Re: s'ban me harrue luften n'kosove
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1. THE ORIGINS OF THE KOSOVO CRISIS
The origins of ethnic conflict are often claimed to date back hundreds of years. Protagonists refer to great migrations, epic battles, and holy sites. The conflict over Kosovo is no exception. Although it is true that stories and myths surrounding Kosovo were kept alive for centuries in ballads and legends, it was only in the late nineteenth century that they were resurrected as part of the narratives of rival Serb and Albanian national movements. The twentieth-century history of Kosovo has been bloody, with episodes of mass expulsions and atrocities conducted both by Slavs and Albanians. Nevertheless, the latest round of violence cannot be explained merely by reference to this history.
The origins of the current crisis have to be understood in terms of a new wave of nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s, which made use of this history. Although Kosovo was populated mainly by Albanians, it was a symbol of nationalist aspirations for both Albanians and Serbs. The Albanian national movement was launched in Prizren/Prizren in 1878, and the incorporation of Kosovo into Serbia in 1912 was one of the bitter memories conjured up in subsequent years. For the Serbs, Kosovo was viewed as the holy place of the Serb nation, the place where the Serbian Army was defeated by the Turks in the famous Battle of Fushe Kosove/Kosovo Polje of June 1389 and the site of many of Serbia’s historic churches. Also, Belgrade nationalist intellectuals exploited discrimination against Serbs living in Kosovo during the 1980s.
It was nationalism that led to the rise of Slobodan Milosevic and the official adoption of an extreme Serbian nationalist agenda. Once the nationalist agenda had become governmental policy, war became a real possibility. Indeed, perhaps the most salient question to ask is why the war was postponed until 1998, and whether the international community could have done anything to make use of this borrowed time to prevent it.
The conflict in Kosovo also has to be understood in the context of the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Kosovo was one of the eight constituent units of Yugoslavia; there were six republics (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina) and two autonomous provinces in Serbia (Vojvodina and Kosovo). The removal of autonomy from Kosovo and Vojvodina in 1989 was a key moment in a series of events leading to demands for independence from other republics, the wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and eventually Kosovo. The final settlement of the former Yugoslavia has still not been determined.
THE RISE OF MILOSEVIC
After the Second World War, the new communist leadership of Yugoslavia declared Kosovo to be an autonomous “constituent part” of Serbia. Under Tito’s rule, Kosovar Albanians experienced both harsh persecution and glimpses of freedom. The effects of three decades of government-sponsored colonization by Serbs of almost half of Kosovo’s arable land were mitigated when Tito returned a third of the land to its Albanian owners after 1945. Also, some of the prewar measures employed to stifle the Albanian language were lifted. The immediate post-war period was, however a period of repression in Yugoslavia and, after Tito broke with Moscow in 1948, Kosovar Albanians experienced particularly harsh repressive measures, since they were suspected of sympathizing with Albanian president and loyal Stalinist, Enver Hoxha.
One of the most public acts of repression during this period was a show trial held in Prizren/Prizren in 1956 at which leading Albanian communists were accused of being part of a network of spies supposedly infiltrating Kosovo from Albania, and were given long prison sentences. During this period Islam was suppressed, and Albanians and Slav Muslims were encouraged to declare themselves Turkish and to emigrate to Turkey. Serbs and Montenegrins dominated the administration, security forces, and industrial employment. Public investment was low, and levels of production and income grew more slowly than in the rest of Yugoslavia.
The situation began to change in the 1960s. In 1966 Aleksandar Rankovic, the person most associated with the Serbianization policy, was dismissed from the Central Committee.1 In 1968 there were student demonstrations, as in the rest of Europe. A new Europeanized generation was demanding greater freedoms in general, although some of the slogans included “Kosovo Republic”, “We want a University”, “Down with colonial policy in Kosovo”, and “Long Live Albania”. Although the demonstrations were dealt with harshly, a series of measures were taken during this period which greatly improved the situation of Kosovar Albanians. These included the establishment of a university in Prishtina/Pristina, rapprochement with Albania, the use of Albanian professors and Albanian textbooks to teach Albanian language and literature, rapid Albanization of administration and security, and increased public investment.
The culmination of these improvements was the 1974 Yugoslav constitution, under which Kosovo, like Vojvodina, was declared an autonomous province of Serbia. The status of autonomous province was almost the same as the status of republic. As an autonomous province, Kosovo had its own administration, assembly, and judiciary, and it was a member of both Serbian institutions and federal institutions -- the collective Presidency and the federal Parliament, in which it had the right of veto. The main difference between an autonomous province and a republic was that provinces did not have the right to secede from the federation and were not considered the bearers of Yugoslav sovereignty, as were the republics. This difference was explained by the fact that the Albanians, like the Hungarians of Vojvodina, were classified as a nationality (narodnost) rather than a nation (narod). Supposedly this was because their nation had a homeland elsewhere. Nations had the right to their own republic but nationalities did not. In the national pecking order, there was an even lower category of national minority, which applied mainly to Roma, Vlachs, and Jews.
When students and other demonstrators took to the streets in 1981, arguably the issue was primarily one of status rather than a desire for independence. It was true that the rapid growth of the university and the influence from Tirana had fed nationalist aspirations; in 1978 there had been festivities all over Kosovo to celebrate the centenary of the founding of the League of Prizren - the so-called Albanian “national awakening.” But the dominant emotion underlying the demand for republic status seems to have been resentment that nationalities, i.e. Albanian or Hungarian, were somehow inferior to nations i.e. Serbs or Croats. In other words they felt like second-class citizens. Among the demonstrators, there were members of clandestine radical groups, generally declaring themselves Marxist-Leninist, who favored unification with Albania. But interviews and commentaries suggest that these were marginal.2
The 1981 demonstrations were brutally crushed. Police and military units and even the newly created territorial defense units were brought to Kosovo from all over Yugoslavia and a state of emergency was declared. Hundreds of people were arrested, tried, and imprisoned.3 A Communist Party purge was undertaken, euphemistically labeled “differentiation”. Thousands of university professors and schoolteachers were sacked. The provision of Albanian professors and Albanian textbooks was stopped.
This was the period of political uncertainty just after Tito’s death, which may account for the vehemence of the reaction at a Serbian and federal level to the demonstrations. The period of the late 1960s and 1970s, which are often considered the apogee of the Tito period and to which both Albanians and Serbs were to look back nostalgically, were over. The consequence was a growing polarization between the Albanian and Serbian communities in Kosovo during the 1980s.
