Understanding the War in Kosovo

Florian Bieber, Zidas Daskalovski, Florian Bieber, Zidas Daskalovski

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135761547
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Geschichte
• Categoria: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

The war in Kosovo has been a defining moment in post-Cold War Europe. Kosovo has great importance beyond the Balkans as the most ambitious attempt of the international community to prevent internal conflicts and rebuild a society destroyed by war and ethnic cleansing. As the danger of ethnic conflict prevails in the region and elsewhere around the world, the experience of Kosovo offers important lessons.
This is a comprehensive survey of developments in Kosovo leading up to, during and after the war in 1999, providing additionally the international and regional framework to the conflict. It examines the underlying causes of the war, the attempts by the international community to intervene, and the war itself in spring 1999. It critically examines the international administration in Kosovo since June 1999 and contextualizes it within the relations of Kosovo to its neighbours and as part of the larger European strategy in Southeastern Europe with the stability pact. It does not seek to promote one interpretation of the conflict and its aftermath, but brings together a range of intellectual arguments from some sixteen researchers from the Balkans, the rest of Europe and North America.

PART I
BACKGROUND TO THE CONFLICT

1
Claims to Kosovo: Nationalism and Self-Determination

Židas Daskalovski

The aim of this chapter is to answer the question of whether claims by different national movements are to be seen in the light of the ‘particularity’ of their cases. As Yael Tamir has put it, ‘[M]ost nationalists, however, tend to repress the knowledge that their nation is but a reiteration of a worldwide phenomenon… they tend to emphasize the particular’.¹ Using the case of Kosovo, I will illustrate how nationalist claims are certainly not so dramatically different that: they each can be judged as specific and therefore meriting special attention, More specifically, I will show the congruence of the claims of Albanian and Serbian nationalists for the right to rule over Kosovo. As it will become evident, both sides, Serbian and Albanian, try to present to the international community their case as being particular and therefore deserving particular attention and consideration. However, if both cases are presented as being particular, but both claims rest on more or less equivalent arguments, then we face a dilemma—how to evaluate Serbian or Kosovo Albanian assertions for political right to rule this province.

If both of the claims are based on a supposed distinctness of ‘their case’ but this uniqueness is a mere illusion, then a neutral observer deciding upon particular present day disputes between the ‘Kosovo Albanians’ and the ‘Serbs’ must evaluate the claims, decide which one of them has the veracity and, therefore, merits attention. In other words, if the Kosovo Albanians’ claim to independence is not based on an unique argumentation, as Albanian nationalists would like us to believe it is, but is indeed similarly constructed to the Serbian argument, then the Albanian assertion over the ‘rule of Kosovo’ would fail the test of originality and we would have to look at which one of the cases is accurate. Given that the ‘ordinariness’ of the Albanian claims for the ‘right to rule Kosovo’ is established, then ‘particularity’ of the case cannot be taken as a measure for passing rightful decisions on the Kosovo question. Instead, careful analysis of the reliability of the claims themselves may be the alternative solution. To reiterate, as the Kosovo case study will evince, nationalist claims are typically not unique, and cannot be judged on the basis of their proclaimed particularity. Before looking for substitute solutions we should consider whether a careful analysis of the reliability of the claims of the two sides can conceivably be an alternative answer. However, is not that clear whether we can duly assess the opposing claims through comparative analysis of the arguments presented by the two sides. For Serbian and Kosovo Albanian arguments for ‘rights’, like many other nationalistic mythologies, are based on a complex interpretation of a combination of historical, legal and demographic details rendering the evaluation of the rightness of the intricate claims.

If the claims by national groups cannot be justifiably considered on the basis of the particularity of their situation question then there would be a need for an alternative mechanism for adjudicating nationalistic demands. This chapter, however, stops at this point. Its aim, based on evidence from the Kosovo case study, is to show that there is a need on the part of social scientists to construct a universal mechanism for evaluating nationalistic claims, a ‘just theory of nationalism’. This chapter, in other words, attempts to illustrate that confronting nationalistic claims cannot be assessed by relying on their supposed particularity. Hence, this analysis will promote different approaches to the study of nationalism, be they liberal, communitarian or other.

