Serbs Were Not Oppressing Kosovo Albanians
Antimulticulture
http://emperors-clothes.com/gilwhite/talk.htm
November 13, 2005
Part I:
We have been sold a false picture of Kosovo
On March 24th 1999, NATO began bombing civilian Serbia because, it claimed,
this was the only way to stop widespread ethnic cleansing against Albanians
by the Yugoslav government.
Ordinary Westerners accepted this.
One cannot blame them, exactly. For years, the Western media had been
alleging that nationalist unrest by separatist Albanians in Kosovo stemmed
from the fact that they were supposedly a besieged minority, persecuted by
an ultranationalist Serbian state. Given this media barrage, by the time
NATO bombed Serbia, the Western public easily believed NATO's claims that
this was necessary to prevent a genocide against Albanian civilians in
Kosovo.
But suppose I told you that the following list summarizes the political
facts in Kosovo in 1981, when the separatist activity by radical Albanians
began in earnest:
(1) Kosovo Albanians controlled the provincial government;
(2) Kosovo Albanians controlled the cultural institutions;
(3) Albanian was the official language in the province (and in fact
Serbs in Kosovo were forced to learn Albanian, not the other way around);
(4) Education was conducted in Albanian;
(5) Albanians were the overwhelming majority of students at
Pristina University;
(6) Albanians were the overwhelming majority in the Kosovo police
force;
(7) As The Economist reported in 1981, "Mr Fadil Hoxha [was] a
member of Jugoslavia's collective state presidency and a Kosovo Albanian."
[1] What does this mean? The collective presidency of the Yugoslav
federation was composed of representatives from its constituent republics,
and also representatives from Kosovo and Vojvodina. However, Kosovo and
Vojvodina were not republics of Yugoslavia but provinces of Serbia. Thus,
Kosovo was treated as if it were a republic of Yugoslavia as far as the
collective presidency of the federation was concerned.
(8) Since 1974, the Kosovo parliament in Pristina (Kosovo's
capital) could veto decisions taken in Belgrade that corresponded to the
entire Republic of Serbia (of which Kosovo is a province), but Belgrade had
no say on matters that were decided in Pristina (!).
(9) Albanians were discriminating against Serbs in industry and in
the political administration.
(10) Kosovo Serbs, apparently starting in the 1970s, were subjected
to low-level terrorism and harassment by either the Albanian KLA or its
precursors. This caused a trickle, then a flood of Kosovo Serbs to flee the
province out of fear for their lives.
Is this the picture of an oppressed Albanian minority in Serbia? Or is this
the picture of an oppressed Serbian minority in Kosovo?
As it bombed Serbia, NATO claimed that, underneath the shower of bombs,
Milosevic was murdering 100,000 - or else 500,000 (who's counting?) - Kosovo
Albanians.
A large number. But what if I told you that all the people who died in the
bombing, put together, add up to no more than 788 people?
And that's not even the Albanian civilians - that figure represents all
deaths, and therefore includes dead Serbian soldiers and civilians, as well
as Albanian KLA terrorists.
You reasonably might suspect that I got my numbers wrong. But these are not
my numbers, they are NATO's! In fact NATO has not produced even one Albanian
civilian murdered in Kosovo by the Yugoslav army or security services! [2]
Are you scandalized by that?
If not, then perhaps this will do it: NATO's excuse to start the bombing was
an allegation that there had been a massacre in the Kosovo town of Racak,
but Racak was a Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) hoax set up in collaboration
with NATO! [3]
In other words, the entire war against Serbia was a put up job by NATO and
the mainstream Western media. Those who know a bit about the war on Viet
Nam, which was justified with a faked attack on US troops that never
happened (Gulf of Tonkin), and which was carried out by lying to the
American people repeatedly, consistently, and massively, will see the
similarities.
And which is the bigger scandal, here?
Is it that NATO lied to us repeatedly in order to start a war of aggression
against innocent Serbs? Is it that NATO allied itself with the worst
fascists, terrorists, and Islamic fundamentalists - people who took pride
and joy in massacring thousands of Serbian civilians?
Or is the bigger scandal the fact that none of this ever became a
front-page-headline scandal in the Western press (unlike Viet Nam, where the
lies did, eventually, surface)? Is the bigger scandal the fact that ordinary
Westerners, whose taxes paid for the slaughter of innocent Serbs, still
don't know what truly happened in Yugoslavia?
It's a tough call...
The KLA, on whose behalf NATO bombed Serbia, claimed to be defending Kosovo
Albanians from the oppression that the mainstream media said they were
suffering at the hands of Serbs, generally, and at the hands of the
government of Serbia in particular. It is this media portrayal that helped
build plausibility in Americans' minds for the idea that the Yugoslav army
was about to commit genocide. Since Americans did not - and still do not -
know much about Yugoslavia, the portrayal was believed, accepted on the
faith and trust they place on what they perceive to be an 'independent' and
'free' press.