It was also a period of austerity for the whole of Yugoslavia, when reforms were introduced as part of a debt-rescheduling package. Kosovo had always been the poorest region of Yugoslavia. Despite high levels of public investment after 1957, and despite receiving the largest share of the Fund for Underdeveloped Regions, the gap between Kosovo and the rest of Yugoslavia grew over the period. In 1952 Kosovo’s Gross Material Product (GMP) 4 per capita was 44% that of the Yugoslav average. It had declined to 29% in 1980 and to 22% in 1990. Unemployment had reached 27% in 1980 and was to increase to 40% in 1990.5 Student numbers also increased rapidly; high student numbers were said to be a kind of “safety valve” for unemployment, but they were also a source of political agitation.
The austerity pressures of the 1980s, directly contributed to the tensions because the way in which resources were distributed became part of the nationalist debate. Typically, bureaucratically regulated economies are characterized by competition for resources rather than competition for markets. Thus, Serbia as well as the other northern republics increasingly resented the monies being taxed to support the development of Kosovo. Long before the rise of Milosevic, Serbian political debate included demands for recentralizing control of economic policy and budgetary resources in Belgrade away from Vojvodina and Kosovo directly parallel to the reforms for the country as a whole in the IMF program and the policy recommendations of market reformers. The withdrawal of Kosovar autonomy corresponded to pressures for government reform toward a market economy and export-oriented investment program. At the same time, Albanian activists believed that their underdevelopment, unemployment, and poverty was a result of insufficient control over their economic life. Republic status would surely give them greater economic control, with which they would introduce more favorable policies. Their capacity to mobilize support on ethnonational lines, using family structures, rural culture, foreign assets (their workers abroad), and university students facing unemployment, cannot be understood except in the context of a social structure created by administrative arrangements combined with liberalization.
Another critical factor in the development of the conflict has been the demographics of Kosovo. Over the period 1961-81, the proportion of Albanians in the population of Kosovo rose from 67% to 78%. This was due both to the very high birth rate of Albanians and to outmigration of Serbs and Montenegrins. Between 1961 and 1981 the Serb and Montenegrin population declined by around 30,000, and fell by a further 20,000 during the 1980s. Actual emigration by Serbs and Montenegrins between 1961 and 1981, was probably around 100,000, although much higher figures were circulating in Belgrade. In fact, emigration among all communities was high, mainly for economic reasons: Kosovo was stagnating while other parts of Yugoslavia were booming. But among the Serbs, there were additional reasons; many complained of harassment and discrimination. Undoubtedly, the Serbian community was becoming smaller both absolutely and relatively and was losing its privileges. Surveys and interviews indicate that the Serbs who left, who were often of an older generation, were genuinely afraid of physical violence and damage to their property; they also experienced institutional and ideological discrimination. In interviews, they suggested that the physical threats came from younger Albanians, often immigrants from Albania, and not from friends and neighbors.6 At the same time, some of the wilder claims that were circulating in Belgrade, especially about rape and murder, are not substantiated by official figures. Crime rates including rates of rape were considerably lower in Kosovo than in the rest of the Yugoslavia. Likewise, the Serb nationalist argument that the Albanian birth rate was politically motivated is belied by the fact that the birth rate of Albanians in towns was the same as the birth rate of the rest of the urban population -- it was only in the countryside, where there was poverty and low levels of education, that the birth rate was so high, (see Table 1).
From the mid-1980s, Serb intellectuals began openly to publish nationalistic tracts and to discuss the “genocide” of Serbs in Kosovo. By 1983, the funeral of Serb hardliner Rankovic had already turned into a nationalist event. Kosovar Serbs and Montenegrins began to make public protestations in the mid-1980s and were supported by Belgrade intellectuals. These sentiments were further inflamed by the Martinovic case, in which a 56 year old Kosovar Serb, Djordje Martinovic, claimed to have been attacked by two Albanians who forced a bottle into his rectum.7
In January 1986, 216 prominent Serbian intellectuals, including Dobrica Cosic, who had been expelled from the Central Committee in 1968 for favoring the Rankovic policy towards Kosovo, presented a petition to the Serb and Yugoslav Assemblies. They declared that: “The case of Djordje Martinovic has come to symbolize the predicament of all Serbs in Kosovo.” Later, in the same year, a memorandum published by the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences sent shock waves through Yugoslavia. The memorandum talked about the “physical, political, legal and cultural genocide” of Serbs in Kosovo and argued that the “remnants of the Serb nation (…) faced with a physical, moral and psychological reign of terror (…) seem to be preparing for their final exodus.” Likewise, the memorandum suggested that the position of the Serbs in Croatia was “jeopardized” and that if “solutions are not found, the consequences might well be disastrous, not only for Croatia but for the whole of Yugoslavia.”8 It was also claimed that the Martinovic case was “reminiscent of the darkest days of the Turkish practice of impalement.”9
These nationalist ideas were criticized by the Yugoslav authorities, especially the President of the Serbian Socialist League, Ivan Stambolic, but nothing like the harsh measures imposed on Albanian nationalists was applied. A turning point was the visit of Slobodan Milosevic, then deputy-president of the Serbian Party, to Kosovo on 24 April 1987. Milosevic arrived at the meeting place in Fushe Kosove/Kosovo Polje in the middle of a scuffle between Serbs and the police. He then uttered the famous words: “No one should dare to beat you,” and proceeded to give a speech about the sacred rights of Serbs. He became a national hero overnight. With the support of Radio TV Belgrade, and with mass rallies throughout the country known as “Meetings of Truth”, he was able to mobilize popular feelings and to take control of the party leadership. First he displaced his old friend and patron Stambolic. Then he forced the resignation of the party leaders in Vojvodina and Montenegro, and finally he removed the two main party leaders in Kosovo. An incident in 1987, that helped his cause was the case of an Albanian army recruit who went berserk and shot four other recruits (two Bosniak, one Croat, and one Serb) and then committed suicide. The case was considered a deliberate attack on Yugoslavia, and eight Albanians were accused of planning the attack. The incident helped to bring the JNA, the Yugoslav Army, into the ambit of Milosevic.
