Historical roots of ethnic conflict in former Yugoslavia

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AUSTRIA Km 200 (Part one of a two-part series)

The turbulent history of the Balkan peninsula explains the complexity of the national question in the former Yugoslavia. No people living in this highway of invasions, this border between Central Europe and the Mediterranean, between the Near East and the West, has ever been left to itself long enough to build a stable national life, let alone an enduring national state.

From the early Middle Ages, the Balkan peninsula was an area of competition between the Byzantine empire, the patron of the Easter Orthodox religion; Austria, the main medieval Catholic state; the city state of Venice; and later between the Austrian and Ottoman Turkish empires. The Austro-Hungarians and Ottomans ("Turks") fought over it for nearly 400 years.

Until modern times, the Balkans have been marked by important population movements. As the Ottoman empire lost its hold on the area, hundreds of thousands of Turks, as well as Muslim Slavs and Albanians, fled to Anatolia-where they are known as Muhajirs and still represent a distinct thread in Turkish culture.

The policy of the Slavic nationalist states that grew out of rebellions against Ottoman rule in the 19th century has generally been to drive out the Muslims, even those who speak the Slavic languages, as an alien element bound up with the Turkish occupation. This was the objective of the Yugoslav monarchy between the First and Second World wars, and most recently of the Stalinist regime in Bulgaria and the Great Serbian neo-Stalinist strongman, Slobodan Milosevic.

In Yugoslavia, at the end of World War I, the dominant Serbian nationalists were able to exploit social grievances against the Slavic Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina (who are generally known as Bosniaks, although some apply this term to adherents of all three religions in Bosnia-Herzegovina.) More than 90 percent of the Bosnian landowners were Muslims, having gained this status under the Ottoman feudal system. Three-fourths of the serfs were Serbs.

The collapse of Austro-Hungarian rule in The Albanians were particularly useful SLOVENIA CROATIA BOSNIA & HERCEGOVINA Sarajevo Adriatic Sea + AIVLE Bosnia-Herzegovina, as a result of Austria's defeat in the First World War (1914-18), was followed immediately by Serbian peasant rebellions that unfortunately led to pogroms against the Muslim population in general. After December 1918, there was a new wave of Muslim flight to Turkey.

"Serbianizing" Kosovo The Great Serbian rulers of the Yugoslav state established in the wake of World War I were also determined to get rid of the Albanian Muslim majority in the Kosovo region, located to the southeast of Bosnia (see map), both by forcing them to emigrate and by colonizing the area with Serbs and Montenegrans. They were, however, unable to "Serbianize" the area. The Yugoslav Stalinist government under Tito, which resumed this policy in the 1950s, also failed. The population of the Kosovo HUNGARY VOIVODINA Belgrade SERBIA MONTE On- Kosovo / between the Ottomans and the Serbian ruling house, along with various Christian allies, in 1389, which ended in defeat for the latter.

Serbian historical mythology The Christian defeat at Kosovo has traditionally been viewed as the end of the powerful medieval Serbian state, although the Serbs did not come under direct Ottoman rule until after the fall of the Byzantine state in 1453. The Battle of Kosovo gained a special importance in Serbian tradition since it served as the setting for an impressive cycle of epic poetry.

The tradition of epic and historical folk poetry was one of the foundations on which Serbian nationalism was built in the 19th century. Under Ottoman despotism and feudalism, the conditions of tribal warfare that form the basis for such oral literature survived until very late times.

Such folk literature, however, hardly gives an accurate picture of the population movements on the Balkan peninsula. The legend that the Albanians stole the lands of the Serbian population of medieval Kosovo was disputed by Branko Horvat, one of the most courageous of the Titoist reformers.

In his book, "The Kosovo Question,"