RESEARCH PAPER - KOSOVO AND METOHIA (2)

Kosovo and Metohija:

Serbia’s troublesome province^*

Dušan T. Bataković

Institute for Balkan Studies Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts Belgrade

Abstract: Kosovo and Metohija, the heartland of medieval Serbia, of her culture, politics and economy (1204–1455), experienced continuous waves of spiralling violence, forced migration and colonization under centuries-long Ottoman rule (1455–1912). A region which symbolizes the national and cultural identity of the Serbian nation as a whole now has an Albanian majority population, who consider it an ancient Albanian land, claiming continuity with ancient Illyrians. Kosovo was reincorporated into Serbia (1912) and Yugoslavia (1918) as a region lacking tradition of inter-ethnic and inter-religious tolerance and cooperation. The two rivalling Kosovo nations, Albanians and Serbs, remained distant, maintaining limited interethnic communication throughout the twentieth century. The mounting national and ideological conflicts, reinforced by the communist ideology, made coexistence almost impossible, even after the 1999 NATO bombing campaign and establishment of KFOR-secured UN administration. Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence in February 2008 is a dangerous attempt to establish a second Albanian state extended into the heartland of Serbia, a failed state cleansed of both Serbs and other major non-Albanian communities.

Keywords: Serbia, Kosovo, ethnic strife, nationalism and communism, Kosovo crisis, NATO bombing, war against Yugoslavia, international protectorate

From Ottoman dominance to a Serbian and Yugoslav realm

Once a Roman and subsequently Byzantine possession, the region known as Kosovo and Metohija was the central part of medieval Serbia, and the homeland of two of her five medieval dynasties. It was the hub of her culture and her religious centre. From the late thirteenth century the see of the Serbian Orthodox Church was at Peć, in Metohija, a region known for the many church-owned Serbian royal endowments.¹³ The Battle of Kosovo in 1389 marked a turn of the tide. The Ottoman Turks gradually conquered the area. Kosovo and Metohija, part of the Despotate of Serbia, was conquered in 1455, and the rest of the Serbian Despotate fell only several years later (1459).¹⁴
Frequent wars fought between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires led, on the one hand, to forced migrations of the Serbs from Kosovo, Metohija and adjacent areas — later subsumed under the name Old Serbia — the most massive being those of 1690 and 1739, and, on the other, to a mass inflow and settlement of Albanians from Albania proper.¹⁵ The whole region, in which tribal and feudal anarchy reigned supreme, remained under Ottoman rule for almost a century longer than the areas of central and northern Serbia. The Old Serbia (Vilayet of Kosovo) was liberated in the First Balkan War in late 1912. Kosovo was reincorporated into the Kingdom of Serbia, while the eastern part of Old Serbia, known as Metohija, went to another Serb state, the Kingdom of Montenegro. The two areas, Kosovo and Metohija, were reintegrated when Montenegro united with Serbia at the end of the First World War. Serbia was fully restored and additionally strengthened by her important military contribution to the final Allied victory.
In December 1918, Serbia responded to the demands of the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs of the defunct Austria-Hungary, and created a new entity, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, from 1929 known as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. During the interwar period Kosovo and Metohija remained an integral part of Serbia, belonging to several of her administrative and political units (oblasts or banovinas). The implementation of extensive social and agrarian reforms led to the repopulation of the area by roughly 60,000 Serb colonists.¹⁶
The questionnaires used in two official interwar censuses (1921 and 1931) contained questions about religious affiliation and native language, rather than ethnic origin or national identity. Even so, present-day Kosovo and Metohija had a relative Albanian majority in demographic terms, a fact that strongly contradicts all propagandistic allegations, both inter-war and post-war, about a mass migration or mass expulsion of Kosovo Albanians (1919–1941). According to the 1921 Yugoslav census, Kosovo had a population of 436,929, with Albanians (i.e. Albanian-speaking inhabitants) accounting for 64.1 percent, while in 1931 Albanians accounted for 62.8 percent of a total of 552,064.¹⁷
Recently made estimates, which are based on the 1921 and 1931 censuses and take into account internal military documents created in 1939, show an increasing trend for the Serbs within the present-day boundaries of the province in both relative and absolute terms: according to the 1921 census, they accounted for 21.1 percent; in 1931 — 26.9 percent; and in 1939 — 33.1 percent or 213,746. The Albanian population also increased: from 288,900 in 1921 to 331,549 in 1931, and to 350,460 in 1939. The third largest ethnic group, Turks, decreased from 6.3 percent in 1921 to 3.8 percent in 1939.¹⁸ The increase in the number of Serbs did not result only from the inflow of settlers. The figure also includes some 5,000 state-appointed officials and technical personnel.¹⁹

