government, killed Essad Pasha in front of the Continental Hotel in Paris,
believing that as an ally to Serbia and then to the Kingdom of Serbs Croats
and Slovenes, he had betrayed the interests of the Albanian people. Essad
Pasha was buried with the last honors in the Serbian army cemetery in Paris.
1 P. Pastorelli, op. cit., pp. 63-86; V. Vinaver, Italijanska akcija
protiv Jugoslavija na albansko-jugoslovenskoj granici 1919-1920. god.,
Istorijski zapisi, XXIII, 3 (1966), pp. 477-515; Z. Avramovski, Albanija
izmedju Jugoslavije i Italije, Vojnoistorijski glasnik, 3 (1984), pp.
164-166.
2 Arhiv Jugoslavije, Delegacija Kraljevine Srba Hrvata i Slovenaca na
Konferenciji mira u Parizu (later in text: AJ, Delegacija), f-27, No 296; D.
Todorovic, Jugoslavija i balkanske drzave 1918-1923, Beograd 1979, p. 50.
3 The Question of Scutari, Paris 1919; A. Mitrovic, Jugoslavija na
Konferenciji 1919-1920, Beograd 1969, pp. 169-176; Documentation in: B.
Krizman - B. Hrabak, Zapisnici sa sednice delegacije Kraljevine SHS na
mirovnoj konferenciji u Parizu 1919-1920, Beograd 1960, pp. 321-324, 365-366
4 Memoir pr sente la Conference de la Paix Paris par son Excellence
le general Essad Toptani pr sident du gouvernement d'Albanie, Paris 16 Avril
1919. (Essad Pasha's correspondence with the Serbian government and his
letter addressed to the Conference in: A3, Delegacija, f-27. The same file
contains the memoirs of Leon Krajewski dated January 2, 1919, focusing
mainly on Essad Pasha's relations with France)
5 AJ, Delegacija, f-27, No 7289; P. Pastorelli, op. cit., pp. 189-225;
D. Todorovic, op. cit, pp. 53-64. Cf P. Milo, L'attitude du Royame
serbo-croato-slovene a I'egard de I'Albanie la Conference de la paw. a
Paris (1919-1920), Studia Albanica, 1 (1989), pp. 37-57.
6 AJ, Delegacija, f-28, Pasic to Prime Minister; A. Mitrovic,
Jugoslavija na Konferenciji mira, pp.
7 Ibid
8 D. Todorovic, op. cit., pp. 49. The originals of a number of
petitions (submitted to the Peace Conference) on the annexation of the
northern Albanian tribes to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes are
kept in: AJ, Delegacija, f-28.
9 Same as footnote 49.
10 AJ, Delegacija, f-27, Nos. 5504, 5376, 6275, 6451, 6589.
11 Z. Avramovski, op. cit., p. 167.
12 AJ, Delegacija, f-27, Nos. 5504, 5376, 6275, 6451, 6589.
13 Ibid, Nos. 5484 - 5489; i. Avramovski, op. cit., pp. 169-170.
14 AJ, Delegacija, f-28, Nos. 6724, 6725.
The cooperation of the Serbian government and subsequently the
government of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes with Essad Pasha is
an important chapter in the history of Serbo-Albanian relations. It was the
first joint effort to resolve issues of dispute between two peoples in the
Balkans to the Balkan peoples principle, in a manner that was, with certain
territorial concessions to Serbia, and subsequently to the Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes, to wipe out old hotbeds of mutual conflict. The
strategic aspirations of the Serbian government to curb the influence of
Great Powers in Albania did not emanate solely from old aspirations to
permanently master northern Albania, but from actual political estimates
that under the influence and protectorat of a Great Power, the Albanian
state would pursue the course of maximalist and national claims to
territories that were inhabited, aside to the Serbian people, by Albanians
-- Kosovo, Metohia and western Macedonia.
Kosovo and Metohia is the native and ancestral land of the Serbs. The
Serbian Jerusalem, which spread over an area of 10,800 km2, is covered with
a dense of about 200 medieval monasteries, churches and fortresses. Kosovo
was the scene of the famous battle held on St. Vitus Day (June 28) in 1389,
when Serbian Prince Lazar and the Turkish emir Murad both lost their lives.
