Kosova Situation

Historical Perspective

Albanians in Yugoslavia are an aboriginal population in their lands. They inhabited these territories since the times of the ancient Illyrians, of whom they are the descendants. Today, they make up about 45 percent of the Albanian people (55 percent living in the mother country, Albania). Kosova, as well as the other territories inhabited by Albanians in Yugoslavia, was occupied by Serbia in 1912, and the Europe of those days approved the borders we have today. The new arranuement dismembered the Albanian territories leaving the predominantly Albanian lands of Eastern Albanian to Serbia. and later to Yugoslavia. Similarly, after World War II. Serbia succeeded in reannexing Kosova again by force.

Immediately following World War II and for a short period thereafter, Albanians in Kosova, who make up over 90 percent of the local population, enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy. This brief period was fully destroyed by Serbia after 1981. Todav, Kosova is an occupied territorywith a heavy concentration of police forces and military units from Serbia and Yugoslavia.

The present confrontation in Kosova dates back six hundreds years. In June 13, 1389, in the battle of Kosovopolja, the allied Christian armies of Serbia, Bulgaria and Albania, under the command of the Serbian King Lazar, fought a gallant but losing battle against the advancing Ottoman Turks. From that year until 1913, nearly the entire Balkan area came under Ottoman rule, which ended only with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire on the eve of World War I.

With the creation of modern Yugoslavia in 1945, six federal “republics” emerged: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia. Serbia included two autonomous provinces: Voivodina, with a large Hungarian population, and the predominantly Albanian Kosova. The latter is a province with a 2 million population (1990) bordering on Albania and occupying an area about the size of the state of Connecticut. Large numbers of Albanians (approx. I million) were left to the Republics of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia proper.

From 1974 on, Kosova was governed by an elected parliament under Serbian control, but with considerable latitude to organize it’s internal affairs. Since May 1977. the rise in power of Serbia’s Communist Party boss, Slobodan Milosevic, was accompanied by a sharp rise in Serbian chauvinism and the continual destruction of Kosova’ s autonomy.

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