Had Americans known a bit about Yugoslavia, however, they would have laughed
out of court the claim that the Serbs had been oppressing the Albanians, let
alone the accusation that a genocide against Albanians was in the wings. Had
Americans known what the social and political situation was in Kosovo in the
early 1980s, when violent separatist activity in Kosovo began in earnest,
the propaganda campaign that explained Albanian terrorist violence and
secessionist sloganeering as produced by Serbian oppression of the Albanians
could never have succeeded.
I shall document all of the bulleted claims I made above concerning the
political realities in Kosovo in 1981, but first I'll give a short summary
of what happened.
In 1981, riots turned violent in Kosovo amid Albanian nationalist and
separatist slogans. Many Balkan analysts agree that this is the moment when
the train that wrecked Yugoslavia was set in motion, for the unrest in
Kosovo fed into other nascent nationalist stirrings in other parts of the
country.
Nothing, of course, is ever that simple, but there is no question that the
1981 riots in Kosovo represented a very worrisome development as it was the
first time since the 1960s that popular demonstrations involving violence,
and linked to separatist sloganeering, had been seen in Kosovo. And they
were a harbinger of things to come.
But the question for a historian should be: why the riots of 1981?
If a historian or a political analyst argued that the extensive political
autonomy and privileges enjoyed by Albanians in Kosovo - unequaled for a
national minority anywhere else - naturally led to violent Albanian riots
crying for secession in 1981, then we would sit up and listen.
The explanation better be good, and it better do three things:
1) Make clear why, given that Albanians were obviously not oppressed, they
nevertheless thought themselves to be.
2) Satisfy us that, under their extraordinarily positive conditions, a
widespread sense of injury sufficient to produce violent riots by Albanians
was even possible.
3) Argue successfully that an Albanian perception that they were 'being
oppressed' was a more plausible cause for the riots than alternative
explanations.
That is a tall order.
Alternative hypotheses easily come to mind. An oppressed population that
loses patience with its condition is not, after all, the only thing that can
produce violent riots. We know from recent meetings of the G7 that a handful
of radicals can provoke a nervous police force into overreacting, injecting
a great deal of violence into a peaceful demonstration. This changes the
general character of the street activity as once non-violent demonstrators
turn to violence in self-defense. Similar things have happened at some
street celebrations following the conclusion of a major sports tournament,
when jubilant crowds end up involved in considerable violence.
So one obviously cannot go directly from the fact of violent riots to the
conclusion that the bulk of those participating were necessarily interested
in protesting oppression, or even doing so with violence. And in the case of
Kosovo, given that there was no oppression to protest against, such a
conclusion is not only implausible but unreasonable.
And it is significant, in this regard, that the events of 1981 in Kosovo
began as a demonstration to protest conditions in the dormitory at Pristina
University. It is not clear what, if anything, this could have to do with
secession, and it raises the suspicion that perhaps violent minority
radicals, with an agenda all their own, turned a narrow student
demonstration into something very different.
The mainstream media, and published scholarly work on Yugoslavia, has for
the most part avoided any kind of analysis along such lines. Instead, they
have presented the 1981 riots as though obviously reflective of the
legitimate grievances of a supposedly oppressed population. In other words,
as if this did not fly in the face of the political and social facts in
Kosovo!
Take, for example, the following passage from Lenard J. Cohen's widely read
Broken Bonds: The disintegration of Yugoslavia (1993:46-47).
[Quote from "Broken Bonds" starts here]
"Throughout Yugoslavia, the economic discontent of the 1980s became closely
intermingled with burgeoning ethnoregional nationalism. Only one year after
Tito's death, nationalist protests by Albanians erupted in Serbia's
economically underdeveloped province of Kosovo, setting in motion a pattern
of ethnic conflict that intensified throughout the decade. Albanian
nationalist leaders and much of the Albanian population (composing 77.4
percent of Kosovo's population in 1981) expressed resentment against what
they viewed as the privileged position of Serbs and Montenegrins in the
province and against Kosovo's subordination to Serbian republican officials
in Belgrade. For their part, the Serbs in the province claimed that they
were being subjected to 'genocide' and 'terror' by Albanian nationalists,
who, they alleged, desired not only the complete elimination of all Serbs
and Montenegrins from Kosovo, but also the eventual removal of the country's
entire Albanian population from the control of Serbia and possibly even
Yugoslavia.
The conflict between Abanians and Serbs in Kosovo spilled over and
complicated other ethnoregional problems in the country."
[Quote from "Broken Bonds" ends here]
The paragraph contains an obvious slant: the Kosovo Albanians had legitimate
grievances, and these were significantly the fault of local Serbs and the
authorities in the Republic of Serbia. Although the Serbs voiced grievances
too, these cannot be given much credence, Cohen intimates, and should be
viewed as a defensive nationalism that rises to counter the demands of the
Albanians.
