1981/No. 35 by Dennison I. Rusinow UNFINISHED BUSINESS: THE Europe [DIR-2-'81] YUGOSLAV'"NATIONAL QUESTION" "Do not forget, the national factor is stronger and potential significance of the trouble were than all others; on this issue history, including our indeed greater than initially admitted. There had history, has not upheldMarx's theory." apparently been more than the officially reported In the first days of April 1981 the Yugoslav 9 dead and 250 wounded during the April riots, regime and public and equally unprepared out- since many in both categories were said to have side observers of the Yugoslav scene were startled been taken into hiding by relatives and clansmen, by reports of widespread and violent nationalist a time-honored Balkan custom. More complete and irredentist disturbances in the Socialist lists of places and incidents made it clear that no Autonomous Province of Kosovo. Constitution- part of Kosovo had been untouched, and trials of ally a sub-unit of Serbia, one of Yugoslavia's six persons with Albanian names were also reported federated republics, the Kosovo region borders on from western Macedonia. The "security situa- Albania and is predominantly inhabited by tion" in Kosovo was ominously being described as Albanians. "still complicated" more than two months later. Spasmodic demonstrations, strikes, and acts of The scale of the disturbances was suggested, violence, usually directed against Serbian graves despite early local attempts to suppress details and monuments and the property of the revealing their seriousness and extent, by refer- Province's Serb and Montenegrin minorities, ences to police reinforcements from other regions continued despite further police reinforcements and territorial militia assisting local police in from other regions and the threatening presence quelling demonstrations in several parts of the of the Army and its tank,,s (reportedly never used). province. Units of the Yugoslav People's Army The University of Pristina (Prishtine), among with tanks guarding key facilities and communi- whose 45,000 students it all began, was closed in cations were called in and state-of-emergency mid-May, 10 days before the academic year measures were invoked over an entire federal unit should have ended. Public gatherings continued for the first time in postwar Yugoslav history. The to be banned, and theaters and cinemas remained stability and tranquility that had characterized closed. Meanwhile, as the press and the regime Yugoslavia's transition from the Tito era for sought to explain the extent and violence of the almost precisely one year had been rudely disorders and the surprise and unpreparedness of breached at their weakest point, on the "national the authorities when they occurredirredentism question" in general and in Kosovo in particular, and occasional nationalist demonstrations are old and with a violence the country had not experi- Kosovo stories, but not on this scale--it was said enced since an earlier armed uprising by Kosovar that Provincial Party and state organs, predomi- Albanians just after World War II, when Tito's nantly Albanian in personnel, had ignored Communist Partisans were consolidating their warmng tremors over a period of several years rule. and even failed to report them to higher authori- In the weeks that followed, with Kosovo still ties in Belgrade, the capital of both Serbia and under a partial state of emergency and closed to the federation. foreign observers except for official conducted Resignations by senior Albanian Party and tours, Yugoslavia's own belatedly unleashed state officials in Kosovo began. The first to go was media gradually revealed that the depth, extent, Provincial Party boss Mahmut Bakalli, whose 2/DIR-2-'81 blithe response to this reporter's suggestion thought. But if this is so, where else to begin during a 3V hour interview only 16 months again? Generalized condemnations of "Albanian earlierthat the situation at the university and in nationalism and irredentism" and mutual re- employment constituted a political time-bomb in criminations, including Kosovar accusations of the Kosovar national context was then interpreted "tendentious" (meaning ethnically prejudiced) as an effort to deceive a foreign observer, but now reporting by "the central Belgrade media," sug- seems also to have included elements of self- gested more evasion and even panic than coherent deception. 