At a rally in Belgrade in November 1988, attended by 350,000 people, Milosevic declared: “Every nation has a love, which eternally warms its heart. For Serbia, it is Kosovo.”10 And in June 1989, on the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, Milosevic declared to 1 million people: “Six centuries later, again, we are in battles and quarrels. They are not armed battles although such things cannot be excluded.”11 There followed a series of steps, including in 1989 the Serbian assembly taking more direct control over Kosovo’s security, judiciary, finance, and social planning,12 which led finally in July 1990 to the revoking of the autonomy of Kosovo. As early as 1989 and early 1990, the Serbian government had already passed a series of decrees aimed at changing the ethnic composition of Kosovo: these included restrictions on the sale of property to Albanians, incentives for Serbs and Montenegrins to return, family planning for Albanians, and encouragement to Albanians to seek work elsewhere in Yugoslavia. In July the Kosovo Assembly was dissolved, despite provisions in the 1974 Constitution requiring Assembly consent for its own dissolution. Arguably, this act signaled the end of the 1974 Constitution, and, according to some, the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
The revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy spawned an increase in human rights abuses and discriminatory government policies designed to Serbianize the province.13 These included discriminatory language policies: the closure of Albanian language newspapers, radio, and television; the closure of the Albanian Institute; and the change of street names from Albanian to Serbian.14 In particular, the introduction of a new Serbian curriculum for universities and schools:
resulted in the closing down of the Educational Administration of Kosovo (…) and of other institutions and facilities in the field of education (…) [M]ore than 18,000 teachers and other staff of Albanian-language classroom facilities (…) were summarily dismissed when they rejected the textbooks of the uniform curricula.15
Thousands of Albanians were dismissed from public employment; according to the independent Kosovar Albanian Association of Trades Unions, 115,000 people out of a total 170,000 lost their jobs. Attempts were also made to colonize the province. Special privileges were granted to Serbs who resettled or returned to Kosovo, including loans and free plots of land.16 Legislation was also passed which made it illegal for Kosovar Albanians to buy or lease property from Serbs, and refugees from Croatia were sent reluctantly to Kosovo. Above all, there were widespread human rights abuses -- arbitrary arrest, torture, detention without trial. Albanians were accused of “verbal crimes” and taken to police stations for “informative talks.” The scale of these abuses has been documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Council for the Defense of Human Rights in Kosovo.17 It is said that at least one member of every Albanian family had been called to a police station, or had spent some time in jail, or was waiting for a trial.
THE ALBANIAN RESISTANCE
Many commentators, especially among the Kosovar Albanians, expected a war in Yugoslavia to begin in Kosovo. Many Kosovar Albanians anticipated ethnic cleansing in the context of violent conflict. Indeed, there were acts of apparent provocation in Kosovo, including random shootings of villagers in central Kosovo and the alleged poisoning of schoolchildren in March and April 1990.18
Prior to 1990, the majority of Albanians supported the Yugoslav framework. Their demands were primarily about constitutional rights. In November 1988, the miners of Trepce/Trepca marched 55 kilometers from Mitrovice/Kosovska Mitrovica to Prishtina/Pristina in the freezing cold, in protest at the removal of the party leaders. In Prishtina/Pristina they were joined by factory workers and students. They carried Yugoslav and Albanian flags, as well as pictures of Tito, and hailed the 1974 constitution. They shouted Titoist slogans like “Brotherhood and Unity” and even (to show they were not anti-Serb) “Long Live the Serbian people!” And in February 1989, the miners of Trepce/Trepca went on hunger strike to protest the imposition of provincial officials. These demonstrations were probably the last Titoist demonstrations in Yugoslavia. The Slovene President Kucan commended the Albanian miners for trying to save Yugoslavia.
Among Kosovar Albanians, there was also a much smaller Enverist political strand consisting of small underground Marxist-Leninist groups. The best known person was Adem Demaqi, who founded the Revolutionary Movement for Albanian Unity during the 1960s; he was arrested in 1964 and spent many years in prison.
One reason why a war did not begin in Kosovo was developments elsewhere in Yugoslavia, especially in Slovenia and Croatia; indeed, up to 1995 Milosevic was preoccupied with the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. The other reason was the adoption of a strategy of non-violence - something that was quite contradictory to Kosovar Albanian traditions. According to Rugova, the dominant figure in the Albanian movement: “The Serbs only wait for a pretext to attack the Albanian population and wipe it out. We believe that it is better to do nothing and stay alive than be massacred.”19
In 1990 the various strands of Albanian political movements -- former officials and former revolutionaries -- came together to form a mass movement which was to operate a self-organized parallel system in Kosovo. On July 2, 1990, three days before the Kosovo Assembly was dissolved, 114 of the 123 Albanian delegates in the Kosovo Assembly met on the steps of the Assembly building, which had been locked. There were enough of them to constitute a quorum and they issued a declaration giving the Albanians the status of a nation entitled to their own republic. On September 7 they met again at Kacanik/Kacanik and agreed on the proclamation of a constitutional law for a “Republic of Kosovo,” including provisions for a new assembly and elected presidency. After the Slovene and Croatian declarations of independence in June 1991, the demand for a republic was changed to a demand for independence. In September 1991, a self-organized referendum on independence took place. It is said that 87% of voters took part, including some minorities, and the vote was 99% in favor. And in May 1992 Kosovo-wide elections were held, using private homes as polling stations, for a new republican government and assembly.
The non-violent character of the movement was not only tactical; it was also principled. First of all, the ideas of the democratic opposition in Eastern Europe had a profound influence in intellectual circles. The Association of Albanian Writers, whose president was Dr Ibrahim Rugova, the Association of Philosophers and Sociologists, and the Prishtina/Pristina branch of the Union for a Yugoslav Democratic Initiative, whose representative was Veton Surroi, held many public meetings in 1988 and 1989 and organized a petition “For Democracy Against Violence” which collected 400,000 signatures. The idea of a parallel system or a “shadow” government was deeply influenced by the notions of autonomy and self-organization developed among Central European intellectuals, and especially Polish Solidarity.
