By Shkëlzen Maliqi
The Albanian-Serbian conflict in Kosovo is increasingly taking on the dimension of a kind of meta-contest. The tension is great, there are many threats, but even there it remains, mainly, in futile verbal retorts. In fact, aiming at the limits of the possibilities of realizing national interests, in verbal escalations, both sides have reached extremes.
Thus, extreme Serbian nationalists threaten to kill or expel Albanians from the holy Serbian land. On the other hand, extreme Albanians believe that on the day Kosovo is free, almost all Serbs here will flee from the north with their tails in the saddle because in recent years they have been burdened with many sins against their fellow citizens and neighbors:
“The Serbs will flee on their own without waiting to mix.” Both sides emphasize that there is no longer any possibility of coexistence, while the solution, they say, is complete and physical separation. In other words, when the Serbs say: “Let the Albanians go to Albania or to the damned hell, because Kosovo is ours!”, these others respond: “And why don’t you Serbs, since you are fewer, go to Serbia and liberate half of the Albanian people and territories?!”
Shkëlzen Maliqi writes
Avoiding open conflict.
However, even though this verbal war is fierce and already going to extremes, in reality there is still a dose of rationality in containing and avoiding a larger-scale conflict. In Kosovo, contrary to expectations, less blood has been shed than in the war zones in Yugoslavia. The current Serbo-Croat war reached, say, Dubrovnik and other Croatian cities before their citizens could even be mentioned and come to their senses, while the Kosovars had been prepared for everything for years, even for worse than what happened to the Croats. But perhaps it was precisely the fact that they knew what they could find that saved the Albanians from the naivety of the Croats who did not believe that the Serbs could cross all the borders and set half of Croatia on fire.
This is not our war.
Ali Podrimja in his poem dedicated to young Albanian boys forcibly mobilized says:
That is not our war.
Life is preparing us for the worst
what is pain or joy
we no longer know
That is not our war
You will probably fall from a Croatian bullet
or from a Serbian knife to some scratch
death is certain
Turn your back on me too, son
my life will increase by two palms
to overcome the flame is wisdom…
The ‘peace’ that cannot be endured
But, if war did not break out in Kosovo, it does not mean that we have been at peace. Instead of coexistence, a strictly separated, parallel life has been taking place here for four years now, in which the points of view of the two communities have been reduced to the smallest extent, except when necessary and necessary in relations with the authorities (contacts with the police, with tax collectors, etc.), or exchange relations (in the market, shops, counters, etc.).
On the other hand, such a Kosovar ‘peace’ is in essence not encouraging at all. On the contrary, it is, on the one hand, much more difficult to endure than a real war. Because, by not confronting the opponent who provokes, the Albanians have created a feeling that they live humbly and like suppressed souls or that, which is also humbly, they are content with verbal retorts, with prayers and the expectation that justice and freedom will finally be brought to them by the magicians of the world, those who “see everything and remember everything”.
But what happened to their own strength? Will the will of the Albanians also have the strength of open resistance?
Camaj’s Bull.
At this moment, I am reminded of the verses of Martin Camaj, our asylum seeker, who died a short time ago in Munich:
“How can I not be conscious even when I smell the blood of a sheep?
With all that power in my body, it is difficult to walk gently and easily over chaos.”
Camaj dedicated his last cycle of poems to the Bull, that huge black beast, which is brimming with health, and yet seems so good and gentle. Herds of bulls can be found all over Kosovo, especially during the summer months, while Camaj, in his vision of the steppe bull, whose calf is slaughtered before his eyes, actually sees Kosovo, that black steppe land, with an extraordinary power, which follows the dictates of fate wisely and gently.
How to remain humane?
Is it possible, however, to “walk gently and gently over the (Kosovar) chaos”? Is it possible, despite all that is happening, to remain humanely invincible. Is it enough that others praise us, among them some of the wisest Serbian minds, such as Milovan Gjilas or Bogdan Bogdanovic or Mirko Kovač? In his Paris diary published by “Borba”, Kovač, among other things, writes: “Politically, Albanians are the most mature people in Yugoslavia.”[1]
The surprise of the Albanian response
Not even the most knowledgeable Despite the Kosovo circumstances and the mentality of the Albanians, who had previously predicted that the situation in Kosovo could deteriorate badly and lead to fierce and long-lasting conflicts, they did not foresee and still cannot explain the fact that the Albanians chose mainly political rather than military means for their general uprising and secessionist goal.
From the Albanians, in fact, everything could be expected, but not Gandhism. The greatest surprise was, of course, experienced by their enemies, the Serbs. Although, on the one hand, Albanian Gandhism enabled them to carry out the radical measures of suppressing the autonomy and “Serbization” of Kosovo relatively without obstacles, on the other hand, all that overwhelming Serbian aggression was an attack on the empty with disappointing effects. Calculated to be poured out on Albanians as a sign of state revenge for the secessionist uprising, it turned into a senseless brutal repression on citizens who freely expressed their independent civic and national will.