Most Americans would find nothing the matter with the above slant because
they heard it in the mainstream media over and over again. They also heard
that NATO's bombing of Serbia was necessary to prevent a Holocaust
(principally through CNN's Christiane Amanpour, whose husband Jamie Rubin
was at the time - coincidentally? - US State Department spokesman!).
However, virtually every word in Cohen's paragraph above - and in the rest
of his book - turns upside down the actual realities of Kosovo in 1981.
If you have read this far, however, you may be wondering why you should
believe my list of political and social facts in Kosovo more than you do
Cohen's portrayal.
A fair question. But I shall not ask you to believe me.
In 1982, the US military - the same establishment that would later make the
decision to bomb Serbia - published a country study of Yugoslavia:
Nyrop, R. F. 1982. Yugoslavia: A country study. Headquarters, Department of
the Army, DA Pam 550-99: American University
Such country studies are published all the time to assist diplomats and
others who may need a crash course on a particular country. This particular
study was completed immediately after the 1981 riots that Cohen alludes to
above, and it comments at length on the social and political situation in
Kosovo, as well as on the riots themselves. As you will see below, this
country study substantiates - and for most points explicitly and directly -
the assertions in my list of political facts about Kosovo, at the top of
this article.
In other words, before the US military developed a propaganda need to
demonize the Serbs in order to bomb them, it had no trouble acknowledging
that the Kosovo Albanians enjoyed autonomy and protections unprecedented for
a national minority anywhere in the world, and unprecedented for any period
in human history.[9]
That is no exaggeration, as we shall see.
--
Jim
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Western_Nationalist
Union Against Multiculty
"Abolish Multiculty and String Up The Traitors!"
Antimulticulture
http://emperors-clothes.com/gilwhite/talk.htm
November 13, 2005
Part II.
The Analysis
Lenard Cohen is hardly the only academic who misportrays the realities of
Kosovo. Readers are left to speculate as to their motivations. What cannot
be denied is that Cohen and others have reversed the facts and put the world
exactly upside down.
To dramatize this phenomenon, I shall examine each sentence in Cohen's
portrayal of the situation in the quote above, and will compare it to how
the study done by the US military described the social and political
situation in Kosovo in 1981. My readers will then be able to judge whether
it is possible for an honest scholar to write as Cohen does. The chosen
quotation is perfectly representative of the entire slant of Cohen's book.
In the quoted paragraph, Cohen opens with the following phrase.
"Throughout Yugoslavia, the economic discontent of the 1980s became closely
intermingled with burgeoning ethnoregional nationalism."
This suggests a causal model. Not explicitly in the sentence, since he says
'intermingled,' but in my view few readers are likely to fail to interpret
this as an implication of causality, especially given that Cohen's previous
chapter, which the reader has just left, is a litany of alleged economic
horrors in the former Yugoslavia.
This therefore has a framing effect: economic disturbance leads to ethnic
strife.
But there are so many impoverished places in the world where ethnic conflict
does not take place, and also quite a few wealthy places where it does (e.g.
N. Ireland) that the importance of economic factors in causing the conflict
cannot just be implied or stated. It has to be defended. As we shall see, in
this case that is very hard; Yugoslavia was, relatively speaking, not that
poor, and the Kosovo Albanians were not suffering oppressive conditions
under any conceivable interpretation of 'oppressive'. Moreover, the local
examples contradict the thesis that relative economic disadvantage is what
leads to secession: Slovenia and Croatia were the first to secede from
Yugoslavia and they were the richest constituent republics of that former
state.
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"Throughout Yugoslavia, the economic discontent of the 1980s became closely
intermingled with burgeoning ethnoregional nationalism .[so].after Tito's
death, nationalist protests.erupted"
This makes it sound like it was the explosion of accumulated and pent up
feelings. That is what a volcanic eruption is, after all: magma accumulates
and is pressing from below, but it is trapped and can't get out, so the
pressure builds. When the pressure becomes very strong, there is an
explosion, and you get the 'eruption'.
Cohen's chosen metaphor is consistent with his implication that discontent
over economic conditions was 'building up,' so to speak. However, given
reactions to the events at the time, it does not appear that discontent had
been accumulating in this manner.
This is Eric Bourne, writing a week after the riots in The Christian Science
Monitor:
[Quote from Christian Science Monitor starts here]
"The riots have resulted in many injuries and arrests and have taken 11
lives. They have also bewildered Yugoslavia's new leaders, who want to know
who was behind the riots, and why.
.The region has since been under strict military curfew while worried local
and federal leaders ponder the source of the disturbances. So far, it is
baffling even the security skills of a country well versed in the
traditional labyrinth of Balkan "konspiratzia" and political plotting."[10]
[Quote from Christian Science Monitor ends here]
Notice that Bourne remarks that Yugoslavia's leaders were "bewildered" and
"baffled," and didn't know who was behind the riots or why.