The Ottoman's breakthrough into the heart of Southeast Europe also marked
the beginning of the five centuries long clash of two civilisations:
European (Christian) and Near Eastern (Islamic). The conflict, alive to this
day, is generated in the visible layer also in the clash of the two nations:
the Serbs, mainly Orthodox Christians, and the ethnic Albanians, mainly
Muslims.
The oath of Prince Lazar, derived from the New Testament tradition of
martyrdom that it was better to obtain freedom in the celestial empire than
to live humiliated in the oppression of the earthly kingdom, became during
the centuries of Turkish rule, the key of Serbian national ideology. The
Kosovo oath, woven into the national epos, became the basis upon which the
Serbs built the cult of resisting and not accepting injustice. The Kosovo
pledge was like a flag raising rebellions against the Ottomans and heading
towards its final aim: the restoration of the Serbian national state. Many a
generation of Serbs received its first notions of itself and the world by
listening to folk poems describing the Kosovo sufferings: the apocalyptical
fall of Serbian Empire, the tormentous death of Prince Lazar, the betrayal
of Vuk Brankovic, the heroism of Milos Obilic who, consciously sacrifying
himself, reached the tent of the emir and cut him down with his sword.
Withdrawing in front of the Turks towards west and the north, the only
political tradition of the Serbs was the Kosovo pledge. Through the Pec
Patriarchate, the historical traditions of the Serbs crystalized into a epic
tradition of an exceptionally national character. Even before the creation
of modern nations, the Serbs found in the Kosovo covenant firm basis for a
future national integration.
When the firsts national revolution in the Balkans broke out in Serbia
in 1804, during the Napoleonic wars, its leaders dreamed of a new battle of
Kosovo with which they would reestablish the lost empire. The historicism of
the romantic epoch only blended harmoniously with the already clearly formed
picture the Serbs had of their past and the tasks that were assigned to them
as a nation. The influence of the Kosovo covenant, functioning towards the
creation of national conscience, continued throughout the entire 19 century.
It the two Serbian states, Serbia and Montenegro, independent since 1878,
the Kosovo ideology (called also the covenant Serbian thought") was
institutionalized, conformed the needs of state nationalism: their national
program had as its final revenge of Kosovo and the restoration of the large
Serbian state in the center of the Balkans. The centuries-dreamed-of fight
with the Turks occurred in the fall of 1912. The Serbian army liberated
Kosovo in a few week, while the forces of Montenegro marched triumphantly
into Metohia. Negotiations on the final unification of the two Serbian
states were interrupted by World War I. Serbian students from Bosnia and
Herzegovina (occupied by Austria-Hungary 1878), inspired by the Kosovo idea,
like new Obilic heroes, assassinated the heir to the Habsburg throne on St.
Vitus Day in 1914, in Sarajevo.
The Kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes, later named Yugoslavia, was
created on the remnants of Austria-Hungary after the Great War ended. A
union of South Slav peoples was created instead of unified Serbian national
state. The Serbs, almost all of them, found themselves within the framework
of one state for the first time in history. It should have been the
guarantee of their civil and national rights. Having underestimated the
influences of thousand-year-long civilisational differences, the Serbs,
although representing the relative majority, found themselves faced with
unsolvable problems regarding differences in religion, historical
traditions, political mentality and national aims. The case of ethnic
Albanian minority in Kosovo and Metohia is a paradigmatic example of the
impossibility of overcoming civilisational gaps caused by the erosive force
of history.
