by Salih Mehmeti | Konica.al. Translation Petrit Latifi

Summary

The book challenges long-standing Serbian propaganda about Kosovo’s demography and history. Dutch researcher Willem Vermeer shows that Albanians have been a clear majority in Kosovo for centuries, a fact confirmed by Yugoslav censuses from 1921 to 1961, even though these were conducted under pro-Serb governments. Claims that Albanians were numerically inferior are therefore misleading. The book also disputes Serbian narratives of extreme anti-Serb violence during World War II. Demographer Bogoljub Kočović concludes that such violence was exaggerated and that Kosovo was among the safer regions in Yugoslavia. His demographic research challenged official state figures and entrenched myths.

Serbian propaganda has always aimed to present an inverted picture of the demography in Kosovo, deliberately reducing the Albanian element and its numerical superiority over the Serbian and Montenegrin settlers.

Dutch researcher Willem Vermeer says that it is “a fact that Albanians constituted a comfortable majority for as long as people remember,” writes Konica.al. The first Yugoslav census of 1921, according to him, shows that in most of Kosovo, people of the Orthodox faith (mainly Serbs and Montenegrins) constituted less than 5 percent of the population.

“The censuses of 1931, 1948, 1953, 1961 all give 27 percent as the proportion of Serbs-Montenegrins in the total population. Since all five censuses were conducted under the supervision of centralized governments, which were to varying degrees pro-Serb, they have hardly underestimated the number of Serbs and Montenegrins,” Vermeer wrote in his study.

One of the most widespread myths in Serbian journalism is the severe “violence” against Serbs in Kosovo during World War II. But Serbian demographer Bogoljub Kočović from Sarajevo points out that the occurrence of interethnic violence in Kosovo during this period has often been exaggerated.

Analyzing demographic facts, he comes to the conclusion that during World War II, Kosovo was one of the safest places in Yugoslavia, especially for Serbs. Bogoljub Kočović, born in 1920 in Sarajevo, is a Bosnian lawyer and statistician. Educated in the United States as an economist, he has lived in France for most of his life.

His best-known book is “Victims of the Second World War in Yugoslavia”, which has challenged many of the official “truths” in Yugoslavia. Analyzing the demographic growth in Yugoslavia and the census data of 1921, 1931 and 1948, Kočović believed that the human losses in Yugoslavia were around 1,014,00, unlike the official numbers given by the state (around 1,706,000).

For these reasons and many others, his book was ignored in his homeland, especially at the time of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, but in 1990 it was reprinted in Sarajevo.

Salih Mehmeti | Konica.al

Sources

Vermeer, Willem, ‘Albanians and Serbs in Yugoslavia’, in Martin van den Heuvel and Jan G. Siccama (eds.), The Disintegration of Yugoslavia, Yearbook of European Studies, vol. 5, Amsterdam: Rodophi, 1992, pp. 101-24

Bogoljub Ko?ovi?, Žrtve Drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji (London, 1985), ff.81-85, 112.

Source

https://www.botasot.info/lajme/802459/libri-qe-rrenon-genjeshtrat-serbe-per-kosoven/