For Your Information
A
Brief History of the Dispute Over Kosovo
The
Albanians are one of the smallest and most ancient nations in Europe. They are
the descendents of the Illyrians, who, along with the Greeks, constitute one of
the original peoples of the Balkans. During the period of decline of the Roman
Empire Slavic tribes began to migrate into the region, eventually becoming the
Serb, Croat and Slovenian nations. As the Slavs advanced, the Albanians were
gradually driven back into what are present-day Albania and Kosovo.
In
the fourteenth century the Ottoman Turks began expanding into Europe and
defeated the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. During the next few
decades, Serbia was greatly weakened as the Ottoman Empire consolidated its control
over the region. In the mid-fifteenth century the Albanians, under the
legendary leader Skanderbeg, defeated the Turks and established an independent
Albanian state. That state, which lasted for about half a century, included the
territory of Kosovo and Albania. However, the Ottomans eventually subjugated
the region which remained under Turkish control until the early twentieth
century, when an independent Albanian state was again established in what are
now Kosovo and Albania.
As
the power of the Austro-Hungarian Empire declined in the early twentieth
century, competing nationalisms swept through the Balkans. Serbia launched
attacks on all of its neighbours in an attempt to
establish a Greater Serbia in the entire northern Balkans region. One of the
regions seized by the Serbian armies was Kosovo. These Balkan Wars led directly
to the First World War, following which the Great Powers divided up Europe in
such a way as to maximize the potential for future conflict.
In
the Balkans arbitrary borders were drawn and many nations found themselves
divided. Half of the former independent country of Albania (Kosovo) was handed
over to Serbia and Serb chauvinists conducted pogroms and ethnic cleansing in
an attempt to drive Albanians out of Kosovo and replace them with Serbs. When
Italy invaded Albania and Yugoslavia in 1939, it conducted its own ethnic
cleansing, driving out Serbs and returning large sections of the region to
ethnic Albanians who had been driven out by the Serbs during and after the
Balkan Wars.
During the Second World War Albanian and Yugoslav
partisans fought together to rid the Balkans of Italian fascism and German
Nazism.
The close cooperation between all of the peoples of the region at this time
established a basis for putting an end to ethnic tensions once and for all. In
fact, after the war the Albanians were prepared to join Yugoslavia to create a
multi-national, socialist federation. Tito had assured them that in this
federation all Albanians, including those in Kosovo, would be reunited in a
single republic. However, as the war drew toward a close, Tito began to renege
on his promises and Albania withdrew from the arrangement.
Following
the Second World War, Yugoslavia retained control of Kosovo and made it a
province of Serbia. Although Tito and other Yugoslav leaders declared the
equality of all nationalities and ethnic groups within Yugoslavia, the reality
was something else. Kosovo was deliberately kept as an economically backward
region and demands by the Kosovar Albanians for greater
autonomy and economic development were met with brute force. On more than one
occasion Yugoslav tanks rolled into Prishtina,
Albanian-language schools and universities were shut down and hundreds of
people were jailed.
As
Tito’s Yugoslavia drew closer and closer to U.S. imperialism and foreign
investments soared, the plight of the Albanians in Kosovo continued to worsen.
Tens of thousands were forced to work abroad in order to feed their families.
Albanian Kosovars became convinced that the
impoverishment of Kosovo was a deliberate policy of the Serbian government
aimed at, once again, driving out Albanians and replacing them with Serbs – a
form of economic ethnic cleansing.
Tensions
came to a head in 1989 when Yugoslav leader Milosevic delivered a speech in Prishtina to a million Serbs, mostly imported from Serbia,
in which he promised Serbs that Kosovo would never again be an autonomous
region. Milosevic rode the resulting wave of Serbian chauvinism to propel him
to leadership of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, a move which split the
Communist League and eventually led to the secession of Slovenia and Croatia
from the Yugoslav Federation. The Yugoslav army was also sent, once again, into
Kosovo to suppress the democratic rights of the Kosovar
Albanians. Throughout the 1990s tensions in Kosovo remained high.
In
1997 the Albanian state, which had come under the control of the U.S. State
Department, collapsed and the Albanian people seized millions of small arms
from the state armouries. When the Italian army was
sent in to restore order, rather than hand over their weapons, many Albanians
smuggled them across the border into Kosovo and a low-level guerilla campaign
there escalated as a result. By early 1998 a virtual civil war was raging
across Kosovo, with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) attacking Yugoslav
soldiers and police and the Yugoslav army shelling villages in response.
In
this situation, the U.S. saw an opportunity to fish in troubled waters and made
a deal with the military wing of the KLA (which the U.S. had earlier labelled a terrorist organization). This essentially brought the KLA under U.S.
command. The U.S. then rolled out its propaganda machine to create a pretext
for the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia and the invasion and occupation of
Kosovo. As a result of that war, the U.S. has been able to establish huge
military bases in both Albania and Kosovo, establishing a beachhead in Europe
from which it can control access to southern Europe and threaten shipments of
oil from the Middle East and Russia.
The
U.S. has also used its military position in Albania and Kosovo to blackmail the
governments of other countries in the region, such as Macedonia, into making
concessions to U.S. corporations.