Bourne is reporting a picture of utter surprise.
He did not contradict this because he himself was surprised. Thus, he went
on to consider 4 theories of how the riots might be Machiavellian and
orchestrated by forces outside Kosovo that may have wanted to destabilize
Yugoslavia by making trouble in Kosovo (the Soviet Union and Albania, for
example). The Yugoslav leaders were themselves worriedly considering these
possibilities.
This is Marvine Howe writing a few weeks later in The New York Times:
[Quote from Marvin Howe starts here]
"Nearly a month after the rioting in a southern province of Yugoslavia, it
is still unclear what the troubles were all about.
It is uncertain whether the incidents, in which at least 9 people were
killed and 59 seriously injured, were a spontaneous outburst of nationalist
discontent by the ethnic Albanians who make up most of the province's
population or a meticulously planned action to undermine the Yugoslav
Government.
What is evident from both public and private declarations by key officials
is that Belgrade considers the events in Kosovo Province of the utmost
gravity and is not very sure what to do to prevent a recurrence."[11]
[Quote from Marvin Howe ends here]
Howe goes on to detail a 'Greater Albania' scenario meant to dismember
Yugoslavia that the country's leaders had long believed the Soviet Union was
planning and which they worried might explain the 1981 riots.
This scenario had the Soviets clandestinely supporting subversive pressures
to create violence leading to demands in Kosovo that it be elevated to the
status of a Yugoslav republic. This republic would then exert pressure for
the Albanian dominated areas of Macedonia and Montenegro to be integrated
into an ethnically homogenous Albanian Yugoslav Republic. Since a Yugoslav
republic constitutionally had the right of secession, the newly constituted
Albanian Yugoslav Republic would then proceed to do this and unite itself
with Albania in a 'Greater Albania'. Then, Bulgaria, which had always
alleged that the remaining inhabitants of Macedonia are really Bulgarians,
would feel justified in claiming the remaining territory in rump Macedonia.
Should Bulgaria annex Macedonia the Soviet Union would gain a straight
corridor to the Mediterranean.
As we see, then,
1) the Yugoslav government was at a loss to explain the events;
2) the idea that machinations from the outside were responsible seemed at
least worth considering to the Yugoslavs; and
3) media reports at the time (as evidenced above) were also scratching their
heads about these riots.
The riots were not expected, it was "unclear what the troubles were all
about," and they did not make much sense in the context of the political
conditions of Kosovo.
I do not offer the Yugoslav government's speculations of a Soviet plot as
evidence for such a plot, merely as evidence that the Yugoslavs were
speculating. The communist government of Yugoslavia was constantly worried
about homegrown nationalisms that might develop and tear the country apart
(and legitimately so). Their security services were always keeping watch
over such developments, and were not likely to be caught off-guard, as
Bourne observed in the Christian Science Monitor. Thus, if the Yugoslavs
were sufficiently surprised by the 1981 riots to wonder about outside
influences, then perhaps we should take the speculation seriously. Perhaps
there was no 'eruption.'
Eruptions are anticipated: the ground shakes, the mountain exhales fumes,
etc. You can see the signs of the accumulation of pressure. But Yugoslavia's
leaders were bewildered and baffled, and suspected outside influences. It
was certainly not obvious to them that this had been a spontaneous outburst
of a widespread and homegrown nationalist discontent. The general picture
suggests that the riots were relatively sudden and were not preceded by
relatively clear signs of building pressure.
I should not give the impression that there was no constituency for
irredentist nationalism in Kosovo. The 1982 country study done by the US
military says:
"According to an interview with the federal secretary for internal affairs
published in the aftermath of these [1981] demonstrations, a variety of
Albanian nationalist activities and incidents had been taking place in
Kosovo and those areas of Macedonia inhabited by Albanians throughout the
1970s. These incidents included the painting of nationalistic slogans on
buildings, distribution of nationalist pamphlets, and organization of secret
societies-which resulted in the arrest, trial, and punishment of 600
individuals."-Nyrop (1982:222)
The size of this nationalist Albanian constituency in the 1970s and leading
up to 1981, however, is a key question. The government activity to suppress
violent nationalists in Kosovo could be evidence of widespread nationalist
activity, or it could be evidence of considerable government concern. A
handful of nationalists can provoke considerable suppressive activity by the
state if they are sufficiently radical, or if the government is sufficiently
worried about nationalism, or both. In a country as touchy about possible
nationalist stirrings as Yugoslavia was, and replete with unreconstructed
fascist ex-allies of the Nazis among the Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Kosovo
Albanians, as was Yugoslavia, it did not take much to invite suppressive
activity from the government in this domain.