THE SERBIAN PERSPECTIVE

The Beginnings

The Serbian ‘fairy tale’² starts with one of the least disputable events in early European history, the arrival of the Slavs in Europe in the fourth century AD, the time of the great migrations. These were the times when the ethnic map of Europe that largely exists today was formed, and every claim of territorial rights that relies on the ethnic map of premigration Europe is simply impossible today, for in this period there were no states or nations of today.³ The Slavs were separated into three groups, one of them made up by south Slavs who settled the Balkans. Among those south Slavs three distinct groups could be observed—the ancestors of the present-day Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.⁴ Kosovo was the area where the Serbs settled between the seventh and tenth centuries.⁵ They were mainly crop farmers and thus inhabited only the plains and river valleys of present-day Albania, leaving the mountains to the early Balkan shepherds—Vlachs and ancestors of modern Albanians.⁶ Prior to the sixteenth century, the time of the conversion of great numbers of Albanians to Islam, ‘Serbo-Albanian relations… can be regarded rather as a symbiosis.’⁷

In the late twelfth century, Kosovo and Metohija were incorporated into the Serbian medieval empire. By this time, Kosovo was, ‘the heart of Serbia’,⁸ or in other words, ‘the state, political, economic and cultural centre of the Serbian nation’.⁹ Studded with more churches and monasteries than any other Serbian land, ‘Kosovo and Metohija became the spiritual nucleus of Serbs’.¹⁰

Stefan Dušan’s (1331–55) time was the peak of the Serbian medieval state for it then incorporated territories from Belgrade, across Albania, Epirus, Thessaly and Macedonia to the Aegean. Dušan was influenced by medieval ideas of the state, which were never national in the modern sense of the word’ and, accordingly, called himself ‘Emperor of the Serbs, Greeks, Bulgars and Arbanasi [Albanians]’.¹¹ However, by1385 the Serbian medieval empire was mostly broken into pieces, falling under Turkish domination. Serbia itself (much divided among feudal lords) clashed with the Ottoman armies at the battle of Kosovo Polje, on 28 June (Vidovdan or St Vitus Day) 1389.

Whether this battle ‘[was] one of the greatest armed confrontations in Europe, [that] can even be compared…to the Battle of Thermopile (480 BC)’¹² or just an insignificant event for world history, didn’t matter to generations of Serbs. What matters is that ‘of all Kosovo battles only one counts in the formation of the psyche of a Serb’.¹³ Thus, for some Serbian historians ‘Kosovo [is not] a myth, but a historical idea, which helps a nation to forge a link with its real historical past’.¹⁴ Themyth and legend of Kosovo and Vidovdan were ‘transmitted to posterity by the popular epic poetry, by the Serbian Orthodox Church, by intellectuals and historians, as well as by national and political leaders in modern times’.¹⁵ For Serbs, the legend of ‘lost’ Kosovo, regardless of how everything really happened, was another indispensable factor that kept the Serbian national consciousness alive and contributed to the successful end of the struggle for independence.

The Ottoman Rule and the Liberation Movements

The Turkish invasion caused Serbs to migrate to the north. Since the Ottoman Empire saw itself as a religious organization,¹⁶ anyonewho embraced the ‘true faith’ of Islam had the same rights as the Ottomans themselves. This resulted in mass conversions, forced or voluntary. The rule of the law of discrimination and the absolute authority of Islam were the factors that contributed largely to the demographic changes that took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹⁷ In the great Austro-Turkish wars Serbs fought, together with other Christian inhabitants of the Balkans, on the Austrian side to overturn the ‘Turkish yoke’. After the Austrians were defeated, reprisals followed and Serbs migrated north in large numbers, partly because of actual reprisals by the Turks and partly out of fear of reprisals.

The great migrations of the Serbs (the first estimated at some 185,000) greatly weakened the Serbian ethnic element in Kosovo and in other regions as well, but it wasn’t before the eighteenth century that Kosovo started to lose its distinctly Serbian ethnic homogeneity. That was the time of the greatest and most numerous Albanian penetrations.¹⁸ The new Albanian settlers, mostly Muslims by faith, were additionally protected by Ottoman authorities or previously settled ethnic Albanians.¹⁹ According to Dimitrije Bogdanović, a Serbian historian, this mass colonization meant genocide for the Slav population.²⁰ The nineteenth century was marked by the national revolutions of the Balkan nations, and by the 1860s Serbs had won autonomy. In 1875 there was unrest in Bosnia. Serbia and Montenegro declared war on the Turks in 1876. The international crisis that followed was resolved first with the Treaty of San Stefano in 1878 and then with its revision, the Congress of Berlin in the same year. Both were a shock to Serbs since they had hoped to win back the ‘Old Serbia’ (Kosovo) and the Sanjak of Novi Pazar.

