Will Yugoslavia disintegrate?
THE YUGOSLAV press agency, Tanjug, was the first to give information about the
N WEDNESDAY January 24, some 30,000 demonstrators gathered in front of the Committee building of the League of Com-
YUGOSLAVIA among them the ex-manager of the mine, face several years in prison.
Half a million Albanians have passed through the hands of the
According to Tanjug, these clashes munists (LCY) in
Kosovo's capital, Pristina. They demanded demonstrators were bloody and followed an end to the state of emergency, an amnesty for political prisoners, the introduction of a multiparty
To become the "media godfather" of the system, free elections and the reseventual liberation of the Albanian people ignation of Rahman Morina, the discredited leader of the League in is of great use to the Yugoslav regime as a the province. The police used tear means of refurbishing its image; It enables gas and truncheons and 16 demonthem to overlook recent events in the
League's leadership denounced
Yugoslav province of Kosovo, which has
"counter-revolution" and a the
"Slovene-Albanian separatist plot" orchestrated from Albania, and reaffirmed that Kosovo was a part of the Serb republic.
The next day, a general strike broke out in more than 40 towns and villages in Kosovo. Some 30 factories stopped work, and shops stayed closed.
Students boycotted lessons and university canteens. The demonstrators shouted slogans considered "hostile" by the police;
"liberty and equality"; "free Adam Dema-
Many dead and wounded in
The demonstrations continued on Saturday and Sunday. The worst events took place in Pec and Orahovac where the police opened fire on the crowd - there were six dead and more than 100 wounded. The number of those arrested remains unknown. The following week, more than
200,000 Albanians came out in the streets
Local clashes between the police and the Albanians have been taking place almost daily. At a primary school in Pristina, the police handcuffed and maltreated children who had protested against the sacking of three Albanian teachers. At Pec the Ramiz Sadiku enterprise was shut on the pretext of bankruptcy and 6,000 Albanians found themselves jobless. The enterprise has for a long time been a thorn in the side of the Serbs, who considered it a
"nest of separatists." The assembly of the workers in front of the enterprise to protest against the sackings coincided with the opening of the Congress of the
Serbian League of Communists, and this led to the gathering being characterized as showing disapproval of Serb policy and, of course, led to numerous arrests.
According to the Slovene weekly, Mladina, 39 people have been killed since the between the Albanian police and by persecution. an Albanian majority. NINA JERKIC and JEAN ZINDEL start of the state of emergency in February 1989, including children. According to an official report, all were counter-revolutionaries. On the other hand, the report says nothing about those kept in "isolation". One would have liked to know more about the conditions in which the "isolated" cases are held, without formal charges, without a time limit and without any right to a defence. This method has been in use for a long time in Kosovo to silence intellectuals, journalists, students and so on. Mladina esti-
The trial of Azem Vlassi (the ex-head of the Kosovo LCY) continues, in the absence of journalists, because "the room is too small". Azem Vlassi and 14 others are accused of organizing demonstrations of miners in Trepca in February 1989. In the absence of any evidence, the charges hinge on the fact that he visited the miners on strike at the Trepca mine. Vlassi was a convinced Titoist, but he had a base of support amongst the Albanian population. He and the other 14 accused, special police and accounts of torture in the prisons are a regular feature of the Amnesty International Yugoslavia has signed the International Convention against torture in prisons. At the end of the war, the Albanians had no rights in Yugoslavia. It was only in 1974 that the new constitution gave them some rights in the sphere of the Albanianization of schools and universities. But the demonstrations that broke out in 1981 for reasons that remain obscure saw the birth of revolution", and the Albanians were reduced to second class citizenship. Little has been known about this problem, due to lack of solid information, while the LCY in the other republics feared a clash with Serbia if they protested.
Representative front of Yugoslav Albanians
The opposition in Kosovo has now begun to organize itself. Some 500,000 Albanians belong to the Democratic Union of Kosovo, led by Ibrahim Rugova, founded last December. This organization and its many factions are the first representative platform of Yugoslav Albanians, and may be able to control the desire for vengeance on the part of individuals and isolated groups. Albanians have never been scared of weapons and local traditions of vengeance make the Corsican vendetta look like a tea party. It is against this background that the mass departure of Serbs from Kosovo should be understood.
How did things get to this state? In the case of the Serb-Albanian dispute there is a symbolic conflict: in 1389, the Serbs were defeated on the Fields of Kosovo by the Turkish army. This was the end of the independent Serb kingdom, while Kosovo remained the heart of the Serb nation. Currently, the Albanian birth-rate is far higher than that of the Serbs and these latter have the feeling that their historic symbol is being taken over by strangers, these second-class citizens. The Albanians, in fact, have been living in the region for thousands of years. The Slavs arrived in the 1. Adem Demagi is an Albanian Yugoslav writer, who has never supported armed struggle. Nonetheless he 23 seems to hold the European record for political imprisonment: 28 years.
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insurrectional events in Albania.
Hungary
International Viewpoint #180 • March 12, 1990
YUGOSLAVIA Balkans at the time of the great invasions around the 6th century. Both sides refer to their own legitimacy without listening to the other.