Secondly there was a spontaneous reaction among ordinary Albanians who wanted to show that they were different from the “primitive and uncivilized” stereotype portrayed by Serbs. At the very height of the tension in the early 1990s, the Kosovar Albanians decided to abolish the traditional practice of blood feud. Some 2000 families were reconciled, and some 20,000 people were able to move outside their homes. A “Council of Reconciliation” was established which tracked down Albanian families (even those living abroad) and brought them together for a mass reconciliation; this event then spawned the Pan-National Movement for the Reconciliation of Blood Vendettas.20 A related factor was the increasing self-identification of Kosovar Albanians as European. Around a third of the Albanian population had spent some time abroad, mostly in Western Europe. Many houses had and have satellite dishes, enabling them not only to receive the Diaspora Albanian language broadcasts from Geneva but also to watch MTV, Eurosport, etc. As travel to Albania became easier and the people became aware of the depressing reality of life in Albania, aspirations to be European came to replace fantasies of returning to Albania. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that it was the Kosovar Albanians in the Diaspora who became the most radicalized part of the Kosovar Albanian community and were to create the KLA.
The dominant political organization was the League for a Democratic Kosovo (LDK). It spread rapidly in 1990 and 1991 and claimed 700,000 members by the spring of 1991. The LDK drew on village organizations and the traditional clan structure of Kosovar Albanian society. It was also able to fill the void left by the collapse of the previous Albanian political movement, the Socialist Alliance. In the May 1992 elections, the LDK won 96 of the 100 single constituency seats. (Of the other 4 seats, 2 were won by independents who were members of LDK, 1 by the SDA, the Bosniak party, and 1 by the Turkish Peoples Party.) A further 42 seats were distributed by proportional representation, giving the Turkish party 12 seats, the Christian Democrats 7 seats, the Social Democrats 1 seat and the SDA 3 seats; 13 seats reserved for Serbs and Montenegrins were left empty.
The LDK, under the leadership of Rugova, set about developing a historically unique parallel state apparatus. A government was established on October 19, 1991; initially it was based in Ljublijana, but it moved to Bonn in 1992. The Prime Minister was Bujor Bukoshi. “Voluntary” taxes were levied on all Kosovar Albanians. Suggested guidelines were: for employed individuals, 5%, for businesses, between 8% and 10%, and for landowners, according to the productivity of their land; workers in the Diaspora were expected to contribute 3% of their income. Computerized databases were maintained that tracked the “tax” records of individual families; non-compliance was low.21 As for expenditure, 90% of the funds were spent on the parallel education system and the remainder went on sports, some cultural activities, the LDK administration and some health care. In 1993, the parallel education system employed 20,000 teachers, lecturers, professors and administrative staff; it included 5291 pre-school pupils, 312,000 elementary school pupils, 65 secondary schools with 56,920 pupils, two special schools for disabled children, 20 faculties and colleges with about 12,000 students, and several other educational establishments such as the Institute for Publishing Textbooks. The elementary schools were allowed to use their own buildings but received no finance; the other 204 facilities, such as homes and garages, were donated by Kosovar Albanians.
Other organizations close to the LDK made important contributions. The Mother Theresa Society was established in 1990 and provided humanitarian assistance and health care for Albanians afraid to use the Serb-dominated facilities, especially after the alleged mass poisoning. (As a result, many children did not receive vaccinations and the incidence of diseases such as polio, tetanus, and tuberculosis increased.) The Council for the Defense of Human Rights set up a monitoring system throughout the province using local people to provide detailed information on human rights abuses. Another significant organization was the Association of Independent Trades Unions. The “Councils for Reconciliation” provided a sort of parallel justice system, and there were also organizations for culture and sport. A number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) dealing with women and young people were also established during this period. Indeed, like the Councils of Reconciliation, these NGOs reflected an interest, even at village level, in breaking with tradition and planting “the seeds of a different kind of state.” 22 A Group for Women’s Studies was established with support from the Belgrade Women’s Group and a magazine called Kosovaria was started. Among the youth groups, the best known was the Post-Pessimist Club.
The only Albanian magazine that was permitted was the farmers’ magazine Bujko. This became the mouthpiece of the LDK. Later, other independent media were founded with support from the Open Society Foundation, including Zeri, Koha Ditore, and Forum (the paper founded by Adem Demaqi) and some women’s and youth magazines.
Alongside the development of the parallel state apparatus went the growth of the informal economy. Many of the Albanians who lost their jobs decided to start private businesses. Maliqi describes how, in just a few weeks, “fired Albanian workers, ex-civil servants and former policemen registered several hundred taxis, vans, lorries and minibuses (twice as many began operating without registration) taking over city and intercity lines. Their initiative made transport so cheap and efficient that the main state companies faced bankruptcy and after six months, Belgrade banned alternative transport and taxis.”23 Other initiatives included tourist agencies, coffee bars, and other small enterprises. As of 1993, the number of registered private enterprises was 27% of the total (up from 20% in 1990) and the informal economy was estimated to account for 70% of the total economy of Kosovo.24
During this period, some 400,000 Albanians are estimated to have emigrated from Kosovo to Western Europe, many to avoid conscription into the Yugoslav army. Skills acquired in Western Europe and remittances contributed to the thriving shadow economy. Many also emigrated to the United States. Nevertheless, poverty was still very widespread, as evidenced by the growing numbers dependent on the Mother Theresa Society. Moreover, the burden of double taxation by the LDK and the Serb authorities weighed heavily on many families.
The main goal of the LDK was independence for Kosovo. The strategy for achieving this goal was to influence the international community and to deny the legitimacy of Belgrade institutions, both through the parallel system and through boycotting elections - by refusing, as one person put it, “to dignify Milosevic with my vote.”25 Rugova pressed instead for the establishment of a temporary protectorate under UN auspices, which could oversee the transition to independence.
The LDK has been criticized for its combination of excessively passive tactics and maximalist political demands (nothing less than independence), and for its refusal to seek accommodation with Belgrade. Rugova, though extremely popular throughout Kosovo, has been paradoxically characterized as both an autocratic and an ineffectual leader. The boycott of the elections was also criticized by some as abdicating responsibility for opposition within Serbia while focusing all attention, somewhat ineffectively, on the international community.