The Kosovo and Metohia were, in the moment of liberation in 1912, a
backward agricultural community with mixed Serbian and ethnic Albanian
population, devastated by the raging of tribal anarchy. Serbs, however, even
then made almost half of the entire population in spite of the huge waves of
emigration in the previous period (about 150,000 from the region Kosovo,
Metohia and the neighboring Raska and northern Macedonia). The Pan-Islamic
policy of Abdulhamid II (1878-1909) made Kosovo and Metohia, beside Armenia,
"the most unfortunate land in the world", as witnessed contemporaries from
Victor Berard and George Gaulis to H. N. Brailsford to Frederick Moore. The
Kurds were crushing the Armenians in Asia Minor, and ethnic Albanians in the
European provinces were dealing in the same way with the unreliable
Christian subjects of Sultan: Serbs, Greeks and Bulgarians. The three
centuries long domination of Islamized ethnic Albanians in the Balkans,
culminated at the beginning of the 20th century. Living for centuries with
the gun in hand, the tribes of ethnic Albanians discovered in the plains of
Kosovo and Metohia the space for their further biological expansion. Islam
granted them the right to persecute Christians, lower grade citizens, and
stay unpunished. In time, a strange conviction settled itself among the
ethnic Albanians' tribes that Islam was the religion of free peoples and
Christianity that of slaves. In the Kingdom of Serbia, constitutional
monarchy with multiparty system and democratic institutions, the ethnic
Albanians mostly minded the fact that their yesterday serfs now became not
only their equals, but the ruling class in the state as well.
Islam marked strongly the national emancipation of ethnic Albanians and
defined their civilisational image. Although not fanatical believers, ethnic
Albanians have also built their national identity on the basis of Islamic
traditions, in fierce opposition to the neighboring Christian states. The
national elite from Catholic and Orthodox tribes in the north and south of
today's Albania did not succeed in imposing Europe-shaped solutions in the
fight for a national state: the Muslim majority dominated in all phases of
the development of the Albanian state. The rule of the founder of Communist
Albania, Enver Hoxha, in spite of the decree banning all religions in the
country, showed that it owed most to solutions represented in the past by
national leaders with Islamic background. His regime, created by mixing
oriental feudalism and Stalinist type of communism, was the ideological
framework accepted without hesitation as a political model for national
movement by ethnic Albanians in communist Yugoslavia.
In the inter-war period, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, by colonizing the
rich but uncultivated spaces of Kosovo and Metohia, tried not only to return
the Serbian character to these areas, but also to establish modern European
institutions, as it did in other provinces of the Yugoslav state. The ethnic
Albanian population on Kosovo found it most difficult to adjust to the civil
order in the Europe-organized state where, instead of status of absolute
privilege during the Ottoman rule, they received only civil and political
equality and with the former rayah at that-people whom they had only
recently treated as serfs.
World War II showed that the national breach developed from the
religious one: after driving the colonists out and burning down their homes,
the ethnic Albanians, mostly Muslims, set fires to and robbed many Orthodox
churches, and Orthodox cemeteries were constantly desecrated.
The development of political circumstances in communist Yugoslavia
suited the further ethnic Albanians' national emancipation. Biologically
exhausted (1,200,000 in World War I in Serbia only, and at least that many
in World War II, now coming mostly from Vojna Krajina in Croatia,
Montenegro, Herzegovina and Bosnia), and, after the brutal destruction of
the civil class, politically decapitated, the Serbs became pawns in the
hands of the new regime. Accepting Yugoslavia again as an inevitable
solution to their national question, the Serbs did not realize for a long
time that a national integration of other nations was going on in the
communist Yugoslavia and almost entirely to their disadvantage. The Kingdom
of Yugoslavia was organized as a centralist state of French type. The
communists on the other hand thought that centralism in that "Versailles
creation" was the most typical expression of the "Greater Serbian hegemony".
Tearing apart the political domination of Serbs in Yugoslavia, the
communist created several federal units dividing Serbian lands after the
World War II. The communist authorities in 1945 forbade with a special
decree all forcibly moved out colonists to return to Kosovo, Metohia and
Macedonia and their estates were mostly confiscated and afterwards granted
to emigrants from Albania. The ethnic Albanians, however, in the divided
Serbian state, have been given not only schools and cultural institutions
but full political power. The communists were making amends for the sins of
the "Greater Serbian hegemony" in the inter-war period.