It is no accident that this conflict has erupted now. These exacerbated nationalisms have their origins in a severe economic crisis, itself due to the system of cavalry charges practised on a national scale. When Fikret Abdic fell, this Bosnian business man, who was very close to Tito, dragged down in his wake every illu-
Austria
Lyubjana
SLOVENIA
Zagreb
CROATIA
~ Rijeka
BOSNIA AND
100mls/160km
Romania
Vojvodina
Novi Sad
*BELGRADE
HERCEGOVNIA sion of a country that had wanted to play in the big league. The era of the
Sarajevo pseudo-capitalists was over, and that of Slobodan Milosevic arrived.
"Slobo", as he is called both by his MONTENEGRO supporters and his enemies, wants to be more than merely the representative of the Serb republic. He sees himself as the guarantor of Yugoslav unity, the man arisen to replace Tito. The latter had in any case, a serious defect: he was Croat, not Serb. And it was Tito who granted Kosovo a certain measure of autonomy, and who had made sure not to designate a suc"revolving presidency" system (each republic taking the office in turn for a year) and then going off leaving the situa-
Milosevic - the man of destiny?
• Milosevic wants to reunify the country and rescue it from the crisis provoked by separatists from all nationalities and greedy business men. Even so, it would be a mistake to see in him a simple Poujadist. Milosevic is an experienced politician, a fluent demagogue advocating freedoms - within specific limits, of course. Enjoying certain talents as a tribune, his intervention on the Kosovo Fields on the 600th anniversary of the battle was his moment of glory. Behind him came hundreds of vehicles decorated for the occasion, along with a broad crosssection of the Serb Orthodox clergy.
His meetings are a weapon against the LCY leaderships in the other republics, who might dare to show their defiance of the Serbs. In this way he has brought down the leaderships of the LCY in Vojvodina, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montethe people, who supposedly love the Serbs and Yugoslavia, from their separatist leaderships. This system worked until the Slovenes, seeing the trap, prohibited one of these meetings in Ljubljana. In reply, Serbia decided on the immediate cessation of economic relations between the two republics, without thinking that this measure would cause Serbia a lot more trouble than Slovenia. In fact the pro-Milosevic paper, Politika soon decided that the blockade did not 24 include paper...
In fact the Yugoslav problem dates
Adriatic Sea Italy from the creation of the country in 1918. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismembered and disparate peoples were reunited in the same state. The vision of a "country of South Slavs" originated with certain late 19c intellectuals (Pribicevic, Supilo) as an alternative to the centuries of Austrian, Hungarian and Turkish domination. The scheme glided lightly over the myriad of other peoples who lived in the region — Bulgarians, Turks, Hungarians, Albanians, Romanians, Gypsies, Italians, Germans and others, who did not have a strong cultural identity. It also neglected the different experiences of colonial domination of the various Slav peoples: to simplify, Austrian domination of the Slovenes; Hungarian control of Croatia and Ottoman rule in Serbia. Despite permanent cultural resistance, the various occupiers left markedly different heritages, making dialogue between the South Slav peoples difficult and opening the way to a simmering racism. Lack of interest in everything beyond Zagreb
This generalized incomprehension leads Slovenes to consider everything that goes on beyond Zagreb as of no interest, the Croats to consider the Slovenes as pretentious snobs and to choke when they hear the term "Serbo-Croat" (there are two very different languages) and the Serbs to distrust the bourgeois separatists to their North. As for the rest....a single label, "Muslim nationality", serves as a holdall for the various non-Slav peoples allows the peculiarities of each community to be passed over and the whole lot to
Kragujevac SERBIA Kosovska Mitrovica Kosovo 7 Titograd
Skopje MACEDONIA Albania Greece be cast into the limbo of tranquil ignorance. Exception that proves the rule: the unity between Slovenes and Albanians, unimaginable five years ago, which stems from facing a common enemy — Serbia. The Kosovo events are only known about outside the province through the Slovene paper Mladina.
Slovenia's defiance of its powerful Serb neighbour is justified by the methods being employed both on the political and military plane. The Slovenes cannot be indifferent: if they do not condemn this intervention, what will they do in the case - hypothetical, but imagined by everybody - of an intervention directed not against Pristina, but at Ljubljana? Many young Slovenes are stating their determination to fight an eventual armed occupation, and it is doubtful that tanks could restore order if the situation deteriorated.
### Danger of Slovenian secession
The greatest danger that Serbia is watching out for is a Slovene secession. This republic of 2 million people provides 30% of the Yugoslav GNP. The rate of unemployment is only 2% despite the crisis, as opposed to 20% in the rest of the country. A break with the Federation, recently adopted in principle by the Slovene parliament, would not only lead to the Federation flying apart, but would also mean an economic cataclysm, leaving those republics and their populations who have lost out economically on the touch-line. Furthermore, the Serbian LC remains one of 2. The reference is to a major corruption scandal that led to the resignation of Bosnia-Herzegovnia's vice-president in September 1987.