RESEARCH PAPER - KOSOVO AND METOHIA (4)

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 spiraling 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 inter-ethnic 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

Limited autonomy, intensified nationalism, escalating conflicts 

The referendum in the whole of Serbia was held on 1 July 1990, but it was boycotted by the ethnic Albanians. Kosovo remained an autonomous province, but with territorial autonomy and a Statute to be enacted by the Parliament of Serbia. Legislative authority was transferred to the parliament of Serbia and executive authority to the government of Serbia. The highest judicial authority was vested in the Supreme Court of Serbia. The name Metohija (erased by the Albanian communists in 1968) reappeared in the official name of the autonomous province.⁵⁴

Claiming that the autonomy of the province was unlawfully abolished, the majority of ethnic Albanians (represented through the members of the dismissed provincial communist Assembly) responded on 2 July 1990 by proclaiming Kosovo a seventh republic within Yugoslavia, and by adopting, on 7 September 1990, their own “Constitution” at a secretly held Albanian assembly at Kačanik. These steps, followed by the widespread Albanian boycott of all official institutions, were assessed by Serbian authorities as a serious attempt at secession. As a result, all Albanians who had voluntarily left their jobs for an indefinite period, thereby contesting the state unity of Serbia, were fired. Another measure was an often harsh police treatment of both armed and unarmed street protesters, mostly younger Albanian population.

Denouncing what they called the “Serbian apartheid”, most of the Kosovo Albanians boycotted every major Serbian institution and the Belgrade-appointed administration from 1991. Instead, they organized their own parallel school and health systems, tacitly tolerated by Belgrade.⁵⁵ After the Dayton Accord of 1995, Slobodan Milošević, as the main guarantor of the hard-won peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina with unconditional Western support, became the chief negotiator for the Kosovo crisis. Nevertheless, the significant efforts of various international mediators to ensure a peaceful solution to the Albanian issue in Kosovo eventually failed.⁵⁶ While Milošević, treating the Albanian issue in humanitarian terms (allowing school facilities to be used), was reluctant to discuss constitutional change, the Albanians in Priština demanded the restoration of the 1974 autonomy status as the foremost concession.⁵⁷ Aside from various semi-official Serbian proposals calling for the ethnic partition of Kosovo as the only long-term solution to the problem, the Serbian democratic opposition put forward a range of transitional solutions, from regionalization to cantonization of Kosovo.⁵⁸

In the early 1990s the Kosovo Albanians pursued the policy of non-violent, passive resistance, symbolized by Ibrahim Rugova, and of the tacitly tolerated coexistence of two parallel systems in Kosovo, Serbian and Albanian. At least fifteen percent of Albanians still loyal to Serbia, as well as the loyalty of Kosovo’s minorities, spared the province from large-scale inter-ethnic conflicts, such as those raging in other parts of the former Yugoslav federation between 1991 and 1995. Yet, the same period witnessed a yearly rhythm of six to twelve terrorist attacks on the Serbian police by smaller armed groups of Kosovo Albanians. This low-intensity conflict, more like testing the police force in preparation for large-scale actions, went on until the middle of 1996, when the number of attacks tripled. The reported score of thirty-one ambush attacks in 1996 rose to fifty-four in 1997.⁵⁹ The UÇK (or KLA/Kosovo Liberation Army) emerged as an organized force in 1998. In Kosovo, it was seen as a national liberation group by the ethnic Albanians, and as an oppressor by non-Albanian ethnic groups. Purely Albanian, the UÇK was the military wing of one of many pro-communist guerrillas, often of Stalinist or Hoxhaist inspiration, tied to the Albanian narco-mafia and political radicals in the diaspora. Trained and armed in neighboring Albania, and sponsored from abroad, the UÇK started attacks on Serb policemen and civilians, but also on the Albanians loyal to Serbia.⁶⁰

The full-scale war instigated by the UÇK and their sponsors in 1998 led, after the failed negotiations held at Rambouillet, to the unilateral NATO intervention in March 1999: 78 days of NATO bombing of Serbia and partially of Montenegro, the other member-state of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. However, the bombing campaign (38,000 combat sorties flown between 24 March and 10 June 1999) lacked legal endorsement of the United Nations and was strongly opposed by many international players, including two permanent members of the UN Security Council, the Russian Federation and China. Ethnically motivated violence remained the prevailing practice in Kosovo even after the establishment of UN administration and KFOR military control in June 1999.⁶¹

UN administration since 1999

The 1999 war over Kosovo, which was not, as confirmed later, a “genocide”, as claimed during the NATO bombing, took the lives of roughly 10,000 Albanians and 2,000 Serbs in Kosovo alone, plus several thousands Serb, mostly civilian, victims in other regions of both Serbia and Montenegro. The bombing campaign was eventually terminated in early June 1999. Serbia gave assent to peace only after the NATO and Russian mediators had assured her that Kosovo would be placed under UN administration and that Yugoslavia would retain sovereignty over it. The UN Security Council Resolution 1244/99, under which Kosovo was entrusted to the United Nations, calls for establishing democracy, multicultural society and “substantial self-government” for Serbia’s southern province torn by spiraling cycles of inter-ethnic violence. 

