THE SERBO-ALBANIAN CONFLICT: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

The centuries-old ethnic rivalry between the Serbs and the Albanians is refracted, like through a lens, in Kosovo, southern province of Serbia. The two intermingled nations living there are separated by different historical experiences, with the exception of the Middle Ages. The difference in religions placed a strong stamp on the ethnic conflict in the period that preceded the formation of modern nations. The unequal levels of national integration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave fresh impetus to the old religious conflicts. The geopolitical framework in which the conflict developed fixated the existing disputes in an attempt to take advantage of them and, thus, make them permanent and insurmountable. Finally, the ideological abuse of the national question in communist Yugoslavia, along with the constantly present social differences, came as the final coup to every attempt at establishing inter-ethnic communication that would be based on individual, instead of on collective rights. Together with the painful, partial or even complete absence of democratic and liberal traditions, so characteristic of the Balkans, the result is a nightmare of a reality and an uncertain and terrifying future.

THE MIDDLE AGES: INTER-ETHNIC COEXISTENCE

In the Middle Ages, marked by the glorious civilization of the Nemanjics, Kosovo was predominantly a Slavic land inhabited by Serbs - serfs whose lords were domestic landowners. Kosovo, the center of the Serbian state, was also the site of the Serbian rulers' capitals and royal courts. Metohia, the seat of the Serbian Archbishopric and afterwards of the Patriarchate as well, was covered by a thick network of monasteries and churches. Most of Metohia's densely populated villages were the possessions of big monasteries, most often rulers' endowments, or were granted to the famous monastic communities on Mt.Athos. The Albanians, whom the Serbs always called Arbanasi, were a cattle-breeding, nomadic people which unhinderedly raised its cattle on the dark mountains separating Kosovo and Albania.

The term Arbanas, just like Walachian, denoted more social status than ethnic affiliation. For this reason, Serbian medieval charters stressed when someone was an Albanian: unlike the Serbs who as peasents were the synonym for serfs, the Albanians belonged to a different social category in the complex feudal structure of the Serbian Empire. There were no visible ethnic divisions; the lords from central Albania and Epirus were just as loyal to their Serbian ruler as were those of Rascia: the short-lived Empire of Stefan Dusan (1331-1355), which encompassed most of the Balkans, as Byzantine Empire, had universalist pretensions.

THE PENETRATION OF ISLAM: THE SOCIAL AND ETHNIC STRATIFICATION

The penetration of the Turks in the fifteenth century, turned Kosovo, as well as the entire Balkans, into a part of the powerful theocratic state - the Ottoman Empire, based on the sharia. The Christians were submitted population who were guaranteed the status of zimmis, a formaly protected layer, if they accepted their new lords and prescribed taxes. Kosovo and Metohia were deep inside the Ottoman lands in Europe and they resembled typical Ottoman provinces in which different religious and ethnic communities coexisted under the surveillance of the centralized administration submitted to the sultan's supreme power. The renewal of patriarchal forms of living in the new conditions was characteristic of both the Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija and the Albanians who, still as nomads, lived almost freely on the neighboring mountains towards Albania. There were no major migrations by the Albanian cattle-breeders in the lowlands, or at least they were negligible, because this meant moving to a more difficult social status.

It was the Serbs who were the first in the Balkans to take advantage of the possibility provided for various non-Islamic communities by the structure of Ottoman system: to unite religious and ethnic affiliations through a semi-autonomous church organization. Supported by Mehmed Pasha Sokolllu (Sokolovic), an Islamized Serb from Bosnia, the third vizier at the Porte, the Serbe obtained the permission to renew the Pec Patriarchate. Reestablishment of Serbian Patriarchate in 1557 marked a kind of religious renaissance of the Serbs which, after the revival of old cults and the renewal of dilapidated monasteries in Kosovo, was followed by a series of insurrections against the ottoman conquerors in Herzegovina, Montenegro and Banat.

