Volume 69, Issue 2-3 - Special Issue: Kosovo in the Yugoslav 1980s

The introductory article in this issue argues for greater consideration of the impact of the Kosovo crisis on political developments in other Yugoslav republics and on the entire federal state structure of Yugoslavia after Tito’s death. It also calls for a closer examination of alternative paths that were considered by various actors to resolve the conflict but were not or could not be pursued. Such a discussion of developments in Kosovo in the 1980s in a broader Yugoslav perspective would, it is argued, also have the potential to contribute to a more complex understanding of the Kosovo crisis itself.

The author explores the ideological underpinning and political goals of Kosovar Marxist-Leninist groups and examines their role in the 1981 demonstrations in Kosovo. She contextualizes these events against the backdrop of theories of revolutionary violence that were prevalent in Kosovar Albanian Marxist groups. Describing the position of Albanians within socialist Yugoslavia, she traces the formation of these groups of dissidents and their support of Hoxhaism—following the political views of the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha. Hoxhaist propaganda shaped anti-Yugoslav dissidence to a certain extent, and the author throws light on the nationalist incentive to support Hoxhaism. She contextualizes Yugoslavia’s response to the demonstrations as an act of coercive violence aimed at stemming events that the Yugoslav officials perceived to be both counter-revolutionary and to presage the rise of nationalism.

The author examines the Kosovo crisis in the context of the pluralisation and democratisation of Slovenian society in the 1980s and early 1990s. This issue became a catalyst not only for the repositioning of structures of party leadership in relation to Belgrade, but also with respect to general public debates. By charting individual stages of the critical decade of 1981–1991, the author presents Slovenian perceptions of Kosovo’s political, economic, and social issues, first through the works of neo-Marxist critics and later through the activism of a group of left-liberal intellectuals, which included the provision of legal support and a high-profile social action related to the violations of Kosovar Albanian human rights. The author discusses the constraints encountered by this brief attempt to establish a pan-Yugoslav civil society initiative. At the same time, he shows how the complexities of the Kosovo crisis were used to coalesce the Slovenian nation into flight from Yugoslavia.

The author explores the creation of public opinion in Serbia in the late 1980s and the (ab)use of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo on 28 June 1989. As a result of Serbian president Slobodan Milošević’s carefully planned propaganda, a negative image of Albanians as well as a positive perception of Serbian nationalism were enforced. The media and popular culture played a particularly important role in reviving the Kosovo Myth, together with the leading Serbian (academic) institutions and influential intellectuals. Thirty-some years after 1989, the Kosovo Myth is presented in the media in a largely unchanged manner, while for Serbia the Kosovo problem remains unsolved.

The author analyses the discourse about Kosovo in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) during the 1980s. During these years, Serbian media developed several stereotypes to discredit the political leaders of BiH and accuse them of fomenting unrest in Kosovo. The author assesses these stereotypical depictions as well as the response of the Islamic Community and political leadership in BiH to these accusations. He asks what the attitude of Serbia’s political elite towards BiH was, and what role the Serbian political leadership played in the media attacks. He then investigates the evolution of the BiH leadership’s stances towards the events in Kosovo between the beginning and the end of the 1980s. And finally, through a close reading of session minutes and media, he assesses the increasingly deviating views of the BiH political leaders vis-á-vis the situation in Kosovo.

In socialist Yugoslavia in 1989 the extremely sensitive matter of Kosovo had an ambiguous effect on the League of Communists of Croatia, which was then still caught in the so-called “Croatian silence”. It did however provoke much turbulence in the Croatian media, which made pointed comments on the larger Yugoslav crisis, on the situation in Kosovo, and on the politics of Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. An intense dynamic could be also found in the field of knowledge production which encompassed scholars, historians, and intellectuals. Who produced knowledge about Kosovo? What were their political and intellectual agendas? How did they intervene in the dominant discourses and media coverage, what debates and reactions did they spark? Within the frames of the history of knowledge, the history of books and intellectual history, the author here assesses the works on Kosovo of a number of Croatian and Yugoslav intellectuals, chiefly Darko Hudelist and Branko Horvat.