To give just one example, consider that in the same year, 1981, "Professor
Franjo Tudjman, a [Croatian] historian and former Partisan general, gave a
series of interviews to Croatian émigré journals and received a three-year
sentence for 'hostile propaganda'" because such émigré organizations were
"dedicated to an independent Croatia [and] engaged in a terrorist campaign
mostly against Yugoslav diplomats" (Nyrop 1982:70). The concerns of the
Yugoslavs were not baseless, dozens of government officials had already been
murdered by the Croatian terrorists (see APPENDIX).
Though Yugoslavia was a liberal country by comparison to the Eastern bloc
countries and the Soviet Union, and though its citizens enjoyed considerable
freedoms of the press, etc., and even the freedom to emigrate, ethnic
nationalisms (which had caused unparalleled blood-letting during WWII) were
officially tabooed, closely watched, and stamped out when identified. It is
obvious from all this that authorities were keeping a close eye on such
activities in Kosovo, and knew they had a constituency. But if they were
bewildered and baffled by the 1981 riots (as the news accounts at the time
suggest), then they must have been unprepared for the scale of the violence
they encountered, and the suddenness of the conflagration. This suggests
that the riots were out of all proportion to the size of the known
constituency for irredentist nationalism in Kosovo.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
"Throughout Yugoslavia, the economic discontent of the 1980s became closely
intermingled with burgeoning ethnoregional nationalism. Only one year after
Tito's death, nationalist protests by Albanians erupted in Serbia's
economically underdeveloped province of Kosovo, setting in motion a pattern
of ethnic conflict that intensified throughout the decade. Albanian
nationalist leaders and much of the Albanian population (composing 77.4
percent of Kosovo's population in 1981) expressed resentment."
To know that there were nationalists in Kosovo does not tell us how most of
the Albanian population felt. Cohen says that "much of the Albanian
population.expressed resentment," but this is a vague formulation. Since we
are not given a figure, and since we do not have privileged access to Cohen'
s mind, it is impossible to determine whether he is exaggerating. From
looking at the data that he himself relies on, however, it seems that he
might be.
Cohen repeatedly uses polling data about participation in the League of
Yugoslav Communists as an index of the support that there was for the unity
of federal Yugoslavia, interpreting participation in the league as
synonymous with support for a united Yugoslavia. This list has an utterly
amazing datum which Cohen does not pause for even a second to examine: as
late as 1989, residents of Kosovo had-by far-the highest rate of
participation in the league. And in 1981, when the disturbances occurred,
they were practically tied in first place with Bosnia. Here is the table
(Cohen 1993:48):
Table 2.1b - Membership in the League of Yugoslav Communists (in
percentages)
Thus, looking at this table, Kosovo would be the last place one would
predict that was going to 'erupt' in nationalist discontent. Cohen (2001:26)
tells us that Albanian membership in the league rose steadily until, by
1978, Albanians constituted nearly 2/3 of the communist membership in
Kosovo. This means that 34.5% of Kosovo Albanians were members of the
communist league immediately prior to the 1981 disturbances, and thus that
they had the highest participation of any ethnic group in the country
(because the participation of Bosnia is divided into Serbs, Croats, and
Bosnian Muslims). Such facts lend support to the idea that the authorities
would have been rightly surprised by a sudden conflagration of nationalist
sentiment in Kosovo.
One could argue it the other way and say that high participation in the
league was an indication of looming ethnic strife. But Cohen chooses the
opposite interpretation because the whole point of the league was to create
a cadre of Yugoslav loyalists in every region. Indeed, Cohen's thesis is
that the low participation in Croatia evident in the table was symptomatic
of burgeoning nationalist activity there.
But, in any case, for Kosovo it matters little which way one interprets the
significance of participation in the communist league because it is almost
perfectly constant there. So not only is it difficult to argue on the basis
of this data that nationalist activity in Kosovo had widespread grass-roots
support, but it is also difficult to argue that the nationalist pressure was
building up.
What then of the hypothesis that the violence in 1981 was the work of a few
radical elements who were getting support from forces outside Kosovo wishing
to destabilize Yugoslavia? Well, Kosovo borders Albania. When the
Yugoslav-Soviet split happened, shortly after WWII, Albania had sided with
the Soviets, who threatened several times to invade Yugoslavia. Moreover,
the Nyrop military study says that immediately after the 1981 riots:
"The Albanian leadership [that is, from Albania, the country], through its
closely controlled press, expressed open support for the demands raised by
the demonstrators in Kosovo, calling for the "liberation of Kosovo from the
tutelage of Serbia," and raised thinly veiled irredentist demands of their
own in Yugoslav territories."-Nyrop (1982:223; my insertion)
Also consistent with the 'outside forces' hypothesis are the apparent
dynamics of the riots. A curious fact that Cohen never mentions is that
"poor living conditions at Pristina University" were responsible for
"sparking" the riots of 1981 (Nyrop 1982:77). It is not obvious why one
should see, at a disturbance that has as its "spark" a protest over the
living conditions at the University, any demonstrators who "wanted full
status as a republic" for Kosovo, and even less some who "suggested that the
proposed Kosovo republic ought to include Albanians in Macedonia and
Montenegro too," and still even less "some extremists [who] voiced
secessionist sentiment calling for a 'Greater Albania'" (Nyrop 1982:77).