Along with the Serbian religious renaissance, underway was also the gradual, and seemingly superficial Islamization of the Albanians, which was the most intense in the regions in Kosovo's vicinity, in northern and central Albania. By converting to Islam, which acquired larger proportions in the seventeenth century, they gradually become part of the ruling class with distinct privileges. Growth of the number of Islamized Albanians holding high posts at the Porte , a layer of the Albanians started appearing as local officials in Kosovo's administration instead of Turks or Arabs. The Serbs and the Albanians, increasingly divided by religion, gradually became members of two opposed social and political strata.

The Serbo-Albanian conflict broke out during the Holy League's war against the Ottoman Empire which ended in 1690 with the 'Great Migration of the Serbs' from Kosovo and other parts of Serbia to the Habsburg Empire, to the region of today's Vojvodina. The Serbs joined the Habsburg troops as a separate Christian militia. The Albanians, with the exception of the brave Catholic Kelmendi tribe, as Muslims, took the side of the sultan's army. After the defeat of the Habsburg troops, a considerable number of Serbs, led by the Patriarch Arsenije III Crnojevic, withdrew from Kosovo and Metohia. Their abandoned estates were taken by Albanian nomads who, unlike the Serbs, did not have the same obligations towards the Porte.

The settlement of the Muslim Albanians proceeded at a slow pace because the number of Serbs who had stayed or who returned after the reprisals calmed down, was still considerable. This settlement took place in uneven waves: upon the seizure of the land, fellow tribesmen were brought in to protect the vast space needed for the big herds of cattle to graze. The social moment played an important role: cattle-breeders were in conflict with peasants. This was supported by the religious dimension: due only to the fact that he was a Muslim, an Albanian cattle-breeder could, without being punished, persecute and rob a Christian, a Serbian peasant. The new wars with the Habsburg Empire in the eighteenth century and the weakening of the central authorities in Constantinople stimulated the growth of anarchy which acquired large proportions at the end of the eighteenth century. A process of social mimicry began: in order to protect themselves from attacks by outlaws, the Serbs accepted the outer characteristics of the Albanian population: their national costumes and language in public communication, while they used their own language only within their families. Less resistant Serbs converted to Islam and afterwards, through marriages, entered Albanian clans. They are called Arnautasi: the first generations secretly celebrated Christian holidays and retained their old surnames and customs. It is only after several generations that they finally assimilated into the new ethnic milieu.

The religious difference between the Serbs and the Albanians in Kosovo became a sharp line of division pending the era of nationalism, which the social mimicry could not absorb. The social reality was also reflected on the level of religious affiliations: many Albanians in Kosovo considered that Islam was the religion of free people, while Christianity, especially Orthodox Christianity, was the religion of slaves. The reflection of such beliefs among the Albanians was noticed by European consuls even a whole century later, at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Muslim Albanians, who bore a strong hallmark of sincretist traditions of the bektashi order, religion was only a means for social promotion: much stronger was the ethnic identity derived from the tribal and patriarchal tradition.

NATIONALISM: UNEVEN RHYTHMS OF INTEGRATION

The dawn of nationalism in the Balkans was announced by the Serbian uprising led by Karadjordje in 1804. Die Serbische revolution as Leopold von Ranke called it, was characterized by the desire for the creation of a national state based on the small farmer's estate and on a democratic order derived from it. By having shaken up all the Balkan Christians, the Serbian revolution initiated an irreconcilable conflict with the Ottoman rule which the Balkan Muslims, primarily the Albanians and the Bosnian Muslims, stood up in defense of. The old religious conflict acquired a new explosive charge called nationalism. Kosovo was ruled by renegade Albanian pashas who, like the Muslim beys in Bosnia, wanted to preserve a status quo which would guarantee their privileges. Struggling for their preservation, both the Albanians and the Bosnian Muslims persecuted the rebellious Serbs, but then they also came into conflict with the reform-oriented sultans who saw the salvation of the empire in its Europeanization.