The author examines the roots of Albanian nationalism in Yugoslavia, focusing on the Socialist Republic of Macedonia (SRM). He displays regional historical developments, interethnic relations, and Kosovo’s political impact upon Albanians in Macedonia. By analysing Macedonian and Albanian nation-building processes from an entangled and comparative perspective, he sheds light on shifting power constellations, divergent social developments, and asynchronous processes of national emancipation. After the occurrence in 1981 of Albanian demonstrations in Kosovo and in western Macedonia, officials in the SRM aimed at counteracting Albanian nationalism with a policy of differentiation—that is, they aimed at drawing a clear dividing line between Albanians loyal or disloyal to Yugoslavia. This punitive policy failed on all levels, further deepening the social divisions between the two major ethnic communities of the SRM and alienating even those Albanians well integrated in the common state and republic.

The year 1989, when Serbia revoked Kosovo’s autonomy, was a break that changed also the course of women’s political engagements. Women had always to negotiate and strategise with different layers of power and against different forms of oppression—state and patriarchal oppression and cultural racism as well as class oppression. The author highlights the convergences and divergences of women’s political activism in the political dynamics of late socialism and then in the 1990s in Kosovo. She looks at gender, class and national dimensions of women’s political engagements with a focus on women who were part of the underground resistance movement commonly known as Ilegalja in the 1970s and 1980s as well as women intellectuals who held high state positions and were considered a part of the elite. After 1989, many engaged in the peacaful resistance movement of the 1990s.

The author analyses how the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) has gained significance for the new leadership of the League of Communists in Serbia since the mid-1980s. With its authority as a scientific institution, the SANU legitimised the political measures implemented to centralise and consolidate authoritarian rule. The new perception of the Yugoslav crisis, marked by ethnicisation and self-victimisation, used Kosovo as the focus and became the dominant stance on the war and authoritarian rule of the 1990s. However, as the author shows, a critique of these developments needs to be included in the analysis in order to adequately grasp the tense dynamics.

The author examines the activities and relations between the writers’ associations of Kosova and Serbia during the second half of the 1980s. He focuses on the interaction between the two cultural institutions and the debates they organized between the mid-1980s and the end of the decade. While political relations were deteriorating, the meetings of the two associations were intended to form a channel for communication which it was hoped would stimulate debate among intellectuals about then-current relations between Kosovar-Albanians and Serbs. But, as this study explains, those attempts ended in endless disagreements over “historical truths.”

The Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia ( Enciklopedija Jugoslavije , EJ) was the flagship project of socialist Yugoslav nation-building in the fields of culture and academic knowledge. The first edition of the EJ was published in one Serbo-Croatian version (1955–1971), but the unfinished second edition of the EJ (1980–90) appeared in Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian in Latin and in Cyrillic script, Macedonian, Hungarian, and Albanian versions. The EJ was transformed from a staunchly federalist Yugoslav cultural platform of the 1950s, which supported Yugoslav unitarism, to one that strongly affirmed the nation-building(s) of the republics and autonomous provinces, thereby reflecting the decentralist remodeling of Yugoslavia from the late 1960s onwards. Using the examples of the two articles on “Albanians” and “Albanian-Yugoslav relations” in the EJ in their 1955, 1980, and 1983 versions, the authors elaborate on the political struggles within the Yugoslav ruling elite and within academia.

The author reflects on the year 1989 when she was a newly hired trainee historian at the Institute for the History of the Serbian Labor Movement in Belgrade. The topic she was assigned in the Institute was the relationship of the Serbian Social Democratic Party to the war goals of Serbia 1912–1918. As her reading and writing progressed, by 1991 what the Serbian social democrats wrote about the Balkan Wars of 1912/13 began approaching her own political views. However, their antiwar positions at the beginning of the twentieth century sounded like a real feat compared to the virtually monolithic support for the war of 1991. This is how the author’s first research left her with the bitter impression that history, the seeming magistra vitae, had really taught nobody anything given that Serbian society was falling into the same trap as some 70 years before.

The author gives a personal account of how he experienced the difficult 1990s in Kosovo. In 1990, when Yugoslavia fell apart, he was 12 years old. He grew up in Kosovo’s “parallel school system”. In 1999, when NATO bombed Yugoslavia, the then 20-year-old worked for the newspaper Koha Ditore in Pristina. His family’s house in Peja was destroyed, members of his extended family as well as friends and acquaintances murdered. His parents and siblings sought refuge in Montenegro; he himself in North Macedonia. They returned to Peja after the end of the war, and slowly regained their lives.