There was, for example, a brief window of opportunity both for more direct political action by the LDK, and for the international community actively to intervene to shape a political compromise in Kosovo, when Milan Panic became prime minister of Serbia in July 1992. Panic met Rugova in London in August and promised “restoration of self-rule for the Kosovar Albanians, the readmittance of Albanian students to Pristina University, the reinstatement of Albanian professors, freedom for the Albanian press, and free elections.”26 In October, Panic visited Kosovo and tried to make a deal with Rugova in exchange for support in the presidential elections. But his efforts failed, and in the elections of December 1992 he was defeated by Milosevic -- had the Albanians voted, they might have tipped the balance. According to Fehmi Agami, vice president of LDK and perhaps the most respected intellectual among the Kosovar Albanians, who was killed during the 1999 war;
Frankly, it is better [for us] to continue with Milosevic. Milosevic was very successful in destroying Yugoslavia and, in the same way, if he continues, he will destroy Serbia (…) [Panic] is offering enlightened hegemony (…) He thinks we will accept him because he is an opponent of Milosevic. It is not enough. He may offer us to take part in the elections but without offering anything concrete. We are against Milosevic but we also know he must fall, with or without Panic.27
And if the Kosovar Albanians believed that they were more likely to achieve their final goals with Milosevic in power, it seems as though Milosevic also preferred the status quothe repressive toleration of the non-violent movement. The end result was what has been called “separate worlds” - a system of apartheid in which there was almost no communication between the two sides.28 As a Kosovar Serb told Tim Judah,
There are two parallel systems here. Each one has organized their own education. They control the private sector, the Serbs the public sector. There is even a double system of taxation. They have their own informal taxes. Our children don’t play together any more (…) [And in the evening when people stroll out in Pristina] they have one side of the main road and we have the other.29
But it was, of course, an unequal parallelism. One of the factors that the Kosovar Albanians perhaps did not take into account was the toll the system took on everyday life and the difficulty of sustaining a shadow state over many years. The conflict in Kosovo, wrote Maliqi in 1996, “has turned into a kind of intense war of nerves, in which one side stops at nothing, committing the most brutal violations of human rights and civil liberties, completely ignoring the protests of the international organizations which for a while kept monitoring teams in Kosovo, while the other side bottles up its humiliation, despair, fury, rage and hatred -- but for how long before it explodes?”30
THE DESCENT INTO WAR
From the mid-1990s, the situation began to deteriorate. At the very moment when many ordinary Kosovar Albanians were losing patience with the strategy of passive resistance and were becoming exhausted from the struggle to sustain the parallel system under such difficult conditions, the Dayton Agreement over Bosnia was signed in which no mention was made of Kosovo. For many Kosovar Albanians, it seemed as though the strategy had failed. The conclusions to be drawn from Dayton, to quote Veton Surroi, were that “ethnic territories have legitimacy” and that “international attention can only be obtained by war.”31 Several leading Kosovar intellectuals, such as Adem Demaqi and Professor Rexhap Qosja, who was close to the politicians in Tirana, began to criticize Rugova for excessive passivity. Qosja talked about the need for active non-violent resistance and Demaqi called for civil disobedience.
A beacon of hope was the agreement on education reached in 1996 by representatives of the LDK and the Belgrade Ministry of Education, mediated by the Italian catholic organization Communita di Sant’Egidio. It was agreed that Albanians could return to the school and university buildings and that the pre-1990 curriculum would be used. There was no agreement, however, about paying teachers and professors. The significance of the agreement lay in the fact that Albanian negotiators had been implicitly recognized as legitimate representatives. This recognition suggested the possibility of negotiation as a feasible, albeit uncertain, path toward normalizing the situation in Kosovo.
A number of proposals were circulating among intellectuals both in Belgrade and Prishtina/Pristina for a compromise solution to the Kosovo question during 1996-7 and, it is in this context that the education agreement should be understood. The best known proposal was from the President of the Academy of Sciences, Aleksandr Despic, who proposed a partition and peaceful secession of Kosovo. He proposed that talks begin “with those who are insisting on secession of Kosovo about a peaceful and civilized separation and demarcation.”32 Other proposals included the “three republic” proposal; that Kosovo should be given equal status to Montenegro. The Kosovar Albanians in this period were being urged by President Berisha in Tirana to be more conciliatory and to open up talks with Belgrade. Had the international community been more attentive in these years, it could have put pressure on Milosevic to negotiate seriously with the LDK. If Western powers had treated the LDK with greater respect, they -- like Berisha -- also could have encouraged this nascent discussion of political options involving autonomy short of independence.
The agreement on education, however, was never implemented. Commentators suggested that both sides had an interest in the status quo because they feared a compromise solution. The continued status quo “allows both sides to harbor illusions of their own supremacy; Serbs in terms of police/military control, and Albanians in terms of running of society.”33 Despite Rugova’s disapproval, students began to protest against the failure to implement the agreement in September 1997, just as the school year was about to begin. The demonstrators were treated harshly, and even today some student leaders are held in Serbian jails.
It was during this period that the KLA first made its appearance. The KLA grew out of a Marxist-Leninist-Enverist party formed in the Diaspora in the early 1980s called the LPK (Levizja Popullare e Kosoves). In 1992 and 1993, the LPK played a leading role in setting up a guerrilla group in secret meetings in Prishtina/Pristina and Tetovo (Macedonia). The first violent action taken was the killing of a Serb policeman in 1995. But it was not until 1996 that an organization based in Switzerland and calling itself the KLA claimed responsibility for these attacks. At the time most Albanians had not heard of the KLA, and many believed that the attacks were artificial provocations by the authorities.
The KLA is alleged to have received funding from illicit drug trade; in addition, many Kosovars in the Diaspora switched their support from the LDK to a fund called “Homeland Calling” set up by the KLA. The dominant figures in the KLA seem to have been a new generation of people, like Thaci (now prime minister of the provisional government established by the KLA), who had been students in the late 1980s and had subsequently worked or studied abroad. (Thaci, for example, holds a Masters Degree in International Relations from the University of Zurich.) The strategy of the KLA also seems to have been directed at the international community. Woefully unprepared for war, the KLA seems instead to have had the deliberate strategy of provoking an international intervention.