With the crucial help of the kindred by religion Russian empire, the Serbs gradually acquired autonomy; slowly but surely they progressed towards the establishment of an independent state according to the French nation-state model. Their nationalism was secularized, derived from a cultural matrix (the common language and the folk tradition), whose aim was to overcome the religious differences, with clear desires for liberal solutions coming from the population's social homogeneity. Kosovo and Metohija, like many other Serbian lands, remained under Ottoman rule. For the purpose of achieving full liberation, plans were being made in Serbia for a general insurrection by the Balkan Christians, and even for the creation of some kind of Balkan federation: these plans also counted, without much certainty, on the cooperation of the Albanians, of both the Muslim and Catholic religion.

Except for a certain kind of ethnic solidarity, the Albanian nationalism developed under unfavorable circumstances: the tribal organization and the religious and social divisions ensured the domination of conservative layers of landowners and tribal headmen. For the purpose of defending their old privileges, the Albanians, just like the Bosnian Muslims, became, in the declining Ottoman empire, an obstacle to its modernization according to the European model. Unable, within the Islamic civilizational circle which most of them belonged to (around 70 percent), to coordinate their privileges with the desires of modern nations, all the way up to the Eastern Crisis (1875-1878), the Albanians moved around in a vicious circle between general loyalty to the empire and the defense of their local interests which meant resisting the central authorities' measures. The beginning of the Albanian national integration was not based on cultural unity or on liberal principles of the European type. The Albanian nationalism was of an ethnic nature, but it was also clearly burdened by conservative Islamic traditions. At the same time, this nationalism was more than half a century behind other Balkan nations in defining its aspirations. The Albanians, similarly to other "belated nations", when confronted with other rival nationalisms, sought support on the outside and advocated radical solutions. In Kosovo and in western Macedonia, where the Serbs and the Albanians were intermingled, with the system of authority falling apart and with the growing social stagnation, it was anarchy that reigned and in it, the Christians were the sole victims and the Muslims were their executioners.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE AUSTRO-SERBIAN CONFLICT

The wars Serbia and Montenegro waged against Ottoman empire (1876-1878) resulted in the defeat of Albanian troops and the migration, either voluntarily or forcibly, of Albanians from the liberated territories. Unwilling to live in a Christian state, they settled in Metohija and Kosovo where they took their revenge on the local Serbs for the estates they had lost in Serbia. The Albanian League, formed on the periphery of the Albanian ethnic space, in Prizren in 1878, called for a resolution of the national question within the frameworks of the Ottoman empire: it was conservative Muslim layers that prevailed in the League's leadership and military forces. Dissatisfied with the Porte's concessions to the European powers, the League tried to sever all ties with Constantinople; in order to prevent further international complications, the sultan carried out a military action in 1881 and destroyed the entire Albanian movement. The internationalization of the Albanian question began and, all the way up to the Balkan wars, it had two forms.

First of all, it was characterized by a new loyalty to the Porte which will conduct a pan-Islamic policy in order to encourage the Albanian Muslims to get in conflict with the Christians who were endangering the Ottoman empire's internal security. The persecution of and violence against the Serbs in Kosovo and the Slavs in Macedonia were in the function of the policy of sultan Abdulhamid II. The result was at least 60,000 expelled Serbs (roughly 25 percent of overall Serbian population).

Secondly, the internationalization of the Albanian question had the form of a search for the support of those big powers which, in their desire to dominate the Balkans, could help the Albanian aspirations - that is, Austria-Hungary and Italy. While Italy's activities among the Albanians were based on establishing influence among their Catholic part in the north country and in the belt along the Adriatic coast, Austria-Hungary had more ambitious plans. In its desire to spread further into the Balkans, towards the Thessaloniki bay, after the occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (1878), Austria-Hungary saw the Albanians in Kosovo and western Macedonia as a bridge over which it could reach the Vardar river valley.

