Anna Di Lellio: La Jugoslavia crollò in miniera. Kosovo 1989: lo sciopero di Trepça e la lotta per l’autonomia

Anna Di Lellio is a sociologist, former United Nations consultant in Kosovo, and one of the founders of the Kosovo Oral History Initiative, which has collected testimonies in the context of Kosovo’s recent history for more than a decade now. Oral sources are also central to her new book, in which she retraces the story of a major event in Kosovo’s contemporary history. The event Di Lellio describes is a strike by 1,300 miners who occupied the Trepça lead and zinc mine near the town of Kosovska Mitrovica for seven days in February 1989 in order to protest against the abolition of the constitutionally guaranteed autonomy of the Province of Kosovo by the Socialist Republic of Serbia. The author considers the strike a “transformative event” (22) for Kosovo, a moment in which the long-simmering political tensions finally came to the surface, leading to no less than the beginning of the breakup of Yugoslavia. The Trepça miners’ strike has frequently been evoked to support the argument of “opposing nationalisms” in explaining the demise of Yugoslavia and its far-reaching aftermath. Through the testimony of protagonists and witnesses, Di Lellio proves this argument wrong. She convincingly shows that the strike was more of a protest for equality and dignity than one motivated by separatism and nationalism (19).

The book is divided into twelve highly accessible chapters. The first six give an overview of the history of Yugoslavia, with a focus on the period since 1945. Chapter One (“Trepça is Trepça”) focuses on the social and political context of this mining area, which was an iconic place for Yugoslavia (43). In this part of the book, Di Lellio focuses mostly on English studies on Trepça and its territory, such as the reports prepared by Eggert Hardten for the Kosovo Stability Initiative about the city of Mitrovica and Pieter Troch’s research on the employment policies at the Trepça mine during socialist times. The second half of the book covers the 1989 strike more specifically, mostly through a large number of testimonies from its protagonists. In a microhistorical perspective, Di Lellio presents the Trepça strike as a prism through which to tell the story of Kosovo and Yugoslavia, a context through which to understand the Yugoslav conflict from the bottom up, and, importantly, to criticise its simplistic interpretation as a war of identities, clashing nationalisms, and cultures.

Since the beginning of the exploitation of its rich mineral resources after World War I, Trepça had been a strategically important place for those who held political power in the region. In fact, the development of industrial mining in Trepça and the history of Yugoslav statehood appear to follow a parallel trajectory: In the history of socialist Yugoslavia, the 1960s and 1970s are considered its “golden age”. In 1974, for example, the new constitution guaranteed more autonomy and equality to Yugoslavia’s nations and nationalities. At the time, Trepça was flourishing both economically and socially. Major investments in education allowed Albanians to reach higher positions, previously mainly occupied by Serbs. Mining labour was highly risky and dangerous, but, as one testimony stated with pride, “if you were a miner, you had the keys to Kosovo in your hand” (47).

That said, even during these “golden” years, there were tensions. On the one hand, the Law of Associated Labour (1976), as part of the Yugoslav self-management system and building on a facet of the 1974 constitution, was targeted by the Serbian press, which claimed it favoured Albanians over Serbs. On the other hand, young Albanians still remained excluded from many of the new aspects of the Yugoslav consumerist society, and they found themselves in what they felt was still a position of subalternity. It was tensions such as these that were manipulated by the nationalist and identitarian propaganda of some of the media outlets and erupted into a violent, more ethnicised than sociopolitical, conflict, resulting in the limitation of Kosovo’s autonomy, which had been enshrined in the 1974 constitution.

During the 1980s, the growing economic crisis also exacerbated political tensions, which finally gave rise to protests. Di Lellio connects the 1989 Trepça miners’ strike with the movement that began in 1981 with the Prishtina student protests. In July of that same year, there were also some miners’ strikes, largely motivated by economic reasons. Only in November 1988 did the miners’ movement become more political, when the strikers marched from Mitrovica to Prishtina to defend the 1974 constitution and protest against the undermining of the Yugoslav Federation’s unity by abolishing Kosovo’s autonomy, thereby strengthening Serbia. By carrying with them a photo of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, who had died more than eight years earlier, as well as the flag of Kosovo, Di Lellio asserts that the Trepça miners were defending the idea of unity and equality among the Yugoslav nations and nationalities. However, the march did not have a positive outcome and sociopolitical relations in Kosovo continued to decline. Events culminated in 20 February 1989, when more than 1,300 miners staged a week-long underground hunger strike. The strike finally ended with forced evacuation and arrests. However, according to some of the testimonies in Di Lellio’s book, ending the hunger strike was a collective decision made by the miners and their representatives.

In Chapter Seven (“Strike”), Di Lellio gives the floor to her witnesses, who tell the story of the occupation of the mine, their motivation, and attitudes, as well as their experience of spending seven long days in the dark humidity of the mining tunnels. Here and in the chapters that follow, the book’s narrative changes quite radically, now resembling an (organised) puzzle of voices and experiences, which the author allows to speak for themselves. The story of the strike puts the reader in the middle of the action through the protagonists’ memories, with an undoubtedly immersive effect. However, a sense of disorientation sometimes negatively affects the reader’s experience. Perhaps, however, this is precisely what the author sought to achieve. Her aim may have been to give the reader a glimpse of the life-threatening uncertainty the miners experienced underground, with no clue about what was happening above ground during those seven days in the darkness of the mine. For a historian, Di Lellio’s choice raises a serious question of methodology: Can, or should, history be written through the sole means of direct reporting by those who remember the events? Memory studies have taught us that it should not. Indeed, Di Lellio’s intention seems to be more that of a reporter than of a historian, who is more likely to approach her book as a critical collection of sources than a comprehensive historical account.

In her final chapter (“History and memory”), Di Lellio seems to suggest that writing the history of Yugoslavia will only be possible through a more thorough historicisation of memory. There is still much work to do to achieve this, beginning with collecting and preserving testimonies. It thus becomes clear why, from the first to last page, interviews are at the heart of Di Lellio’s book. They are the result of her personal work and testimony to the most recent Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav history. As she states in her conclusion, her book is rooted in her own experience. As a UN consultant in the complex situation of postwar Kosovo, she visited Trepça in 2000 in order to film a documentary, a project which however remained unfinished. When she launched the Kosovo Oral History Initiative in 2012, her previous experience in Trepça came back to her as a memory and the “interviews”, she writes, “helped [to] fill the emptiness of ghostly spaces” (6). In her attempt at mnemonic “revival”, one can perhaps find the purpose of this book. It is meant to make the reader hear the voices of the protagonists of a historical event, voices that have been dispersed and silenced by war and its aftermath. Di Lellio’s book is thus to be read as a product of the Kosovo Oral History Initiative. Indeed it is its manifesto: an oral history work-in-progress, which, to historians, suggests a microanalytical research perspective, and offers a critical view of the materials collected in this public history project.