Indeed, until late 1997, active armed resistance groups in Kosovo were very small and without permanent bases in the province. They had few arms and do not seem to have had any clear leadership structure. Individual operations consisted of hit-and-run terrorist attacks on Serbian police outposts and supposed Albanian “collaborators”. These operations were commanded and planned by KLA members coming from abroad with only a few days of preparation with local fighters. The collapse of the Albanian state system and institutions in 1997 changed the situation dramatically. Albanian Army and Interior Ministry warehouses and depots were looted and arms and ammunition were made available to the KLA. Because of the collapse of the security system and the ensuing lawlessness in Albania, it was possible, for the first time, to organize training facilities in northern Albania near the borders with Kosovo. This proved to be the most important precondition for creating permanent recruitment and training facilities, for organizing supply routes into Kosovo, and for the first efforts to coordinate different regional and even local fighting groups. As elsewhere in post-Yugoslav wars, organized crime played an important role in organizing and financing the conflict. The combination of large-scale Albanian political and economic emigration from Kosovo, the collapse of the Albanian state, and the criminal nature of Serbian police and para-military oppression, all contributed to the self-proclaimed “Robin Hood” image of Albanian organized crime.
With the rise of the KLA, the already pervasive police harassment increased. The Serbian government proclaimed the KLA a terrorist organization, thereby justifying searches, detentions, and political trials. The Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) documented numerous cases involving police mistreatment of ethnic Albanians, including arbitrary arrest, detention, physical abuse, illegal searches, and extra-judicial killing. In 1997 the hlc investigated the death of three ethnic Albanians who had been in police custody in Kosovo, concluding that police officers were responsible for physical abuse and extra-judicial killing.34 Other human rights organizations, including the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, corroborate the prevalence of extensive beatings, including the use of electric shocks.35 Albanians charged with membership in the KLA reported the use of torture to extract false confessions. In addition, the defense counsel for the accused reported that they were not given free access to their clients or to necessary information.36 This police behavior was targeted not only at members of the KLA, but also at members of the LDK political party, activists, and other civilians.
If the status quo was being challenged on the Albanian side, it is also useful to speculate about the ways in which it was being challenged in Belgrade. During 1996-7, Milosevic’s position was challenged both by the pro-democracy opposition and by the extreme right. In the municipal elections of November 1996, the opposition coalition Zajedno won the mayoral elections in 15 major towns and gained control of the Belgrade Assembly. The ruling elite tried to quash the election results, and this led to major demonstrations in Belgrade and other cities. In February 1997 the authorities finally conceded. At the same time, the ruling party in Montenegro split and a new government committed to democratization came to power. The mobilization of students and the spread of an independent radio network seemed to offer genuine hope for moves towards democratization including a more conciliatory approach towards Kosovo. Indeed, the students in Belgrade were making contact with the students in Prishtina/ Pristina; the Post-Pessimists’ club for example, developed branches throughout Yugoslavia.
Milosevic’s party also lost votes in the Serbian Parliamentary elections of September 1997, while the Serbian Radical Party of Vojislav Seselj made important gains. Seselj, whose para-military group known as the “Chetniks” had been responsible for some of the most terrible atrocities in Bosnia, had always held an extreme position on Kosovo. Seselj’s political program since 1991 had included the expulsion “without delay” of what were claimed to be 360,000 postwar immigrants to Kosovo from Albania “and their descendants”. He proposed clearing a belt “20 to 30 km as the crow flies along the Albanian border” of Kosovars “as it has transpired that Albania is a state lastingly hostile to Serbia.” He also demanded that no parliamentary elections be held in Kosovo “until the ethnic structure of the population is restored to the ratio which existed on 6 April 1941.” 37 In February 1998 a new governing coalition for Serbia was formed which included the Radical Party, and Seselj himself became deputy prime minister.
Commentators at the time suggested that the victory of Seselj “does not imply wide support for Mr Seselj’s “Greater Serbia” nationalism but rather reflects the strength of feeling against the Milosevic regime among an embittered and outcast section of the population, including hundreds of thousands of refugees and their families who are among the biggest losers of the turmoil in former Yugoslavia during the past decade.” 38 Nevertheless, the success of Seselj and his inclusion in the government should have set alarm bells ringing in international circles. Moreover, it can be argued that that an increased atmosphere of tension was the method through which Milosevic had always neutralized his opposition, both progressive and extreme. Moreover, the power of both Milosevic and Seselj depends on criminalized networks that benefit from violence and related phenomena such as sanction breaking. Thus, at that time, there were extremist elements in the government and society that were resistant to moves towards compromise and had a vested interest (both political and economic) in an escalation of violence to sustain their positions.
The denouement came on February 28 1998, when the Serbs decided to arrest Adem Jashari, a local strongman in Prekazi/ Prekaze, who had joined the KLA. Within a week, his extended family of 58 people was killed. At this point, village militias all over Kosovo sprang up to defend their villages. Many of them were linked to the parallel structures, but they called themselves the KLA, even though a number still considered Rugova to be their President.
This was the beginning of the war.
THE ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY
The first-and last-attempt to find a comprehensive negotiated settlement to the dissolution of Yugoslavia was the Brioni agreement, brokered by the EU in July 1991, and Lord Carrington’s plan submitted in October of that year. The destruction of the town of Vukovar, Croatia, by the Yugoslav army in November 1991 and later the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia’s independence put an end to such attempts to find a global approach to the Yugoslav crisis. From then on, separate and disjointed solutions were posed for each successive crisis.
Kosovo was not a priority for the international community before 1998. The province’s troubles almost appear to have been an inconvenience, adding further complications to negotiations about the wars in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia. Kosovo seems to have been regarded as secondary to these conflicts in terms of both urgency and status. Had the international community shown greater interest and commitment in these years preceding the rise of the KLA, the war in Kosovo might conceivably have been avoided. In this light, the escalation of armed violence in 1998-9 signals a dismal failure of “early warning” lessons.
The one strong statement that was made in official circles during this period was President Bush’s Christmas warning. On December 24 1992, the US Ambassador to Belgrade read the following message to Milosevic: “In the event of conflict in Kosovo caused by Serbian action, the US will be prepared to employ military force against Serbians in Kosovo and Serbia proper.”39 The message was subsequently reiterated by Madeline Albright in the UN Security Council in August 1993.40
The quantitatively low level of deadly violence in Kosovo during the early 1990s was by and large misinterpreted by the international community. Milosevic had allowed the LDK to establish its parallel network, cracking down only sporadically to prevent direct challenges to Belgrade’s authority, such as an attempt to set up a parallel police force. The LDK’s passive strategy served Milosevic’s purpose for apparently convergent reasons, since he seemed eager to avoid another conflictual front during the Bosnian hostilities. The international community, rather than recognize the temporary and still-volatile nature of this apparent truce, and the possibility for engagement offered by the LDK, instead responded complacently, pushing Kosovo further and further into the background.
