Where the national question [in Kosovo] is concerned, it is necessary to keep two facts in mind. First, every nation has the right to self-determination, including secession. Second, we do not support all national movements, but only those which are really against imperialism, that is, which are for truly democratic national development. That means that the Albanians in Kosovo and Metohija have the right to do what they want, how they want.

JOSIP BROZ TITO, in a letter to the central committee of CP Albania, dated December 2, 1943¹

If the nationalist euphoria of 1969-71 demonstrated anything, it was that, maxims of socialist unity notwithstanding, nationalist sentiment still represents a powerful oestrus in collective behavior in Yugoslavia. By the end of the 1970s, various Yugoslav figures, such as Gazmend Zajmi, were denying that the withering away of the state would entail the withering away of the nation.² And yet the hope continued to be expressed that “in socialism, in the process of overcoming and transcending the division of classes and the class character of labor, national emancipation grows into human emancipation, and the national community into a direct human community.”³ Equally important was the direct challenge to the LCY’s policy—contained in the efforts to legitimize nationalism; to distinguish between positive, if exclusivist, nationalism and ethnocentric chauvinism; and to carve out a new ideological watering hole at which republican etatism might nourish itself.

But if Croatian nationalism and its political consequences represented the principal threat to the integrity and stability of the Yugoslav federation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by the end of the 1970s, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo had become the loci of new ethnocentric malaises. Indeed, the Muslim question and the persistence of separatist sentiment among Yugoslavia’s Albanians were, in the mid-1980s, the chief axes of nationalist disequilibrium in the Yugoslav system. But by the end of the 1980s, under the pressure of the disintegration of the system, nationalism was stirring among the members of every nationality.

The Muslim Question

Even before Muslim consciousness became politicized, the question of Bosnia’s status in the federation was recognized as critical to the stabilization of interrepublican politics. Had Bosnia been allowed to remain part of Croatia, leaving intact the eastern boundaries set by the Ustaše state, the Croatian republic would have been assured of overweaning economic preponderance in the federation—with 40.1 percent of the country’s population (by 1948 figures), 42.9 percent of its surface area, 40.2 percent of its hydroelectric potential, 73.9 percent of its coal, 64.3 percent of its petroleum, vast stretches of Bosnian forests, and the reasonably advanced Croatian industry.⁴ Yet the incorporation of Bosnia-Herzegovina into Serbia was equally unthinkable to a generation that had languished under Greater Serbian exploitation and had devoted more than two decades to the struggle against Serbianization. Nor was there any confidence that dividing Bosnia between Croatia and Serbia could provide a basis for interethnic harmony.⁵ A separate status for Bosnia was as necessary to socialist Yugoslavia as was a Montenegrin republic. The legitimacy of such a status in an ethnically based federal state hinged, however, on some particular ethnic claims by the prospective regional unit. As early as July 1940, at its Fifth Conference, the CPY discussed the case for the ethnic particularity of Bosnia’s Muslim population. The conference failed to resolve the issue, except to declare itself “against the attempts of the Serbian and Croatian bourgeoisies to divide Bosnia-Herzegovina between themselves.”⁶ During the war, as the Partisans were setting about the business of establishing the new constitutional order, some voices suggested constituting Bosnia-Herzegovina not as a republic but as an autonomous province attached to the Serbian republic (on the pattern of Vojvodina). Others felt that Bosnia’s lack of a numerically dominant nationality that was distinct from those of the other republics deprived it of any claim to republican status. Yet, apprehensive of Serbian tutelage, they advanced an alternative proposal: establishment of Bosnia-Herzegovina as an autonomous province directly linked to the Yugoslav federation (a proposal somewhat reminiscent of Bosnia’s unique status under Habsburg rule).⁷ Both these proposals were felt to provide insufficient guarantees of political stability, and so, when AVNOJ proclaimed the federal principle on November 29, 1943, Bosnia-Herzegovina was listed alongside the other republics—on the supposition that the 44.7 percent Serb, 23.9 percent Croat, and 30.9 percent Muslim configuration of the republic (by 1948 figures) was sufficient justification for that arrangement.

In the early postwar period, the Muslims were viewed as the least “national” of Yugoslavia’s peoples, even as potentially anational (if they did not identify themselves either as Serbs or as Croats). Some conservatives viewed the Muslims as the anational core around which the new Yugoslav nation would be formed. No one dared suggest that the Muslims might themselves have a claim to recognition as a nationality group. Ranković, who covertly admired Soviet nationalities policy and favored emulation of Russification, was openly against the notion of Muslim particularity and denied the existence, or the possibility of, a Muslim nation.⁸ Throughout this period, antagonistic groups advanced rival theories about the origins of the Bosnian Muslims. The best known in the West is the Bogomil theory, which, in the variant expostulated by Croatian nationalists, held that certain groups of ethnic Croats embraced a Manichaean religion known as Bogomilism, were thereafter persecuted by both the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and converted en masse to Islam when the comparatively liberal-minded Turks subsequently conquered the region.⁹ This theory contends that the Muslims are “Islamic Croats” and describes Bosnia-Herzegovina as the Croatian hinterland (more than 60 percent Croatian). An alternative theory espoused by Serbs and Serbophiles holds that the so-called Muslims are in fact Serbian settlers from the time of the Turkish occupation who abandoned Orthodoxy and adopted Islam. This theory adds, for good measure, that some Serbian immigrants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries converted to Catholicism, so that many of today’s Croats in Bosnia are Serbs by origin.¹⁰ Later, when the Serbianists had been squeezed out of positions of power, Avdo Humo, one of Bosnia’s foremost Muslim leaders, told a party conference that the Serbian theory was an assimilationist device aimed at the Croatian and Muslim people of Bosnia-Herzegovina and that “in the policy of assimilation . . . of the Muslims there was always present an attempt by the authorities to turn the Muslim national institutions into Serbian Muslim institutions.”¹¹

In time, a third theory was advanced by Muslim nationalists, who argued for a Turkish origin and traced their antecedents to immigration from Anatolia. This theory contests the customary belief that the Bogomil sect was a spin-off from Christianity and contends that the Bogomils were a non-Christian sect whose doctrines were related to Islam. According to this theory, the only thing Slavic about the Bosnian Muslims is their language, which they absorbed from the indigenous population.¹²

Ranković, whose repressive Serbianization policies were concentrated in Kosovo, Vojvodina, and Bosnia-Herzegovina (i.e., against the Albanians, the Hungarians, and the Muslims), subscribed to the second theory, that is, to the notion of a Serbian origin for the Muslims. During the period of his ascendancy, Ranković and his coterie emphasized Yugoslav unity and attempted to suppress any acknowledgement or discussion of ethnic particularities. Thus, not until the Eighth Congress in 1964—that is, after the expiration of twenty-four years—was the subject of Muslim nationality once again openly broached.¹³

The fall of Ranković was not merely a victory for the Croats or the decentralists, nor even “merely” for the forces of reform: it was a victory for Yugoslavia’s Muslims. Within five years of the defeat of Ranković, the status of the Muslims was significantly enhanced on a number of levels. To begin with, shortly after Ranković’s expulsion from the party, Tito made an ex cathedra declaration that the national identity and national specificity of the Muslims must be recognized—a pronouncement that made possible the recognition of the Muslims as a sixth Yugoslav nationality. Tito also endorsed the concept of organic Yugoslavism (organsko Jugoslovenstvo), a harmonious symbiosis between national specificity and affective attachment to the Yugoslav federal community (as opposed to the concept of integral Yugoslavism endorsed by Ranković, under which national specificity and affective attachment to Yugoslavia were seen as antagonistic). Tito’s endorsement of all three theories of Muslim ethnogenesis must be seen as an effort to deny exclusive legitimacy to any one theory and to close the debate once and for all.

Yet there continued to be uncertainties about the Muslims, centering especially on the relationship of Islam to their national identity. Many continued to doubt, in particular, whether the Muslims could lay claim to being more than a distinct cultural community. Though the “Bosniaks” were recognized as an ethnic group in 1961, and, despite the fact that the Fourth Congress of the Bosnian party (1964) had assured these “Bosniaks” of their right of self-determination, it was not conceded that the Bosnian Muslims were as fully “national” as the Serbs or Croats. R. V. Burks credits Muhammed Filipovic, a professor at Sarajevo, with being the first (in 1967) to articulate the Muslim claim to separate national status.¹⁴ Filipović’s claim was politically premature, and he was summarily expelled from the party. But just a few months later—in February 1968—the central committee of the League of Communists of Bosnia-Herzegovina resolved, at its Eighteenth Session, that “experience has shown the damage of various forms of pressure and insistence, in the earlier period, that Muslims declare themselves ethnically to be Serbs or Croats because, as was demonstrated still earlier and as contemporary socialist experience continues to show, the Muslims are a separate nation.”¹⁵ This proclamation provoked certain groups in other republics, and, at the Fourteenth Session of the central committee of the LC Serbia (May 1968), Jovan Marjanović, supported by Dobrica Ćosić, declared that “the proclamation of a Muslim nation is senseless” and sought to obtain a resolution that would prevent the category “Muslim” (in the ethnic sense) from appearing on the next census. The resolution failed to find support, however, and the majority condemned Marjanovic and Ćosić for their views, expelling them from the party.¹⁶ Avdo Humo’s three-part article for Komunist in July 1968 (under the title “Muslimani u Jugoslaviji”) was a symptom of the increasing assertiveness of the Yugoslav Muslim community— no longer on the defensive after the fall of Ranković. Humo’s warning was unmistakable: “Not to see the truth about the Muslims,” he declared, “not to comprehend their specificity, means to fall headlong into arbitrary and subjective interpretations of national-social relations, to lose one’s balance and to irritate, unnecessarily, the national feelings of a people and of individuals.”¹⁷ Lest anyone miss the point, Humo pointedly condemned as a sign of “confusion” the assertion that Muslim communal specificity was merely a matter of religion. The Fifth Congress of the LC B-H (January 9—11, 1969) capped the process of recognition of the Muslim nation by formally endorsing its complete equality with the other Yugoslav nationalities.

The final token of the coming of age of the Muslim nationality was its formal recognition on the 1971 census forms. In the 1948 census, Bosnia’s Muslims had only three options: “Serb-Muslim,” “Croat-Muslim,” and “ethnically undeclared Muslim.” “Muslim” continued to be treated as a matter of religious preference rather than ethnicity in the 1953 census, but the category “Yugoslav, ethnically undeclared” was introduced. It is now more or less acknowledged that the overwhelming majority of such “Yugoslavs, ethnically undeclared” were Muslims. Whereas the original census report listed 998,698 “Yugoslavs, ethnically undeclared,” the 1979 edition of Statistički Godišnjak lists that same figure for “Muslims in the ethnic sense” for 1953. Even in the 1961 census, when “Yugoslav in the ethnic sense” was incorporated into the census, the Muslims were still more or less ignored; most of the reporting “Yugoslavs” were once again Muslims. The 1971 census was the first in which “Muslim” was treated as a fully recognized nationality (see table 22). Inevitably, the non-Muslim nationalities of Bosnia, that is, the Croats and Serbs, felt threatened by the specter of a new ethnic force, while Muslim facnons were eager to legitimize the fruit of a long campaign. The 1971 census thus witnessed considerable nationalist agitation in Bosnia, as some groups pressured citizens to declare themselves “Muslims, in the ethnic sense,” while others pressured them to declare themselves “Yugoslavs, ethnically undeclared.”¹⁸

Table 22. Major Nationality Groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Sources: “Staat und Nationalität in Jugoslawien,” in Wissenschaftlicher Dienst Südosteuropa 19 (8) (August 1970): 114; StatistiČki godišnjak Jugoslavije 1979 (Belgrade: Savenzni zavod za statistiku, July 1979), p. 413; and Tanjug, February 16, 1982, in FBIS, Yugoslavia, February 17, 1982.

A coalition of conservatives and other forces that felt they stood to lose by the introduction of the new ethnic category attempted to restrict the ethnic Muslim category to the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Sandžak region of Serbia.¹⁹ This ostensible compromise was clearly a rearguard reaction, a device to block full recognition of the Muslim nationality by linking it with republican citizenship. The move failed, and the party presidium, echoed by the leading body of the Socialist Alliance of Working People of Yugoslavia, declared that the Muslims constituted a national group on a par with Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Montenegrins.²⁰ As a result, ethnic Muslims can be found in every Yugoslav federal unit (see table 23).

Table 23. Distribution of Ethnic Muslims in Yugoslavia, 1981

Source: Statistički godiśnjak Jugoslavije 1989 (Belgrade: Savenzni Zavod za Statistiku, 1989), p. 453.

