Kosovo: An example of Yugoslav Stalinists lip-service to rights of nationalities

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Albanians in Kosovo may soon suffer the same fate as the Muslims in Bosnia Herzegovina, as Serbian strongman Milosevic tries to carve out an empire for himself. A study of the experience of the Albanians in Kosovo reveals a history of deceit and betrayal by the Yugoslav Stalinists, who never gave nore than half-hearted support to the rights of oppressed nationalities. 16 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 1992 on the streets of (Last of a two-part series)

Kosovo is the legendary heartland of the Serbian nation. But most of the population today is Albanian. Kosovo is the likely site of a new extension of the war provoked by the neo-Stalinist regime of the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.

When Serbia took Kosovo from Turkey in 1912, Serbs in the region were already far outnumbered by Albanians. Despite its attempts to settle Serbs and Montenegrans in the area and to force the Albanians to leave, the Yugoslav monarchy failed to change the ethnic pattern.

However, the Great Serbian rulers did leave a legacy of extreme bitterness among the Albanians. As a result, when the Italian fascist armies occupied the area in 1940, the Kosovo Albanians welcomed them as liberators.

The severest test of the Yugoslav Communist Party's (CP) principles on the national question was its attitude to the Albanian population of Kosovo. After it came to power, the CP retreated from the national policy that it had followed during the partisan struggle of the second world wat.

A striking illustration of this is the fate of the resolution of the founding conference of the National Liberation Committee for Kosovo and Dukadjin. The meeting took place in the village of Bujan at the end of 1943. The following passage from the Bujan resolution obviously came to stick in the throats of the Yugoslav Stalinist regime:

"Kosovo and Mehojia is an area where Albanians form the majority of the population. Always and still today, they have wanted to be united with Albania. For this reason, we have considered it our duty to point out the right road by which the AlbaSarajevo: A preview nian people can achieve their aspiration. The only way that the Albanians of Kosovo and Metohija can unite with Albania is through joining in a united struggle with the other peoples of Yugoslavia against the occupiers and their lackeys.

"Because this is the only way to win freedom, when all the peoples, including the Albanians, will be able to say what they think about their fate, with the right of self-determination up to and including separation. The guarantee of this is the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia, as well as the National Liberation Army of Albania, to which it has close ties."

But the Bujan resolution became a dead letter after the victory by the Tito CP leadership. It eventually became a scandal for Serbian chauvinists in the Communist Party. Thus, in 1987, Branko Petranovic, an official historian of the war period, wrote in a major Yugoslav publication: "The Kosovo leadership must turn its back on it [the Bujan resolution], wipe it out, in Kosovo? and publicly distance itself from this document, inasmuch as it represents an open expression of separatism."

It had become the fashion in Serbian and central govemment circles to view the resolution as an aberration, perhaps owing to the participation of a majority of Albanians in the Bujan conference.

Horvat rescues the facts The liberal Titoist economist Branko Horvat had to rescue the facts in his courageous book "The Kosovo Question" (Globus, 1988, Zagreb). He documented well the fact that the Bujan resolution was in line with the general approach of the Communist Party during the war period. He also chided Petranovic for subjectivism: "Historical facts cannot be crossed out."

When Horvat's book was published, Kosovo Albanians were being denounced as "counterrevolutionaries," even defending their right to autonomy and equality with the other peoples of Yugoslavia. Nonetheless, by 1988, the totalitarianism established by the victorious CP had broken down to the point that it was possible, to some extent, to publish critical studies.

Horvat is no revolutionist. In this book, he explicitly rejects the "right of self-determination up to and including separation" as utopian.

He writes: "As long as ethnic groups are not systematically discriminated against, there is no right to self-determination. In that case, the predominant consideration is the principle of state integrity. The reason for this is the priority that the world community gives to the stability of the international legal system and peaceful coexistence, for which the essential prerequisite is the unalterability of frontiers.

Thus, Horvat stays within the framework of Stalinist reformism. The extent of national rights to be granted is entirely subordinate to pragmatic considerations of "international politics." Nonetheless, the the record that he restores is damning for the Tito Stalinist regime.

First of all, Horvat explains why such a concession to Albanian national feeling was necessary. At the beginning of the war, the Communist Party had only 239 members in the region, of whom only 23 were Albanians.