In spite of some, though unsatisfactory, efforts of the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and an unparalleled international military presence (a 45,000-strong “Kosovo Force” or KFOR for an area of only 10,887 sq km and less than two million inhabitants, scaled down after nine years to a still strong contingent of 16,000 NATO-led troops), the position of the Serbs and other non-Albanians continuously deteriorated.⁶² The Albanian-dominated provisional institutions of Kosovo (president, government and parliament) not only failed to prevent large-scale persecution of Serbs and other non-Albanians, but gave a tacit approval to all kinds of ethnically motivated crimes.⁶³

In the months following the quick and safe return in the summer of 1999 of hundreds of thousands of displaced Kosovo Albanians, a reverse process ensued: mass expulsion (according to the UNHCR) of 246,000 Serbs, Roma, Gorani (Muslim Slavs) and other non-Albanians by Albanian extremists.⁶⁴ Besides, more than 40,000 houses and flats owned by non-Al-banians were burned to the ground or usurped by ethnic Albanians, includ-ing many illegal immigrants from Albania who plundered the property of the expulsed non-Albanian owners. Furthermore, since 10 June 1999, there are another 1,300 Serbs killed and 1,300 considered missing.⁶⁵ Since 10 June 1999, Priština, capital city of the Kosovo province, has lost one-fourth of its pre-war population (250,000): the city’s pre-war Serbian community of 40,000 (including 8,000 students and professors of the Serbian-language section of Priština University) has been reduced to barely above zero, a few dozen KFOR-guarded families, mostly elderly people.

The same horrendous fate befell the large, at least 10,000-strong ur-ban and suburban Roma population of Priština, presently the only ethnically cleansed provincial capital in the whole of Europe, and the same goes for all major urban centres in Kosovo. The only exception remained to be northern Kosovska Mitrovica, which strongly resisted frequent Albanian attacks from June 1999. The predominantly Serb-inhabited municipalities north of Mitrovica (Zvečan, Zubin Potok, Leposavić), still resist the Albanian authorities in Priština, recognizing only UNMIK and the Serbian government. Ten years after the end of the war, more than sixty percent of the Kosovo Serbs are still internally displaced persons (a euphemism for 200,000 refugees living in both Serbia and Montenegro since 1999), as well as seventy percent of the Roma and seventy percent of the Gorani. So it was only after a decade of successive campaigns of ethnic cleansing that the Albanians became a ninety-percent majority in Kosovo. This percentage remains conjectural given that the Albanians refused to organize a population census in the province after 1999.⁶⁶ To add to this appalling human rights record, 156 Serbian Orthodox churches, of which one third are important medieval monuments, were razed to the ground, burned down or severely damaged by local Albanian extremists.⁶⁷ This was a systematic effort to obliterate any trace of previous Serbian presence in the area in pursuit of further legitimization of post-war Kosovo as an exclusively Albanian-inhabited land.⁶⁸ As stressed by a West-ern observer, “this demolition cannot be just ‘revenge’ — NATO’s usual ex-cuse for the destruction under its auspices. You do not just fill with rage and spend days gathering explosives to blow up churches. This is vandalism with a mission.”⁶⁹

This “vandalism with a mission” undoubtedly is an integral part of every standard practice of ethnic cleansing. Two of the four major Serb monasteries in Kosovo — the Patriarchate of Peć and, to a lesser extent, the monastery of Visoki Dečani — until recently sustained occasional shelling by Albanian extremists from the surrounding hills. The whole of Metohija — save for a thousand Serbs still living under siege in the enclaves of Goraždevac and Velika Hoča, and a few hundred Serbs isolated in scattered villages — is effectively an ethnically cleansed part of the province of Kosovo and Metohija.

