anians. Instead of a political emancipation and
economic progress of the ethnic Albanians' minority, the local communist
leadership in Kosovo and Metohia and the Islamic institutions (including
Bekteshi order, widely spread among ethnic Albanians), had the same aim:
pushing out the Serbs; the modernization of Kosovo and Metohia for which the
federation had put aside huge sums, turned out to be symbolic. The enormous
resources from the federal funds which were intended for the economic and
cultural development (these amounts reached the sum of over 1 million US
dollars per day in the late seventies and in the eighties) were spent in a
similar way as the help the Third world countries received from the European
states. Instead of economy, the communist-national oligarchy spent the money
on propaganda of secession ideology and used it for joint political action
with communist Albania.
At the same time, the friendship of the Yugoslav communist leadership
with the Third World Muslim countries helped a lot create a suitable climate
for the penetration of Muslim fundamentalism which, for ethnic Albanians,
mainly signifies traditional framework of civilization. Albania, formally
atheistic, watched with favor upon the biological expansion of ethnic
Albanians in Yugoslavia and the support of Islamic institutions and
officials, because it all led to a final goal: the creation of the Greater
Albania. Being the nation with the highest birthrate in Europe (28 promils),
ethnic Albanians soon became the majority in Kosovo and Metohia. Another
200,000 native Serbs, faced with constant physical and political pressure,
looked for a safer life outside the Province. The Serbs in Kosovo and
Metohia became, in their own state, a persecuted and unprotected minority.
From making almost a half of the population after World War II, the number
of Serbs in Kosovo and Metohia dropped to 15-20% of the population.
One year after Tito's death, in March 1981, ethnic Albanians announced
their rebellion against Yugoslavia by setting a fire at the Pec
Patriarchate, a complex of medieval churches, where the throne of the
patriarch of Serbian Orthodox Church is formally located. It surfaced again
that religious intolerance remained the deepest layer of their obsession
against the Serbs. Several days later they came out into the streets
demanding that the Province gets republic status so that they could acquire
one more right which only republic (according to a Leninist principle) hold:
the right to self-determination up to secession. The Yugoslav communists
have for the first time openly shown the true face of their national policy
in the case of Kosovo and Metohia: in their ideology every appearance of the
Serbian national identity was considered as the biggest danger for the
internal equilibrium of the regime: all other national movements were
watched with complacency. Delegations of Serbs from Kosovo and Metohia were
coming, for almost an entire decade, to the National Assembly in Belgrade,
asking the highest state bodies for protection, pointing to the ties between
the ethnic Albanian oligarchy, the Albanian secret police (Sigurimi) and the
radical currents in Muslim circles. It was ascertained that the local ethnic
Albanians' authorities in Metohia entered Serbian medieval monasteries in
new land-registry books as mosques, while the private land of the Serbian
refugees-peasants, was entered as the ownership of those very ethnic
Albanians (mostly emigrants from Albania) who usurped them in the first
place with the political support of the local authorities. Attacks on
Serbian churches an the demolishing of Orthodox monuments became an everyday
form of expressing Albanian national identity. Significant sign of religious
influence on everyday life of ethnic Albanians is new architecture of
private houses: almost all are surrounded by two or three meters high walls
which, according to Muslim traditions, are hiding Albanian women from eyes
of strangers. Similar picture gives a architecture of public buildings, from
libraries to hotels: all of them are shaped with strong Muslim tradition.
All recent researches on religion in Yugoslavia shows that ethnic
Albanians, mainly Muslims, are the most religious population: 70% of entire
population; 34% of Serbs are religious, 53% of Croats, 60% of Slovenes and
only 37% of Bosnian Muslims. Among intellectuals 61% of ethnic Albanians,
15% of Serbs and 19% of Bosnian Muslims are religious; in lower classes 85%
of ethnic Albanians, 48% of Serbs and 60% of Muslims in Bosnia and
Herzegovina.
The persecution of the Serbs in Kosovo and Metohia and their
innumerable appeals to the Serbian and Yugoslav public, managed to shake the
Serbs out of their comfortable Yugoslavism. It appeared that Yugoslavism was
only an ideological framework consistently neutralizing the political,
economic, cultural and the entire national potential of the Serbs. They
evoked from the forbidden past their Kosovo pledge, once again discovering
the essence of their national identity. The awareness of the vital Serbian
interests being threatened, spread under the influence of the oppositional
intellectuals and with the crucial support of unofficial media. The support
which was arriving to Kosovo ethnic Albanians from all Muslim countries, and
even from Muslim intellectuals in Bosnia and Herzegovina, showed that the
question was far more than an ethnical and interstate conflict over the
territory. Becoming aware of the nation being endangered, Serbs began to
return to the national and political traditions, culture and religion,
realizing that once again, like in the age of the Ottoman rule, their lands
will be the scene of the final phase of the centuries-long clash between the
basically Islamic concept of society and the European-shaped Serbian
civilization.
Unfortunately, the Serbian movement in Kosovo was skillfully used by
new communist leadership in Serbia who in 1987 introduced the populist
policy to preserve the old bureaucratic structure upon rediscovered national
ideals. But the accelerated disintegration of the Yugoslav federation showed
that narrow interest of the ruling communist and post-communist national
lites hid underneath a heap ethnic tensions which could hardly be overcome
by democratic means.
A deep driving force of all tectonic disturbances in Kosovo and Metohia
emerged from layers beneath the deceptive communist reality and the
inheritance of centuries long conflict of different nations: a clash of two
civilizations, the Christian and the Islamic, which found cohabitations
difficult even in other European countries where Islamized population is
usually a minority.
Ethnic strife in Kosovo and Metohia are, for many influential Serbian
intellectuals, only stirred up foam on the surface of the sea whose
invisible currents hide its true contents. Although the clash between these
two mutually excluding points of view will be taking place under the
protection of different ideological premises adjusted to the demands of the
political situation, the clash of civilisations as a powerful process of "la
longue duree", remains the framework which will, maybe even permanently,
determine the further flow of history in this entire region. It is only to
be hoped that the influential rays of the European integration, based on
democratic institutions, market economy and civil sovereignty will, in the
long run, turn out to be the more stable than the challenges fixed by
historical heritage.
FIGURES:
Otoman Vilayets
Serbia 1804-1913
Comunist Yugoslavia: Federal Organization
Settling of Albanian tribes
Fig. 1: Ottoman Vilayets
Fig. 2: Serbia 1804-1913
Fig. 3: Comunist Yugoslavia: Federal Organization
Fig. 4: Settling of Albanian Tribes