Regional rivalries and nationalist movements

After 1918 Italy emerged as a new regional power and assumed the role of Albania’s main protector and certified interpreter of Albanian interests. Rome continued its old policy of stirring Serb-Albanian strife, now rivalling the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes for supremacy in the Eastern Adriatic. For several years (1918–1924) Kosovo and Metohija remained a restless border area constantly threatened by Albanian outlaws (kaçaks) supported by the “Kosovo Committee”, an organization of Albanian emigrants from Kosovo whose struggle for a “Greater Albania” involved frequent terrorist incursions into the Yugoslav territory.²⁰

In security terms, the whole area sustained frequent outlaw raids from Albania, which often targeted Serb colonists and Yugoslav state officials, in particular in the Drenica area.²¹ The Serbian Orthodox Church, in the Ottoman period racketeered by local Albanian chieftains for armed protection against their fellow tribesmen, remained the preferred target of kaçak attacks, to the extent that in the 1920s both the Monastery of Dečani and the Patriarchate of Peć had to be placed under military protection. The royal Yugoslav authorities, struggling to build a long-term security, responded with severe and often brutal military and police measures against the local outlaws and the raiders from Albania, and occasionally retaliated against the local Albanian civilians as well.²²
The “Kosovo Committee” was financed and armed by different Italian governments. The Albanians in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the same as in pre-war Serbia (1912–1915, 1918), were an ethnic minority who largely harboured a hostile attitude towards the new state ruled by their former Slavic serfs. Yet, the influential Albanian beys of Kosovo and neighbouring areas reached an agreement with Belgrade concerning the preservation of their own privileges, and found the guarantee of religious rights for their clansmen satisfactory enough. They showed no interest in improving their inadequate minority rights, in providing secular education and broader cultural activities in their native language.²³ As a predominantly conservative patriarchal community, Kosovo’s Muslim Albanians more often than not preferred religious to secular schooling, and Islamic to secular institutions.²⁴
Muslim beys from Kosovo, Metohija and north-western Macedonia founded in 1919 a Muslim-oriented political party. The Çemijet entered into direct arrangements with Belgrade, offering political backing in exchange for a partial exemption from the agrarian reform. Supported by the local Muslim population (mostly Albanian, Turkish and Slavic), the Çemijet obtained twelve seats in the Yugoslav Parliament in the 1921 elections, and two more seats (14) two years later. Initially serving religious and social rather than political interests, the Çemijet gradually evolved into an organization that combined religious affiliation with distinctly national goals. As early as 1925, however, the party was banned by the royal Yugoslav authorities on the grounds of its clandestine ties with the remaining kaçak groups and the anti-Belgrade government in Tirana. For a certain period of time it continued to operate clandestinely and to recruit followers, mostly young men, for the Albanian national cause.
In the long-run, however, Belgrade proved unable to rival Mussolini’s growing influence in the region, Albania included. Under Ahmed Zogu, a former protégé of Belgrade and future king of Albania Zog I, Albania was drawn back into the political and economic orbit of fascist Italy.²⁵ The conflict with Mussolini’s Italy and the Rome-controlled Albanian national movement were given fresh impetus as the Second World War drew near. Under Mussolini’s patronage, Albanian emigrants from Kosovo and Metohija, the pro-Bulgarian IMRO movement in Yugoslav Macedonia, and the Croatian fascist forces (Ustasha), coordinated their guerrilla actions against the multinational and politically vulnerable Yugoslav kingdom.²⁶ Belgrade’s ambitious plan to remove the growing threat to the stability of its southwestern border by means of arranging with Turkey (1938) a mass resettlement of the Albanian and Turkish populations from both Kosovo and Slavic Macedonia (Vardarska banovina) was never implemented due to the death of Kemal Attatürk, the fall of Milan Stojadinović’s cabinet (1939), unsettled financial terms with Ankara and the outbreak of the Second World War.²⁷ The growing discontent of the Kosovo Albanians, expecting to receive decisive support from the fascist camp after Italy’s occupation of Albania in 1939, remained a latent threat to Yugoslavia’s security.²⁸

To be continued: The Second World War: persecution, forced migrations, Albanization

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^* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the University of Ottawa, Canada, on 6 March 2008. 