The hypocrisy of those who only console
Many Albanians are not that fascinated by such judgments and shake their heads in confusion when Gandhism is mentioned to them. You have to be in their shoes and understand that the victim who endures the pain often does not have it easy at all when you praise their resilience. Moral support, of course, can be encouraging. But when you are in the shoes of the victim, moral support sometimes feels almost like a hypocrisy of those who only console without doing anything to really help the victim.
They praise you for sacrificing yourself, for not responding to violence with violence, and they are unable to even wipe the sweat from their brow, much less do something to change the situation in the slightest, and that not because of the Albanians, but because of themselves.
Because, even though in Kosovo for ten whole years the Albanians suffered mainly, what was happening there actually belonged to everyone and affected everyone [in Yugoslavia], even the Serbian people themselves, who in the end experienced being plunged into conflict with everyone, while Belgrade and Šumadija, due to sick ambitions and reckless and suicidal militarization, were transformed into huge trenches of military chaos.
Fear of premature idealizations.
Of course, it is no small matter and it is very inspiring when wise people say that as a people we have shown ourselves to be politically wiser and more mature in the entire former Yugoslavia? It’s just that this doesn’t help us much to understand ourselves better and to explain that, even as a victim, we have preserved our dignity and have won morally.
I can’t even jump to the end of the analysis of the assessments given by Gjilasi or Kovaçi. First, because the whole issue is still in process, everything is in the making and in a state of explosive tension, in which perhaps we Albanians have not shown to the end who and what we are.
I fear all the premature generalizations and idealizations and that the fascination with our Gandhism is being deflated, like when the whole world supported and idealized the war of the Vietnamese with the Americans, while later it was seen that the winners were real Stalinists and regional imperial thugs.
Where do we get this wisdom?
The second has to do with the lack of so-called explainers of relevant sources. In truth, we do not have the answer to the question: where do we get this wisdom and this maturity? From which tradition? From which books? From which doctrinal manual or national program? Which of our leaders or thinkers invented that ingenious strategy of patience and long-suffering action? Because there is nothing written in this regard and everything, so to speak, must be thought out, explained on the go, extracted from the living dough of events.
David against Goliath.
In answering the question of what Albanian Gandhism is, I do not dare to depart so much from the notes I recorded in the spring and autumn of 1990,[2] when the Albanian resistance suddenly took a form of nonviolence, or during the year of the 1991 war, when the first signs of Albanian-Serbian détente warned of the possibility that this specific Gandhism, for the good of all, could also end in victory.
After all, the situation in Kosovo today [in 1992] has not changed a single step compared to 1990, until the following year, the year of war [in Slovenia and Croatia], created a space of relative peace here, where apartheid reigned and there was a lot of police repression, but there were no mass murders and great destruction, so one could live somewhat.
Recently, in the book “Warsaw Rallies 1978-1984” by [Polish writer] Kazimierz Brandys, I discovered an extraordinary observation about Gandhism as a David versus Goliath struggle. “We may be lost today, but we cannot be lost forever. There are plans that have been made for our extinction, but it is impossible to foresee the secret action of yet undiscovered storms and events in the future and others hidden in the nature of the world.
Plans of extinction can clash in them. One must place one’s trust in good against evil, but one must play wisely and patiently. In such a war, the people often win over two or three generations (in India, which proved to the world what the power of passive resistance is, the generation of Gandhi and Nehru decided). Such a war relies on an extraordinary, very long work of will and mind. This is the war for oneself, not only for freedom. In it, we ourselves are transformed.”
Concluding this note, Brandys also says this: “This is a difficult task of creating a new form of Polishness.”[3], while I am paraphrasing that Albanian Gandhism also has a difficult and long task ahead of it to create a new form of Albanianness.
The Deposit on Good: “Appeal to Democratic Opinion” of January 23, 1990
Perhaps we should remember the decisive moment when in Kosovo, as Brandys says, we placed the deposit on good against evil. In January 1990, a few days before the Extraordinary Congress, in which the League of Communists of Yugoslavia was destroyed, dictating that there was a ready-made scenario for the militarization of the Yugoslav issue by inciting unrest in Kosovo, a group of young people from the political thinkers who were just affirming themselves encouraged several Kosovar associations to issue an Appeal to Democratic Opinion in which it was stated:
“The systems authoritarian one-party systems have plunged into crisis in all spheres of social life because they did not allow the free articulation of citizens’ interests or the resolution of problems through tolerant dialogue in democratic institutions. In Yugoslavia, this is best seen in Kosovo, where the disqualification and criminalization of every demand and all forms of expression of dissatisfaction of citizens (of Albanian nationality) over the last nine years has done nothing but strengthen their dissatisfaction even more, while the intensification of repression with which the government reacted to their dissatisfaction led to the continuous strengthening of political tension.
