia) and in Duklja (later Zeta and then Montenegro). The center of the
Nemanjic slate moved to Kosovo and Metohia after the fall of Constantinople
(1204). At its peak, in the early the 14th century, these lands were the
richest and the most densely populated areas, as well as state and its
cultural and administrative centers.1
In his wars with Byzantium, Stefan Nemanja conquered various parts of
what is today Kosovo, and his successors, Stefan the First Crown (became
king in 1217), expanded his state by including Prizren. The entire Kosovo
and Metohia region became a permanent part of the Serbian state by the
beginning of the 13th century. Soon after becoming autocephalous (1219), the
Serbian Orthodox Church moved its seat to Metohia. The heirs of the first
archbishop Saint Sava (prince Rastko Nemanjic) built several additional
temples around the Church of the Holy Apostles, lying the ground for what
was to become the Patriarchate of Pec. The founding of a separate
bishophoric (1220) near Pec was indicative of the region's political
importance growing along with religious influence. With the proclamation of
the empire, the patriarchal throne was permanently established at the Pec
monastery in 1346. Serbia's rulers alotted the fertile valleys between Pec,
Prizren, Mitrovica and Pristina and nearby areas to churches and
monasteries, and the whole region eventually acquired the name Metohia, from
the Greek metoch which mean an estate owned by the church.
Studded with more churches and monasteries than any other Serbian land,
Kosovo and Metohia became the spiritual nucleus of Serbs. Lying at the
crossroads of the main Balkan routes connecting the surrounding Serbian
lands of Raska, Bosnia, Zeta and the Scutari littoral with the Macedonia and
the Morava region, Kosovo and Metohia were, geographically speaking, the
ideal place for a state and cultural center. Girfled by mountain gorges and
comparatively safe from outside attacks, Kosovo and Metohia were not chosen
by chance as the site for building religious centers, church mausoleums and
palaces. The rich holdings of Decant monastery provided and economic
underpinning for the wealth of spiritual activities in the area. Learned
monks and religious dignitaries assembled in large monastic communities
(which were well provided for by the rich feudal holdings), strongly
influenced the spiritual shaping of the nation, especially in strengthening
local cults and fostering the Orthodox doctrine.
In the monasteries of Metohia and Kosovo, old theological and literary
writings were transcribed and new ones penned, including the lives of local
saints, from ordinary monks and priors to the archbishops and rulers of the
house of Nemanjic. The libraries and scriptoria were stocked with the best
liturgical and theoretical writings from all over Byzantine commonwealth,
especially with various codes from the monasteries of Mounth Athos with
which close ties were established. The architecture of the churches and
monasteries developed and the artistic value of their frescoes increased as
Serbian medieval culture flourished, and by the end of the 13th century new
ideas applied in architecture and in the technique of fresco painting
surpassed the traditional Byzantine models. With time, especially in
centuries to come, the people came to believe that Kosovo was the center of
Serbian Orthodoxy and the most resistant stronghold of the Serbian
nation.2
The most important buildings to be endowed by the last Nemanjices were
erected in Kosovo and Metohia, where their courts which became their
capitals were situated. From King Milutin to emperor Uros, court life
evolved in the royal residences in southern Kosovo and Prizren. There rulers
summoned the landed gentry, received foreign legates and issued charters.
The court of Svrcin stood on the banks of Lake Sazlia, and it was there that
Stefan Dusan was crowned king in 1331. On the opposite side was the palace
in Pauni, where King Milutin often dwelled. The court in Nerodimlje was the
favourite residence of King Stefan Decanski, and it was at the palace in
Stimlje that emperor Uros issued his charters. Oral tradition, especially
epic poems, usually mention Prizren as emperor Dusan's capital, for he
frequently sojourned there when he was still king.3
Among dozens of churches and monasteries erected in medieval Kosovo and
Metohia by rulers, ecclesiastical dignitaries and the local nobility, Decani
outside of Pec, built by Stefan Uros III Decanski, stands out for its
monumental size and artistic beauty. King Milutin left behind the largest
number of endowments in Kosovo, one of the finest of which is Gracanica
monastery (1321) near Pristina, certainly the most beautiful medieval
monument in the Balkans. The monasteries of Banjska dear Zvecan (early 14th
century) and Our Lady of Ljeviska in Prizren (1307), although devastated
during Ottoman rule, are eloquent examples of the wealth and power of the
Serbian state at the start of the 14th century. Also of artistic importance
is the complex of churches in Juxtaposition to the Patriarchate of Pec. The
biggest of the royal endowments, the Church of the Holy Archangels near
Prizren, erected by Tsar Stefan Dusan in the Bistrica River Canyon, was
destroyed in the 16th century.4
Founding chapter whereby Serbian rulers granted large estates to
monasteries offer a reliable demographic picture of the area. Fertile plains
were largely owned by the large monasteries, from Chilandar in Mount Athos
to Decant in Metohia. The data given in the charters show that during the
period of the political rise of Serbian state, the population gradually
moved from the mountain plateau in the west and north southward to the
fertile valleys of Metohia and Kosovo. The census of monast