From the Congress of Berlin to the First World War

The Albanians who moved from the newly liberated Serbian territories contributed to the changes of the demographic picture of Kosovo.²¹ Serbian ethnographer Niko Zupancić, for example, declared that 150,000 Serbs left Kosovo between 1876 and 1912.²² Serbian official Branislav Nusić, compiled statistics for the villages in the Peć region, from which he concluded that 15,756 Serbs had left in the period 1870–95.²³ The creation of the independent Albania and Serbia’s territorial gains in the Balkan wars—including Kosovo—did not solve the Serbian-Albanian problems. Serbia maintained—after the Balkan wars and later—that Kosovo had to be a part of the Serbian state, whether the Albanians made up the majority of the population or not.²⁴ Upon these premises the policy of the Serbian State towards the Albanian minority has been conducted ever since.

The Albanian Minority and the Yugoslav State from 1914 to 1989

During the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the policy of moving the Albanian population out (for it was seen as the remnant of Ottoman dominance) was never approached systematically, although it was suggested by Turkey in 1914 and completed in respect to the other Muslims, from Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia ‘proper’.²⁵ However, by this time, it had become absurd to consider the Albanians as strangers on Serbian land—people who should, in due time, be expelled from it. The developments during and after the Second World War firmly established them as a native population of Kosovo and they came to think of Kosovo as their land, that was unjustly not a part of a ‘greater’ Albanian state. During the Second World War Kosovo became a part of Greater Albania, created by Italy, and huge numbers of Albanians flooded into the region.²⁶ This period of Serbian history is marked by a reign of terror—there were mass and single killings of Serbs in Kosovo and a ‘campaign of expulsion and extermination [was conducted] against the Serbian population in the…area’.²⁷ According to the Serbian historian, author Predrag Živančević, 60,000 Serbs and Monteriegrins were killed during the war.²⁸ However, the outcome of all this was the incorporation of Kosovo not into Albania, but into a new, socialist Yugoslavia. Kosovo (or Kosovo-Metohija, more precisely, also called Kosmet) was until 1966 an autonomous ‘region’. In 1974 Kosovo was bestowed a constitution separate from that of Serbia, the status of the Socialist Autonomous Province with rights equal to those of the nations of Yugoslavia.

After Tito’s death in 1980, the manifestations of Albanian nationalism became more frequent. Many private assaults against Serbian persons and property were reported, as well as various other cases of rapes, beatings, destruction of graves and murders. Some monasteries and churches had also been defaced—all for reasons of ethnic hatred.²⁹ The pattern was emerging, that of systematic pressure on the Serbs and Montenegrins to leave Kosovo, sell everything they had and go to Serbia. (The percentage of the Serbian population in Kosovo fell from 23.6 per cent in 1961 to 13.2 per cent in 1981. It is now less than 10 per cent.³⁰) In 1981³¹ the secessionist tendencies of the Albanian population culminated in the so-called March riots. The central message of these mass protests was the demand for Kosovo to become a republic of Yugoslavia and the final aim of the protesters was union with their mother-state—Albania. A state of emergency was declared and the Yugoslav People’s Army had to crush the revolt and restore order in Kosmet.

Even after these events the Albanian pressure and abuse of the Serbs and the Montenegrins continued. In 1990 Serbian historians alleged that in the previous two decades some 400,000 Serbs were forced to leave Kosovo.³² They were ignored both by the Kosovo and the federal government. Resentment for the state that could not and did not want to protect its own citizens was rising. That, together with the coming six-hundredth anniversary of the famous battle of Kosovo created an atmosphere conducive to the rise of Serbian nationalism. Slobodan Milošević, an emerging figure on the political scene, used the emotions of the people and their dissatisfaction to gain power. Milošević only did what most of the Serbian people wished for: the c...