The belatedness in the Albanians' national integration was favorable for a broad action by the Dual Monarchy: the Albanian elite, divided among three religious confessions just like the nation itself, consisted of people of unequal social statuses and speaking different dialects. In order for the existing differences to be evened out as easily and as soon as possible, Vienna launched important cultural initiatives: books about the Albanian history were printed and distributed, national coats-of-arms were made and various grammars were written in order for a unified Albanian language to be created. The Latin script, supplemented with new letters for non-resounding sounds, was envisaged as the common script. Even more important was the Illyrian theory about the Albanians' origin. The theory about the Albanians' alleged Illyrian origin was launched from the cabinets of Viennese and German scientists where, until then, it only had the form of a narrow scientific debate, and it was skillfully propagated in a simplified form. According to this theory, for which reliable scientific evidence has not been found to the present day, the Albanians are the oldest nation in Europe created through a mixture of Illyrian and Pelazgi tribes from an Aryan flock ("Volksschwarm"). Thus, for the needs of a great power, a disputable scientific issue about the ethnological genesis of a nation was turned into the mythological basis for national integration, in time, becoming the main pillar of the Albanians' national awareness.

The way in which Vienna used the Albanian national movement against the "greater Serbian danger" in its conflict with the Serbian movement for unification, was similar to the way in which Russia tried to manipulate the Serbian question, at the time of the Serbian revolution, in its wars with Ottomans, but the results were different. The Serbs successfully got rid of Russia's tutorage creating, with a lot of difficulty, a modern parliamentary state that conducted its own independent national policy; the Albanians got from Vienna an important framework for further cultural emancipation but its price was a permanent conflict with Serbia and Montenegro. Although they were deeply distrustful towards the Albanian movement, both Serbian states tried, on several occasions, to establish cooperation with it and to resolve mutual disputes without the interference of the big powers. The support to the Albanian insurrections against the Turkish authorities from 1910 to 1912, prior to First World War and the liberation of Kosovo, as well as cooperation with Essad-pasha Toptani during FirstWorld War, were obvious expressions of such efforts. Albania's joining in the chain of states which tried, under the patronage of Austria-Hungary, to break the independence of Serbia and Montenegro, strengthened Serbia's old pretensions to get access to the sea on the northern Albanian coast, and somewhat later, also to prevent the creation of an independent Albanian state (the agreements with Essad-pasha on a real union in 1915 and the attempt at creating a separate republic of the Mirdites on the Catholic north of Albania in 1920).

IN THE SHADOW OF THE ITALIAN-YUGOSLAV CONFLICT

Following First World War, the role of the protector of Albania and of Albanian interests was taken over by a new regional power - Italy. It continued with its old practice of stirring Serbo-Albanian conflicts, now in the function of its own conflict with Yugoslavia over dominance on the eastern Adriatic coast. Kosovo was an unquiet border province where there operated Albanian outlaws and activists of the "Kosovo committee", an organization of Albanian emigrants which, in its struggle for a "Greater Albania", was financed by the Italian government. In Yugoslavia, the Albanians were a minority that was antagonistic towards the state ruled by their former serfs. The Albanian beys who led the Albanian people, agreed with Belgrade on their privileges without paying attention to the fact that their kinsmen were not guaranteed adequate minority rights.

Belgrade responded with twofold measures: on the internal plane, it carried out the recolonization of Serbs in Kosovo in order to restore the ethnic structure disrupted in the last decades of the Turkish rule and to secure the region bordering on Albania; for this reason the colonists were the targets of attacks by Albanian outlaws. On the foreign political plane, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia reacted by actively interfering in the internal political battles in Albania and by organizing the liquidation of the most prominent Kosovo emigrants, but it did not have the strength to impose its influence on Tirana.

The conflict with Italy and the Albanian movement which it controlled, gained new impetus with the approaching of Second World War. Under Mussolini's patronage, Albanian emigrants from Kosovo, the pro-Bulgarian VMRO organization in Macedonia and the Croatian Ustasha, coordinated their terrorist actions against Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav government's intention to avert the growing danger for the stability of its southwestern borders by moving out the Muslim - that is, the Albanian and Turkish populations from Kosovo and from Macedonia to Turkey, was never carried out because of unsettled terms with Ankara.