In the latter half of January 1971, immediately after the census, the Muslim question fueled a dramatic interrepublican confrontation and underlined the fragility of interethnic harmony. Esad Ćimić, a professor at the University of Sarajevo, sparked the controversy when, in the course of a program broadcast over Sarajevo television, he opined that Yugoslavia’s Muslims were “a national hybrid” and not a nationality, because it was “too late for them to be a people (narod) and too early for them to be a nation (nacija).”²¹ Although he did not exclude the possibility that they might have certain characteristic features of nationality, at the same time he questioned whether those who declared themselves “Muslims in an ethnic sense” were in fact doing so under duress.

Shortly thereafter, the executive committee of the Socialist Alliance of Working People of Bosnia-Herzegovina (SAWP B-H) issued a sharp condemnation of Cimić’s opinions. Atif Purivatra, president of the SAWP B-H’s Commission for Interethnic Relations, said that Ćimić’s sentiments were at odds with LCY policy in the area of interethnic relations and denounced the recently touted designation “Bosniak.” The label was unacceptable, he said, because it was a denial of specificity and a negation of the Serbian, Croatian, and Muslim national feeling within the Bosnian republic. Ethnicity, Purivatra went on, cannot be determined on the basis of place of birth or of the ethnicity of one’s parents but only on the basis of the individual’s group consciousness, that is, on the basis of his ethnic self-identification. Accordingly, any suggestion that the Muslims were in some way “second-rate,” “incompletely developed,” or “immature” was not only demeaning but historically inaccurate.²²

Though one might argue that Purivatra’s comments were in a sense defensive, they incited the Macedonians and ignited a polemical exchange between Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina over the status of the Muslims. The Macedonian party was sensitive to waxing Muslim nationalism because, though the majority of Macedonians are Orthodox—to the extent that Orthodoxy is identified with Macedonianness much as Catholicism is identified with Croatianness, the alleged Orthodoxy of certain pockets of Croats notwithstanding—a certain segment of Macedonian-speaking citizens are Muslim. The LC Macedonia insisted that “Muslims who speak Macedonian are Macedonian” and that they were, as they viewed themselves, “Macedonians of Islamic faith.” “Historically and scientifically,” the secretariat of the central committee of the LC Macedonia declared, “it is quite clear that Muslims of Slavic extraction living in Macedonia, who speak Macedonian, are nothing other than Macedonians.”²³ Nova Makedonija, the official organ of the Macedonian party, worriedly warned that “the thesis about Muslims of Slavic origin in Macedonia, as parts of a nascent Muslim nation, conceals an immediate threat of the reawakening of an old hegemonism vis-à-vis Macedonian nationality, history, and culture.”²⁴ The LC Macedonia adamantly denied that Muslims in Macedonia have any ethnic tie whatsoever with Muslims in Bosnia. The party said there was nothing peculiar about the fact that Macedonians can be either Orthodox or Muslim, adding that Albanians living in Macedonia can be Muslim, Catholic, or Orthodox.

Before the end of the month, Slavko Milosavlevski, secretary of the central committee of the LC Macedonia, received representatives of the Debarsko-Resavski region in western Macedonia (a region heavily populated by Muslims), who affirmed their support for the party’s position and underlined their own Macedonian consciousness. Milosavlevski took advantage of this occasion to stress that religion has no connection with nationality. Yet his superior, Angel Čemerski, president of the central committee of the LC Macedonia, conceded that Macedonian national consciousness is likely to be weaker among Macedonia’s Muslims.

Nova Makedonija’s reference to “Muslim hegemonism” naturally rankled the Bosnian party, and Purivatra replied by accusing Macedonia of meddling in the internal affairs of Bosnia. Nova Makedonija replied two days later, complaining that Purivatra and his colleagues had misunderstood the article but reiterating that Macedonian Muslims could not belong to two ethnic groups at once. Oslobodjenje’s response two days later revealed that the Bosnian party continued to be sensitive to what it perceived as Macedonian underestimation of the development of Muslim national consciousness. Recalling Vjećeslav Holjevac’s book, Hrvati izvan domovine, which had appeared a few years earlier and had treated Muslims of both Croatia and Bosnia as “Croats of the Islamic faith,” Purivatra underlined the distinction between Muslim religion and Muslim nationality and maintained that Bosnia’s Muslims ought to be considered a fully formed national group.

As the verbal volleys escalated, Kosovo entered into the fray when a meeting of the presidency of the SAWP Kosovo declared that “Muslim ethnic affiliation cannot be connected with this or that republic or spoken language, because every citizen, without regard to where she or he lives, enjoys the same freedom of expressing her or his national or ethnic affiliation, which cannot be confused with religious affiliation.”²⁵ This was, perhaps, even further than the Bosnians had wanted to go, for the Kosovars had opened fire on the Macedonian dogma that “Muslims who speak Macedonian are, ipso facto, Macedonian,” and hence allowed for the possibility that a portion of that republic’s population might indeed be Muslim—in the ethnic sense.

This was followed by an article in Kritika, in which Vladimir Blašković, a professor of economics at the University of Zagreb, questioned the degree to which the Bosnian Muslims had developed a distinct ethnic consciousness. His skepticism could only signify de facto support for Holjevac’s claim that Slavic Muslims are Croats. Shaken by the renewed challenge to the claims of Muslim nationalists, Branko Mikulić, president of the central committee of the LC B-H, nervously warned that such opinions undermined the equal status of the Muslim nationality with the other Yugoslav nationalities and thereby threatened the delicate balance achieved in Bosnia.

The squabble was clearly getting out of hand. Most interesting in all this ruckus is that the position advanced by each republic—whether Bosnia, Macedonia, Croatia, or Kosovo—is the theory most appropriate to its own conditions. Each unit attempted to impose its own theory on the others, even though that theory was only appropriate to its own republic. Bosnia wanted religiocultural heritage accepted as a sufficient basis for national identity. Macedonia wanted to emphasize language and ethnic descent; Croatia, chiefly ethnic descent. Kosovo, finally, with its mixed population of Muslims of Albanian, Turkish, and Macedonian descent and Orthodox citizens of Serbian, Albanian, and Macedonian descent, preferred to articulate what superficially appeared to be the most open-minded approach.

Eventually, the Serbian party lent oblique support to the Bosnia-Kosovo coalition when Latinka Perović, secretary of the central committee of the LC Serbia, declared it a matter of LCY policy that all people in Yugoslavia must be free to determine their own ethnic affiliation. This vaguely formulated declaration amounted to a reprimand of Macedonia and Croatia and succeeded in bringing this particular episode to a close. Ironically, Professor Ćimić, whose opinions on the subject had sparked the controversy, eventually declared himself a Croat and moved to Zadar.

Whatever amity might have been established between Bosnia and Kosovo was, however, dissipated in 1977 when alleged religious persecution created friction in relations between those two federal units. According to Preporod, Kosovar government representatives had been illegally interfering in Muslim religious instruction in Kosovo, and, though appeals to higher courts had resulted in the rights of religious instruction being upheld, the Kosovar authorities continued to interfere.²⁶

The Kosovar-Macedonian quarrel over Muslim nationality resurfaced ten years later in the months preceding the 1981 census, when a Macedonian historian, Nijazi Limanovi, published a twenty-three-installment study, in the Skopje daily, Večer (September 25-October 21, 1980), on “Islamism in Macedonia.” He argued that the Albanians of Kosovo were utilizing Islam in a strategy to de-Macedonize Macedonia. Limanovi’s conclusion was that there were some 50,000 Muslim Macedonians in Macedonia who had previously reported themselves to be Albanians, Muslims, or even Serbs and that, in the forthcoming census, they should declare themselves to be Muslim Macedonians. Ali Hadri, a Kosovar historian, shot back in the Priština daily, Rilindja:

Nijazi Limanovi is so maliciously disposed toward the Albanian nation that he seeks more falsifications by borrowing the most offensive adjectives from the old arsenal of the bourgeois monarchies of the Balkans. According to him, the Albanians were “primitive,” “wild,” “aggressive,” “domineering,” “abusive,” “plunderers,” “killers,” and so forth. . . . It seems that he thought that, by debasing the Albanian people in a harsh manner, he could successfully argue about the mistaken theory that one of the main factors for the “Islamization of the Macedonians” and of the “Albanization of the Muslim Macedonians” has allegedly been the Albanians, who in order to attain this objective, have allegedly resorted to great pressure and unequaled injury against the Macedonian people.²⁷

Hadri remonstrated against Limanovi’s attempt to fix the Macedonian label on this group of 50,000 and asserted that, on the contrary, ethnic identity was a matter of individual determination—a right guaranteed by the Yugoslav constitution.

Having emerged victorious both in the 1971 controversy over Macedonian Muslims and in the debate surrounding the 1971 census, Muslim nationalists gained confidence and began to agitate for redesignating Bosnia a “Muslim Republic” in the same way that Serbia is the “Republic of the Serbs” and Macedonia the “Republic of the Macedonians.”²⁸ Under the 1974 constitutional order, however, the Serbian constitution declared that the “Socialist Republic is the state of the Serbian nation and of sections of other nations and nationalities who live . . . in it,” and Montenegro’s constitution allowed that “the Socialist Republic of Montenegro is the state of the Montenegrin nation and of members of other nations and nationalities who live in it”—both thus listing only one titular nationality. But the Bosnian constitution asserted that “the Socialist Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina is a socialist democratic state and a socialist self-managing democratic community of the working people, citizens, and nations of Bosnia-Herzegovina—Muslims, Serbs, and Croats, and of members of other nations and nationalities living in it.”²⁹ Even Croatia and Macedonia fare better, both being termed “national states,” while the Socialist Republic of Slovenia was said to be “a state based on the sovereignty of the Slovene nation and the people of Slovenia.”³⁰ The Muslim nationalists wished the Bosnian constitution to read something like “the Socialist Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina is a state based on the sovereignty of the Muslim nation; it is the national state of the Muslim nation, and the state of the members of the Serbian and Croatian nations who live in it, as well as of the members of other nations and nationalities who live in it. “ The distinction between “national state” and “state” was drawn in the Croatian constitution and implied a somewhat higher status for the possessors of the “national state.”

About the same time that agitation for a Muslim republic began, certain Bosnian linguists started toying with the idea that Bosanski, the language of the Muslims, should be recognized as a distinct language.³¹ By 1972-73, the party had concluded that increasing Muslim ethnic consciousness was potentially threatening, and, in 1972, two leading Muslim politicians—Avdo Humo and Osman Karabegović—were dismissed from their posts for alleged Muslim “exclusivism” and “nationalism.” The following year, 1973, the earliest warnings were sounded about “pan-Islamism” in Bosnia and about Muslim nationalists’ aspirations toward “supremacy” in Bosnia.³² Muslim nationalism, the party admonished, was no special case, but was just as “dangerous” as Serbian or Croatian nationalism.³³ In a four-part article for Oslobodjenje (February 1922, 1974), Aziz Hadžihasanović warned of the misconception that Muslim nationalism, unlike Serbian and Croatian nationalism, was somehow “naive, harmless, . . . on another political plane.” That is sheer “confusion,” charged Hadžihasanović, for Muslim nationalism, even when wearing a “red veil,” is a breeding ground for “antisocialist forces.”³⁴ Hadžihasanović also condemned efforts to identify everything positive in Bosnian culture with the Islamic legacy. He upbraided Muslim nationalists for having sought, during the October 1973 war, to align Yugoslavia squarely with the Arabs and against Israel—a move that, according to him, would have compromised Yugoslavia’s policy of nonalignment.³⁵ The Muslim clergy, the ulema, had become increasingly active spokesmen for Muslim ethnic interests and repeatedly sought permission to establish cultural institutions to stimulate Muslim national identity. Even before the census, Preporod (June 15, 1970), the official organ of the Islamic community of Bosnia, had complained that “in an organizational sense we still exist only as an Islamic community. Neither as Muslims in the ethnic sense nor as Muslims in the religious sense do we have any specific institutions through which we might develop our Islamic and Muslim activity, other than the existing institutions and organs of the Islamic community.”³⁶ More recently, nationally conscious Muslims renewed efforts to found autonomous cultural institutions. Citing the existence of Matica Hrvatska and Matica Srpska, Muslim nationalists demanded the establishment of a Matica Muslimanska and the organization of Muslim cultural-artistic societies. But the LCY consistently blocked such endeavors, calling them efforts to obtain a “privileged status” and to establish a power base from which to pursue a policy of “discrimination against the other religions.”³⁷ In October 1979, these “Islamic socialists,” under the spell of their Arab coreligionists, tried to capture Preporod and use it for their own purposes. This effort failed, and in November 1979 the faction was blasted for groveling in “the pigsty of nationalism, which is only one step away from fratricidal genocide.”³⁸

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, attendance at Muslim religious services in Yugoslavia seemed in decline, and some mosques drew only meager attendance. But this situation changed in the late 1970s, when a new generation, educated to think of the Bosnian Muslims as a national group and encouraged by contacts with a renascent Middle East, began to look to Islam as a basis for political mobilization. In April 1983, Yugoslav authorities uncovered an illegal organization of Bosnian Muslims described as working for the creation of an Islamic republic in Yugoslavia and having illegal ties with “reactionary” Muslims abroad. Eleven persons, including two imams, were put on trial and, in the course of the month-long proceedings, were said to have described communism as a threat to Islam, welcomed anti-Yugoslav turmoil in Kosovo, criticized Yugoslav nationalities policy as aimed at the Serbianization of the Muslims, plotted to eliminate the Serbian and Croatian populations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and manipulated the religious feelings of others in an effort to mobilize support for a militant Islam. They were ultimately sentenced to prison for terms averaging more than eight years³⁹ but were amnestied at the end of 1988. Among those sentenced was Alija Izetbegović, whom the authorities had previously incarcerated for Islamic fundamentalism in 1946.