During the World War II, the majority of ethnic Albanians from
Yugoslavia accepted, under the wing of fascist Italy, the creation of the
satellite "Greater Albania" and thus cooperated in large numbers with the
fascist and Nazi military authorities, unmistakably showing that they were
in favor of the unification with Albania; notwithstanding this, their
secessionist tendencies were completely revitalized after the war. A plan
existed to form a Balkan federation (Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania under
the leadership of Tito), and that is why Tito supported the large
colonization of Albanians from Albania and promised Kosovo to Enver Hoxha if
he entered the joint federal state. After the split with USSR and Cominform
in 1948, Albania, turned into Yugoslavia's toughest enemy. The relations
were normalized as Yugoslavia's insistence only in 1971, when an unusually
lively and wide exchange of ideas and functionaries began between Kosovo and
Albania. Under auspices of Albanian regime a 19th century type of national
romanticism mixed with Albanian version of Marxism-Leninism, religious
intolerance and almost racial prejudice towards Slavs became the essence of
the ethnic Albanian's national movement in Kosovo and Metohia. Ideological
and theocratic monism along with the strong tribal traditions as heritage of
Ottoman empire fit well into a ideological monism of totalitarian ideology
of communist Albania.
Kosovo and Metohia has already then been an autonomous province on its
way towards acquiring the attributes of a state within Yugoslav federation.
The confederalization of communist Yugoslavia, finalized with the 1974
Constitution, excluded both provinces (Kosovo and Vojvodina) from Serbian
authority, turning them into state entities with almost independent
governments. In order to legalize formally the Albanization of the Province,
the ethnic Albanian communist leadership threw out of its name the word
Metohia (of Greek origin meaning church-owned land). It turned out that the
hundreds of attacks the ethnic Albanians made upon Orthodox believers,
priests monks and nuns, churches and monasteries, and the annexation of
monastery property in the post-war period, were manifestations of centuries
deep religious and national intolerance.
The restoration of religious life of the Muslims in Kosovo and Metohia
was conducted parallely with the Albanization. New mosque sprang up (about
700 mosques were built in Yugoslavia under communist rule, more than during
the several centuries long Ottoman dominion; at the same time, about 500
Catholic and 300 Orthodox churches were erected); the Muslim clergy's
primary demand from the believers was for them to have as many children as
possible. The highest birth-rate in Europe derived also from religious
traditions of ethnic Albanians. 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.
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
believing that as an ally to Serbia and then to the Kingdom of Serbs Croats
and Slovenes, he had betrayed the interests of the Albanian people. Essad
Pasha was buried with the last honors in the Serbian army cemetery in Paris.
1 P. Pastorelli, op. cit., pp. 63-86; V. Vinaver, Italijanska akcija
protiv Jugoslavija na albansko-jugoslovenskoj granici 1919-1920. god.,
Istorijski zapisi, XXIII, 3 (1966), pp. 477-515; Z. Avramovski, Albanija
izmedju Jugoslavije i Italije, Vojnoistorijski glasnik, 3 (1984), pp.
164-166.
2 Arhiv Jugoslavije, Delegacija Kraljevine Srba Hrvata i Slovenaca na
Konferenciji mira u Parizu (later in text: AJ, Delegacija), f-27, No 296; D.
Todorovic, Jugoslavija i balkanske drzave 1918-1923, Beograd 1979, p. 50.
3 The Question of Scutari, Paris 1919; A. Mitrovic, Jugoslavija na
Konferenciji 1919-1920, Beograd 1969, pp. 169-176; Documentation in: B.
Krizman - B. Hrabak, Zapisnici sa sednice delegacije Kraljevine SHS na
mirovnoj konferenciji u Parizu 1919-1920, Beograd 1960, pp. 321-324, 365-366
4 Memoir pr sente la Conference de la Paix Paris par son Excellence
le general Essad Toptani pr sident du gouvernement d'Albanie, Paris 16 Avril
1919. (Essad Pasha's correspondence with the Serbian government and his
letter addressed to the Conference in: A3, Delegacija, f-27. The same file
contains the memoirs of Leon Krajewski dated January 2, 1919, focusing
mainly on Essad Pasha's relations with France)
5 AJ, Delegacija, f-27, No 7289; P. Pastorelli, op. cit., pp. 189-225;
D. Todorovic, op. cit, pp. 53-64. Cf P. Milo, L'attitude du Royame
serbo-croato-slovene a I'egard de I'Albanie la Conference de la paw. a
Paris (1919-1920), Studia Albanica, 1 (1989), pp. 37-57.
