As part of the Yugoslav federation, the province of Kosovo was granted full autonomy in 1974, giving it almost the same rights as Yugoslavia’s six republics. Fifteen years later, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic proposed amendments to the Constitution of Serbia which would strip Kosovo of most of its autonomous powers. This prompted violent protests and on 3 March 1989 a state of emergency was declared, imposing direct rule from Belgrade over the province.

On 23 March 1989, the Assembly of Kosovo voted to accept the proposed amendments and five days later the Assembly of Serbia approved the constitutional changes effectively revoking the autonomy granted in 1974. Milosevic would go on to further fan Serbian nationalism, which ultimately led to the break-up of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars of the 1990s.

Yugoslav reforms will not end ethnic strife

Barney Petrovici in Belgrade

26 November 1988

Yugoslavia yesterday enacted constitutional reforms to streamline its economy and boost central power in the face of the country’s crippling economic, political and social crisis.

It has taken two years of bitter debating and quarrelling at various levels of the state and the ruling Communist Party structures to adopt 39 amendments, or one-third of the constitution .

Yugoslavia is a complex political structure made up of six republics and two autonomous provinces, both within Serbia, its largest republic. Each of the federal units has the power to veto any changes.

Ethnic Albanians in the southern Kosovo province, making up 90 per cent of the population, have resisted attempts by the Serbs to reduce their autonomy. And in the northern republic of Slovenia opposition has grown against the amendments, suspected of aiming to curb their liberal self-rule.

As ethnic and social strife appeared on the political scene in Yugoslavia, several authorities moved to ease the tensions. In Kosovo, a virtual state of emergency has been enforced after days of bitter anti-Serbian demonstration. Heavily armed federal police units are now patrolling the streets of the capital, Pristina, after all mass gatherings were banned and all approaches the town sealed off.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest President Milosevic arrives in Pristina, capital of Kosovo, to meet mine workers on strike over constitutional changes, December 1988. Photograph: Petar Kujundzic/Reuters

Editorial: Tito’s last device

28 February 1989

The shrewd Marshal Tito once remarked that ‘a strong Yugoslavia needs a weak Serbia’; but his device for containing Serbian nationalism is close to disintegration. The immediate victims of the intra-federal struggle are the 1.7 million Albanians in the autonomous province of Kosovo, now fighting off desperately Serbia’s revanchist drive to re-assert control. The hunger strike of more than one thousand Kosovo miners in the Trepca lead and zinc mines, which entered its second week yesterday, is a remarkable expression of largely spontaneous commitment. A miner’s family is interviewed poignantly on television, illustrating one of the statistics so relevant to the crisis: wife and nine children wonder if they will ever see him again. Yesterday two of the new leaders imposed upon Kosovo at the recent Communist Party plenum resigned – appearing to meet the first of the strikers’ demands. But meanwhile units from the federal army – widely perceived as being dominated by Serbs – were moving in. Even if the resignations settle the immediate issue which provoked the protest, the causes of unrest go much deeper. The Kosovo Albanians demand that the constitutional reform which threatens to deprive them of autonomy should be submitted to democratic discussion. And they call for an end to being treated as second-class citizens, only too conscious of Serbian propaganda against them which under the populist leadership of Mr Slobodan Milosevic had adopted an increasingly racialist tone.

One can easily sympathise with the Albanian minority – a majority within their own province – yet threatened like the other autonomous province of Vojvodina with subordination to Serbia. For the past two years they have been living under tight security, with heavy sentences handed out for minor offences and restrictions on the purchase of land and free movement. For much longer they have suffered from the unequal north-south division of federal resources. Yet there is a legitimate Serbian side to the argument. The Serbian minority of 200,000 within Kosovo, outnumbered 7 to 1 by the Albanians, is dangerously exposed. The 1974 Constitution arguably placed Serbia – whose population is 40 per cent of the Yugoslav total and occupies one third of the national territory – in a federal minority of one against eight, with its two autonomous provinces able to vote against it. But Mr Milosevic has crudely exploited old myths of a Serbian golden age in order to further his own bid for federal power.

In any rational struggle for economic parity, Serbia and Kosovo should form a common front against the wealthier north. But it is in Slovenia and Croatia this week that voices are being raised against Serbian pressure upon Kosovo. The leading Slovene Socialist Alliance called yesterday for Albanian national and human rights to be respected according to the UN charter. In Zagreb, the new Society for Yugoslav Democratic Initiative has proposed that Kosovo should be governed directly by the federation. Yet at the recent Party congress, Kosovo‘s autonomy was in effect sacrificed by the northern republics in order to check Mr Milosevic’s wider aims. Those aims need to be recognised bleakly for what they are: to secure Serbian supremacy by discrediting the federalist structure as Titoist. Yugoslavia needs, by whatever name, a centralised authority which can redress the economic imbalance. Otherwise the dark shadows of Northern Ireland and Nagorno-Karabakh hover uncomfortably in the air.