Certain of the Bosnian ulema tried to draw a line between “positive political activity” and “negative political activity” on the part of religious organizations and thus to claim for the Islamic community a legitimate role in the political constellation. This has often been combined with a desire to stress that religion is, after all, the source of Muslim “ethnicity.” But the LCY, which feared the identification of religion and nationality, wanted to have it both ways: namely, to derive a new nationality from a religion, but yet to deny that derivation and suppress demands based on it.

The rising tide of Muslim nationalism in Yugoslavia probably owed more to indigenous factors than to any influence from abroad. The nationalist renaissance of the 1969-71 period was, in particular, an important stimulus of Muslim nationalism, insofar as Croatian and Serbian calls for the annexation to their respective republics of all or part of Bosnia provided the sort of cultural threat that so quickly inflames ethnic sensitivities. In any event, Muslim nationalism in Yugoslavia predated the worldwide Islamic revival by several years. At this time, moreover, the Muslims revised the dormant “concept of Muslims as the ‘only real Bosnians’ and demanded the formation of separate Muslim national institutions in which the Muslim intelligentsia would gather and oppose the activity of Croatian and Serbian institutions.”⁴⁰

It is somewhat ironic that Tito, in one of his last public addresses (November 25, 1979, just before the incident that provoked Pozderac’s condemnation of the “pigsty of nationalism”), should have claimed that “the nations of Bosnia-Herzegovina can be proud of their successes . . . because they have succeeded in outgrowing mutual conflicts and frictions among nationalities.”⁴¹ There was a degree of stability, but all the nationality groups in Bosnia could imagine other possibilities (e.g., proclamation of a Muslim republic, annexation of Bosnia by Croatia, annexation of Bosnia by Serbia, etc.), some of which appeared more palatable to certain people than the status quo. Edvard Kardelj once wrote that “a nation does not arise by chance, and when it does arise, it must doubtless have a social function.”⁴² As for this functional view of nationality, it might be argued that the Bosnian Muslims served to keep the Croats and Serbs from destroying each other. Such, at least, seemed to be the view of the LCY, even if it feared the growth of rampant nationalism.

Albanian Nationalism in Kosovo

Albanian nationalism is a problem for interrepublican relations for at least five reasons: (1) it directly affects relations between Kosovo on the one hand and Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro on the other (since Kosovo has long been dominated by Serbs and since many Albanians are living in Macedonia); (2) Albanian agitation for republican status for Kosovo—the central force for upgrading the autonomous provinces—has an impact on the interrepublican balance of power; (3) the nationalism of one group has an incendiary effect on the others; (4) the threat of secession is not merely a matter of concern to the federation as a whole but also to its several parts; and (5) Kosovo was the ultimate test of the Titoists’ Marxist premise that economic equality causes nationalist temper to abate.

More than one-third of the 3.5 million Albanians in the world live in Yugoslavia. Most of Yugoslavia’s Albanians live in Kosovo (about 1.2 million), in western Macedonia near lakes Prespa and Ohrid and in the valley of the Black Smoke (Crni Dim) (about another 350,000), or in Montenegro near Ulcinj along the Albanian frontier (yet another 50,000). There is also an important pocket of Albanians in Belgrade. During the Second World War the Kosovo region was attached to Italian-dominated Albania—a solution welcomed by most Albanians.⁴³ Tito’s partisans, therefore, experienced considerable difficulty recruiting Albanians in Kosovo and only a few joined the partisans. Svetozar Vukmanović-Tempo, who was in charge of organizing partisan activity in Kosovo, later recalled that “the Albanian population remained suspicious toward all those who fought for the resurrection of Yugoslavia, whether it was a question of old or new Yugoslavia. In their eyes, that was less than what they [had] received from the occupiers.”⁴⁴ And for several years after the war officially ended, Albanian guerrilla groups held out in Kosovo, desperately resisting reincorporation into Yugoslavia.

In interwar Yugoslavia, the Serbian-dominated government had driven out large numbers of Albanians from Kosovo and had turned their land over to Serbian and Montenegrin colonists. These had, in turn, been driven out of Kosovo in 1941. Fearing that the return of these colonists would only further aggravate what was already a delicate situation, the federal Commissariat for Internal Affairs issued a decree in 1945, barring their return.⁴⁵ But colonists or no colonists, some Albanians were determined to opt out of Yugoslavia. In July 1946, Albanian separatists (“Ballists”) held an underground congress in the village of Lipovo. But gradually their ranks were decimated by arrests. Some were captured and tried in October 1946, still others were condemned to death in January 1947.⁴⁶

As early as May 1945, Djoko Pajković, secretary of the district committee of Kosmet (as Kosovo was then called) warned that if the communists repeated the error of the interwar kingdom by assigning leadership positions in Kosovo predominantly to Serbs and Montenegrins, the local Albanians would revolt.⁴⁷ But this warning fell on deaf ears, and Serbs and Montenegrins were overwhelmingly dominant in the leadership, as well as in the state security forces and the regular police. As of 1956, Serbs accounted for some 23.5 percent of the province’s population, but 58.3 percent of the members of the security forces and 60.8 percent of the regular police. Montenegrins accounted for only 3.9 percent of the local population, but fully 28.3 percent of security forces were Montenegrins, alongside 7.9 percent of regular police. By contrast, Albanians, who already numbered 64.9 percent of the population, accounted for only 13.3 percent of security police and 31.3 percent of regular police.⁴⁸

Tension between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo ran high in the 1950s, and the provincial police often terrorized the local population. In July 1956, several ethnic Albanians were tried in Prizren on charges of espionage (for Albania) and subversion. They were convicted and given prison terms ranging from three to twelve years. In the course of the proceedings, testimony was presented implicating several leading functionaries—specifically, Mehmet Hodža, provincial deputy in the Serbian Assembly; Fadilj Hodža, member of the executive council of Kosovo-Metohija; Šeho Hasani, provincial deputy in the Serbian Assembly; Čamilja Šarko, former deputy in the Serbian Assembly; Ismet Sačiri, member of the executive council of Kosovo-Metohija; Dževet Hamza, provincial deputy in the federal Assembly; Avdi Bakalii, former committee secretary; and Saiti Bakalii, functionary of the District People’s Committee. All were said to have engaged in espionage for the Albanian secret service. Obviously, testimony to this effect was troubling to local Albanian communists, and already in 1956 the district assembly of Kosmet allegedly decided to collect all the materials and documentation related to the Prizren trial and destroy them. They subsequently declared that the entire affair had been an anti-Albanian machination of the part of UDBa (the secret police, controlled by Ranković). Until 1988, this version of the trial was almost universally accepted, and most books on the subject describe the Prizren trial as a miscarriage of justice. But in 1988, Ljiljana Bulatović wrote a book in which she argued that the case should be reexamined, claiming that the Albanians had in fact been working against Serbian domination, in effect, that the trial had been justified.⁴⁹ What really happened in Prizren in 1956? The answer to this question awaits scholarly analysis. What can be said here is that its importance for Serb-Albanian relations is clear: it seriously increased friction between the two and created yet another issue dividing the two peoples.

Ranković, the head of the secret police, deeply distrusted non-Serbs in general and Albanians in particular. He believed that surveillance was the best method for ruling Kosovo. As early as the winter of 1956, UDBa undertook to confiscate the weapons of the Albanian population of Kosovo—a project that provoked resistance and resulted in the deaths of a number of Albanians before an estimated nine thousand firearms were confiscated.⁵⁰ But the disruption of the political equilibrium in Kosovo is normally traced to 1966, when revelations of Serbian dominance of the governmental, party, and security apparatus in Kosovo inflamed resentment among the Kosovar Albanians.

Backward by all the standard socioeconomic measures, Kosovars had no reason to be grateful for Belgrade’s rule. As late as 1971, 36 percent of Kosovo’s Albanians were officially illiterate. Since statistics failed to distinguish between formal literacy and working literacy, however, the actual level of illiteracy among the Albanians at any given time is much worse than the statistics indicate.⁵¹ The situation is aggravated, moreover, by a patriarchal proclivity for Albanian families to keep their female children from attending school—a practice that made the work of the authorities much more difficult.⁵² There have been enduring problems of infrastructure: even in the 1974—75 school year, 564 Kosovar towns and villages lacked elementary schools, and many were hampered by the lack of good roads to bus children.

As Ranković’s power base eroded and the nature of his practices in Kosovo came to light, the demand for reform became irresistible. The Sixth Session (1966) of the Serbian party’s central committee (CC) issued a condemnation of “certain sections of the State Security Apparatus,’’ that is, of Ranković’s domain, for discriminatory and illegal practices “entirely contrary to the LCY program and the Yugoslav constitution,” especially vis-à-vis the Albanians. The subsequent Fourth Plenum of the CC of the LCY, reviewing conditions in Kosovo, amplified this judgment and warned of Greater Serbian tendencies within the ranks of the League of Communists. The consensus was that Greater Serbian nationalism was the greater stimulus to Greater Albanian separatism and, therefore, had to be systematically expunged.⁵³ Albanian separatism was identified as a problem at this time, even though Kosovo had not yet been shaken by ethnic riots.

These conclusions were echoed by the provincial committee of the central committee of the Kosovar branch of the LCY at its seventh session of that year. Excoriating “Greater Serbian chauvinistic tendencies,” the provincial committee warned that “every nationalism . . . represents a menace to LCY policy. . . . Communists must be alert to the man and active in the struggle against all nationalist deviations. “⁵⁴ By then Ranković had slipped from power, and command of the security forces in Kosovo had been turned over to Albanian cadres. Subsequently, the Albanians were also granted permission to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the death of the Albanian national hero, Skanderbeg. But Serbs were still far more likely than Albanians to find employment in the party-governmental apparatus, and the Tenth Session of the LC of Kosovo (1967) paid particular attention to the ethnic structure of employment in the province.

These developments sent Marjanović and Ćosić into a rage. The same duo that had blasted the “senseless proclamation of a Muslim nation,” Marjanović and Ćosić castigated the open promotion of Albanian nationalism and irredentism in Kosovo and lamented that Serbs had become the victims of systematic reverse discrimination insofar as employment in Kosovo was concerned. Yet, despite the resistance of Serbophile conservatives like Marjanović and Ćosić, the tide was turning. In February 1968, those Albanians who had been convicted in the Prizren trial of 1956 were rehabilitated on the grounds that the security apparatus under Ranković had rigged the proceedings, fabricated evidence, and bribed witnesses.⁵⁵ On the urging of Kosovar Albanians Mahmut Bakali and Salih Nuši, the LCY agreed in the spring of 1968 to substitute the neutral term “Albanian” for the term “Shiptar,” which the Albanians considered pejorative but which had hitherto been standard vocabulary in official as well as unofficial business.

