Many observers today agree that the present Yugoslav crisis has historical roots in structural defects of Yugoslavia, which determined the country’s permanent instability. So it is no accident that this crisis should have manifested itself soon afer Marshal Tito’s death. Very soon it was realized that his charisma, more precisely his uncontested authority, had been a key element holding the balance in the delicate federation of Yugoslavia. For Serbia almost at once began to seek a redefinition of the federation, with the aim of either acquiring complete hegemony in Yugoslavia or creating a Greater Serbia.

Serbia opened its campaign with Kosova, calling its long- established autonomy into question. Unfortunately the other Yugoslav republics, faced with Serbia’s aggressive insistence, agreed to its demands for a reduction of Kosova’s autonomy (naturally, until a later stage Serbia hid the fact that its real goal was a complete abolition of that autonomy), in the hope that sacrificing Kosova would satisfy Serbian appetites. The Albanians thus remained alone in their struggle to defend their autonomy, and Serbia received the go—ahead to use the authority, instruments and military and police potential, of the Federation itself in subduing Kosova. The Albanians offered a great deal of determined resistance against the Serbian campaign to destroy Kosova’s autonomy, but in the constellation of forces/interests in the Yugoslav federation everything was against them.

In 1988, after an eight-year systematic campaign of repression, Serbia was trying to finalize the project of abolishing Kosova’s autonomy. In the public discussion regarding the proposed constitutional changes, organized in October of that year (albeit in an atmosphere of unprecedented propagandistic and psychological terror and enforced police repression), Albanians declared themselves in a plebiscitary manner against the changes

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