6 AJ, Delegacija, f-28, Pasic to Prime Minister; A. Mitrovic,
Jugoslavija na Konferenciji mira, pp.
7 Ibid
8 D. Todorovic, op. cit., pp. 49. The originals of a number of
petitions (submitted to the Peace Conference) on the annexation of the
northern Albanian tribes to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes are
kept in: AJ, Delegacija, f-28.
9 Same as footnote 49.
10 AJ, Delegacija, f-27, Nos. 5504, 5376, 6275, 6451, 6589.
11 Z. Avramovski, op. cit., p. 167.
12 AJ, Delegacija, f-27, Nos. 5504, 5376, 6275, 6451, 6589.
13 Ibid, Nos. 5484 - 5489; i. Avramovski, op. cit., pp. 169-170.
14 AJ, Delegacija, f-28, Nos. 6724, 6725.
The cooperation of the Serbian government and subsequently the
government of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes with Essad Pasha is
an important chapter in the history of Serbo-Albanian relations. It was the
first joint effort to resolve issues of dispute between two peoples in the
Balkans to the Balkan peoples principle, in a manner that was, with certain
territorial concessions to Serbia, and subsequently to the Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes, to wipe out old hotbeds of mutual conflict. The
strategic aspirations of the Serbian government to curb the influence of
Great Powers in Albania did not emanate solely from old aspirations to
permanently master northern Albania, but from actual political estimates
that under the influence and protectorat of a Great Power, the Albanian
state would pursue the course of maximalist and national claims to
territories that were inhabited, aside to the Serbian people, by Albanians
-- Kosovo, Metohia and western Macedonia.
Kosovo and Metohia is the native and ancestral land of the Serbs. The
Serbian Jerusalem, which spread over an area of 10,800 km2, is covered with
a dense of about 200 medieval monasteries, churches and fortresses. Kosovo
was the scene of the famous battle held on St. Vitus Day (June 28) in 1389,
when Serbian Prince Lazar and the Turkish emir Murad both lost their lives.
The Ottoman's breakthrough into the heart of Southeast Europe also marked
the beginning of the five centuries long clash of two civilisations:
European (Christian) and Near Eastern (Islamic). The conflict, alive to this
day, is generated in the visible layer also in the clash of the two nations:
the Serbs, mainly Orthodox Christians, and the ethnic Albanians, mainly
Muslims.
The oath of Prince Lazar, derived from the New Testament tradition of
martyrdom that it was better to obtain freedom in the celestial empire than
to live humiliated in the oppression of the earthly kingdom, became during
the centuries of Turkish rule, the key of Serbian national ideology. The
Kosovo oath, woven into the national epos, became the basis upon which the
Serbs built the cult of resisting and not accepting injustice. The Kosovo
pledge was like a flag raising rebellions against the Ottomans and heading
towards its final aim: the restoration of the Serbian national state. Many a
generation of Serbs received its first notions of itself and the world by
listening to folk poems describing the Kosovo sufferings: the apocalyptical
fall of Serbian Empire, the tormentous death of Prince Lazar, the betrayal
of Vuk Brankovic, the heroism of Milos Obilic who, consciously sacrifying
himself, reached the tent of the emir and cut him down with his sword.
Withdrawing in front of the Turks towards west and the north, the only
political tradition of the Serbs was the Kosovo pledge. Through the Pec
Patriarchate, the historical traditions of the Serbs crystalized into a epic
tradition of an exceptionally national character. Even before the creation
of modern nations, the Serbs found in the Kosovo covenant firm basis for a
future national integration.
When the firsts national revolution in the Balkans broke out in Serbia
in 1804, during the Napoleonic wars, its leaders dreamed of a new battle of
Kosovo with which they would reestablish the lost empire. The historicism of
the romantic epoch only blended harmoniously with the already clearly formed
picture the Serbs had of their past and the tasks that were assigned to them
as a nation. The influence of the Kosovo covenant, functioning towards the
creation of national conscience, continued throughout the entire 19 century.