¹³ C. Jireček, La civilisation serbe au Moyen Âge, transl. from German L. Eisenmann, preface E. Denis (Paris: Bossard, 1920); M. Lutovac, La Metohija. Etude de géographie humaine (Paris: Institut des Etudes Slaves, 1935); Cultural Heritage of Kosovo and Metohija, ed. M. Omčikus (Belgrade: Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of the Republic of Serbia, 1999); Z. Rakić, The Church of St. John the Baptist at Crkolez (Belgrade: Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of the Republic of Serbia, 2007); Visoki Dečani Monastery, ed. by the Dečani monks (Dečani: Visoki Dečani Monastery, 2007).
¹⁴ S. M. Ćirković, La Serbie au Moyen Age (Paris: Zodiaque, 1992).
¹⁵ O. Zirojević, Srbija pod turskom vlašću (1459-1804) (Novi Pazar: Damad, 1995).
¹⁶ B. Krstić, Kosovo. Facing the Court of History (New York: Humanity Books 2004), 80–95. 
¹⁷ Interwar censuses quoted by H. Isljami, “Demografska stvarnost Kosova”, in Sukob ili dijalog. Srpsko-albanski odnosi i integracija Balkana (Subotica: Otvoreni univerzitet, 1994), 39–41. Within the French-inspired banovina system introduced by King Aleksandar I Karadjordjević in 1931, the distribution of ethnic Albanians was as follows: 16 percent in Zetska banovina (most of Metohija and today’s Montenegro with Dubrovnik); 3.36 percent in Moravska banovina (central Serbia with northern Kosovo); and 19.24 percent in Vardarska banovina (eastern and southern Kosovo, Prizren and the Gora region, and Slavic Macedonia). As for ethnic Turks, they accounted for 7.91 percent of the population in Vardarska banovina, mostly in the Prizren area. 
¹⁸ M. Vučković and G. Nikolić, Stanovništvo Kosova u razdoblju 1918–1991. godine (Munich: Slavica Verlag, 1996), 80–82; J. A. Mertus, Kosovo. How Myths and Truths Started a War (Berkeley: University of California, 1999), 315–318.  
¹⁹ Dj. Borozan, “Kosovo i Metohija u granicama protektorata Velika Albanija”, in Kosovo i Metohija u velikoalbanskim planovima 1878–2000 (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 2001), 125–126. 
²⁰ For more see M. Dogo, Kosovo. Albanesi e Serbi, passim. 
²¹ In 1922 alone, Albanian outlaws (kaçaks), who were celebrated by the local Albanian population as national heroes, committed fifty-eight murders, eighteen attempted murders, thirteen assaults and seventy-one robberies. In Metohija alone there were at least 370 active kaçaks, led by Azem Bejta in the Drenica area. Cf. D. Maliković, Kačački pokret na Kosovu i Metohiji 1918–1924 (Leposavić–Kosovska Mitrovica: Institut za srpsku kulturu, 2005).
²² Ample documentation available in Lj. Dimić and Dj. Borozan, Dimić and Dj. Borozan, Jugoslovenska država i Albanci, 2 vols. (Belgrade: Službeni list SRJ, 1998); for the Albanian, mostly romantic, perspective on the kaçak movement, see L. Rushiti, Lëvizja kacakë në Kosovë (1918– 1928) (Pristinë: Instituti Albanologjik i Prishtinës, 1981). 
²³ Under the Treaty of Saint-Germain (1919), minorities in Serbia within the borders of 1913 (including Kosovo-Metohija) were excluded from international protection; cf. R. Rajović, Autonomija Kosova. Pravno-politička studija (Belgrade: Ekonomika, 1987), 100–105. 
²⁴ Roughly five percent of Kosovo Albanians, concentrated mostly in the Prizren area, and an insignificant number scattered elsewhere, are Roman Catholics while the rest are Muslims by faith, originating from the Albanian tribes of northern and central Albania.

²⁵ Ž. Avramovski, “Albanija izmedju Jugoslavije i Italije”, Vojnoistorijski glasnik 3 (1984), 153–180; R. Morrozzo della Rocca, Nazione e religione in Albania (1920–1944) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 151–166.

²⁶ Cf. G. Zamboni, Mussolinis Expansionspolitik auf dem Balkan. Italiens Albanienpolitik vom 1. bis z. 2. Tiranapakt im Rahmen d. italien.-jugoslaw. Interessenkonflikts u. d. italien. imperialen Bestrebungen in Südosteuropa (Hamburg: Burke, 1970), 301–338. 
²⁷ Individual proposals concerning mass resettlement or even expulsion of ethnic Albanians from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, such as the infamous one proposed by the historian Vasa Čubrilović in 1937, were neither discussed nor accepted by the Yugoslav government which remained focused exclusively on the bilateral agreement with Ankara. Contrary to what is often strongly suggested by most Albanian and some Western scholars, there is no evidence in either the Serbian or Yugoslav military and civilian archives for any connection between Čubrilović’s proposal and Yugoslavia’s official policy. 
²⁸ B. Gligorijević, “Fatalna jednostranost. Povodom knjige B. Horvata Kosovsko pitanje”, Istorija XX veka 1–2 (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 1988), 185–192.