The Second World War brought about radical solutions marked by a totalitarian ideology: after Yugoslavia's defeat in the April war of 1941, its territories were divided up among a number of satellite pro-Nazi states. Kosovo and part of western Macedonia were annexed, as compensation, to Albania which was already under Italy's occupation. The consequence was the merciless persecution of around 100,000 Serbs, mostly colonists, while over ten thousand of the other Serbs were the victims of the punitive retaliation by Albanian militias. In the same period, around 75,000 people moved to Kosovo from Albania. New persecutions of the Serbs in Kosovo followed the capitulation of Italy in the autumn of 1943, when Kosovo fell under the control of the Third Reich. The Albanians' revanchism was stimulated by the creation of the so-called "Second Albanian League"; the special SS "Skenderbeg" division carried out a new wave of violence against the Serbian civilian population.

THE FAILURE OF IDEOLOGICAL RECONCILIATION

The attempt at achieving a historical reconciliation of the Serbs and the Albanians within the framework of the new social project - communism of the Soviet type - proved to be impossible because the geopolitical realities remained unchanged, while the old rivalry over territories only acquired a new ideological framework. For reasons of a realpolitik nature, J.B.Tito had to preserve Yugoslavia's integrity in order to become its legal successor. At the same time, he had to take into account the feelings of the Serbs, the communists and partizans who constituted the majority of his forces. The Albanian rebellion against the new authorities at the beginning of 1945 intensified the need for Kosovo to remain part of Serbia, as it was before the war. Nevertheless, as a concession to Albania, a special decree banned the return of Serbian colonists to Kosovo. A similar decree, as a concession to Bulgaria, was also adopted in regard to the Serbs colonized in Macedonia.

The project of a Balkan federation which, apart from Yugoslavia and Albania, was also to include Bulgaria, and where Kosovo would, according to Tito's idea, belong to Albania, had a twofold meaning. For the Yugoslav communists this represented the realization of the old desires for Yugoslavia to dominate Albania, and for Tito it was the achievement of his personal ambition to become the ruler of the Balkans; for Albanian leader Enver Hohxa this was an attempt at working out Kosovo's annexation to Albania through agreement. The severance of ties with Albania in 1948, done as part of Yugoslavia's conflict with the Cominform, stopped the second wave of the immigration of Albanians into Yugoslavia which was favoured by the Yugoslav government whose aim was to tie Albania as much to itself as possible. The number of immigrants has not been precisely determined to the present day.

TITOISM: MANIPULATION WITH NATIONAL CONFLICTS

In communist Yugoslavia, the Serbo-Albanian conflicts were only part of the complex concept for resolving the national question which was carried out in phases and in the name of "brotherhood and unity" by J. B. Tito. Being a Croat, brought up in the Habsburg milieu of fear from "the greater Serbian danger" and on the principles of Lenin's teaching that the nationalism of big nations is more dangerous than the nationalism of smaller nations, Tito was consistent in stifling any intimation of "Serbian hegemony" which, according to the communists, was personified in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The first two decades of bureaucratic centralism (1945-1966) were necessary for the authorities to consolidate, and during that period Tito relied on Serbian cadres with whom he emerged victorious from the civil war. The decentralization based on the plans of his closest associates, Edvard Kardelj - a Slovene, and Vladimir Bakaric - a Croat, aimed at strengthening the competencies of the federal units, led to the renewal of nationalisms with which Tito skillfully manipulated in order to prevent an ideological unfreezing and to preserve his undisputed authority. In the last phase of his rule, marked by the federal Constitution of 1974, he became, just like Brezhnyev in the USSR, the obstacle to any development, to any kind of evolution of the system. As Tito's only legacy there remained the common, but ideological army, and the bulky party-bureaucratic apparatus, now divided along republican and provincial borders which, although allegedly administrative, increasingly resembled the borders of self-sufficient, covertly rival national sates, linked from the inside by the authority of the charismatic leader, and from the outside by the danger of a Soviet invasion.