None of the main international actors, including the International Conference on Former Yugoslavia (ICFY), the European Union (EU), the Organization of Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the United Nations (UN), paid Kosovo more than sporadic attention. The little attention that was directed toward Kosovo by intergovernmental organizations seems to have been concentrated in the 1992-3 period when governments feared that war in Bosnia-Herzegovina would spill over into Kosovo.
The tone was set by the European Union (EU, then Community) Conference on Yugoslavia, chaired by Lord Carrington, which took place in the Hague in 1991. This conference went so far as to define Kosovo as an “internal” problem for Yugoslavia, thus discouraging international interest and involvement. At its second meeting in London in August 1992, Carrington put out very mixed signals, almost but not quite inviting Rugova to attend.41
Meanwhile, Rugova and other LDK leaders were managing to get increased attention from the international NGO community, and even arranged several high-level diplomatic meetings with foreign governments. The international message given to Rugova was nearly unanimous praise for his movement, especially for its non-violent character, but this praise was never translated into concrete support.
The ec Conference became the International Conference on Former Yugoslavia (ICFY) under the joint chairmanship of David Owen and Cyrus Vance. Under the auspices of ICFY, a Working Group on Ethnic and National Communities and Minorities was established in August 1992, chaired by Geert Ahrens, and this Working Group in turn established a Special Group on Kosovo. The Special Group concluded that it was important to normalize the situation in Kosovo and that the Group should focus on negotiations about education. The Group tried to mediate, and a Common Statement by the Kosovar Albanians and the federal government was agreed in October 1992. However the dialogue collapsed after the rector of the parallel university, Ejup Statovici, was arrested in late 1992. The Working Group continued in existence and was later transferred to the Dayton Peace Implementation Council and subsequently the Contact Group,42 but very little was achieved.
The low priority of the Kosovo issue was also reflected in the EU’s deliberations about the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia in the autumn of 1991. European governments accepted the distinction between republics and provinces or between nations and nationalities enshrined in the Yugoslav constitution. Rugova had appealed to the EU for recognition of independence in December 1991 when the EU was discussing the issue of recognition of Slovenia and Croatia. The Badinter Commission, which reported in early 1992, proposed that republics of Yugoslavia should have the right to become independent provided certain preconditions were met. Autonomous provinces were not offered the same option. In November 1993 the European Union endorsed a proposal for the reestablishment of autonomy for Kosovo in its European Action Program on Yugoslavia. But leading politicians, including David Owen, the co-chair of ICFY, continued to insist on the integrity of Yugoslavia. The fear was, of course, a never-ending process of political fragmentation sometimes referred to as Balkanization. There is a real question to be asked about whether Badinter itself committed the original sin, permitting the disintegration of Yugoslavia, or whether, having decided to accept the breakup into constituent units, it was right to treat provinces differently from republics.
The Helsinki Summit of the newly established OSCE in July 1992 adopted a Declaration on the Yugoslav Crisis, calling for “immediate preventative action” and urging “the authorities in Belgrade to refrain from further repression and to engage in serious dialogue with representatives from Kosovo in the presence of a third party.”43 In August 1992 it was decided to establish Missions of Long Duration to Kosovo and Vojvodina. These Missions did try to open a dialogue on the ground, especially concerning education. However, in 1993 Milosevic refused the renewal of visas for members of the Missions and they had to leave the country on July 28. This may have been a response to the suspension of Yugoslav membership in the OSCE. Human rights violations were reported to be lower when the Missions were present; and they rose immediately after the withdrawal of the Missions.
The UN Special Rapporteurs for Human Rights, Tadeusz Maziowiecki and subsequently Elizabeth Rehn, both reported on the situation in Kosovo. Mazowiecki tried unsuccessfully to establish an office in Kosovo. Various resolutions were passed by the UN General Assembly, and in July 1993 the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for the return of the OSCE Mission. Other UN efforts included attempts by UNESCO to mediate an education agreement and, in 1996, a joint initiative by UNICEF and who to carry out a polio vaccination program together with both the government and the parallel system.
Most of these efforts were concentrated in the years 1992-93. Clearly, the intransigence of the Belgrade regime hampered any international attempts to deal with Kosovo. However, little was done to counter this intransigence up to late 1997. On the contrary, in the desperation to halt the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo was deliberately sidelined. Kosovo was not included in the Dayton negotiations because Tudjman and Izetbegovic were not interested in Kosovo and Milosevic would have refused to consider it. Milosevic was viewed as a key player, and the international community did not want to jeopardize the chances of reaching agreement. The result of this caution, however, was indirectly to legitimate Milosevic’s role in Kosovo, and to send a clear signal to both Milosevic and the Kosovar Albanians that Kosovo was definitely off the current international agenda.
This message had three serious conflict-escalating effects: it gave the FRY a free hand in Kosovo; it demoralized and weakened the non-violent movement in Kosovo, which felt betrayed by the international community and began to doubt the effectiveness of its own tactics; and it led directly to a decisive surge of support among Kosovars for the path of violent resistance as the only politically realistic path to independence.
After Dayton, the EU formally recognized the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) as including Kosovo, and Germany even repatriated 130,000 Kosovar Albanians. According to Bukoshi, “It was a shock. We weren’t expecting it and it was a fatal mistake.”44
Attempts were made to soften the blow of Dayton. The United States, while recognizing the FRY, insisted on maintaining the outer wall of sanctions against the FRY because of the situation in Kosovo. Also in 1996, a US Information Service (USIS) office was established and this had considerable symbolic value. In fact, the USIS presence was in part a result of pressure brought to bear at Dayton. Nevertheless, the Dayton process did aggravate the Kosovo problem. Although it was highly unlikely that Dayton would have been able to devise a solution for the Kosovo crisis, it would have been helpful if the process had at least included a discussion of the situation in Kosovo. For example, despite Milosevic’s supposedly constructive role in negotiations around Bosnia, the earlier “hands off Kosovo” message of President Bush could have been reiterated in some fashion; or Dayton could have been used as a forum to encourage FRY acceptance of an NGO presence in Kosovo -- and even in the rest of Serbia.