In summer 1968, the Commission for Constitutional Questions met. It consisted of delegates from all the chambers of the federal Skupština. Their meetings were accompanied by public discussions throughout the country. In Djakovica and Peć, local communists criticized the draft drawn up by the Provincial Committee for Constitutional Questions and demanded that Kosovo be reconstituted as a republic.⁵⁶ But this demand was not confined to local committees; it was, in fact, a sentiment shared by many Albanian communists in Kosovo. The Albanian-language daily, Rilindja, reflected this broad sentiment by urging the same thing in an August 1968 editorial.⁵⁷ But the provincial party apparatus itself shied away from this and pushed, instead, for an “enrichment” of the prerogatives of the province.⁵⁸

At the plenum of the CC of the LC Serbia, held in early November 1968 (i.e., just before the 1968 Kosovo riots), it was finally proposed that the designations of the party organizations of the autonomous provinces be changed: henceforth, the League of Communists of Serbia for Vojvodina would be simply the League of Communists of Vojvodina, and the League of Communists of Serbia for Kosovo and Metohija would be simply the League of Communists of Kosovo-Metohija. The Sixth Congress of the LC Serbia (mid-November 1968) authorized the provincial party organizations to pass their own statutes. The Albanian component was immediately strengthened in the Kosovar party organization (though it must be admitted that Albanians and Hungarians were still significantly underrepresented in the respective party organizations of Kosovo and Vojvodina). The Albanians were becoming restless precisely at this point, when the slow beginnings of reform had become unmistakable—a confirmation of Machiavelli and Crane Brinton’s proposition that repression becomes intolerable once reforms are begun.

There were signs of steady deterioration in Serbian-Albanian relations as 1967 drew on, including sporadic eruptions of interethnic violence.⁵⁹ By October 1968, reports surfaced of anti-Serbian demonstrations in Suva Reka, Prizren, and Peć. Participants were said to number only a “couple of hundred,” and officials tried to peg the blame on “foreign [i.e., Albanian] intelligence services.”⁶⁰ Officials failed to assuage Albanian discontent, and tension mounted. On November 27, the eve of Albanian National Independence Day, Kosovar Liberation Day, and the anniversary of the proclamation of the Yugoslav federal state—all celebrated, by an ironic twist of fate, on November 29—”Kosmet” (Kosovo-Metohija) exploded in violence. Demonstrators numbering in the hundreds smashed windows and overturned cars in Pristina, and the anti-Serbian demonstrations quickly spread to other towns in Kosovo, leaving thirty-seven injured (among them, thirteen police) and one dead. There were reports that some rioters demanded annexation by Albania and that riotous crowds could be heard chanting “Long live Enver Hoxha!”⁶¹ The protestors drew up a list of demands that included dropping “Metohija” (a Serbian word) from the official name of the region, its redesignation as a republic, the extension of the right of self-determination to Kosovo (the right of a republic but not of an autonomous province), and the establishment of an independent university in Pristina. At the same time, the disturbances spread to the Macedonian cities of Gostivar and Tetovo, both with large Albanian populations. Haberl reports that the children of Kosovo’s leading political figures took part in the Kosovo riots, but adds that this was firmly denied by those concerned.⁶²

The League of Communists responded swiftly and decisively. The ring-leaders of the apparently well-organized demonstrations received jail terms of up to five years, and those held chiefly accountable for the unrest in Macedonia received sentences of up to seven years. Another forty-four persons in Kosovo received jail terms of up to thirty days. By mid-February, moreover, thirty-seven LCY members had been expelled from the party for participation in or support of the demonstrations.

The federal government was not prepared to indulge in the partition of Serbia; nevertheless, ameliorative measures had to be taken. The demand for republican status was flatly turned down. Both Kosovo and Vojvodina, however, were granted some of the prerogatives of republics, and the modifier “socialist” was appended to their official designations (hence, the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo). In December, in another concession to the Albanians, Kosovo-Metohija was redesignated simply Kosovo, dropping the purely Serbian “Metohija,” and the Kosovars were also given permission to fly the Albanian flag alongside the Yugoslav. Furthermore, though jailing thirty of the leading Albanian agitators for extended periods, Belgrade took steps to improve the economic situation in Kosovo and to promote more Albanians to positions of authority. Finally, there followed the creation of an independent University of Priština in 1969 and the rapid Albanianization of both faculty and student body in what had hitherto been a branch of the University of Belgrade.

Although this poured oil on the waters of discontent and eased federal regime-Albanian minority relations, Serbian-Albanian relations within Kosovo remained tense. For the Serbs, the demographic threat in Kosovo is particularly poignant because the region contains many shrines of the medieval Serbian kingdom: most important, it was at Kosovo polje (the Field of the Blackbirds) that the Serbian army was crushed by the Turks in 1389, and the battlefield has retained great patriotic value for the Serbs. The region, however, is now overwhelmingly inhabited by Albanians, who have had by far the highest birth rate of all of Yugoslavia’s peoples. As a result of the turmoil, moreover, Albanian and Serbian neighbors became openly hostile and the university polarized along ethnic lines; the result—as revealed in March 1969—was that thousands of Serbs and Montenegrins streamed out of Kosovo, most of them professionals and specialists with higher education. Even the dead were not immune to the ethnic hatred, as Albanians broke up Serbian and Montenegrin gravestones in Kosovo. Meanwhile, relations between Albanians and Macedonians remained tense, as the first of some one hundred accused instigators was sentenced to seven years at hard labor on March 15, 1969.

Obviously, the Kosovo question has remained unresolved. It is worth noting, at the same time, that recurrent problems with Albanian nationalism manifest some of the same characteristics that marked the Croatian crisis. First, there were the instances of anomic and collective violence manifested in the demonstrations of 1968, the mutual incitement of the two national groups, and the Serbian exodus itself. Second, there was strong evidence that members of the local nationality were prepared to organize in defense of their aspirations: in 1975, for example, four Yugoslav citizens of Albanian nationality were imprisoned for plotting the secession of Kosovo and its attachment to Albania.⁶³ Third, conflict in Kosovo, as in Croatia, was transmuted to the elite level: thus, at the Twenty-ninth Plenum of the Kosovo party organization in June 1971, Serbs and Montenegrins exchanged broadsides with Albanian delegates over questions of rights for the Serbian minority in Kosovo and alleged separatist plots. Finally, the Kosovo case exemplifies conflict accommodation as practiced in communist Yugoslavia: jail the troublemakers but grant their nondisintegrative demands.

Albanian gains in Kosovo, though modest, excited a Serbian backlash. Serbs became apprehensive at Albanian inroads, dreaded the transfer of any property from Serb to Albanian, and agitatedly spoke of “losing” Kosovo. Shortly after the 1971 census, a number of periodicals began to question the validity of the Kosovo count and to spread the idea that Albanians there had pressured the indigenous Slavs to declare themselves Albanians. Stane Stanic, writing in the Belgrade weekly, NIN, in August 1971, followed this tack, adding that the Albanians were also exerting unrelenting pressure on Serbian and Montenegrin inhabitants to leave Kosovo. Stanic concluded that the census results were unreliable, and that the Slavic proportion had been seriously underestimated.⁶⁴ As the Albanian component of the central committee of the LC Kosovo edged upward from 61.7 percent (in 1973) to 62.5 percent (in 1974) and the Albanians registered small gains in governmental employment, Serbian nationalists clamored that the status quo in Kosovar employment and political representation was entirely satisfactory and opposed any further changes in the ethnic structure of the civil service in Kosovo. Yet the Albanians tallied some 73.7 percent of the province’s population in 1971—they accounted for 77.5 percent in 1981— and they were demanding equivalent representation.⁶⁵

Nebi Gasi, chairman of Kosovo’s Committee for Interethnic Relations, told a Belgrade audience in 1977 that, although eight out of every one hundred Albanians in Kosovo had jobs in the social sector, seventeen out of every one hundred Serbs and twenty out of every one hundred Montenegrins in Kosovo were employed in the social sector. This reflected the fact that of the 128,000 Kosovars employed in the social sector at the end of 1974, 58.2 percent were Albanians, 31 percent were Serbs, 5.7 percent were Montenegrins, and 5 percent were members of other nationality groups.⁶⁶ By 1978, however, Albanians accounted for 83 percent of Kosovars employed in the social sector, with Serbs numbering only 9.3 percent. By 1980, Albanians constituted fully 92 percent of those employed in the social sector, with Serbs dramatically underrepresented at a mere 5 percent.⁶⁷

During the 1970-71 period, when political controls were loosened, chauvinist outbursts became more frequent and more open, in Kosovo as elsewhere. The įstok region of Kosovo was identified at this time as a particular trouble spot. With anti-Serbian sentiment sweeping through Croatia and Kosovo, Mujo Krasnici, a Kosovar student, told a receptive Croatian audience in Zagreb that the Albanians were the “original” Kosovars, that the Slavs were “guests,” and that the people of Kosovo wanted their own socialist republic.⁶⁸ In mid-December 1971, at the same time as Croatian students at the University of Zagreb were bringing matters in Croatia to a head, Albanian students clashed with Slavic students (mostly Serbian and Macedonian) at the University of Pristina. In a stormy session of the provincial committee of the LC Kosovo, committee member Jovo Sotra observed that Albanian separatist nationalism was the principal source of instability in the province.⁶⁹

Interethnic tension has remained high in Kosovo over the years, and distrust between the Slavs and the local Albanians runs deep. Indeed, the heavily Albanianized security forces enjoyed only a brief respite between 1969 and 1973, when Albanian separatists launched their first large-scale propaganda offensive since the demonstrations of November 1968. Yugoslav security forces discovered evidence of an underground separatist organization known as the Revolutionary Movement of United Albania, led by Adem Demachi, but were unable to uproot it. This group, together with the so-called Marxist-Leninist Communist party of Albanians of Yugoslavia, which may have enjoyed Albania’s support, undertook what the regime labeled “serious propaganda actions” in 1973-75. The group called for the secession of Kosovo and those parts of Macedonia and Montenegro inhabited by Albanians and the creation of a Greater Albania that would be specifically anti-Serbian in orientation. This “Marxist-Leninist” party was apparently uncovered by Yugoslav security organs in early 1975. Another underground group, similar in nature and dubbed the National Liberation Movement of Kosovo, was discovered shortly thereafter. Two of its leading members, both students at the University of Pristina and both in their mid-twenties, were given lengthy prison sentences. Five more groups, operating in Pristina and Uroševac, were discovered in the course of 1979 and 1980. Security organs turned up still another such group early in 1981, which, according to Franjo Herljević, minister of the interior, had been operating in conjunction with the pro-Albanian “Red Front” organization.⁷⁰

There were reports of student demonstrations in Pristina in December 1974, in which more than one hundred ethnic Albanians were said to have been arrested. The Eleventh Provincial Conference of the CC of LC Kosovo warned that “Communists must wage a concrete and decisive campaign against particularistic-separatist Albanian nationalism.”⁷¹ In 1976, thirty-one Albanians were tried in connection with separatist activities during 1973-75 and sentenced to prison terms of up to fifteen years.⁷² Another fifty Kosovar Albanians were tried and sentenced early in 1980 for subversive activity.⁷³ In fact, between 1974 and the beginning of 1981, the state security service had arrested more than 600 Kosovars for Albanian separatism.⁷⁴

In addition to organized and semiorganized activity of this nature, anomic violence repeatedly broke out in Kosovo during the 1970s. In the spring of 1978, for instance, the province was shaken by massive prison riots. Albanian prisoners, claiming that their Serbian guards were racially prejudiced and guilty of brutally manhandling Albanian inmates, created a makeshift barricade from parts of the deteriorating prison. Throughout 1979, Albanian nationalists in Kosovo distributed pamphlets attacking Belgrade and stirring up ethnic passions, and, late in 1979, an angry crowd of Albanians wrecked a police station in Novi Pazar.⁷⁵

At the same time, organized Albanian separatism was spreading to neighboring Macedonia. Between 1978 and 1981, Yugoslav security organs reportedly uncovered and suppressed two illegal Albanian separatist organizations operating in Macedonia. At its session of July 3, 1980, the High Court of Skopje convicted the alleged ringleaders of the first of these organizations of treasonous activities during 1977-80. The leaders received jail terms of three to six years.⁷⁶ The presumed leaders of the second organization, a more or less formal revolutionary party known as the National Party of Labor that was reportedly active between June 1979 and February 1981, were put on trial in Skopje in May 1981. The five accused were convicted of carrying out subversive activities in Gostivar and surrounding villages and received prison sentences of seven to thirteen-and-a-half years.⁷⁷