What does any of this have to do with the quite possibly awful dormitories
at Pristina University?
Given that Kosovo was heavily subsidized by the other Yugoslav republics
(see below), and hardly oppressed but all to the contrary (see below),
Albanians were quite unlikely to get "better conditions" at the University
or anywhere else by becoming a part of Albania, which was and is (1) a
radically impoverished country far below the living standards of Yugoslavia;
(2) unable to favor Kosovo with the astonishing subsidies it enjoyed in
Yugoslavia; and (3) with a truly Stalinist system of government that
contrasted sharply with Yugoslavia's considerably more liberal policies.
But if a few radical elements assisted from the outside were indeed active,
it becomes easier to understand why anybody would call for a 'Greater
Albania' at a demonstration to protest for better living conditions at the
university, and also why such a demonstration could become a violent riot:
perhaps what began as a student demonstration was infiltrated by a few
radicals who wanted to create a nationalistic confrontation.
It is well-documented from recent meetings of the G7, etc., that peaceful
mass demonstrations can easily be turned into violent riots when a few
radicals provoke a nervous police force to overreact and manage thus to use
this state organ as a tool for causing a much larger proportion of the
demonstrators to engage in angry violence. Such an overreaction by the state
would also tend to make the irredentist claims of the nationalists more
palatable to the other demonstrators, and would also create a fresh
grievance leading to more anger in the streets. That these radicals could
count on a vigorous reaction if they engaged in violence while chanting
nationalist slogans was virtually guaranteed by the fact that there was
always great concern in Yugoslavia that ethnonationalist activity could
ignite another civil war.
The 'outside influences' hypothesis has sufficient circumstantial evidence
going for it that one would expect a scholar to put it on the table-if only
to dismiss it. It deserves this minimal courtesy, especially since it was
being considered by the Yugoslav government. But Cohen does not even allude
to it-not even as a speculation entertained at the time by the authorities;
not even to call it a 'scapegoat.' Nothing.
Cohen simply proceeds as though everybody knows that the Albanian
separatists had reasons to be upset. But I shall address the question that
Cohen ignores: did the Albanian nationalists among the rioters have
legitimate grievances?
As we shall see, to investigate this question is to provide even more
circumstantial evidence for the 'outside influences' hypothesis.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
"Throughout Yugoslavia, the economic discontent of the 1980s became closely
intermingled with burgeoning ethnoregional nationalism .[so].after Tito's
death, nationalist protests.erupted. Albanian nationalist leaders and much
of the Albanian population (composing 77.4 percent of Kosovo's population in
1981) expressed resentment against what they viewed as the privileged
position of Serbs and Montenegrins in the province and against Kosovo's
subordination to Serbian republican officials in Belgrade."
Since Cohen emphasizes that the Kosovo Albanians were 77.4 percent of the
population, his statement that Albanians felt "resentment against what they
viewed as the privileged position of Serbs and Montenegrins in the province"
seems to suggest that the province was a less extreme form of the South
African model: a tiny minority has control of all the institutions and
economic power, whereas the vast majority are disenfranchised. Most people
in the West, educated as they are by the mainstream media, probably have
this picture of Kosovo. But what Cohen does not tell you is that Kosovo
Albanians were in control of the provincial government, and all other
important institutions.
"Kosovo became an autonomous province in 1968; Albanians had extensive
control of the local political administration, and cultural and educational
organizations."-Nyrop (1982:76)
Does that look like the picture of a province where Serbs and Montenegrins
had a privileged political position?
And if not, then why does Cohen write that "much of the Albanian
population...expressed resentment against what they viewed as the privileged
position of Serbs and Montenegrins in the province"? Cohen provides no
comment on "what [Albanians] viewed" and thereby communicates that he
considers the supposed Albanian view as justified.
One of course may wonder about economics. Perhaps the Serbs were privileged
economically if not politically? But in fact the Serbs in Kosovo were mostly
peasant farmers, and they were not economically dominant. This was true even
of white-collar Serbs. Consider:
"Between 1961 and 1981 Serbs dropped from roughly 23 percent to slightly
more than 13 percent of the province's population; at the same time,
Albanians rose from two-thirds to over three-quarters of all inhabitants of
Kosovo. In part the Albanian high birthrate accounted for the province's
changing ethnic portrait; the exodus of Serbs from the province, however,
was more worrisome to Serbian officialdom. There had been a trickle of
Serbs, mostly white-collar workers, displaced by the growing Albanian
presence in local industry and government administration from the late 1960'
s onward."-Nyrop (1982)
There was an exodus, the Nyrop military study says, of white collar Serbs
leaving the province of Kosovo because they were being "displaced by the
growing Albanian presence in local industry and government."