2- Calls for more "assigning responsi- strategy. Implicit in 11 this has been a broader bility" and a campaign for "political differentia- question. Is the "Titoist solution" to Yugoslavia's tion," a new euphemism for impending wider "national question," so long regarded as prom- purges, were said to be meeting widespread ising if problematic and incomplete, failing its resistance in the form of lip service and protective first post-Tito test in Kosovo? And if so, where "family-ism" on the part of Kosovar Albanian next? Party cadres. The extent and violence of the nationalist dis- Polemics with neighboring Albania escalated turbances in Kosovo in spring 1981 pale in com- sharply after the (Tirana) Albanian media took up parison with similarly inspired events in many the cause of their "brothers" in Yugoslavia, sup- countries of the Third World and even Europe, to porting the demonstrators' demand that Kosovo both of which Yugoslavia belongs. Pritina is not be elevated to the status of a seventh Yugoslav yet Belfast or Beirut; Kosovo is not yet Kurdistan Republic, and that alleged Serbian domination or the Basque country; and only extraordinary and exploitation should cease. With demon- stupidities by the Yugoslav authorities (which strators' demands for a separate federal republic cannot, however, be excluded if panic ultimately interpreted as merely a first step toward detach- triumphs over policy) can erase these "not yets." ment of Kosovo from Yugoslavia and its incorpo- On the other hand, and as the Yugoslav media are ration in a "Greater Albania" ruled from Tirana, now glumly and repeatedly reminding their and with "We are the soldiers of Enver Hoxha" readers and listeners, the trouble in Kosovo and (the Albanian head of state and Party) among the its repercussions, whether imitative or reactive, slogans of some of the student demonstrators in are not likely to go away soon or with a small dose Kosovo, Yugoslav officials and media accused of combined repression and economic and polit- Albania of challenging Yugoslavia's territorial ical concessions. integrity and endangering peace in the Balkans, As in the economy, where serious problems are with inevitable repercussions for world peace. also aggravating the national question and under- Meanwhile, Yugoslav officials and the media mining stability as well as living standards and wondered aloud, in hurt and bewildered tones, further economic development, a serious rethink- how it could be possible that an apparently large ing of solutions and systems inherited from the number of Kosovar Albanian students, workers, Tito era---which is not the same thing as their and peasants seemed to prefer Enver Hoxha's abandonment or a radical "de-Titoization"---is in Stalinist Albania, with its notorious lack of per- order, and this is being said with all due circum- sonal, civic, and religious freedom as well as pros- spection at several official and popular levels. A perity and modernity, to Titoist Yugoslavia, where lively public discussion of problems and deficien- all of these things are present in manifestly far cies in the political and constitutional relationship greater abundance, even if less so in Kosovo. between the Autonomous Provinces of Kosovo Some are suggesting that comparative counting and the V0jvodina, and the Republic of Serbia of per capita television sets, refrigerators, per- to which they formally belong, is only one straw sonal automobiles, and industrial development, in the wind of critical reappraisal that was certain with which Yugoslav officialdom had tradi- to blow before the first post-Tito Yugoslav Party tionally comforted itself---and sought to per- Congress in 1982, and that has been spawned only suade Yugoslavia's Albanians---that Albanian a little prematurely by the storm centers in Kosovo irredentism had no allure, may not be the best way and the economy. Other straws include parallel either to understand or to respond to the problem. discussions of "responsibility" for a purportedly Perhaps not even far greater freedom of expres- accelerating "disintegration" of the "unified sion, religion, opportunity, participation, and Yugoslav market" into "closed, autarchic Repub- movement in Yugoslavia than in Albania counts lican and Provincial markets" that is substan- as much against the "national factor" as had been tiated by statistics on declining interrregional DI R-2-'81/3 A U S T R A H U N G A R Y Tirana MACEDONIA Yugoslavia 1981 4/DIR-2-'81 commerce, and about ways to make the system of Examples, which the predominantly Austrian "workers' and social self-management" economi- originators of this interpretation generally drew cally more efficient. The first of these debates was from Hapsburg and therefore in part Yugoslav generated by events in Kosovo, the second is part experiences, included the oppression and exploi- of the problem, and all three are bound to stir the tation of proletarian or peasant nations or parts embers of old conflicts between "centralists" and of nations by Capitalist or landowning ones or "de-centralizers," also intimately involving the portions thereof. These and analogous phe- national question. nomena may appear within individual multi- Pending more information about what is still cultural countries or internationally in the form happening in Kosovo, a more thorough analysis of imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, and of this new challenge from Albanian nationalism their ilk. and irredentism would be premature, and the Nationalism and national conflicts, so under- present writer has in any case had his say in stood, should therefore tend to disappear when anticipation about the background to these the bourgeois carriers and economic reasons for events, aAs the general debate proceeds, how- them are eliminated under socialism.