It the two Serbian states, Serbia and Montenegro, independent since 1878,
the Kosovo ideology (called also the covenant Serbian thought") was
institutionalized, conformed the needs of state nationalism: their national
program had as its final revenge of Kosovo and the restoration of the large
Serbian state in the center of the Balkans. The centuries-dreamed-of fight
with the Turks occurred in the fall of 1912. The Serbian army liberated
Kosovo in a few week, while the forces of Montenegro marched triumphantly
into Metohia. Negotiations on the final unification of the two Serbian
states were interrupted by World War I. Serbian students from Bosnia and
Herzegovina (occupied by Austria-Hungary 1878), inspired by the Kosovo idea,
like new Obilic heroes, assassinated the heir to the Habsburg throne on St.
Vitus Day in 1914, in Sarajevo.
The Kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes, later named Yugoslavia, was
created on the remnants of Austria-Hungary after the Great War ended. A
union of South Slav peoples was created instead of unified Serbian national
state. The Serbs, almost all of them, found themselves within the framework
of one state for the first time in history. It should have been the
guarantee of their civil and national rights. Having underestimated the
influences of thousand-year-long civilisational differences, the Serbs,
although representing the relative majority, found themselves faced with
unsolvable problems regarding differences in religion, historical
traditions, political mentality and national aims. The case of ethnic
Albanian minority in Kosovo and Metohia is a paradigmatic example of the
impossibility of overcoming civilisational gaps caused by the erosive force
of history.
The Kosovo and Metohia were, in the moment of liberation in 1912, a
backward agricultural community with mixed Serbian and ethnic Albanian
population, devastated by the raging of tribal anarchy. Serbs, however, even
then made almost half of the entire population in spite of the huge waves of
emigration in the previous period (about 150,000 from the region Kosovo,
Metohia and the neighboring Raska and northern Macedonia). The Pan-Islamic
policy of Abdulhamid II (1878-1909) made Kosovo and Metohia, beside Armenia,
"the most unfortunate land in the world", as witnessed contemporaries from
Victor Berard and George Gaulis to H. N. Brailsford to Frederick Moore. The
Kurds were crushing the Armenians in Asia Minor, and ethnic Albanians in the
European provinces were dealing in the same way with the unreliable
Christian subjects of Sultan: Serbs, Greeks and Bulgarians. The three
centuries long domination of Islamized ethnic Albanians in the Balkans,
culminated at the beginning of the 20th century. Living for centuries with
the gun in hand, the tribes of ethnic Albanians discovered in the plains of
Kosovo and Metohia the space for their further biological expansion. Islam
granted them the right to persecute Christians, lower grade citizens, and
stay unpunished. In time, a strange conviction settled itself among the
ethnic Albanians' tribes that Islam was the religion of free peoples and
Christianity that of slaves. In the Kingdom of Serbia, constitutional
monarchy with multiparty system and democratic institutions, the ethnic
Albanians mostly minded the fact that their yesterday serfs now became not
only their equals, but the ruling class in the state as well.
Islam marked strongly the national emancipation of ethnic Albanians and
defined their civilisational image. Although not fanatical believers, ethnic
Albanians have also built their national identity on the basis of Islamic
traditions, in fierce opposition to the neighboring Christian states. The
national elite from Catholic and Orthodox tribes in the north and south of
today's Albania did not succeed in imposing Europe-shaped solutions in the
fight for a national state: the Muslim majority dominated in all phases of
the development of the Albanian state. The rule of the founder of Communist
Albania, Enver Hoxha, in spite of the decree banning all religions in the
country, showed that it owed most to solutions represented in the past by
national leaders with Islamic background. His regime, created by mixing
oriental feudalism and Stalinist type of communism, was the ideological
framework accepted without hesitation as a political model for national
movement by ethnic Albanians in communist Yugoslavia.
In the inter-war period, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, by colonizing the
rich but uncultivated spaces of Kosovo and Metohia, tried not only to return
the Serbian character to these areas, but also to establish modern European
institutions, as it did in other provinces of the Yugoslav state. The ethnic
Albanian population on Kosovo found it most difficult to adjust to the civil
order in the Europe-organized state where, instead of status of absolute
privilege during the Ottoman rule, they received only civil and political
equality and with the former rayah at that-people whom they had only
recently treated as serfs.
