Written by Petrit Latifi
As mentioned at the beginning of this subsection, Kosovo Albanians were the targets of discrimination, especially under Ranković (from 1945 to 1966) and Milošević (from 1987 to 1999). Ranković used his offices and the Yugoslav institutions to effectively build a police state in Kosovo. Police who arbitrarily checked and arrested Albanians, surveillance detention without police or judicial grounds, the filling of almost all management positions in state-owned companies with non-Albanians, but also the awarding of state and party offices to the exclusion of Albanians in Kosovo were among Ranković’s practices and approaches.
For example, the disarmament of its citizens can be one of the legitimate tasks of the intervening state; that this is done by the police is just as justified. The change from intervention to oppression occurs when these instruments are used to take action against one ethnic group without reason and a level of severity is applied that is not applied to the others.
There are many signs that the disarmament of the Albanians was pushed forward much more strongly and strictly than that of the other ethnic groups, especially the Serbs in Kosovo at the same time.
Der Spiegel (1966) reported in a journalistic manner:
“Before the war, every second Skipetar had mange, today every second person is illiterate – if they live in Yugoslavia. But the Skipetar (i.e. Albanian) minority in Tito’s empire is suffering the most today under the Serbian rulers, or so claims Albania’s party newspaper Zeri i Popullit in a long indictment against Yugoslavia.
Zeri i Popullit
Content: Tito’s Serbs are committing genocide against Tito’s Skipetars. […] The Skipetars – they pushed into the abandoned Serb settlements at the end of the 17th century, when the Serbs were flooding back from the Turks – have always been persecuted: by Turkish sultans, by Montenegrin and Serbian kings. And even under Tito’s regime, the fate of their compatriots in the neighboring country had not changed, so claimed the Albanian central organ.
40,000 Albanians were shot, stabbed or poisoned between 1944-1948
Between 1944 and 1948, 40,000 Skipetars were shot, stabbed or poisoned. In the winter of 1955/56, the former Tito favorite Aleksandar Ranković personally led a punitive expedition against the oppressed.
Albanian newspaper Zeri i Popullit:
They (Albanians) were beaten with rubber truncheons (weight: 70
kilograms) to death, shocked with electric current, left barefoot in the snow all night and thrown into an ice-cold canal the next day.
In the Serbian prison of Nis, 2,000 Skipetarian prisoners are said to have been treated with hypothermia and heat. The prison director had already served under the German occupiers.
In the prison in Prizren, a Skipetar was dismembered during torture, two fellow sufferers survived – one with broken arms and legs, the other missing an eye, an ear, part of his lip and his beard. The Albanian party newspaper summed up: The Titoists have turned the Skipetar areas of Yugoslavia into prisons and concentration camps. Yugoslavia’s party and press emerged as completely unexpected witnesses for the Albanian prosecution: Aleksandar Ranković was overthrown as vice president in July 1966 because of his coup plans against head of state Tito (SPIEGEL 28/1966) – and his powerful secret police Udba were also held responsible for the reign of terror in Kosmet.
200 Albanian prisoners were left handicapped
The Belgrade evening newspaper, Vecernje Novosti revealed secret service atrocities: 200 prisoners had been released from Prizren prison as invalids, and since 1959 eight people had been killed in the security service building or driven to their deaths by inhumane interrogation methods. The party organ, Borba, attributed 19 murders of Skipetaren to the Udba people” (Spiegel 7.11.1966, 140).
Of course, Der Spiegel’s reporting focuses on the police methods of Ranković, who was deposed in 1966, the year of the report. The fact that the article is not beyond all doubt, both historically and (from today’s perspective) linguistically, does not make the entire report unbelievable. The overall picture is important; and it is a bleak one that certainly justifies talk of oppression.
The time under Milošević can also be counted as oppression. According to Sell (2002) and Janjić et al. (2013), the Serbian and Yugoslav presidents pursued the above-mentioned policies of expelling Albanians from the economy and public offices. However, he took an even more radical course from 1989 onwards, because he reversed the political, linguistic and educational autonomy that Kosovo had achieved in the course of Yugoslav development. He relied on the repression and deliberate suppression of the Albanians through the police, the army and the secret service.
Reference
Balkan Academia 