"This small party membership," Horvat writes, "was unable to organize the national liberation struggle among a population that awaited the Italians as liberators."

Therefore, the Albanian Communist movement, organized with help from the Yugoslav CP, played a decisive role. "Young Kosovars were ready to join Albanian brigades, from Kosovo or Albania. But they were not ready to join mixed brigades for fear of being declared supporters of reactionary forces and then liquidated. It is significant that the Fourth KosovoMetohija Brigade was formed in Krum, on Albanian territory."

The trust of the Albanians in their Slavic allies evidently did not go very deep, even though many felt compelled to join with them against the brutal fascist occupiers. The suspicions of the Albanian people led to rebellion against the victorious Yugoslav forces in 1945.

And the mistrust of the Albanians proved quite justified. At the founding congress of the Serbian CP in 1945, the Central Committee secretary Djoko Pajkovic acknowledged:

"We committed such big mistakes in Kosovo and Metohija in dealing with the Albanians that they became convinced that nothing had changed from the time of old Yugoslavia. For example, they were forbidden to display their flag, forced to speak Serbian. ... The leading posts were taken by Serbs and Montenegrans, which provoked revolt among the Albanian masses. ... When fighting was going on, a number of officers came from the country, but after the liberation there have been committees in which there have been no Albanians, but mainly Montenegrans and Serbs."

In Kosovo, in 1956, 86.6 percent of the secret police were Serbians and Montenegrans, while these two groups made up only 27.4 percent of the local population at the time. Only 13.3 were Albanians, although the latter represented 64.9 percent of the population. Kosovo was only the most extreme example. In general, Serbians predominated in the secret police and among the officers of the new Yugoslav army.

Moreover, also in 1956, the secret police staged a major frameup trial in Kosovo and forcibly disarmed the Albanian population.

The liberal Titoist Horvat opines that disarming the people was a good thing since if this had not been done there might have been armed resistance to the repressive campaign launched in 1981 and thus "more bloodshed."

But Horvat deplores that "the operation was accompanied with beatings, mistreatment, torture, arrests, and jailings without trial. Some murder cases have not been cleared up to this day. Yugoslav public opinion was not properly informed about these events, which was a serious political (and journalistic) failing." He goes on: "The methods used led to the conclusion (continued on next page)

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An anonymous sniper in Sarajevo. Milosevic's Lebanon in Yugoslavia.

SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 1992 17 (continued from previous page)

that the aim of the operation was retaliation and intimidating the population."

Under the thaw

In 1966, a liberalization was launched at the Yugoslav Communist Party plenum on the island of Brioni. Tito's minister of the interior, Aleksandar Rankovic, accused, among other things of being a Great Serbian chauvinist, was removed. In the atmosphere of the thaw and the disgrace of the political police, revelations began about the past repression of the regime, which had supposedly now corrected those errors.

Thus, at the Serbian CP plenum in 1966, Veli Deva talked about large-scale surveillance of intellectual workers by the secret police: "But those in the worst position were teachers of the Albanian language, literature, and history." They were often called in by the secret police and warned not to teach anything not approved by the Council for Education and Culture of the Serbian republic.

In a contribution to a seminar on "Bosnia and the Bosniaks" held in 1990, Muhamed Filipovic recounted how a similar totalitarian straitjacket had been imposed on the Bosniaks: "After 1947, an extremely aggressive campaign was waged against their [the Muslim Bosniaks'] individuality ... against their national culture, education and charitable institutions....

"The regime that unquestionably helped save the Bosniak Muslims from extermination, very quickly wore out its credit, and turned all thinking Muslim-Bosniaks against it."

Unlike the totalitarian regime in the USSR, however, the Titoists came to power as the result of a revolution and not a counterrevolution. (The actual revolutionary leadership of the Russian revolution was liquidated by Stalin, the chief of the rising bureaucracy). Under the pressures of the partisan war, the Yugoslav CP was led to go too far for the Kremlin, which did not want a social revolution in the country. But its break from Stalin's line was pragmatic and limited.

"A War Within the War"

Milovan Djilas, one of Tito's major lieutenants, broke from the Communist Party some years after the establishment of the new regime, going to the right. In his book, "A War Within the War," Dijilas explains that people who criticized the Communist Party during the war were harshly treated. After the war, they were imprisoned or shot.