In such a context, Kosovo had an important role: first it was an autonomous region (1946), then an autonomous province within Serbia (1963) and finally an autonomous province only formally linked with Serbia (1974), with competencies that were hardly any different from those of the republics (the main prerogative that lacked was the Leninist principle concerning the right to self-determination). Kosovo owes the change of its status within the Serbia and federation not to the freely expressed will of the people of Serbia which it had been an integral part of since 1912, but exclusively to the concepts of a narrow circle of communist leaders around Tito, for resolving the national question within the entire Yugoslav federation. In the period of centralism when Albania was, for a long time, part of the Soviet bloc which was hostile towards Yugoslavia, Tito relied on the Serbs in Kosovo who represented the guarantee of the preservation of Yugoslavia's integrity. After the reconciliation with Moscow (1955)and the gradual normalization of relations with Albania (1971), Tito favoured the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in a way which, after the 1968 Constitutional amendments, they understood not only as a possibility for national emancipation but also as a long awaited opportunity for a historical revenge against the Serbs. The ideological and national model the Kosovo ethnic Albanians looked up to was the Stalinist ethno-nationalism of Enver Hoxha, imbued with the old intolerance towards the Serbs. The erasing of the name of Metohija, as a Serbian term, from the name of the province, symbolically indicated what direction the national policy of the Albanian communists in Kosovo would take. After the name was thrown out, there came a series of successive administrative and physical pressures which resulted in the quiet, but forced moving of a large number of Serbs from Kosovo, a process which many knew about, but which very few dared publicly mention. As the process of moving out proceeded, the land of the expelled Serbs was given to emigrants from Albania. From the end of Second World War until Tito's death in 1980, the number of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo tripled (undoubtedly also due to a large number of immigrants from Albania, a number that has still not be definitely determined). The uncontrolled growth of the population gave additional social stimuli to the numerous young people, increasingly and openly educated on the basis of national mythology and brought up to hate Yugoslavia.

The unanimous requests of the Albanian minority for creating a separate republic of Kosovo (with the right to self-determination, including secession), set out only a year after Tito's death, disrupted the sensitive balance of forces in the federal leadership. The attempt to hush up the Albanian question in Kosovo with a party purge and with outside effects (actions by the federal military and police forces) and to minimize the problem of the forced moving of the Serbs, resulted in the deep frustration of the Serbs in the years that followed. They gradually, but in an increasingly large number, started realizing that the Titoist order was based on the national inequality of the Serbs in Yugoslavia. The attempts by Serbian communists to resolve the question of Serbia's competencies over the provinces in agreement with the other republican leaderships, for the purpose of protecting the Serbs in Kosovo more efficiently, were rejected with unhidden antagonism. The intransigence of the national-communist nomenclatures in the federal leadership created dangerous tensions that were hard to control: the Kosovo Serbs started broadly self-organizing.

The Serbs' growing national frustration was skillfully taken advantage of, after a party coup, by Slobodan Milosevic, the new leader of the Serbian communists: instead of forums he used populist methods, taking over from the church and the critical intelligentsia the role of the protector of national interests. Thus, the protection of the endangered rights of the Serbs in Kosovo became a means of political manipulation. Milosevic's intention to renew the weary communist party on the basis of new national ideals, and at a moment when an irreversible process of communism's demise by means of nationalism was launched in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself, started compromising the overall Serbian interests in Yugoslavia. At that moment, for most of the Serbs, preoccupied by the question of Kosovo, the interests of the nation were more important than the democratic changes taking place in the East, especially since Milosevi}c had created the semblance of the freedom of the media where former taboos were freely discussed. Democracy in Serbia was belated only because of the unresolved national question: practice has confirmed the theoretical axiom that these two terms are mutually exclusive.

