Kosovo

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KOSOVO.

KOSOVO'S SIGNIFICANCE
WORLD WAR I
INTERWAR PERIOD
ITALIAN AND ALBANIAN OCCUPATION
THE ERA OF SOCIALISM
TOWARD DISSOLUTION
TOWARD INTERNATIONAL
ADMINISTRATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kosovo lies between Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, and Montenegro. Its population of approximately two million people is estimated to be over 90 percent Albanian, with the remainder being Serbs, Montenegrins, Muslim Slavs, ethnic Turks, Roma, and others. While it remains a formal part of Serbia-Montenegro, it has been under the United Nations' international administration since 10 June 1999, when the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1244. This Resolution marked the end to NATO's military campaign, "Operation Allied Force," against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The NATO campaign had begun on 23 March 1999 and was designed to compel the Yugoslav government to cease violating the human rights of Kosovar Albanians and to accept changes in Kosovo's political status.

Discord over Kosovo's legal and political status lay at the heart of the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) that began in the early 1980s and continues, as of 2006, to impede diplomatic efforts to end the fractious conflicts in this corner ofsoutheastern Europe. Mediators from the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States have been addressing an issue that has defied resolution since the decline of Ottoman power in the Balkans just before World War I.

KOSOVO'S SIGNIFICANCE

Kosovo's deep emotional and symbolic significance to Serbs and Albanians has obstructed the search for a peaceful settlement of national differences. Albanians claim to have lived in Kosovo as Illyrians and Dardanians well in advance of the Slavic invasions of the Balkans in the sixth and seventh centuries. Kosovo was also the site of the Prizren League following the Berlin Congress in 1878 that gave birth to the modern Albanian national movement. On the other hand, Serbs claim Kosovo as "the cradle of Serbian civilization." It was the center of the medieval Serbian state and long the seat of the patriarchate of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The defeat of Serbian forces by the Ottoman Army on 28 June 1389 has forever anointed Kosovo as a symbol of the "new Jerusalem" that is central to the Serbians' sense of place in the Balkans. Over the centuries, a cycle of folk epics about Kosovo transformed these memories so that Serbs closely associated Albanians with the Ottoman Empire and saw them as incapable of governing their own state.

This history provides background to the formation of national states with the retreat of Ottoman power from the Balkans at the end of the Balkan Wars. This retreat led to the creation of an independent Albania that left up to 40 percent of ethnic Albanians outside its borders. The victorious Serbian and Montenegrin armies arrived in Kosovo in 1913 to find a land in which they were greatly outnumbered. The Yugoslav census of 1921 recorded that 280,440 of the 436,929 inhabitants, or 64.1 percent of the population, were Albanian speakers. After World War II Albanians comprised an absolute majority of Kosovo's population and grew from 498,242 people, or 68.5 percent of the population, in 1948 to 1,607,690 people, or 82.2 percent of the population, in 1991. In that same period, the Serbs' share of the population shrank from 23.6 percent in 1948 to 9.9 percent in 1991. Montenegrins' share of the population shrank from 3.9 percent in 1948 to 1 percent in 1991. The Serbian government's efforts to transform Kosovo back to the center of Serbian political and cultural life have been faced with these population trends.

WORLD WAR I

Albanian rebel bands known as Kaçaks resisted the advance of Serbian and Montenegrin forces into Kosovo. As many as twenty thousand Albanians in Kosovo were killed and tens of thousands fled the area during this initial Serb occupation in 1912–1913. With the Serbian defeat by German-Austrian forces in 1915 during World War I the situation was reversed. The Serbian Army, led by its government and royal family, was forced to retreat through Kosovo into Albania and as many as one hundred thousand people died in the trek. Kosovo's Albanian majority initially welcomed the partitioning Austrian, German, and Bulgarian powers. Local government in the Austrian sector employed the Albanian language and the Austrians set up three hundred Albanian-language schools and training academies. Conditions under Bulgarian occupation were significantly worse and were marked by compulsory labor service and forced requisitions of food. With the Austro-Hungarian forces' reversal of fortune in 1918 Serbian troops again brutally occupied Kosovo much as they had in 1913. According to agreements that were made during the fighting among the Allied powers, Kosovo was awarded to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes at the Paris Peace Conference and Kosovo was known as the "southern region" of Serbia and was part of "Old Serbia."