The situation was complicated by another factor, however. The increasingly Albanian-dominated provincial leadership in Kosovo was loathe to allow Serbian involvement in antiseparatist efforts, partly because of a natural sympathy with the province’s Albanian ethnics and partly because of a fear that the problems might incite the leadership of the Serbian republic to retract some of the political powers that the Kosovar party had—sometimes unconstitutionally—acquired. The provincial leadership engaged in a massive cover-up, the scale of which was only appreciated after the province erupted in violence in the spring of 1981. Certainly the LCY was well aware that trouble was brewing in Kosovo. The arrests of several hundred Albanian nationalists in 1979, on charges of distributing subversive material, and a telltale eruption of ethnic turmoil in Kosovo in May 1980 were powerful reminders that the festering discontent retained political significance. State security organs were placed in a state of alert in the months following Tito’s demise. As early as 1977, in fact, Kardelj had warned his colleagues that if the party failed to adopt a resolute policy that would narrow the economic gap and tranquilize interethnic tensions in the province, Kosovo would explode in violence. But Belgrade had only sketchy information about the Albanian separatist movement; the Kosovar ministry of the interior, which was well informed about the strength and doings of at least some of the underground organizations, was withholding its intelligence.⁷⁸ Thus, although Albanian-language Rilindja warned of persistent problems with Albanian separatist groups (in 1975), the Kosovar leadership, when dealing with the Belgrade media, was far less open.⁷⁹ In 1975, for instance, Mahmut Bakali told a Tanjug reporter that interethnic “relations [in Kosovo] are good, because there is a good degree of brotherhood and unity and of trust between nations and nationalities living here.”⁸⁰ Again, in 1980, Bakali, the leading Kosovar politician at the time, would tell Politika that “the efforts of enemies have not found wide support among the Albanian masses . . . [which] shows that the devotion of the Albanians to Tito’s Yugoslavia is durable and indestructible. “⁸¹

But the information problem involved not merely the Serbia-Kosovo relationship; it was, in fact, also an internal problem for Kosovo. As Živorad Igić noted in an article that appeared in Obeležja (the Kosovar party organ) in 1979, the district committees in the province were routinely withholding information from the provincial committee. In addition, the growing tendency to publish internal information in Kosovo in Albanian only tended to leave local Serbs ignorant of important aspects of basic issues.⁸²

In February 1981, on the eve of a new eruption of ethnically inspired tumult, both Komunist and Politika warned of simmering discontent in the province, the latter adding that “antisocialist forces” continued to organize hostile provocations in various parts of Kosovo.⁸³ In spite of this, and in spite of the evident latent instability in the province, few observers were prepared for the vehemence of the nationalistically inspired riots that shook the province in March and April of 1981. In fact, when some two thousand Albanian students at the University of Pristina went on a rampage on March 11, officials initially denied any ethnic link and claimed that the riot had been sparked by dissatisfaction with bad cooking in the university cafeteria. The mere fact that the riots lasted two days, producing thirteen injured (including one policeman), suggested that more than bad food was involved.⁸⁴ Indeed, a closer investigation reveals that the provincial committee of the League of Communists of Kosovo (LCK) had been scheduled to discuss the province’s abysmal economic problems on March 13 and that the local press had been running a series of disturbing articles on that theme in anticipation of the committee meeting. The press reports no doubt exacerbated the already waxing resentment among university students in Pristina and may have occasioned the March riots. Yet, despite the involvement of some two thousand students, the first wave of riots attracted little attention.

Further demonstrations by Prizren students on March 25 and by Pristina university students on March 26 produced thirty-five injuries (twenty-three demonstrators and twelve police) and resulted in twenty-one arrests. Demonstrations followed in Obilić on March 31. Subsequently, on April 1, violent riots broke out at the University of Pristina (whose full-time student body numbered 37,000 at the time). Beginning with marauding protesters who smashed factory equipment and shop windows and set trucks on fire, tensions quickly escalated into open street battles, in which some rioters used kindergarten-aged children as shields against police.⁸⁵ Miners from the nearby coal mine and workers from the electric power station in the neighboring town of Obilić joined the students as the disorder spread to Podujevo, Leposlavić, Vučiturn, Vitana, and Glogovac. By April 3, the strife had spread to Kosovoska Mitrovica and Uroševac. Hardly any municipality in Kosovo abstained from the violence. Many of the demonstrators—said to have numbered between ten and twenty thousand—were armed, and in the ensuing clashes with the riot police, perhaps as many as one thousand persons were killed and about one thousand persons injured, many by firearms.⁸⁶ The revolutionary overtones of the Albanian riots were unmistakable. Rioters demanded either republican status for Kosovo or outright secession. In the official viewpoint, these amounted to the same thing.⁸⁷ The regime rushed in tanks and armored personnel carriers, imposed a curfew throughout the province, cut off telephone connections with the rest of Yugoslavia, and established control points on all roads into Pristina. Commandos and soldiers armed with machine-guns moved in to patrol the streets, and helicopters hovered overhead. Some two dozen ringleaders were jailed immediately, and a state of emergency was declared.⁸⁸ On April 5, Priština’s factories were reopened, though a ban on public meetings remained in effect. Only on April 8 did the Yugoslav authorities finally lift the nighttime curfew.

But pacification failed, as local Albanians continued to scrawl anti-Serbian and anti-Yugoslav graffiti on public walls, to distribute insurrectionary pamphlets, and to disrupt instruction in schools. Trains were derailed, and the power station in Kosovo Polje, the furniture factory in Uroševac, and numerous other installations and buildings suffered varying degrees of damage in a rash of unexplained fires. Further strife flared up in įstok on the night of April 30 and at the University of Pristina on May 12.⁸⁹ Eventually, the schools, closed once and reopened two weeks later, were closed for a second time, and the school year was declared over. Borba openly asked why the University of Pristina had been encouraged to grow so large, when it was inconceivable that its graduates could find jobs commensurate with their training and ambitions.

Meanwhile, the unrest spread to Montenegro, where Borba reported the perpetration of “incidents” by the local Albanian minority in the capital city of Titograd and the scrawling of anti-Tito slogans on shop windows. In January 1982, it was revealed that Albanian nationalists were active in the Bar commune.⁹⁰

In Macedonia, which had endured prolonged Albanian unrest thirteen years before, there were initially no hints of turmoil. Officials did charge that Albanian nationalists, including Muslim clergy of Albanian extraction, had exerted pressure on Macedonian Gypsies and Turks and on Muslim Macedonians, during the census taken early that year, to declare themselves Albanians.⁹¹ The apparent calm notwithstanding, the Macedonian security apparatus was put on high alert. By the end of May, reports surfaced that local Albanians were distributing insurrectionary and irredentist literature, writing revolutionary slogans in public places, and engaging in various acts of desecration. These activities, which were especially serious in the Ohrid and Tetovo districts, prompted Yugoslav authorities to tighten security in Tetovo and the surrounding area in early July. But, by mid-July, manifestations of Albanian nationalism in the Tetovo region were said to be escalating. Skopje was rocked by “organized enemy manifestations” involving ethnic Albanians early in July. Moreover, hostile Albanian activities, such as sloganeering, were still reported in the Tetovo region in late August.⁹²

Even Serbia had problems, with Albanian nationalists allegedly stirring up trouble in the communes of Bujanovac, Presevo, and Medvedja in southern Serbia. “Albanian ruffians” created disorder in Zagreb, too, while in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana, police were able to abort a demonstration of Albanians only at the last minute.⁹³

Arson, sabotage, terrorism, and pamphleteering became, overnight, a way of life in Kosovo. Some 680 fires, attributed to arson, caused damage estimated at 70 million dinars between 1980 and 1981.⁹⁴ There were again violent demonstrations in July 1981 in Djakovica, in January 1982 at the University of Pristina, in February and March 1982 in Priština and Suva Reka, and in April 1982 in Uroševac. Three bombs were set off in downtown Priština between October and November 1982, the third exploding in the immediate vicinity of the headquarters of the party provincial committee. Hundreds of demonstrators clashed with security police in the February and March riots, leaving numerous injured. As 1982 drew to a close, the situation was still said to be “deteriorating,” with the authorities unable to guarantee public safety or the security of property.⁹⁵

Mahmut Bakali resigned his post as provincial party chief, admitting to the futility of past policy in Kosovo and confessing that he had attempted to sweep problems under the rug. In April 1983, he was belatedly expelled from the party. But the very ranks of the party were infected by the nationalist germ, and, by late July 1982, some 1,000 LCK members had been expelled from the party, at least some for having participated in the riots. Several basic organizations of the LCK were simply dissolved outright. More than 700 Albanians had, by this time, been put behind bars.⁹⁶ Even the party-controlled press had proven unreliable. The April 1 issue of Fjalja, an Albanian-language periodical, was suppressed for nationalistically provocative material, and Obeležja itself, the Kosovar party’s Serbo-Croatian theoretical journal, was said to be treading a fine line.⁹⁷ Yet resistance to Belgrade’s policy runs so deep that two years later, at a session on June 6, 1983, the Kosovar party’s Provincial Committee for Information revealed that the reportage in the province’s Albanian-language daily, Rilindja, regularly differed from that in its Serbo-Croatian daily, Jedinstvo; specifically, Rilindja was said to be allowing “alien positions” to infiltrate its pages.⁹⁸

The LCY central committee convened on May 7 and reprimanded the Kosovar party organization for serious “weaknesses.”⁹⁹ A series of purges followed. Among those dismissed were Bakali (he subsequently resigned his membership in the central committee of LC Serbia and was replaced as president of the Kosovo party’s provincial committee by his predecessor, Veli Deva); assembly president Dušan Ristić (replaced by Ilija Vakic); SAP premier Bahri Oruči; Pristina television station director Fahredin Ginga; Radio Pristina director Šaban Hiseni; University of Priština rector Gazmend Zajmi; and both the secretary for internal affairs (Mustafa Šefedini) and the undersecretary for internal affairs (Ismail Bajrami). Six of the nineteen members of the provincial committee presidium were expelled. Three persons were dropped from the executive council. The editors of the radio and television stations in Pristina were fired, as were more than two hundred faculty members at the University of Priština.¹⁰⁰

A state of siege prevailed in the province, with 30,000 troops and police— many of them sent from Croatia and Slovenia—patrolling the province as an occupation force. All incoming and outgoing traffic was scrupulously checked, and the movement of outsiders into the province was largely proscribed. Belgrade hastened to ban textbooks imported from Albania, which were now discovered to have incendiary overtones, and undertook to translate the more “reliable” Serbian textbooks into Albanian for the use of the Kosovars.¹⁰¹ Party spokesmen also began to express misgivings about the radical devolution of authority to the autonomous provinces, arguing that they should coordinate their policies more closely with the Serbian republic and that some of the prerogatives they enjoyed in practice had no constitutional basis. Understandably, members of the Vojvodinan party, uncompromised in this debate, expressed strong opposition to suggestions that the prerogatives of the autonomous provinces be curtailed.¹⁰²

The 1981 riots were a rude awakening insofar as they signified the repudiation of more than ten years of intense efforts to accelerate development in this backward region. They demonstrated the primacy of ethnic community: the demonstrators and all who sympathized with them preferred to live under an Albanian despot rather than remain part of Yugoslavia, however open the latter might be. Clearly, it was this separatist dimension, as well as the possible impact this latest outbreak might have on other discontented nationalities in the multiethnic country, that troubled Belgrade most. Rumors circulated, moreover, that at least some of the Albanian separatist groups had formed guerrilla units in the back country of Kosovo—an allegation quickly denied by Yugoslav authorities.¹⁰³

The incipient revolt in Kosovo drove additional Kosovar Montenegrins and Serbs out of Kosovo, sparked a nationalist backlash among Macedonians and Serbs, and triggered the proliferation of nationalist excesses throughout the other seven federal units.

The 1981 census already showed an absolute decline in the Serbian and Montenegrin populations of Kosovo. There were 18,172 fewer Serbs in 1981 than in 1971, while the number of Montenegrins decreased by 4,680. As a result of the post-April turmoil, in which Albanian residents frequently “targeted” local Slavs, there was a renewed exodus of Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo. By one estimate, some ten thousand Serbs and Montenegrins left Kosovo between April and the end of October 1981.¹⁰⁴ Most of them have fled to Serbia, often to Belgrade, bearing tales of Albanian excesses.

This exodus only served to reinforce a Serbian nationalist backlash, aggravating a problem to which the party had to devote increased attention in subsequent years. It was just three years earlier, at the Fifteenth Session of the CC of the LC Serbia (April 19, 1978), that various speakers inveighed against a renascence of Serbian ethnocentric chauvinism. Mirko Popović specifically noted, on that occasion, that Serbian chauvinism had become more serious “in the last year or two.” Popović charged that the Greater Serbian nationalists were exploiting every friction to further their own chauvinistic purposes.¹⁰⁵ Incensed by the anti-Serbian edge to these latest Albanian riots, Serbs began to speak openly of the “good old days” when Ranković was in charge of the security apparatus and claimed that it was time to put the Albanians of Kosovo in their place once and for all. Indeed, Ranković became, overnight, a hero of Serbs. Simultaneously, Serbs and Macedonians began boycotting Albanian shops and bakeries, cutting sales, in some cases, by as much as 85 percent.¹⁰⁶ There were even demands by Serbs that the autonomous province of Kosovo be abolished altogether—an alternative that party officials quickly labeled “unacceptable.” A similar syndrome developed in Macedonia, where Macedonians started ostracizing Albanian neighbors, acquaintances, and former friends.