Indeed, the only significant actors during the period 1993-7 were NGOs. Human Rights Watch, Mercy Corps, and Amnesty International, as well as human rights groups in Kosovo and in Belgrade such as the Humanitarian Law Foundation and the Yugoslav Red Cross, were monitoring human rights violations.45 A number of other organizations were making statements about Kosovo and calling for a UN protectorate or trusteeship, for example the United Nations Peoples Organization, the Transnational Foundation in Sweden, the Helsinki Citizens Assembly, and the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. But undoubtedly, the two most important NGOs were the Communita di Sant’Egidio, which negotiated the education agreement in 1996, and the Open Society Foundation of Belgrade (OSF), which played a unique role in supporting the parallel system and fostering dialogue among Albanians and Serbs. The osf began its work at the end of 1992 with children’s programs. The first English classes were established for both Albanian and Serbian children, and in 1994 an Open Club was established in Prishtina/ Pristina for both Albanian and Serbian young people (though they tended to come in separate groups). The OSF also supported the Mother Teresa Society, women and youth NGOs, the independent media, and various cultural activities -- the first art gallery was opened in Prishtina/Pristina in the mid-1990s and an exhibition of Albanian painters was held in Belgrade in June 1997. Particularly successful was the educational enrichment program, which set up computer centers all over Kosovo and, in the first two years, attracted more than 15,000 participants.
The problem for OSF was that other donors were almost totally absent, and that it was almost impossible to get official international support and backing for these activities, which could have greatly increased their effectiveness. Norwegian Peoples Aid supported the Post-Pessimists, and the Swiss Disaster Relief and the American International Rescue Committee assisted in the physical rebuilding of schools, but these were exceptions rather than the rule. The parallel system was, in practice, rather limited and could not be sustained in the long run as an alternative to a functioning public sector. The difficulties of everyday life and the frustration, especially of young people denied a formal education, were bound to escalate tension. When, for example, in late 1997 the authorities finally agreed to open up the technical faculty of the university to Albanian students, it was discovered that everything had been packed up and taken away; the faculty was nothing but an empty building, and there were no donors available to invest in the necessary equipment.
The OSF lobbied governments and other donors but, according to the osf Director Sonja Licht, it was like “kicking the Chinese Wall.” In November 1997 a State Department official told her that the US government “cannot support civil society because it would lead to secession.” She replied that “if civil society is not supported, then secession will be achieved through terrorism.”
CONCLUSION
From the 1980s onwards, Kosovo exhibited all the signs of a catastrophe waiting to happen. Here was an authoritarian society exposed to pressures for liberalization and democratization. Unemployment was very high, especially among young, educated people and criminality was growing. Nationalist propaganda, especially on the Serbian side, was being pumped out by the media and by intellectuals. An active Diaspora on the Albanian side was becoming increasingly radical. These are the conditions that typically give rise to “new wars”. 46
Moreover, no one can claim that the international community was ignorant of developments in Kosovo. Quite apart from intelligence and media reports, a number of well-known NGOs as well as the UN Special Rapporteurs for Human Rights were regularly monitoring the situation. Yet the international community responded with a series of mixed signals. The non-violent movement received international endorsements and praise, but no solid commitments. US officials courted Rugova, but then Dayton ignored Kosovo. The West continued to acknowledge Rugova post-Dayton, but there was no visible effort to encourage the LDK to develop a more accommodating political stance on the status of Kosovo, and there were no moves to put the issue back on the diplomatic table. Milosevic, meanwhile, who had been warned early about Kosovo, was later repeatedly assured that its status within the FRY was beyond challenge and that its administration was an internal matter.
Three general lessons can be drawn from the experience of this period. First of all, the failure to respond adequately at an early stage of the evolution of the conflict created difficulties in later stages. At each stage of the conflict, the diplomatic options narrowed. The decision not to deal seriously with the Kosovo issue in 1991 created obstacles to action in 1992-3. The decision not to confront the intransigence of Milosevic in 1993, and above all the neglect of Kosovo during the Dayton negotiations, contributed to the developments that were to escalate the conflict in 1996-7. The inadequacy of diplomatic efforts in the period 1997-8 was to culminate eventually with Rambouillet where the space for maneuver was extremely limited.
Second, during this period it was more important to establish an international presence on the ground and to support efforts to normalize the situation than to find a solution to status questions. Any compromise on status was bound to be very difficult since the Kosovars insisted on independence and the Belgrade authorities insisted on the integrity of Yugoslavia. Conflict prevention should have focused instead on establishing a presence on the ground to provide some protection against human rights violations, to support and facilitate the parallel institutions, and to encourage dialogue. The deterring impact of an international NGO or intergovernmental (UN or OSCE) civilian presence on human rights abuse has been amply demonstrated in many conflicts. Unless or until a situation escalates to the point where the international presence is itself in great peril, an unarmed presence can not only impact the daily life of the oppressed population, but often can also be reconciled with state concerns over infringement of sovereignty. The presence of the Mission of Long Duration does seem to have ameliorated the situation in 1992-3. Much more effort should have been directed towards ensuring a strong international presence within Kosovo, improving conditions of everyday life, and fostering communication among Serbs and Albanians inside Kosovo as well as with people in the rest of Serbia.
Third, much more could have been done by the international community to support the initiatives of the parallel society.47 For example, universities in other nations did little to aid the alternative educational efforts developed as passive resistance after Serbian officials fired Kosovar faculty and removed Kosovar students from the University of Pristina. Year after year, the LDK appealed to the international community for support in dealing with the tensions and ongoing repression in Kosovo. The LDK offered itself as a legitimate and willing ally for diplomatic, political, or other levels of non-forceful pressure or intervention that might have been undertaken. The unarmed nature (at least on one side) of the conflict provided potential avenues of civilian international involvement that were less intrusive, and not as threatening to the sovereignty and security concerns of the FRY as an armed presence.
Although no one can answer the “what ifs” of retrospective assessment, international support for these parallel systems might have sustained peaceful resistance sufficiently to have carved a different path for Kosovo. Furthermore, the failure to take more seriously the demands of the non-violent movement at an early stage led to the conclusion that violence produces results and is a more effective political strategy. This had profound implications for the post-conflict political culture. The parallel structures that were created in this period still exist and command widespread loyalty, especially outside Prishtina/Pristina. However, this loyalty is undermined daily by the actions of those who have learned that violence is an effective way to achieve political objectives.
Preface Internal Armed Conflict
per shqiperin