Page 830 - Kosovo Metohija Heritage

logical and political power base when the system of fed- eral states was introduced within the Communist and Workers Party of Yugoslavia. This ill-considered depart- mentalization of Yugoslavia again ignored historical facts: in this case, the historical make-up of Yugoslav national ethnic groups. This Balkanization of Yugoslavia was fa- cilitated by the Comintern via its transmissions. This un- natural complexity that, objectively speaking, was pro- moted by the Communist party and national extremists, caused a specific political development which, in turn, gave rise to various forms of anti-Serbianism. The process of “re-Serbianization” was halted though many “albanians” still remembered their Serbian ancestry, and the Com- munists moved albanians as well as some other nation- alities against Yugoslavia.
Symbols of the “socialistic utopia of the future” em- bodied by the Russian Revolution of 1917, ideologically joined tradition and revolution. This was particularly at- tractive to the Serbian people because of their Pan-Slav sentimentality. it resulted in the campaign directed against the alleged “great Serbian hegemonism” and in favor of the struggle for “equal national rights.”
However, the adjective “national” was used less in the West european sense and more in the idiom of Soviet fed- eralism. This “equal national rights” course led to the break- ing up of Yugoslavia as well as the destruction of the ideal of a Yugoslavia, and gave rise to national distinctions based on the historical division of religions. On the other hand, in a Machiavellian way, the Serbian national fiber was torn into several pieces. This stimulated the process of artifi- cial creation of “national identifications” within Serbia, which had no historical relevance. These artificial “nation- alities” were nothing but regional specifics developed un- der the long Ottoman domination. These cracks in the otherwise integral Serbian whole of the Central Balkans have facilitated the precipitous albanian intrusion into Serbian lands. This is especially true in Macedonia, where the intrusion was expedited by separating this region from the Serbian cultural and historical fold.
another exploitation of “national identifications” is motivated by religious interests, especially by Roman Cath- olic groups. The Kosovo tragedy is a natural result of anti- -Serbian tactic which used albanians as a tool for anti- Serbian politics.
albanian nationalism and separatism have grown quickly into chauvinism thanks in large part to the “mys- tification” of the “revolutionary formulas” and this, in turn, was promoted by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which adopted as one of its fundamental slogans the myths of “Great Serbian hegemony” and “national oppression” of other peoples by the Serbs. in this regard a special role was played by the agencies of Stalinist Russia, which pro- moted the calculated “anti-Great Serbian” line, using it in its interplay with the Western democracies. Tendencies to break up Serbia were also manifested very early at the
highest levels of the pre-war Communist Party of Yugo- slavia. These tendencies became part of CPY’s wartime politics as well as of its theories of national state organi- zation. in the outline of the communist “anti-Fascist Coun- cil” drawn up on November 29, 1943 to reorganize Yugo- slavia along federal lines, Serbia was broken up into sev- eral federal units, while Croatia remained integral, com- prising three regions partially or mainly inhabited by Serbs. This solution was put forward as a matter of the will of the people although the conditions for the articulation of the national will did not exist in the wartime: it could only be the decision of a few communist protagonists. Serbs, who at that time comprised some eighty percent of the Partisan (communist) forces, thought more in non-Ser- bian terms of “proletarian internationalism,” than they did in terms of nationality. The genocide, which was inflicted on the Serbs from the first day of the war, did not induce in them a will to resist self-destruction. Later, this com- munist federal outline further separated islamized Serbs from their roots and turned them into allies of albanian separatism while at the same time the existence of Ser- bian Roman Catholics was systematically denied (they were regarded as Croats).
The individuality of Kosovo was not included in the anti-Fascist Council’s concept of the federal structure prob- ably because their was no Partisan albanian movement (if one does not count a few albanian communists) which could be represented. in our time their late entry as an independent region is used for propaganda reasons to dem- onstrate that albanians were not able to determine their own destiny. Western public opinion could get the im- pression that Kosovo was until recently a part of albania.
after World War ii, a declaration of the Federal anti- Fascist Council gave birth to the federal state which left half of the Serbs outside their ancestral Serbia, while what was left of Serbia was torn into two autonomous regions (Kosovo-Metohija and Vojvodina). The Serbian national problem was obscured at this time by ideological enthu- siasm as well as by the state centralization. The Serbian question was pushed back by scandals in which the “Great Serbian” ghost was always found to be lurking. One of these affairs, linked to the overthrow of the Minister of internal affairs aleksandar Ranković in 1966, explicitly recognized the “post-war oppression” of albanians. a vig- orous campaign validated the wartime albanian genocide against the Serbs, as well as the “long Serbian oppression” of this small people. at the end, a strange result was ob- tained by joining politics to propaganda: Kosovo was sep- arated not only from Serbia but Yugoslavia as well. With the advent of the national Constitution of 1974—one which jeopardized the equal standing of Serbia vis-à-vis other republics and her own regions—the full effect of the slo- gan “the weaker Serbia is, the stronger Yugoslavia becomes” was finally felt. The long-term effect of this policy is po- litical disintegration and human conflict. The application
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