Tim Judah in 1998 - Milosevic's crimes Read more

Riots greet Kosovo loss of power: parliament accepts control by Serbian republic

Barney Petrovic

24 March 1989

Belgrade

Riot police beat up ethnic Albanian students protesting yesterday over curbs on local self-rule in Yugoslavia’s turbulent Kosovo province, Croatian Television reported.

Police charged into 1,000 students on the university campus in the Kosovo capital Pristina. The television showed them beating the students with batons. Twenty thousand people massed in the town of Urosevac, 150 miles south of Belgrade, to protest against the curbs passed by Kosovo’s parliament.

Tanjug news agency said police clashed with 1,500 youths who hurled rocks. Foreign reporters had been barred from the town. Jeeps packed with heavily-armed federal police rushed to Urosevac and prevented a column of women and children from marching on Pristina.

The Albanian-dominated Yugoslav province yesterday surrendered its years-long ambitions of becoming a federal republic when its local parliament endorsed constitutional amendments giving away control of the region to Serbia.

Kosovo is an autonomous part of the biggest Yugoslav republic of Serbia, but 90 per cent of its population of 1.9 million are ethnic Albanians, who have been struggling for years for their own federal republic. Yugoslavia is made up of six republics including Serbia.

Today, fewer than 5 per cent of the 180-member Kosovo National Assembly voted against the amendments, but steel-helmeted police armed with automatic rifles surrounded the building nevertheless.

The constitutional changes give Serbia control of police, courts and civil defence and a free hand to alter Kosovo’s status once again any time in the future. It would also give Serbia control of Kosovo’s relations with other countries, including neighbouring Albania.

All public gatherings in Kosovo are banned under the current state of emergency clampdown in the aftermath of the general strike led by miners which paralysed the region last month. An estimated 100 tanks and 15,000 troops now keep manoeuvring in Kosovo in an attempt to scare protesters into obedience.

In the past two decades, Albanian nationalists staged several nationalist riots. But their protest is now being opposed by a surge of Serbian nationalism long suppressed under the late President Tito and suddenly erupting a few years ago after Serbs complained about persecution by the ethnic Albanians.

The number of Serbs has shrunk by 50,000 in the last eight years after mass migration from the province under alleged Albanian pressure.

With the end of the general strike in Kosovo a new form of silent Gandhi-style protest has been sweeping through the region. Many miners and industrial workers ignore orders to show up at work and increasing numbers of Albanian politicians and managers are being detained, some of them facing capital punishment for counter-revolutionary activities.

Constitutional amendments are now to be formally approved by the Serbian parliament on March 28. But translating them into laws and implementing them in practice will remain a problem.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A young ethnic Albanian is clubbed by several riot policemen during clashes in the provincial capital of Kosovo 27 March 1989. Photograph: Udo Weitz/AP



Death toll in Kosovo rises to 21

29 March 1989

Ian Traynor and Barney Petrovic

The death toll in the explosive southern Yugoslav province of Kosovo rose to 21 last night as pitched battles continued for the sixth successive day between Albanians and the Yugoslav security forces.

The Yugoslav leadership announced that additional forces had been sent to the province to combat what it described as a growing tide of ‘nationalist fanaticism’ among the majority Albanian population.

The death toll, which is widely expected to rise further and is now more than double that incurred in the bloody uprising in Kosovo in 1981, marks the gravest turn to date in Yugoslavia’s long-running ethnic and economic crisis.

The rest of Serbia, meanwhile, celebrated the climax of Serbia’s drive to reclaim control of the province with jubilant official and street festivities.

Widespread violence occurred throughout Kosovo as the Albanians, angered by the surrender of the region’s sovereignty in the face of a sustained campaign led by the Serbian Communist Party chief, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, took up arms against the heavy presence of special federal paramilitary forces that have overseen a state of emergency in the province for the past month.

The Yugoslav Interior Ministry claimed that the violence bore the mark of an ‘armed rebellion’ organised by ‘separatists and nationalists’. Of the 21 killed so far, 19 were demonstrators and two policemen.

Another 49 demonstrators have been injured, some seriously, in gunfire, as have five policemen, as the use of firearms escalates ominously in the unrest.

Some 160 miles to the north, the streets of Belgrade, in graphic contrast to the menacing atmosphere in the south, were the scene for a street party at the centre of the Yugoslav and Serbian capital. Roads were barricaded in the warm spring sunshine to accommodate strolling holiday crowds and bands playing Serbian folk music.

People danced and sang in the streets, open air concerts and theatre shows were staged in the capital and elsewhere in Serbian towns across the republic and fireworks lit the skies last night.