INTERWAR PERIOD

In the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes that was proclaimed on 1 December 1918 Kosovo was part of southern Serbia. The establishment of Yugoslavia, ruled by a royal dictatorship, on 6 January 1929 led to an administrative reform in which the territory of Kosovo was split into three separate banovinas or regions. Albanians were considered a national minority but the government denied them important rights contained in the Treaty on the Protection of Minorities, which it had signed in 1919. Albanians could not legally attend schools taught in their own language, nor were any Albanian-language publications on sale. Only 2 percent of eligible Albanian students were enrolled in secondary schools. All leading administrative positions of authority were in the hands of ethnic Serbs.

Possibly in anticipation of this inequality, a Committee for the National Defense of Kosovo, or Kosovo Committee, was formed to encourage as many as ten thousand rebel Kaçaks to engage in an anti-Serbian insurgency throughout all Albanian areas in southern Serbia and Montenegro. This insurgency remained active until the end of 1924, when it was finally suppressed by the government in Belgrade with the cooperation of the Albanian government headed by Prime Minister Ahmet Zogu (1895–1961), who had been forcibly removed from this position a year earlier by a coalition that included the Kosovo Committee. The Serbian government assisted Zogu's return to power with this cooperation in mind.

Throughout the interwar period, the Serbian government focused on changing the ethnic composition of Kosovo and sponsored an agrarian reform that primarily featured a colonization program under which former Montenegrin and Serb soldiers were encouraged to emigrate in exchange for land. Under this program, just under two hundred thousand hectares of land—of 584,000 total hectares of land—were redistributed to as many as seventy thousand colonists. Between the two world wars, tens of thousands of Albanians emigrated to Greece, Albania, and Turkey. In 1938 the government signed a convention with the government in Turkey that foresaw the emigration of two hundred thousand people to Turkey over the next six years.

ITALIAN AND ALBANIAN OCCUPATION

These plans were interrupted by Nazi Germany's attack on Yugoslavia in April 1941 and the subsequent three-way partition of Kosovo. Bulgaria gained control of a small part of eastern Kosovo. The northern section that contained valuable zinc- and lead-producing mines in the city of Mitrovica was attached to the quisling regime in Serbia. The rest of Kosovo was joined with Albanian-inhabited regions of western Macedonia to Albania, which had been conquered by Mussolini's Italy in 1939. In a manner reminiscent of the pattern established during World War I the Italian region saw the establishment of Albanian-language elementary schools. The German military occupiers played a significant role in the occupation of the Serbian section. In the course of the war between thirty thousand and one hundred thousand Serbs fled from or were expelled from the region and between three thousand and ten thousand Serbs and Montenegrins were killed. With the imposition of socialist power in 1944 and 1945 between three thousand and twenty-five thousand Albanians were killed.

Albanian collaboration with the Germans and Italians was driven more by their dislike of Serbs than for their fealty to the goals of the Axis powers. German efforts to develop a Kosovar division to fight against the Serbs were not very successful. Similarly, the antifascist partisans led by the Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) failed to win significant Albanian support for their cause of establishing a government that gave every nation the right to self-determination. Even the communists' declaration at the beginning of 1944 that appealed to a desire for unity with Albania by working with the communist movement throughout Yugoslavia did not lead many Albanians to join the Communist Party. In July 1945 Kosovo was formally annexed to Serbia. In the period before Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Stalinist Cominform in 1948 there was hope that Kosovo could be reunited with Albania as part of a larger Balkan Federation.

THE ERA OF SOCIALISM

From 1945 until 1990 Kosovo enjoyed autonomous status within the Socialist Republic of Serbia. It was known officially as "Kosovo-Metohia" or "Kosmet" until 1968. (A metoh is an Orthodox Church holding and the title emphasizes Kosovo's Serbian character.) Kosovo was an "Autonomous Region" until the passage of a new Yugoslav constitution in 1963, when it became an "Autonomous Province." Under reforms that were promulgated in 1968 and strengthened in the 1974 constitution Kosovo's government gained a status equivalent in most respects to that of the six Yugoslav republics, with direct representation on Yugoslav federal bodies and the right to write its own constitution, but without the formal right of succession.