A cult of personality was built up around Tito. It was not so false as the Stalin cult, since the Yugoslav leader had won real respect from the masses for his role during the war. But it was hardly less religious and all pervasive.

The general effects of this totalitarian regime were similar to those of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. Horvat alludes to them over and over again by his references to the failure of the press to report problems, the failure of the official institutions to study the reality in the country, the absence of real public opinion. In the conditions of bureaucratic dictatorship, it was inevitable that historic inequalities would be integrated into the pattern of privilege.

As an official economist, Horvat attributes the failure of the 1966 liberalization to lead to effective democracy and to the solution of the country's problems, in particular the national question, to economic factors and mistakes by the leaders. The introduction of self-management (primarily autonomy of factory managers) in 1952, he notes, was followed by a rapid growth of the economy. In 1965, he writes, before the Brioni plenum, an "extremely unprofessional economic reform was adopted." The country then entered a phase of stagnation.

The students rebel The liberalization unleashed processes that "discredited the progressives." In 1968, there were radical student demonstrations in Belgrade, similar to those seen in Western Europe, especially France, in the same period. Among the slogans raised by the Belgrade students was "down with the red bourgeoisie!"

A few months after the demonstrations in Belgrade, Albanian students also went into the streets in Kosovo. Horvat lists the following slogans, among others: "We want a republic!" (Although they are as numerous as the Slovenians, the Albanians have been denied a republic of their own on the basis that they are not a nation but a "national minority, since the majority of the Albanian nation lives in Albania!) "We are Albanians and not Yugoslavs!" "The national liberation struggle did not bring freedom to the Albanians!" "We want the [Albanian] national flag!" "Freedom for the political prisoners!' "Long live Adem Demaçi!"

(Demaçi was an Albanian writer who Adriatic Sea ITALY founded the Revolutionary Movement for the Unification of the Albanians in 1961 to press for exercise of the right of self-determination up to and including separation that was guaranteed by the Communist Party. He spent the next two decades in prison.)

The liberalization went further in Croatia, under a nationalist wing of the Communist Party. This development actually challenged the power of the central government and the monolithism of the Yugoslav CP. Tito himself gave the signal for a purge of the Croatian party, which ended the period of thaw. A number of Croatian Communists, including the current president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, were imprisoned.

A centralist opposed to Croatian nationalism and to any form of "national economy," Horvat writes that he lost all confidence in the CP leaders at the time of the purge, except for the Slovenian ones. In fact, the reform elements in the Slovenian CP and CP youth took the leadership of the reviving reform movement in the 1980s.

Stalinists grant concessions In 1974, after the movement for national and other democratic rights had been stopped by the Croatian purge, a new Yugoslav constitution was adopted giving additional autonomy to the constituent republics and to the national minorities in Serbia.

At the same time, important concessions were made to Kosovo, in particular the establishment of a university (in 1970). By 1981, the new university had 26 thousand students, an enormous advance from the prewar period, when there were only about 17 thousand students in the whole of Yugoslavia-of whom 19 were Albanians. But there were no jobs for these students.

In the period from 1952 to 1981, the gap between Kosovo and the most developed republic of Yugoslavia, grew from one to four to one to 6.1—as big, Horvat notes, as that between England and North Africa. What is more, the insufficient jobs available were alloted unevenly. Out of every thousand employed in Kosovo, 258 were Montenegrans, 228 were Serbs, and only 109 were Albanians, although the last grouping was a large majority.

Thus, the reforms clearly did not amount to a consistent revolutionary policy to eliminate the inequalities. At the same time, there can hardly be any doubt that the Yugoslav authorities did not want the BOSNIA 8 Belgrade Sarajevo SERBIA MONTE AK NEGRO MACEDONIA ALBANIA E GREECE inequality to reach such an explosive point, and that they took important measures, within the limits of their resources to avoid that.

The fundamental problem is that Yugoslavia remained a small, relatively backward country. And within its borders, it did not have the capacity to build an economy strong enough to eliminate longstanding historic unevenesses.