At the same time, the Albanians of Kosovo have found considerable sympathy among the Hungarians of Vojvodina. In a poignant expression of that sympathy, a large Hungarian crowd, which had been giving pro forma applause to dance troupes from various Yugoslav republics at a folk dance festival held in Vojvodina shortly after the riots, cheered and clapped boisterously when the Albanian dance troupe from Kosovo performed. The message was not lost on the Serbs. Shortly thereafter, Borba lashed out at “bourgeois-liberalist . . . Hungarian nationalism, that engages in tactical games and calculates and waits to see whether another nationalism that is rising might perhaps benefit it in some way.”¹⁰⁷ Subsequently, nationalist incidents were reported in the Vojvodinan towns of Kanjiza, Zrenjanin, Novi Sad, Ada, Senta, Sombor, Subotica, and elsewhere.¹⁰⁸

Throughout the 1980s various underground organizations of Albanians were uncovered in Kosovo, and their members prosecuted.¹⁰⁹ Between April 1981 and September 1987, criminal charges were brought against 5,200 Kosovar Albanians, according to official figures. In the Yugoslav army alone, some 216 illegal organizations were discovered during those years, with some 1,435 members of Albanian nationality.¹¹⁰ Some 1,800 persons (1,600 of them Albanians) were expelled from the Kosovo party organization. And in June 1987, the LCY central committee convened a special two-day session to review the situation in Kosovo, describing it as “the most difficult crisis in the history of new Yugoslavia.”¹¹¹ The session devoted special attention to the out-migration of Serbs and Montenegrins from the province, which had already reduced the Slavic population in the province by 22,000. By September 1988, this figure would reach 30,000.¹¹² The session concluded that LCY policy until then had been essentially nugatory and gave impetus to discussions about how to halt the outmigration of Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo. In November 1987, a program was agreed on to deal with that issue.¹¹³

The Belgrade media (especially television and periodicals such as Duga and Reporter) began to give play to stories about Albanian atrocities against Serbs. Meanwhile, the Serbs who had left Kosovo, including some who had left for economic reasons, began to talk of their own alleged sufferings and to demand special benefits in Kosovo in terms of housing and job placement. By 1986, Serbia (especially Belgrade) was aflame with nationalism. Overnight it became fashionable for Serbs to proclaim their devotion to the Serbian Orthodox Church, which naturally adopted a pose as the guardian of the Serbian people and culture.¹¹⁴

In October 1986, members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences drew up a seventy-page “Memorandum” bewailing Serbia’s fate in communist Yugoslavia and accusing Tito and Kardelj of having conspired to “destroy Serbia.” Vuk Draskovic, a Serbian novelist who would found a Serbian nationalist party three years later, addressed an appeal to the Association of Hebrew Writers in Tel-Aviv, proposing a “blood brotherhood” between Serbs and Jews. In Draskovic’s view, “We Serbs are a lost unhappy tribe of Israel.”¹¹⁵ Eight months later, the Serbian Association of Writers issued its own appeal, accusing responsible government organs of covering up the true situation and of ignoring the plight of local Serbs.¹¹⁶ Serbs complained that Albanians dominated various sectors of Kosovo society, such as Television Pristina,¹¹⁷ and the press became awash with poems devoted to the sufferings of Serbs in Kosovo.¹¹⁸ Bora Djordjević, a self-styled rock bard living in Belgrade, sang about the corruption of the party and wrote poems expressing the Serbian spirit vis-à-vis Kosovo. These poems won Djordjević election to the Serbian Association of Writers.

While Kosovar Albanians continued to demand republic status, Serbs began to talk increasingly of the need to whittle down the prerogatives of the provincial party apparatus. In an effort to head off Serbian encroachment, Azem Vllasi, then president of the Kosovo LC provincial committee presidium, told a two-day conference of communists in January 1987,

Our forces have strengthened to such an extent that we may essentially control the situation on the front of the struggle against Albanian nationalism and irredentism, that this nationalism no longer has either strength or a chance to consolidate itself, . . . [let alone] to essentially influence a destabilization of the situation. . . . We have to a great extent broken up the illegal organizations.¹¹⁹

As long as Ivan Stambolić headed the Serbian party apparatus, little was done, and party organs repeated vapid and vacuous phrases about the situation improving and being under control. But in late 1987, Stambolić was ousted by his erstwhile understudy, Slobodan Milošević, and the entire political picture changed overnight. (Slobodan Milošević’s career and program are treated in some detail in chapter 11.)

Milosevic and his adherents were angered by the steady decline in the number of Serbs and Montenegrins in the province. In 1953, these two groups combined had accounted for some 27.9 percent of the provincial population. This figure had steadily dropped—to 20.9 percent in 1971, 14.9 percent in 1981, and finally to 10 percent in 1987.¹²⁰

Having told the Yugoslav public for years that the situation in Kosovo was being normalized, the Serbian party, now controlled by unabashed nationalists, announced that in fact the complete opposite was the case. Thus Petar Gračanin, president of the Serbian presidency, declared at a joint session of the Serbian presidency and the Serbian LC central committee presidium in September 1988,

In all essential respects the political and security situation in Kosovo is getting significantly worse. In the past month, since the 16th LCY central committee plenum, several incidents have occurred which constitute an extremely serious warning about the negative tendencies of the continuing aggressive activity of Albanian nationalism and separatism which, if it is not ended urgently and in a radical way, will have wider and tragic consequences.¹²¹

The new Serbian leadership staged large-scale “spontaneous” demonstrations by Serbs and Montenegrins, to which the Albanians replied with equally large demonstrations. On November 18, 1988, in particular, some 100,000 ethnic Albanians marched through Pristina in what was described as the biggest protest by Albanians in Kosovo since 1981.¹²² Shortly after that protest, provincial officials in Kosovo banned any further public meetings in a vain effort to contain overt expressions of discontent.

Much of the Kosovar party apparatus had been sympathetic to the concerns and aspirations of local Albanians, as Borba obliquely conceded in 1981,¹²³ and as became clear later.¹²⁴ In the first edition of this book, I called the Kosovo crisis, “the most trying and most intractable problem on Belgrade’s agenda.”¹²⁵ As we shall see in chapter 11, the Kosovo crisis provided the grist for Milosevic’s rise to power in Serbia, provoked a dramatic showdown between Slovenia and Serbia over the place of the autonomous provinces in the federation, provided the backdrop for a general deterioration in relations between Serbia and the other republics, and fueled rising Serbian nationalism, which in turn infected Serbs in Croatia, leading to renewed difficulties in Croatia.

The Croatian Question

The purge of the Zagreb troika and the closing of Matica Hrvatska could not liquidate Croatian nationalism: it only drove it underground. The Croatian press again became, at least until the last year of Tito’s reign, relatively timid about such sensitive questions as the interests of the republic and the nature of Croatian nationalism. The charismatic and popular leaders were purged and driven out of politics. They were replaced by mediocre, if pragmatic, bureaucrats who were unpopular with the people. Only one institution was available to champion Croatian national interests until 1989—the Croatian Catholic Church. Whatever it might do to Matica Hrvatska, the regime dared not suppress the church.

According to Šime Djodan, thousands of Croats were punished in one way or another. He estimates that 50,000 members of the LC Croatia lost their party cards, 12,000 enterprise directors and engineers were fired, 2,000-5,000 persons were imprisoned, 50,000 students were identified as “class enemies” and thus had a permanent blemish entered on their records that would obstruct career advancement. In addition, 270 partisan officers were expelled from the party or punished in other ways, 18 generals were punished, and 14 national heroes (including some of the aforementioned generals) were likewise punished. These sweeping penalties sowed deep bitterness among Croats. When I met Djodan in 1989, he drew attention to the fact that, shortly after the purge of the Croatian liberals, Tito was decorated, by Moscow, with the Order of Lenin.¹²⁶

Of those Croats who received jail sentences, many were brought to Stara Gradiška, an antiquated prison known for its poor conditions and callous treatment of prisoners. Among its inmates were Croatian economists Marko Veselica and Sime Djodan, who became so seriously ill while in prison that they were finally released: they were not, however, able to find work for some time (in Djodan’s case, until 1982). Neither they nor Franjo Tudjman, a leading Croatian historian who was sentenced to a two-year prison term in 1972 and was likewise unemployed, were allowed to publish in Yugoslavia. Vjesnik reported that some 5, 806 indictments for political crimes were handed down between January 1972 and March 1973. Forty-four percent of these involved Croats, though their republic represents only 21 percent of the total Yugoslav population. Bosnia, with 19 percent of the Yugoslav population, accounted nonetheless for another 27 percent of these indictments—many of those were no doubt Bosnian Croats.¹²⁷

The conservatives quickly quashed almost all the forums in which the nationalists had been able to publish their views, including Tlo, Kolo, Kritika, Hrvatski književni list, and Studentski list. The prestigious Croatian magazine Encyclopaedia Moderna, however, remained somewhat independent in its editorial policy and allowed articles of liberal shades into its pages. This oversight was corrected at the end of 1974, when the publication was belatedly suppressed. A short story by Dubravko Horvatić that refused to paint the Ustaše in purely negative hues served as the pretext.¹²⁸

Deprived of any input into the politics of the society, nationalistically inclined Croats often “dropped out” altogether, adopting a forced apathy. In the rural regions of Croatia, anti-Serbian feelings became more intense than ever, and certain towns, particularly Zadar, were said to display a defiant mood.¹²⁹ In July 1974, fifteen Croats—among them three professors, a building technician, and a “distinguished member” of the Communist party—were taken into custody. After three months of interrogation, a four-month trial ensued in which the fifteen, together with Pavle Perović, a twenty-two-year-old philosophy student who had managed to escape to West Germany, were accused of having organized a terrorist organization known as the Hrvatska Oslobodilačka Revolucionarna Armija (Croatian Liberation Revolutionary Army). Perović denied that there had been any such organization or that the group had any armaments whatsoever but admitted that he and the other defendants were Croatian nationalists. Nova Hrvatska, the Croatian émigré publication, also pointed out that the name of the alleged organization betrayed its nullibicity, since no right-minded Croat would use the Serbian word “Armija” in place of the Croatian word “Vojska. “¹³⁰ Another fifteen Zagrebers were brought to trial in 1976 for allegedly having planned to assassinate President Tito. The fifteen appealed their convictions, and, in the retrials, two of the accused complained of having been tortured and harassed by the police while in custody. In the end, the court reduced their sentences to fifteen years at hard labor.

Rumored attempts to rehabilitate the fallen troika and reinstate its members in the party inevitably failed, and the expression of sympathy for their program remained totally taboo. One Croatian farmer, Josip Česarec, who ignored this taboo and praised the troika in public, was said to have been given a four-year prison term in 1980. After Tito’s passing, some thought it might be possible to obtain a certain degree of liberalization and, accordingly, in a petition sent to the federal Skupština and to the party presidium, forty-five Croatian intellectuals sought a general amnesty for all political prisoners. The petition, drawn up and submitted in November 1980, was signed, among others, by the former rector of Zagreb University, Ivan Supek; novelists Vlado Gotovac (restricted to Zagreb for spreading “hostile propaganda”) and Zlatko Tomičić; former partisan general Franjo Tudjman; and bygone student leaders.¹³¹

Temporarily freed from jail, Gotovac told a foreign journalist in 1978, “We could be put in jail again at any moment, under any pretense, although we have not done anything.”¹³² By the end of 1980, both Gotovac and Tudjman were once again taken to court. The charge this time was spreading anti-Yugoslav propaganda, specifically, by complaining, in interviews given to Western correspondents over the years 1977-80, that the Croatian people continued to be politically, economically, and culturally oppressed in socialist Yugoslavia. Tudjman had gone so far as to provide Peter Miroschnikoff, a correspondent for ARD (a German news agency), with up-to-date statistics showing that the Serbs continued to dominate both the Croatian Communist party and the officer corps of the JNA within Croatia. NIN, in fact, admitted in 1980 that Serbs constituted 24 percent of the Croatian party and a majority of the Croatian police force, even though only 14 percent of Croatia’s inhabitants were Serbs.¹³³ In February 1981, Tudjman was found guilty of having engaged in hostile propaganda and was sentenced to three years in jail. He was released early, after serving almost two years, because of illness.¹³⁴ Gotovac and former student leader Dobroslav Paraga, also identified with the Croatian mass movement, went to jail for “antistate activity,” and the sickly Marko Veselica, arrested in the early spring of 1981, likewise charged with spreading hostile propaganda, eventually received a sentence of eleven years imprisonment.