The destruction of at least 117 Serbian cultural sites between 1999 and 2004, mostly churches and monasteries, one third of a medieval date, passed almost unnoticed, or was mildly criticized everywhere except in Serbia, Russia or Greece. Nonetheless, ethnic purity as envisaged by Kosovo’s Albanian extremists is not a concept that can be accepted as a legitimate basis for either democracy or state independence. It has become evident that none of the values of the West will be able to eventually take root in the lawless, illegal trafficking paradise of a mafia-ruled Kosovo, “Balkan Colombia” as it has often been described by renowned international experts for drug-trafficking routes leading to Western capitals.⁷⁰

Most of the remaining Serbs and non-Albanians throughout Kosovo, with the exception of the Serb-inhabited area north of the Ibar River, in Kosovska Mitrovica, live in squalid conditions in smaller or larger ghetto-like enclaves (Gračanica and Lipljan, Štrpce, Šilovo, Parteš, Klokot, Novo Brdo, Orahovac and Velika Hoča, Goraždevac), often surrounded by barbed wire and always under the protection of international forces. They practically have no freedom of movement. The appalling ethnic discrimination they have been suffering is well-documented in the reports of both Serbian and relevant international organizations.⁷¹ The post-1999 ghetto-like situation remains a rule for smaller Serb communities (villages, parts of villages or groups of villages). For example, the village of Cernica in the Gnjilane area once had 85 Serb and 400 Albanian households. From 2000 to 2003 the Serb villagers sustained frequent attacks by the local Albanian extremists: five families lost their members, including a child; dozens were wounded, their houses were burned or destroyed, and the church of St Elijah was largely devastated. At the end of 2003, the score showed 6,391 ethnically motivated attacks by Albanian extremists, 1,192 Serbs killed, 1,303 kid-napped and another 1,305 wounded. Nevertheless, few perpetrators of these ethnically motivated crimes have ever been identified, let alone arrested and prosecuted.⁷² The Albanian-dominated provisional institutions of Kosovo not only did nothing to prevent these tragic events, but effectively gave them a tacit approval. The perpetrators have not been brought to justice.

The spread of the Kosovo war model of ethnic domination, first to the mixed Serb-Albanian municipalities in Preševo Valley in southern central Serbia in 2000, and then to the predominantly Albanian-inhabited areas of neighbouring Slavic Macedonia (FYROM) in 2001, demonstrated the essence of the aspirations of the anachronous concept of Albanian national-ism in the region. Contrary to the way they are presented to the public and international institutions worldwide, these aspirations are not motivated by a struggle for human, civil, collective or any other internationally sanctified rights, but by a long-term project of achieving full and uncontested ethnic domination over a territory through systematic persecution, pressure and discrimination of all other and numerically weaker ethnic groups.

To be continued: The March pogrom 2004

---

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

⁵⁴“Ustav Republike Srbije”, Službeni glasnik Republike Srbije 1 (1990).

⁵⁵ For the Albanian point of view see I. Rugova, Independence and Democracy (Prishtina: Fjala, 1991); The Denial of Human and National Rights of Albanians in Yugoslavia, ed. A. Gashi (New York: Illiria, 1992); Open Wounds: Human Rights Abuses in Kosovo (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993). Roughly ten to fifteen percent of Kosovo Albani-ans, however, remained loyal to Serbia and the Yugoslav state, which later made them preferred targets of Albanian terrorist groups.

⁵⁶ D. T. Bataković, “Kosovo-Metohija Question: Origins of a Conflict and Possible Solutions”, Dialogue 7/25 (1998), 41–56.

⁵⁷ The Milošević–Rugova agreement on education in Kosovo, signed under the auspices of the Community of St Egidio, never came into effect due to different interpretations: Naša Borba, Belgrade, 3 and 4 September 1996. For an overview of different initiatives with associated documentation, see Conflict in Kosovo: An Analytical Documentation, 1992–1998, ed. S. Troebst (Flensburg: European Centre for Minority Issues, Working Paper No 1, 1998).

⁵⁸ D. T. Bataković, “Progetti serbi di spartazione”, Kosovo: Il triangolo dei Balcani, Limes 3 (1998), 153–169. For views of Serbian experts from the democratic opposition ranks, see “Kako rešiti kosovsko pitanje” [How to solve the Kosovo issue], in Belgrade’s Književne novine no 973 of 1 May 1998, and no 974 of 15 May, with the discussion of the following participants: D. T. Bataković, S. Samardžić, D. M. Popović, Z. Lutovac, Z. Radović, S. Ugričić and M. Perišić.

⁵⁹ According to Belgrade’s data, thirteen police officers, nine Albanian terrorists and twenty-five civilians, mostly Serb, were killed, and sixty-seven persons were wounded. Moreover, in 1997 there were twenty-seven registered attacks on the Yugoslav army, hitherto uninvolved in operations against rebel groups. Also observed during 1997 was intensive smuggling of both drugs and ever-larger quantities of weapons from Albania, where the looted army barracks (700,000 pieces of small arms were stolen) became a source for the illegal export into Serbia, notably into Kosovo and Metohija, of tens of thousands of Kalashnikovs and other weapons, usually of Chinese, Soviet and Albanian provenance.