A prime example was the attempt to set up a steel industry in Macedonia. The installations set up could not produce at competitive prices. The project thus failed to improve the position of Macedonia. And was seen in the more developed republics as a waste of their money.

The Yugoslay CP became the victim of its own narrow nationalistic conception of building a socialist economy, its abandonment of the perspective of extending the socialist revolution. The left tendencies that existed in the party at the time of the break from the Kremlin did not prevail. The Tito regime, like the other ruling bureaucracies, oriented decisively toward a policy of international class collaboration, hoping to profit from greater integration into the capitalist world market.

After the end of the world capitalist boom in 1974, the Yugoslav rulers found themselves in a trap. Their plans exploded, and the economy went into a nose dive in which it has remained. Hyperinflation began long before the present war. Horvat attributes problems on the world market to the rise in the oil price. But they actually reflected a growing crisis of the capitalist economy as such.

On the other hand, Horvat does note correctly that in the context of a shrinking economy, the inequalities among the Yugoslav peoples sharpened, with a corresponding increase in ethnic tensions. That was particularly true when the leadership had no consistent program for fighting inequality.

In this situation, the concessions given to the Albanians only led to frustration, and to another explosion of student unrest in Kosovo in 1981, which was followed by a wave of repression, one that Horvat says in one way or another touched a hundred thousand people.

The response to this repression became an important factor in deepening the crisis of the Yugoslav Stalinist regime. Horvat writes:

"In Kosovo, three exceptionally important innovations were accomplished. The first has to do with mass organization. Of course, organization on a national basis is the worst sort of mass organization. However, it is a great advance by comparison with a lack of mass organization. This is moreover a lesson for our social theorists showing that in Yugoslavia, the nation plays a much stronger integrating role than class, party or ideology.

"In the Labin strike [the strongest Albanian protest against the abolition of Kosovo autonomy], the miners did not get any class solidarity from other miners. [The pragmatic Horvat does not inquire about the reasons for this, although he saw class solidarity among workers of different nationalities in the struggle against the fascist occupiers.] The policy took care of the activists. And the leadership of the unions did not even deem it necessary to talk to the miners.

"The second innovation is the public attempt of the victimized groups that the police and state organizations act as mandated. The petitioners went to Belgrade and forced their way into the parliament and Central Committee.

"Both innovations would have been quite unthinkable a few years ago when the govemment would have arrested any citizens assembling publicly as 'enemies.' "The third innovation has to do with citizens challenging political functionaries in the press. Before, the latter called the people to order. Now the situation is reversed."

A springboard to power On the other hand, the Serbian neo-Stalinist leader Milosevic took the repression of the Albanian movement and the campaign of Serbian chauvinist hysteria as his springboard to power. He managed to mobilize many hundreds of thousands of Serbs to demonstrate for a "Serbian Kosovo." He removed the independent Kosovo government, in fact abolishing Kosovar autonomy.

Milosevic also mobilized Serbian masses under chauvinist slogans to bring down the government of the autonomous province of Vojvodina, where there is a large Hungarian minority. All of this he called the "Great Antibureaucratic Revolution," hoping to convince the Serbian people that he was fighting the hated bureaucracy.

Milosevic's policy became clearly not just to centralize the republic of Serbia by liquidating the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina but to "recentralize" all of Yugoslavia around Serbia. This line began to force the reluctant bureaucracies in the other republics into confrontation with the Serbian party boss.

A conflict had been growing with Slovenia, where the Belgrade Stalinists had considered a military takeover to oust what they considered a too tolerant local regime and stop the growth of the democratic The Croatian regime, too, installed on the basis of the "antinationalist" purge of the early 1970s, was now driven with extreme reluctance to criticize Milosevic. National resentments boiled in Croatia. In the first real parliamentary elections in 1990, new Croat nationalist parties overwhelmed the Communist Party.

However, Milosevic refused to retreat. He continued to push for a "recentralization" of Yugoslavia around his Serbian regime and to try to whip the balky nationalities back into line. Facing his ultimatum, their only recourse was to declare independence.

Milosevic's last card was to try to construct a greater Serbia out of the ruins of the Yugoslav federation. The crisis of the Yugoslav variant of Stalinism thus led to ; open war—a form of Stalinism particularly contradictory, which, because of its revolutionary origin, had proved to be a highly explosive compound.