Those who occupy a privileged economic position are not forced to go looking
for jobs elsewhere because they get displaced. In fact, the Serbs were being
actively discriminated against.
To see the justice of this point, consider first that the access Albanians
had to higher education was as good or better than that enjoyed by Serbs in
Kosovo.
Pristina University, founded in 1970, was Yugoslavia's third largest
university by 1980. Its enrollment expanded nearly seven times in the decade
and was transformed from being a disproportionately Serb student body to one
predominantly Albanian."-Nyrop (1982:76)
However, this did not translate into greater numbers of Albanians who were
trained for white-collar jobs in the private sector. Albanians
overwhelmingly chose to study such things as history and literature, rather
than obtain marketable degrees.
"While the number of Albanians holding higher academic degrees rose, the
preponderance of graduates in the liberal arts gave Kosovo little of the
technical expertise it needed... The dramatic increase in educated Albanians
contributed less to an indigenous intelligentsia than to unemployed
academics."-Nyrop (1982:76)
Since the white-collar Serbs who could not get jobs in Kosovo were
apparently better trained than the Albanians, then we can see that not only
were the Serbs not economically privileged, but they were in fact being
discriminated against.
Thus, Serbs had a privileged position neither in politics, nor in access to
education, nor in economic status... Quite the opposite.
Had Cohen included these details in his book he would have had to reword his
paragraph or else his claims about the supposedly privileged position of the
Serbs in Kosovo would have seemed utterly bizarre. This does not look like
minority colonialism or apartheid at all, and, to the extent that there
seems to be unfair patronage, it goes against the Serbs.
Serbs were not the 'establishment' in Kosovo, the Albanians were.
Cohen also does not include the interesting constitutional status of Kosovo.
Was it colonial? Or even remotely approximating colonialism? A colony is
controlled by the mother country and cannot run its own affairs. Kosovo was
a province of Serbia, true, but a province and a colony are hardly the same
thing, especially if the province is autonomous and all its institutions are
run by the locally majoritarian ethnic Albanians.
In fact, 'autonomous' doesn't quite describe it.
Cohen writes that Albanians "expressed resentment against what they viewed
as...Kosovo's subordination to Serbian republican officials in Belgrade."
What subordination?
The Kosovo parliament, meeting in Pristina, could veto Serbia-wide measures
passed by the Serbian parliament in Belgrade, but Belgrade did not have a
similar veto power over decisions taken in Pristina pertaining to Kosovo!
That's subordination?
".even in policy areas formerly subject to uniform solution throughout
Serbia, the provincial leaders-primarily the Albanian dominated leadership
of Kosovo (for the leadership of Vojvodina remains heavily Serb)-exercise de
facto veto power through their representatives in the [Serbian] republican
parliament. The constitutional provisions for the organization and operation
of the Serbian parliament have created a de facto federal structure for the
republic [of Serbia]."-Nyrop (1982:192)
Again, had Cohen included these facts in his book, he would have had to
reword his paragraph, for otherwise the claim about Kosovo's supposed
subordination to Serbia would have seemed fantastic.
What remains? The police, perhaps...
Nyrop (1982:192) does say that the security police apparatus in Kosovo was
under the direct administration of the Serbian republican apparatus, and
characterizes this as almost the only element of formal subordination of the
province of Kosovo to Belgrade.
This may appear to be disproportionately meaningful because the police can
easily be an organ of repression. However, Nyrop's statement pertains to the
degree of linkage between the chains of command in the security police
apparatus in Kosovo and republican-level authorities. Whatever the
institutional structure of this chain of command, it does not change the
fact that the manpower of the Kosovo police force was predominantly
Albanian, something that even Cohen (2001:62) concedes was true as late as
1987, when nationalist passions in Kosovo were considerably more inflamed
and the mostly Kosovo Albanian policemen beat peasant Serbs who had come to
air their grievances to Slobodan Milosevic, who was then visiting Kosovo.
Could we at least say that Kosovo was economically exploited, as a province,
by Belgrade? Many who attack the Serbs like to portray the relationship
between Belgrade and Kosovo as a colonial one. In the minds of many, this
suggests that Kosovo was plundered and exploited because colonies often are.
But not only was Kosovo not a colony, it was economically subsidized. And
not just a little: 70% of its income came from the federation. "In the 1970s
Kosovo was the biggest gainer in transfer funds; with less than 20 percent
of the population of the less developed regions, it received one-third the
[total] federal investment funds [in Yugoslavia]" (Nyrop 1982:66). Since
1957 Kosovo had been designated as a 'less-developed region' and therefore
eligible for federal funds (Nyrop 1982:64).
An enormous effort had been made to benefit Kosovo disproportionately and
bring it economically up to par with the other regions of the country.
What about language, then? Perhaps the Kosovo Albanians were not allowed to
speak their own language?