World War II showed that the national breach developed from the
religious one: after driving the colonists out and burning down their homes,
the ethnic Albanians, mostly Muslims, set fires to and robbed many Orthodox
churches, and Orthodox cemeteries were constantly desecrated.
The development of political circumstances in communist Yugoslavia
suited the further ethnic Albanians' national emancipation. Biologically
exhausted (1,200,000 in World War I in Serbia only, and at least that many
in World War II, now coming mostly from Vojna Krajina in Croatia,
Montenegro, Herzegovina and Bosnia), and, after the brutal destruction of
the civil class, politically decapitated, the Serbs became pawns in the
hands of the new regime. Accepting Yugoslavia again as an inevitable
solution to their national question, the Serbs did not realize for a long
time that a national integration of other nations was going on in the
communist Yugoslavia and almost entirely to their disadvantage. The Kingdom
of Yugoslavia was organized as a centralist state of French type. The
communists on the other hand thought that centralism in that "Versailles
creation" was the most typical expression of the "Greater Serbian hegemony".
Tearing apart the political domination of Serbs in Yugoslavia, the
communist created several federal units dividing Serbian lands after the
World War II. The communist authorities in 1945 forbade with a special
decree all forcibly moved out colonists to return to Kosovo, Metohia and
Macedonia and their estates were mostly confiscated and afterwards granted
to emigrants from Albania. The ethnic Albanians, however, in the divided
Serbian state, have been given not only schools and cultural institutions
but full political power. The communists were making amends for the sins of
the "Greater Serbian hegemony" in the inter-war period.
During the World War II, the majority of ethnic Albanians from
Yugoslavia accepted, under the wing of fascist Italy, the creation of the
satellite "Greater Albania" and thus cooperated in large numbers with the
fascist and Nazi military authorities, unmistakably showing that they were
in favor of the unification with Albania; notwithstanding this, their
secessionist tendencies were completely revitalized after the war. A plan
existed to form a Balkan federation (Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania under
the leadership of Tito), and that is why Tito supported the large
colonization of Albanians from Albania and promised Kosovo to Enver Hoxha if
he entered the joint federal state. After the split with USSR and Cominform
in 1948, Albania, turned into Yugoslavia's toughest enemy. The relations
were normalized as Yugoslavia's insistence only in 1971, when an unusually
lively and wide exchange of ideas and functionaries began between Kosovo and
Albania. Under auspices of Albanian regime a 19th century type of national
romanticism mixed with Albanian version of Marxism-Leninism, religious
intolerance and almost racial prejudice towards Slavs became the essence of
the ethnic Albanian's national movement in Kosovo and Metohia. Ideological
and theocratic monism along with the strong tribal traditions as heritage of
Ottoman empire fit well into a ideological monism of totalitarian ideology
of communist Albania.
Kosovo and Metohia has already then been an autonomous province on its
way towards acquiring the attributes of a state within Yugoslav federation.
The confederalization of communist Yugoslavia, finalized with the 1974
Constitution, excluded both provinces (Kosovo and Vojvodina) from Serbian
authority, turning them into state entities with almost independent
governments. In order to legalize formally the Albanization of the Province,
the ethnic Albanian communist leadership threw out of its name the word
Metohia (of Greek origin meaning church-owned land). It turned out that the
hundreds of attacks the ethnic Albanians made upon Orthodox believers,
priests monks and nuns, churches and monasteries, and the annexation of
monastery property in the post-war period, were manifestations of centuries
deep religious and national intolerance.
The restoration of religious life of the Muslims in Kosovo and Metohia
was conducted parallely with the Albanization. New mosque sprang up (about
700 mosques were built in Yugoslavia under communist rule, more than during
the several centuries long Ottoman dominion; at the same time, about 500
Catholic and 300 Orthodox churches were erected); the Muslim clergy's
primary demand from the believers was for them to have as many children as
possible. The highest birth-rate in Europe derived also from religious
traditions of ethnic Albanians. 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.
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