[MACEDONIA ALBANIA I GREECE area is now 90…]
1992 1992-09Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 13 →
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MACEDONIA ALBANIA I GREECE area is now 90 percent Albanian.
All the attempts to displace the Kosovo Albanians were defeated by the prevailing poverty of the region, which discouraged lasting settlement by the better off Slavic peoples.
Being mostly Muslims, the Albanians make up the second largest Muslim group in the former Yugoslavia, along with the Bosniaks. The Albanians, however, are not confined to the Kosovo region. Their area of settlement extends into Macedonia, where they form an important minority.
According to Serbian nationalist mythology, the Kosovo region is the cradle of the Serbian nation, from which the Serbs were driven by the Ottoman rulers and their Albanian auxiliaries. The salvation of the Serbian nation, therefore, is supposed to include re-Serbianization of the historic heartland.
Kosovo was the site of a major battle published in 1988, Horvat explained that the Albanian and Slavic populations were still fluid at the time, and that there were backward and forward movements, with Albanian stockraisers living side by side with Slavic agriculturalists.
The political center of the medieval Serbian state at its height was far to the south, in what is Macedonia today, since that was the area closer to Byzantium, and therefore the richest part of the dominions of the Serbian dynasts. The decline of Byzantium and the Ottoman advance changed that situation, and the Serbian centers shifted toward the north, where the center of gravity of the Serbian population remained.
At the time of the Ottoman Turkish conquest of the Balkans, the Albanians and Bosnians were the outsiders among the older populations, both for the same reason. They were on the edges of the feudal system.
The Albanians remained semi-tribal until modern times. Among them, there is still a very elaborate system of blood feud, based on tribal law, which is described in the works of the best-known modern Albanian writer, Ismael Kadare (notably in his "Broken Spring").
Origins of the Bosniaks Feudalism was also late in taking hold in Bosnia. Mountains and forests isolated the Bosnians. And there were no major Roman (continued on next page)