Subjugated peoples gripped by secessionist feelings are typically not
allowed to speak their language. The English did not allow Irish; the Turks
do not allow Kurdish, etc. The suggestion that there was a relationship of
subordination and/or subjugation again will suggest to many that Albanians
could not express their culture.
But in Kosovo, most everything official, and almost everything else
(education, commerce, etc.) was conducted in Albanian. The right to make
Albanian the official language in Kosovo was explicitly specified in the
Yugoslav constitution of 1974 (see Krieger 2001; pp.2-11):
Article 246: The languages of the nations and nationalities and their
alphabets shall be equal throughout the territory of Yugoslavia. [...]
Albanians were a "nationality" (rather than a "nation") in the definitions
used by the Yugoslav constitution, and so the following applies to them:
Article 247: In order to ensure that its right to express its nationality
and culture shall be realized, each nationality shall be guaranteed the
right freely to use its language and alphabet, to develop its culture for
this purpose to set up organizations and enjoy other
constitutionally-established rights [...]
This freedom to express Albanian culture extended to all of cultural and
political life in Kosovo. Albanians dominated the political administration
and could thus decree that official life and education be conducted only in
Albanian. But though this may have satisfied a desire for cultural
expression, it crippled Albanians because, as the Nyrop (1982:76) study
states, "Employment opportunities for Albanian speakers were limited in
Serbo-Croatian regions."
This kept Kosovo economically backward despite the high subsidies. An
additional problem, economically, was the high rate of Albanian population
growth.
"Perhaps the single most damaging [economic] factor.was the poorer regions'
cripplingly high population growth rate. Between 1947 and 1966 Kosovo's
national income grew by 320 percent-hardly less than Slovenia's 360 percent.
Per capita, however, Slovenia's growth rate was 311 percent to Kosovo's 274
percent. The picture is one of general postwar economic growth-but the rank
of the individual regions on a national income scale has changed little. Had
the less developed regions maintained a population growth rate comparable to
that of the developed north.Kosovo's rate would increase from one third to
half the Yugoslav average."-Nyrop (1982:66)
When there was an economic downturn in the 1970s and the Albanian growth
rate did not let up, Kosovo was especially hard hit.
None of this can be explained in terms of inattention from the federal
authorities, oppression of the Albanians at the hands of Serbs, or the
'subordination' of Kosovo to Belgrade. These are wounds that Albanians
inflicted on themselves with the unparalleled autonomy given to Kosovo and
the extensive control Albanians had of the province. The predilection of
Albanians for degrees in the humanities that offered few job prospects can
hardly be blamed on anybody but the same Albanians who chose to pursue such
degrees. The choice of Albanian leaders in the political administration to
educate and conduct most of Kosovo's official life in Albanian prevented
labor from migrating to areas with higher employment opportunities. And the
high growth rate of the Albanian population which prevented economic growth
in the province from translating into per-capita improvements comparable to
those of the other republics was due to the millions of individual and
freely-made decisions of Albanian fathers and mothers.
One final point deserves to be made here.
There are simply no examples of colonialism where people from the colonized
country are sent to govern the mother country. None. So it is worth noting,
for example, that Fadil Hoxha, a Kosovo Albanian, was vice-president of
Yugoslavia's collective presidency from 1978-79. [11a] This is the final
nail on the coffin of any interpretation that wishes to suggest that
Albanian radical separatism resulted from conditions of oppression in a
colonial or apartheid system.
So what exactly was the supposed "resentment" of the Kosovo Albanians that
Cohen refers us to about? How can such an argument be defended in light of
the above facts? It is noteworthy that (1) Cohen does not try to construct
it, but merely states it (or implies it), and (2) he leaves out all of the
above information. If he had included this information, then his implicit
characterization of the situation in Kosovo would have stuck out as
positively aberrant, and would demand a quite extensive explanation of his
slant.
Kosovo was a province coddled with extensive subsidies that were
considerably costly to the other republics, and enjoyed a degree of
political, cultural, and constitutional autonomy that amounted to the status
of a Yugoslav republic in everything but name (including representation in
the rotating presidency of the federation, and an asymmetric veto power in
the republic of Serbia).
The one thing it lacked was the right to secede from Yugoslavia.
Thus, the indignant passion for making Kosovo a bona-fide Yugoslav republic
indeed suggests that what the radicals really wanted was to secede, which
again is consistent with other cries heard at the same 1981 riot calling for
a 'Greater Albania'. The entire picture is consistent with a group of
radicals who wish to generate the conditions for secession rather than a
mass upwelling of discontent following unnecessarily harsh or unjust
conditions.
But lest someone find sufficient evidence of 'oppression' in Kosovo's
inability to secede and in the reluctance of Serbian authorities to consider
giving it the republican status that would have enabled secession, it is
important to review the pertinent historical facts that underlie this
reluctance, which facts are entirely absent from Cohen's book.