This constitutional evolution reflected the changing political circumstances in Kosovo and Yugoslavia more broadly. Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Cominform in 1948 raised fears in Belgrade that anti-Yugoslav propaganda emanating from Albania might have appeal among Kosovo's Albanians. The Serbian-dominated secret police subsequently imposed harsh rule over the region. In the 1950s Serbs and Montenegrins accounted for 50 percent of party membership and of industrial workers when they only made up 27 percent of the population. The regime held public show trials of Albanians accused of subversion and espionage. Thousands of Albanians declared themselves Turks and emigrated to Turkey. The pendulum swung back again with the reforms in the late 1960s, which gave Kosovo Albanians the right to fly a flag bearing the Albanian national emblem. The University of Pristina grew rapidly as an educational center and, under an agreement with the University of Tirana, Kosovo students used textbooks printed in Albania and were taught by visiting professors from Albania. The Albanian share of the industrial and professional workforce, management structures, League of Communists, and police force increased considerably in the period after 1974.

TOWARD DISSOLUTION

The improved position of Albanians in Kosovo led to increasingly strong demands for elevation of Kosovo's status to that of a republic within the Yugoslav Federation. The culmination of these demands came in massive student demonstrations less than one year after Tito's death in 1981. The strong suppression of these demonstrations and the efforts of Albanian communists to restore order quieted neither the demands of increasingly radical Albanians nor the province's Serbs, whose emigration from Kosovo had begun to increase still further. By the mid-1980s Serbs and Montenegrins in Kosovo began openly complaining that they were under a great deal of pressure and began to organize for defense of Serbs in Kosovo. The situation of Serbs in Kosovo became a national cause célèbre as the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986 drafted a memorandum that criticized Serbia's socialist politicians for allowing the genocide of Serbs in Kosovo and leading Serbia to its greatest defeat in history. Developments in Kosovo were also central in propelling the career of Slobodan Miloševi? (1941–2006), the first senior politician to acknowledge the validity of Serb anger toward Kosovo. Miloševi? manipulated Serb fears over Kosovo in support of his efforts to gain power throughout the Yugoslav federation and then to create the conditions for the wars that plagued Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo throughout the 1990s.

The Serbian constitution of 1990 eliminated Kosovo's autonomy and Kosovo began to be referred to again in official Serbian documents as Kosmet. The newly established administration systematically removed Albanians from the mass media, government and administration, business, and management, as well as from the health and educational systems. Albanian ceased to be a language of instruction in the university and in high schools. Legislation was passed forbidding the sale of property to Albanians. This repression increased still further as the Serbian government became involved in wars fought in Croatia and Bosnia.

TOWARD INTERNATIONAL
ADMINISTRATION

This repression led many thousands of Albanians to emigrate from Kosovo and Albanians remaining in Kosovo to boycott participation in all aspects of official social and political life. They organized a nonviolent parallel political system that was led in the early years by the Democratic League of Kosovo or LDK. Its leader, Ibrahim Rugova (1944–2006), was overwhelmingly elected president in 1992. Contributions from Albanians employed at home and abroad provided the basis for the development of a parallel system of education and health care. By 1997 the failure of this movement to win independence or international recognition led to the emergence of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which engaged in guerrilla warfare in regions that were favored by the Kaçaks in the 1920s. Fighting escalated in 1998 and many thousands of Kosovar Albanians fled into the hills to continue the fighting. Threatened with NATO bombardment, Serbian president Miloševi? accepted an unarmed observer mission from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) that would facilitate political negotiations between the Serbian government and the Albanian movement. The effort to build confidence between Serbs and Albanians on the ground failed with increasingly violent fighting between Serb and Albanian forces. Diplomatic efforts to hammer out a political settlement in February 1999 also failed when the Serbian government refused to sign an agreement that would give Albanians the widest possible autonomy within Serbia. This led to the seventy-eight-day NATO campaign, Operation Allied Force, which focused on Serbian military targets and civic infrastructure. During the fighting the Serbian forces killed an estimated eleven thousand Albanians and drove almost a million Albanians out of Kosovo.

The UN interim administration, which was charged with preparing Kosovo for self-government and for the settlement of Kosovo's future status, was bolstered by a NATO force of forty-two thousand troops to provide security. Hundreds of thousands of Albanian refugees quickly flooded back into Kosovo and have emerged as the predominant political force in Kosovo. These interim arrangements have succeeded neither in preventing thousands of Serbs from emigrating from Kosovo nor in providing a basis on which to build confidence between Albanians and Serbs who remain in Kosovo. There is hope among international negotiators that the negotiations over Kosovo's future status that began in 2005 will succeed at resolving the problems that remained unsolved throughout the twentieth century.