Earlier, the Serbian parliament met to proclaim Kosovo‘s restoration to Serbia proper. The meeting at the 4,000-capacity Sava Centre was followed by lavish eating and drinking among the republic’s leadership grouped around the charismatic figure of Mr Milosevic, who at yesterday’s festival session was proposed for the post of Serbian President.

Mr Milosevic and his colleagues were celebrating an end to 15 years of virtual self-rule in Kosovo, as granted under the late President Josip Broz Tito’s 1974 constitution. Belgrade has now gained control of the province’s police, judiciary and security policies and it need not consult Kosovo on further changes to Serbia’s constitution.

The celebrations in the streets of Belgrade proclaimed Serbia’s victory. But many observers say it appears Pyrrhic in the light of the reaction in the province. Massive banners and flags were carried which were devoted to the theme of Serbian unity.

The new Serbian constitution was formally declared at a 30-minute solemn ceremony at the spacious conference hall on the left bank of the Sava River in Belgade earlier yesterday.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Serbian policemen take their position near the village Doneje Prekaze in the Serbian province of Kosovo , March 1989. Photograph: Srdjan Suki/EPA

Editorial: Kosovo on the brink

29 March 1989

There is an ugly air of Lhasa, Tibet in the violence from Kosovo, Yugoslavia, where a score of ethnic Albanians have died in the last two days. Reports on Monday from the Serbian government in Belgrade, which has precipitated the crisis by its drive to undermine Kosovo’s autonomy, spoke of two policemen being shot. Yesterday the federal authorities revealed an escalating number of Albanian deaths, but insisted that the demonstrators had fired first. There is no first-hand evidence for this, nor for the excited Serbian claim that neighbouring Albania has begun to foment trouble. In any case the fuel had already been fully ignited by Serbian revanchism, led by the populist leader Mr Slobodan Milosevic. News of the riots still took second place in the Belgrade press yesterday to the celebration of what was called a ‘festive, joyous and historic day,’ with the official proclamation of the constitutional amendments which have caused the crisis. These remove most of the autonomy granted in 1974 to Kosovo in a federal constitution now denounced by Serbians as an ‘alien’ plot against their glorious past.

G2: The Kosovo war Read more

The amendments were passed by the Kosovo parliament last week, in an open ballot in a building surrounded by armed police. Kosovo has suffered a state of emergency, heavy police and army presence, arrests and detentions, and the enforced removal of its own ethnic leaders. Only this Monday, more than one hundred miners received two-month jail sentences under a dubious law for defying compulsory work orders. The Albanian majority now has good reason to fear a return to the repression of the 1950s and 1960s when Kosovo was ruled directly from Belgrade.

There is a more rational argument on Serbia’s side than the historical myth that Kosovo was the ‘cradle of our nation.’ It is that despite constituting the largest ethnic group in the Yugoslav federation, Serbs do not find their numerical group properly represented. Mr Milosevic is seen as the only politician who dared to say this out loud. Never mind the Albanians, runs the argument. It is the Serbs who are looked down on as second-class citizens by hostile (and richer) Slovenians and Croatians.

Serbia according to this view is the backbone of Yugoslavia, which will disintegrate unless its legitimate demands are met. But we should not forget that Mr Milosevic only prevailed two years ago against the more liberal Pavlovic-Stambolic leadership that had opposed chauvinist agitation, and his victory was followed by a vicious purge of the Serbian party. Nor does Mr Milosevic provide a more coherent solution to Yugoslavia’s economic problems than the leaderships of Slovenia or Croatia, while he has nothing to offer Kosovo which has 50 per cent unemployment and the second lowest per capita income in the country.

There is also a wider responsibility for the Kosovo crisis. The constitutional amendments were approved by the federal communist party, and the Kosovo assembly was acting under its orders when it voted them through. In effect, the federal party allowed Mr Milosevic last October at its 17th plenum to twist its arm, and traded off Kosovo against the maintenance of formal unity. No one expected then that the ethnic Albanians would protest with such passion. But Kosovo is now an occupied province where Serbian fears of Albanian armed struggle could become self-fulfilling. It will need a stronger federal nerve to avoid national catastrophe.

Kosovo at 10: challenges overshadow independence celebrations Read more

A Kosovo-Serbia land swap is ethnic cleansing by another name. Don’t do it

Agron Bajrami

17 October 2018

The Balkans are boiling again. This time it’s because speculation is rife that Kosovo and Serbia may finally end their dispute and normalise their relations. Kosovo’s president, Hashim Thaçi, and his Serbian counterpart, Aleksandar Vučić, are said to be close to an agreement that would help stabilise the Balkans and open the doors for both countries to join the European Union. Negotiations are happening under the mediation of the EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini. Ten years after Kosovo declared its independence, the last chapter of the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia would be closed.

Continue reading here …