⁶⁰ T. Hundley, “Kosovo Serbs Live in Fear of Future”, Chicago Tribune, 22 February 1999. The Albanian version in P. Denaud and V. Pras, Kosovo. Naissance d’une lutte armée UCK. Entretiens avec Bardhyl Mahmuti représentant politique de l’armée de libération du Kosovo (Paris: Harmattan, 1999).

⁶¹ See rather critical analyses of the evolution of the Kosovo crisis and NATO operations in La nouvelle guerre des Balkans, eds. I. Ramonet and A. Gresh, Manière de voir 45, Le monde diplomatique, May–June 1999 (a collection of previously published articles).

⁶² For more see I. King and W. Mason, Peace at Any Price. How the World Failed Kosovo (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2006).

⁶³ H. Morris, “Church warns over attacks on Serbs”, Financial Times, 29 June 1999, 1; cf. also D. François, “La KFOR confrontée à la violence albanaise. Les représailles se multiplient contre les minorités serbe et rom”, Libération, 29 June 1999, 8; “Sad Serb”, The Economist, 31 July 1999, 41.

⁶⁴ According to the UNHCR data, between the beginning of June and 26 July 1999, 172,061 persons fled Kosovo and Metohija, ninety percent of whom were Serbs. There were 132,789 officially registered refugees in Serbia and Montenegro, and 22,811 fled to Montenegro alone (the data reproduced in Danas, Belgrade, 27 July 1999, 2). For other on-the-spot reports that were published, see M. O’Connor, “Rebel Terror Forcing Minority Serbs Out of Kosovo”, New York Times, 31 August 1998; R. Jeffrey Smith, “Kosovo Rebels Make Own Law”, Washington Post, 24 November 1999; P. Worthington, “NATO’s Reputation a Casualty of War”, The Toronto Sun, 18 November 1999; cf. also M. Boot, “U.N. Discovers Colonialism Isn’t Easy in Kosovo”, The Wall Street Jour-nal, New York, 2 November 1999.

⁶⁵ Cf. detailed documentation on 932 missing persons in Abductions and Disappearances of non-Albanians in Kosovo (Belgrade: Humanitarian Law Center, 2001).

⁶⁶ Important personal testimony is provided by T. Judah, Kosovo. War and Revenge (Yale University Press, 2000).

⁶⁷ R. Fisk, “Nato turns a blind eye as scores of ancient Christian churches are reduced to rubble”, The Independent, 20 November 1999; “French Troops Feel Anger of Albanian Kosovars”, International Herald Tribune, 9 August 1999, 5. Cf. also the bilingual Serbian-English publication Crucified Kosovo. Destroyed and Desecrated Serbian Orthodox Churches in Kosovo and Metohija (June–August 1999), ed. Fr. Sava Janjić (Belgrade 1999). A revised and updated Internet edition available at: www.kosovo.net

⁶⁸ “The Serb church has issued its own list of destroyed or partly demolished buildings. Between 13 June — when NATO troops entered Kosovo — and 20 October, they say, seventy-four churches have been turned to dust or burnt or vandalised. The fifteenth-century monastery of the Holy Trinity above Mušutište, constructed in 1465, has been levelled to the ground by the planted explosives. The monastery of the St. Archangel near Vitina, built in the fourteenth century, has been looted and burnt. So has the church of the St. Archangels in Gornje Nerodimlje. The church of St Paraskeva, near Peć, and the church of St. Nicholas in Prekoruplje — razed and its nine sixteenth-century icons lost, including that of the apostle Thomas. The rubble of [Serb] Orthodox churches across Kosovo stands as a monument to Kosovo Albanian vandalism and to NATO’s indifference or — at the least — incompetence. After declaring that Kosovo must remain a ‘multi-ethnic society’, 40,000 troops from K-For cannot, it seems, look after its historical heritage against the violence of those whom its spokesmen treated as allies in the war against Yugoslavia’s President, Slobodan Milošević, only five months ago.” The Independent, 20 November 1999.

⁶⁹ Ibid.

⁷⁰ D. T. Bataković, “Serbs and other non-Albanian Communities in Kosovo and Me-tohija: Appalling Conditions and an Uncertain Future“, Review of International Affairs LVII:1122 (2006), 13–15.

⁷¹ A comprehensive analysis is available in Kosovo and Metohija. Living in the Enclave, ed. D. T. Bataković (Belgrade: Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 2007).

⁷² By way of illustration, let me present just one of many examples: on 12 April 2003 Albanian extremists planted a 40kg explosive device under the railway bridge Ložište near Banjska and Zvečan. Due to a mistake made in planting and activating the device, the bridge was only slightly damaged, but both explosive planters, members of the “Kosovo Protection Corps” and the “Albanian National Army”, were killed. A UNMIK police investigation established that the objective of the attack was to blow up the train carrying Serbs from the central-Kosovo enclaves to Leposavić in the north, on its way to its final destination, Belgrade.