The Albanians held to their radical stands: they responded with a relentless series of strikes and demonstrations aware of the fact that the abolition of the autonomy based on the 1974 Constitution, meant, in fact, the abolition of elements of statehood. But by doing so, they only strengthened Milosevic's positions. The polarization within the republican leaderships in regard to the Kosovo issue became public. The support of Slovenia and Croatia to the Albanian requests definitely cemented Milosevic's charisma. The results were the limitation of autonomy, unrest and police repression in Kosovo: thus, an old ethnic dispute over whether Kosovo is or is not part of Serbia, became seemingly ideological: Serbia, thanks to Milosevic, acquired the unpleasant image of "the last bastion of communism in Europe", while the Albanians, because of their exclusive resistance, but which had a passive form, gained the heroic aureole of an "oppressed nation" exposed to "apartheid" in its search for democracy and human rights.

The secessionist movement of the Albanians in Kosovo, derived from the logic of the Titoist order and based on ethnic intolerance, led to the homogenization of the Serbs in Yugoslavia, directly producing Milosevic. This, according to the domino effect, resulted in the homogenization of the other Yugoslav nations. In a country with such mixed populations, due to the inability of the communist and post-communist leaderships to place democratic principles of organizing a multi-ethnic community above narrow national interests, this homogenization directly led to the tragic drama which we are the unfortunate witnesses of today. In that sense, the disintegration of Yugoslavia is the revenge of Tito's "zombis", the revenge of the negative selection of cadres and of the wrongly conducted national policy.

THE BALANCE OF INTOLERANCE

After the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991, the Serbo-Albanian conflict lost its Titoist dimension: it, once again, became Serbia's internal issue, despite the wish for the self-proclaimed "Republic of Kosovo" to be created through the internationalization of the Kosovo issue and to be included in the search for a global solution for the war and the ethnic conflicts on the territory of former Yugoslavia. At the moment, the authoritarian leader of the Serbs, Milosevic, and the undisputed leader of the Kosovo Albanians, Ibrahim Rugova, are helping each other with their extreme positions. If the ethnic Albanians were to give up their refusal to live in Serbia, with their votes the democratic opposition in Serbia would easily take over power. On the other hand, while Milosevic, who is disliked in the world, is in power in Serbia, Rugova can still hope for the internationalization of the Kosovo issue. Without Milosevic, even the last doubt that Kosovo will remain exclusively Serbia's internal affair, would be eliminated.

The geopolitical realities point to the fact that every attempt at achieving the Kosovo ethnic Albanians' goals would cause a war of broader Balkan proportions with unforeseeable consequences, because this would mean changing the stable inter-state borders established way back in 1912 and 1913. The right to self-determination, which the ethnic Albanians refer to when rejecting even the very thought of remaining within Serbia, is not envisaged anywhere in the world for national minorities, no matter how large their percentage may be compared to the country's overall population. Today, the Albanians account for 18% of the overall population of Serbia. That is the same percentage of the Serbs and other non-Albanians in Kosovo. This would represent yet another fragmentation accompanied by a war in which there would be no winner. On the other hand, after the experiences with the self-determination of the three kindred nations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which turned into a bloody orgy with hundreds of thousands of dead and displaced persons, it is hard to believe that the international community would tolerate yet another such attempt. After mistakes on both sides - the attempts of the ethnic Albanians to resolve the Kosovo issue without the participation of the Serbs, and the efforts of the Serbs to resolve the same problem without consulting the ethnic Albanians, the only possible solution appears to be the opening of dialogue. After mutual concessions - first of all the Albanians' recognition of Serbia's sovereignty over Kosovo and afterwards, adequate concessions by the Serbian side concerning the form of Kosovo's cultural autonomy (education, culture, science, the media, the economy), following the gradual establishment of mutual trust, dialogue should be conducted there where other minorities, like the ethnic Hungarians, are also represented - in the Serbian parliament.

Dusan T.Batakovic