There was a certain irony in the fact that, having repudiated the Novi Sad agreement and produced a separate Croatian orthography in the early 1970s, the Croats should have been forced subsequently to accept a new orthography based on the defunct Novi Sad agreement. This new Croatian orthography, the work of Vladimir Anić and Josip Silić, appeared in mid-1980. Work had begun on the project in 1976, on assignment from the Croatian Commission for Language Questions. In an interview with NIN, Anić admitted that, since the language of the Croats, Serbs, Muslims, and Montenegrins was a single language, he and his collaborators had consulted the incomplete Novi Sad orthography whenever possible.¹³⁵

As a result of the purge of the Croatian liberals and the suppression of Matica Hrvatska, the Catholic church became the leading spokesperson for disaffected Croats, a role not altogether different from that acquired by the church in Poland. Several, if not most, of the Croatian upper clergy sympathize with all the traditional Croatian nationalist desiderata.¹³⁶ Archbishop Franjo Kuharić of Zagreb openly took up Paraga’s cause in his Christmas sermon in 1980.¹³⁷ More recently, Jozo Zovko, the parish priest of Medjugorje in Herzegovina, went to prison on a three-and-a-half-year term, after telling his parishioners that they had been “enslaved for forty years” and that it was time to “remove the chains, [and] untie the knots.”¹³⁸ Not sporadic misdemeanors on the part of isolated clergymen, however, but systematic church insistence on the legitimacy of its public role disquieted the LCY, since the LCY did not recognize such a role. “A depoliticized church does not bother the state,” wrote Todo Kurtovic, the chairman of SAWPY, “but the identification of religion and nationality in our conditions is sheer politicization—it is an undiluted clerical act. . . . It cannot be viewed as anything but a political act when someone claims . . . that no one can be a good Croat unless he is a good Catholic.”¹³⁹ Monsignor Franjo Kuharić, archbishop of Zagreb, was guilty of this cardinal sin of “politicization,” and Milka Planinc, Dabčević-Kučar’s successor as president of the Croatian party, denounced the archbishop in July 1977 for using “the pulpit to appear as the protector of the Croatian nation.”¹⁴⁰ Although relations between the Slovenian Catholic Church and the regime have been reasonably amicable in recent years, the same cannot be said for relations between the Croatian Catholic Church and the regime. The difference is that the former has been uninvolved in Slovenian nationalist currents (which are themselves far less potent and thus less threatening), while the Croatian Catholic Church has continued to act out the role of institutional bulwark against Serbianization.

Although the communists could not close down the church as they did Matica Hrvatska, the clergy enjoyed no immunity from prosecution. There continued to be reports of arrests and sentences for nationalistic clergy. In May 1980, to cite one instance, two young Croatian Franciscan monks were sent to jail: one for five years, for writing a poem treating the “oppression of the Croatian people,” the other for five-and-a-half years, for possessing a copy of his fellow friar’s poem and a Croatian flag that lacked the communist red star.¹⁴¹

In 1979, the Croatian Catholic Church celebrated the 1, 100th anniversary of the year that Prince Branimir converted Croatia to Catholicism. The celebration took on the quality of a nationalistic event, and the church showed itself quite eager to underline the identification of Catholicism and Croatian nationality.¹⁴² As 1981 opened, the regime, shaken by the church’s renewed confidence in defending human and national rights in Yugoslavia, initiated a ferocious and slanderous anticlerical campaign, which did not stop short of identifying the archbishop of Zagreb as a fascist sympathizer.¹⁴³ Yet when, in February 1981, the archbishop celebrated a commemorative mass for Cardinal Stepinac, villified by the communists as a wartime collaborator, several thousand Croats jammed into the cathedral in a show of solidarity and defiance of the regime.

In the mid-1980s, a series of strange reports came out of Croatia. In September 1984, a group of young Croats from Duvno were arrested for having sung songs associated with the defunct wartime fascist regime of Ante Pavelić.¹⁴⁴ Another group of young people were apprehended for the same reason three months later. In both cases, all the accused received prison terms.¹⁴⁵ Other similar cases were reported in the press.

The following spring there were trials in Zagreb and Varaždin of alleged terrorists, said to have been members of an organization called the Croatian Fighting Unit and to have maintained contact with hostile Croatian exiles in West Germany. Stjepan Deglin was identified as the leader of the Varaždin group. The trials produced allegations of distribution of propaganda and the massing of weapons and incendiary devices. Members of a third alleged Ustaše group were put on trial about the same time in Osijek. These trials resulted ultimately in sentences of up to fifteen years in prison.¹⁴⁶

Shortly after this, the party weekly Komunist published an article by Franjo Butorac, party secretary in Rijeka, complaining of the infiltration of purely Croatian words into Croatian schoolbooks and media (replacing words shared with Serbian). The purpose of this “strategy,” according to Butorac, was “to indoctrinate young Croats with the spirit of nationalism.”¹⁴⁷ Despite the fact that some of Croatia’s most prominent nationalists were being shuttled in and out of jail, Butorac argued that

the nationalists defeated in 1971 are mostly operating legally today, using means to push the ideas defeated in 1971; they are exceptionally well organized and linked, and are acting deliberately and “for the long,” and they are doing so in a particularly sensitive sphere—language and education.¹⁴⁸

The article sparked polemics in the Croatian Sabor and gave rise to a flood of letters to Komunist alleging that there was linguistic nationalism in Croatia. But when one of the chiefs of Školska knjiga, the Zagreb publishing house reponsible for most of the textbooks being attacked in Komunist, tried to contact the authors of the letters, he found that all the names and addresses were fake. He surmised that the letter campaign figured as part of a “wider political game.”¹⁴⁹

Table 24. Total Residents and Serbs Living in Croatia, 1948-81

Source: NIN, no. 2018, September 3, 1989, p. 23.

The “Croatian question” had a particular edge because of the presence, in the republic, of several hundred thousand Serbs, accounting for about 12 percent of the republic’s population in 1981. The number of Serbs residing in Croatia is shown in Table 24.

The Serbs came to Croatia in Habsburg times, when the Austrian dynasty invited Serbs to settle along the border and serve as border guards, fighting the Ottoman Turks when necessary. In exchange for this service, they were paid a state salary. This pattern resulted in Croatian Serbs abandoning agriculture, and when some of them returned to farming decades later, not surprisingly, they were far less skilled at it than the Croats. After the Old Empire collapsed, they joined the Yugoslav army or took employment in the police force, the post office, the railways, and the administration. During World War II, Croatian Serbs responded enthusiastically to Tito’s call, and about 50 percent of Tito’s recruits in Croatia were Serbs. After the war, many Croatian Serbs remained in the army and many joined UDBa (the secret police).¹⁵⁰ In the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Cyrillic had been introduced as the official language throughout the country, but the Ustaše brought in the Latin alphabet in the areas under their control. After the war, the communists allowed the Croats to retain use of the Latin alphabet, although local Serbs preferred Cyrillic. Even today one can see shop signs in Cyrillic in the heavily Serbian regions of Knin, Banja, Kordun, and Lika. In Knin, as much as 80-90 percent of the local population is Serbian, while in the other regions, 45-55 percent is Serbian.

In late 1942, Moše Pijade, one of the partisans’ “Big Five,” proposed that a Serbian autonomous province be established in Croatia after the war. But Tito vetoed the proposal at once.¹⁵¹ Yet the idea of some form of autonomy for Croatian Serbs never dięd and resurfaced in 1971, during the Croatian Spring. There are several issues related to Croatia’s Serbs. Their overrepresentation in the police and security forces in the Titoist era was the most troubling in Croatian eyes. To the Serbs themselves, however, the real issues included the lack of special Serbian cultural institutions and newspapers, the relatively lower level of Serbian economic development, and the sheer fact of rule from Zagreb. But to Serbian demands for special societies and autonomy, Croats have generally replied that there are also large pockets of Croats in Vojvodina and Bosnia-Herzegovina and yet no one talks of Croatian autonomous provinces in those federal units—not, that is, until 1990.¹⁵²

From 1972 to 1987, the conservatives controlled the Croatian party apparatus. But the conservatives’ policy of narrowing institutional alternatives within Croatia reinforced the very thing the communist regime dreaded most—the identification of nationality with religion—and thus reinforced latent tendencies within Croatia to reenact the Napoleonic syndrome and embark once again on a “Croatia first” course. Titoist Yugoslavia enjoyed a degree of success in conflict regulation, at least until the 1980s, and in federal relations the republics acquired wide autonomy, which permitted their elites to pursue those programs and to advance those policies that they perceived to be most in the interest of their respective federal units. It is another thing, however, to infer from this that the elites within each republic always authentically represented the viewpoints of the population whose interests they professed or, alternatively, that Yugoslavia ever managed anything resembling a “final solution” of the nationalities question. This became patently obvious (again!) in 1989-90. Repeated instances showed that tensions on the interethnic level had the potential to transform interrepublican relations, replacing one set of elites with another set that had different programmatic dispositions.

The Slovenian Syndrome

Sometime in the early 1980s, or perhaps even in the late 1970s, intellectuals and cultural elites in Slovenia began to stir. An early hint came in 1984, when Josip Vidmar told a symposium on “Yugoslavism” that Slovenian nationalism should be accepted as a normal (i.e., not evil) phenomenon.¹⁵³ That was only a straw in the wind. This syndrome went unnoticed at first, but by 1986 or 1987 it was perfectly obvious, and people began to be able to trace it back, at least part of the way. The “Slovenian syndrome” is really the Ljubljana syndrome because the political and social departures in that republic from common practice in Yugoslavia as a whole, which came into full bloom in the late 1980s, were (and are) essentially phenomena of the Slovenian capital city, even if they have consequences for the entire republic.

When people in Yugoslavia speak of the “Slovenački sindrom,” they have in mind the fact that Slovenia in many ways marches to its own drummer. But more concretely the Slovenian syndrome emerged largely through three central components: Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), the Alternative Movement, and the confederal proclivity of the Slovenian political leadership.¹⁵⁴ These phenomena began as forms of dissidence, albeit at different levels, but by 1990 had become the basis for the political and cultural mainstream in Slovenia.

Neue Slowenische Kunst (New Slovenian Art) is a multimedia artistic group consisting of the Irwin group for painting, the Cosmo-Kinetic Theater of the Red Pilot, the rock group Laibach, and a propaganda/advertising unit which calls itself the New Collectivism. NSK involves relatively few people—perhaps fifty in all—and flirts with totalitarianism, professing to be trying to foster totalitarian thinking.¹⁵⁵ This is all pose. NSK’s real power is elsewhere, and the pop-totalitarian guise is used as an energizing medium to promote a certain image of Slovenian culture (and to market Laibach’s rock albums).

NSK is deeply ironic and by nature provocative. Its members and adherents view themselves as looking back to Slovenian roots and as rediscovering the Slovenian soul. But the very choice of a German expression (it never appears in Slovenian) to denote the current was conceived as a kind of provocation: Germanization threatened Slovenian national culture for centuries, and now the project of the rediscovery of the Slovenian soul is given a German name. Laibach’s 1987 album, Krst pod Triglavom—Baptism, is, in fact, a celebration of the Slovenian soul in music. It solemnly recreates ancient pagan music, which shifts to music darkly evocative of turmoil. Later there are lengthy citations from Johann Strauss—an allusion to Slovenia’s long incorporation into the Austrian Empire—though this is inevitably sifted through Laibach’s unique rhythmic prism. Then there are ponderous, dramatic-sounding but empty chords done in a mock Wagnerian style that run in circles. Still later there is an unmistakable Nazi march, frenetically sung in pseudo-German.

In fact, the Nazi style is a Laibach specialty. The group’s members wear brown shirts and Nazi-style regalia, sing in German, and conduct totalitarian-style ceremonies in their performances. Even the name Laibach, the German name for Ljubljana, recalls not merely the long period of Habsburg rule, but also the much shorter, but far more traumatic, period of Nazi rule. What does it all mean? The Slovenes debated this for several years and finally gave it up, without coming to an agreement. Part of the group’s meaning, certainly—as I have argued—lies in its assertion of a separate Slovenian path.¹⁵⁶

The Alternative Movement, since it is not a single institution but, rather, an alliance of movements and individuals is in flux even now. One might say that the Alternative Movement is a way of thinking, and as circumstances change, the way one thinks about circumstances changes as well. The Alternative Movement was born in 1982 with the formation of the Peace and Ecology Movement. This movement became involved in protests against the country’s nuclear energy program. Lilit, a feminist group, was formed by a group of female students in the humanities in April 1985. And Magnus, a gay rights movement, likewise formed in 1985, has put on gay festivals in Ljubljana annually since then.

In addition, the Slovenian student periodicals Mladina (Ljubljana) and Katedra (Maribor) and the Ljubljana station, Radio Student, offered outlets for ideas, discussions, and cultural trends that for one reason or another were not acceptable for the communist-linked and sponsored media (up to 1990). Radio Student was somewhat anomalous to begin with, in that it was always an entirely independent radio station, never staffed or supervised by any agency of the Communist party. It was created in 1969 on student initiative; during unrest the previous year, Slovenian students had demanded the right to establish their own radio station. This was reluctantly granted, and the students literally built the station themselves. By contrast, the editorial appointments of Mladina and Katedra had to be approved by the local youth organization (until the end of 1989), but in the late 1980s such approval became more or less pro forma. Some of the people on the staffs of these three outlets were associated with the alternative scene (e.g., punk, in its heyday).

Later, in 1988, independent political parties were created that would take power in Slovenia in spring 1990. In this way, the Alternative Movement took over the government and brought its alternative into fruition.

The third component of the “Slovenian syndrome” was the confederal proclivity of the Slovenian political leadership—both of the communist leadership and of the noncommunist leadership that succeeded it. Like the Slovenian population generally, neither leadership was eager to have the republic’s relatively greater prosperity milked through measures designed to support the less solvent republics in the south or to give up their policy autonomy (or “sovereignty,” in the parlance of 1990) in internal matters. Predictably, this attitude aroused resentment and suspicion in some of the other republics.

In February 1987, the Slovenian journal Nova revija published a collection of articles devoted to the “Slovenian national program, “ which included, among other things, a protest against the second-class status of the Slovenian language in Yugoslavia. The issue was quickly subjected to attack in other republics in Yugoslavia, where some people expressed prescient (as it turned out) concern that the Slovenes were sliding in the direction of secessionism.¹⁵⁷ Eventually, there were polemics between the federal prosecutor and the Slovenian prosecutor over Nova revija. The Slovenes held their ground.

Slovenes started to talk of a “defensive nationalism”¹⁵⁸ and of how they were being milked by the other, less productive republics. Outside the republic, there was resentment of the Slovenes’ tendency to look inward, or northward, rather than south, and a growing realization that Slovenes did not really consider themselves part of Yugoslavia. Moving between Belgrade, Zagreb, and Sarajevo, one encountered the same issues, the same personalities, and elements of shared culture; the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian environments intersected. But traveling to Slovenia, one lost all sense of the relevance of Belgrade and Zagreb. In Ljubljana, Serbia came to seem like a distant (and, of course, foreign) world.

The army did not like what was happening in Slovenia. Toward the end of March 1988, the Military Council—an advisory body to the federal presidency—prepared a report on political trends in Slovenia. The report spoke of “counterrevolution” in Slovenia, which, it said, was waging “war” against the achievements of socialism. The central committee of the Slovenian party convened a secret meeting at which it tried to refute the Military Council’s accusations—but the military was not convinced. A few weeks later, rumors started circulating in Ljubljana to the effect that the army was preparing a coup in Slovenia, that it planned to clean out the liberals, that it planned executions, and so forth. In May, Slovenian party chief Milan Kučan’s speech to the secret session of the central committee was leaked, confirming the truth of these rumors.¹⁵⁹ Ivan Borstner, a sergeant-major in the Yugoslav army, absconded with an army document outlining preparations for the coup and took it to the weekly magazine Mladina, making contact with journalists Janez Janša and David Tasić and editor Franci Zavrl. Mladina prepared to publish the material. Instead, the army arrested Janša and Borstner on May 31, and Tasić and Zavrl a few days later. On the same day that Janša and Borstner were arrested, the LCY presidency issued a completely unbelievable statement to the effect that “rumors of alleged preparations for a military coup in the Republic of Slovenia last March are absolutely groundless and represent a political intrigue.”¹⁶⁰ In the meantime, Stane Dolanc (Slovenia’s representative in the state presidency) and Milan Kučan (president of the Slovenian central committee presidium) had succeeded in thwarting the plan.

The trial sent political shock waves throughout Slovenia. The four accused became national heroes in Slovenia overnight, and in Ljubljana, crowds of ten to twenty thousand regularly convened, day after day, for the duration of the trial. The trial came to be seen in national-patriotic terms, as Slovenes turned out for the demonstrations waving the Slovenian flag and singing nationalistic Slovenian songs. Folk musicians accompanied the singing and played well-known Slovenian marches.¹⁶¹ The demonstrations took on some of the character of a vigil. The Catholic Church called for the release of “the Slovenian four” and conducted an all-night prayer vigil on July 18.¹⁶²

The Slovenian communist authorities remonstrated against the trial, and when an extralegal Committee for the Protection of Human Rights began functioning (and signing up tens of thousands of sympathizers), they entered into direct and supportive contact with the committee, even declaring their views identical with those of the committee.¹⁶³

Janez Janša was not just any journalist, in any case. He was the author of a series of articles in Mladina critical of the military. He was leader of the Slovenian pacifist movement, president of the wayward Slovenian Youth Organization, and—at the time of his arrest—a candidate for the presidency of the Yugoslav Youth Organization.¹⁶⁴ His arrest was thus experienced as a particularly sharp, direct attack on Slovenian values, including pacifism. After his arrest Janša continued to write, and he produced an article, “War and Peace in the New Constitution,” in which he argued for limiting the share of the national revenue allocated for military expenditures to 2 percent. Janša argued further,

In the new constitution, the question of equal status of the nations within the YNA [Yugoslav National Army] should be regulated. In this very field the army lags behind most of all. . . . The constitutional changes should regulate anew: a) the question of the general plenipotentiaries of the army; b) the question of equal status of the languages in the YNA; c) the question of the extra-territorial principle of serving in [the] armed forces; d) the question of [the] even distribution of senior officers regarding their nationality, in the YNA. Among general competences, the way of financing in terms of already proposed restrictions should be regulated, military courts should be abolished, republics should have plenipotentiaries over military education, political parties within the army should be banned, the nomination of senior officers of higher rank on the territory of each republic or autonomous province should be in [the] competence of [the] republic.¹⁶⁵

The trial was bad enough in and of itself, as far as Slovenes were concerned, and antimilitary sentiment now ran in high fever. Antimilitary graffiti adorned public walls in Ljubljana, in open expression of this tide.¹⁶⁶ But the entire affair was aggravated by the army’s decision to conduct the trial—being held in Ljubljana—in Serbo-Croatian. The party leadership in Slovenia took the matter to the Yugoslav presidency, which ruled that the use of Serbo-Croatian in the Ljubljana military court was not unconstitutional—that is, that Slovenian law did not apply to the Yugoslav military.¹⁶⁷ It was a straight line from this ruling to Slovenia’s 1990 declaration that its own legislation took priority over federal law. The Slovenian party leadership of course appealed the presidency’s decision, but in vain. Milan Kučan commented bitterly that “Slovenes cannot regard as their own any state that does not secure the use of their mother tongue and its equality, and in which the freedom, sovereignty and equality of the Slovene people is not guaranteed. “¹⁶⁸

Finally, on July 27, the court found the four guilty and sentenced them to prison terms of four years (Borstner), one-and-a-half years (Janša and Zavrl, each), and five months (Tasić).

The trial had mobilized the Slovenian public, inflamed Slovenian exclusivism, provoked the creation of a human rights committee, and legitimized dissent. In the wake of the trial, a series of political initiatives were undertaken, giving birth to the Social Democratic Alliance of Slovenia, the Slovenian Democratic Union, the Slovenian Christian Socialist Movement, and a “Green” party.¹⁶⁹

As a result of the trial, Slovenes began to talk in a new way. Already in June 1988, Kučan underlined the right of Slovenes to legislate for their own republic. ¹⁷⁰ Mirjana Kasapović, a contributor to Naše teme, echoed this sentiment, noting, “We Slovenes did not join with other Yugoslav peoples in a common state in order to lose our soul and our national identity, but in order to defend them.”¹⁷¹ Then, in December 1988, Kučan introduced an entirely new element into the discourse, when, in an article penned for the party weekly, Komunist, he underlined that Slovenia retained the right of secession.¹⁷² Republican leaders had not broached this subject in twenty years. There was no immediate follow-up to this, but then, in September 1989, Vladimir Rabzelj, a Slovenian lawyer, wrote an article for Mladina urging the secession of Slovenia and Croatia from the Yugoslav federation and the creation of a Slovenian-Croatian confederation.¹⁷³

Mazes in Montenegro

Montenegro is a special case. Unlike the other nationalisms of Yugoslavia, Montenegrin nationalism comes in two variants—an anti-Serbian and a proSerbian variant—and there are Montenegrins adhering to each. Anti-Serbian nationalism follows the model of nationalism in the other republics, with the refinement that some scholars argue that Montenegrins are not Slavs at all but descend from originally non-Slavic stock, only accepting Serbo-Croatian as their indigenous language somewhat later.¹⁷⁴ Anti-Serbian nationalists typically want to maximize the sovereignty and juridical autonomy of the Montenegrin republic and are highly distrustful of Serbs.

Pro-Serbian Montenegrin nationalists perhaps should be called simply Serbian nationalists, since the argument they make is that Montenegrins are merely one tribe of the Serbian nation and that Montenegrins and Serbs have the same ethnogenesis, the same culture, and—allowing, of course, for the refinement of the independent Principality of Montenegro, which existed until 1918—in some “larger” sense, the same history.¹⁷⁵ Serbian nationalists in Montenegro complain that the “artificial” resurrection of a separate Montenegrin federal unit by the communists after World War II was a ploy to weaken Serbia that lacked any intrinsic merit.

Until the mid-1970s, the cultural infrastructure in Montenegro was weak. Only at that time were the University of Titograd and the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences founded. And only then was there a tangible development of Montenegrin media (including local television) and local scientific, cultural, and research institutes.¹⁷⁶ That is to say, the institutional prerequisites for the development of an articulate Montenegrin culture and identity were long in coming. By the mid-1980s, however, Montenegro was becoming sharply polarized between anti-Serbian and pro-Serbian nationalists, resulting in a worsening of the political climate among Montenegrins.¹⁷⁷

In 1990, a new People’s party was established in Montenegro. Its president (Novak Kilibarda) argued that Montenegro and Serbia are two Serbian states and that Montenegrins should be encouraged to think of themselves as Serbs. Although Kilibarda allowed that Montenegrins should have their own state, he also told a public gathering in July 1990 that in the event of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Montenegro and Serbia should be united as a single Serbian state.¹⁷⁸

A movement for the unification of Serbia and Montenegro was set up, and a petition to that effect was circulated that gathered more than 10,000 signatures from “citizens of Serbia and Montenegro.”¹⁷⁹

These Serbophile currents in turn provoked fear and anxiety among many Montenegrins, and one highly placed Montenegrin official claimed, in August 1990, that anti-Serbian sentiment in Montenegro had never been as strong.¹⁸⁰ A new Party of Socialists came into being in Montenegro and quickly issued a public warning of the threat of “Greater Serbian pretensions to the territory of the state of Montenegro.”¹⁸¹

Conclusion

This chapter has highlighted the phenomenon of nationalism among five nationalities in Yugoslavia—Muslims, Albanians, Croats, Slovenes, and Montenegrins. Serbs—the most numerous Yugoslav nation and, arguably, the nation with the most complexes—are treated separately in chapter 11. But nationalism is not confined to these groups, of course. In particular, Macedonian and Hungarian nationalism have also played a certain, albeit smaller, role in recent Yugoslav politics.

Nationalism is a kind of political fuel. And as fuel, it can power different engines, driving in different directions. At various times, scholars, politicians, and polemicists have linked nationalism to fascism or democracy or political atavism—and perhaps to other things as well. But none of these linkages are automatic. They are only possible linkages. But in the Yugoslav context, which is also to say, in the context of communist one-party rule, this fuel powered a specific engine, namely, the engine of republic etatism. Hence, as Slovenian journalist Miha Kovač told the New Left Review in 1988,

the nationalisms or local interests of Yugoslavia’s six republics and two autonomous provinces became a kind of surrogate for all other political identities. You could be active within the existing political structure only on the basis of defending the interests of your republic or province. . . . Thus the system that had supposedly emerged through the defeat of Croat and other nationalisms turned out to be itself most conducive to nationalism. Nationalism is produced within the very structure of the Yugoslav system.¹⁸²