The main problem of Kosovo is therefore the repressive regime that produces enemies, impatience, political tension, ethnic polarization, blockades and the paralysis of the economy and public life. Therefore, the free association of citizens and free elections, as well as the identification of interests and the dimensioning of the problem on these bases, is a prerequisite for democratic dialogue, as the only rational and fair way] for resolving the Kosovo crisis.
However, the [usurped] government in Kosovo is doing everything in its power to hinder democratic processes in the Province. [The appeal was written before the Declaration of Independence on June 2, 1990 and the proclamation of the Republic on September 7, 1990]. Since it cannot openly declare itself against political pluralism, the “violent” government is now trying to prove that Kosovo is supposedly not yet ripe for democracy. According to them, this Province should remain a kind of special zone where extraordinary measures should continue to be applied.
To support this racist theory of theirs, the Kosovar government has recently increased the campaign of slander and imputations with which it is sought to disqualify the newly formed alternative groups and movements, while on the other hand the situation in Kosovo is being presented in increasingly dramatic tones.
Moreover, official bodies and public forums warn of the imminent onset of unrest, even of armed uprising! How can such categorical predictions of political unrest be given – we ask? Are the wishes and intentions of the Kosovar government actually being revealed in this way. It is to be expected, therefore, that all eventual incidents in the future will be used to argue for the necessity of continuing and strengthening the extraordinary measures.
For this reason, we draw the attention of the public to the following:
We are expressing our conviction that demonstrations, protest rallies and other forms of political pressure, currently prohibited, i.e. illegal, do not contribute to democratization and the solution of the problem, but will be used to strengthen extraordinary measures;
We call on all democratic forces in Kosovo, especially the youth, to engage in preventing excesses and any other action that could encourage and prolong the life of the repressive system;
We appeal to the democratic Yugoslav and world public to engage more firmly against attempts to isolate Kosovo from democratic processes, among other things because the fate of democracy in Yugoslavia is closely linked to the fate of democracy in Kosovo;
We demand the abolition of extraordinary measures, so that the competent state bodies and courts can protect constitutionality and legality and thus ensure respect for the fundamental rights and freedoms of every citizen, which have been massively violated for a long time (the prosecution of citizens for because of the opinion expressed in public forums, the denial of the right to work and the right to education through the application of unconstitutional criteria of moral-political suitability, the suppression of freedom of speech through rigorous control of the means of public information, etc.) and finally, we demand the cessation of all political [judicial] processes, as well as the release of all political prisoners who have not practiced violence.[4]
Trepça Miners.
I am not saying that this Appeal was the first act of Kosovar Gandhism. This privilege is perhaps deserved by the “Trepça” miners who in November 1988 organized an exemplary and disciplined protest march [from Mirovica to Pristina], while in February 1989 they also launched the well-known eight-day strike in the mines. The appeal is important because it provided the first clear political articulation of what the miners had intuitively laid out as a strategy, that Serbian violence should not be responded to with violence, but with a clear expression of political will.
Serbian provocations for war.
The appeal, however, did not prevent the outbreak of Albanian discontent after the brutal intervention of the police against peaceful demonstrations in Pristina on January 26, 1990, in which democracy and free elections were demanded. Within a week, 36 Albanians were killed in Kosovo, including children and the elderly, the actions of Serbian punitive expeditions in several places (Malishevo, Glogovac) seemed to have the sole purpose of inciting a mass uprising so that a major military retaliation could be justified.
Petition “For Democracy, Against Violence”
During this time, the same group of people who drafted the Appeal encouraged the public signing of the petition called “For Democracy Against Violence”, which would be signed by about 400,000 people within a week.
Ibrahim Rugova, finally, since he had already been promoted as the national leader of the Albanians, on February 2, 1990, issued an appeal for restraint from street conflicts and for the application of mainly political means in the war for national liberation. With this, the deposit was definitively placed on good against evil, for democracy and against violence, because the Albanians from those days were completely transformed, stopped all anarchic and other actions, submitted to self-discipline, organization and fanatical self-sacrifice.
All the facts show that they have hit upon the true argument, or that their thinking was in the spirit of the new era and of the general European and world détente. But if the Kosovo problem from the aspect of the violation of human rights was clear to everyone and provided an orientation for the solution through pressures on the state under whose jurisdiction Kosovo is, in the Gandhian rebellion of the Albanians it suddenly took on other dimensions of what is sanctioned in international law as secession or as a violation of the principle of the inviolability of borders. Do the Albanians of Kosovo have the right to their own republic? Can they, if that is their will, secede from Serbia and Yugoslavia and then join Albania?
The will and the right to secede.
Peaceful self-determination?
The Albanians of Kosovo have thus, in a harsh form, but with absolutely acceptable and incontestable means – through de facto civic self-determination – made questionable the traditional concepts of state sovereignty and the so-called status of minorities as citizens and subjects with limited rights [within a sovereign state]. With this, on the other hand, the sensitive wound has been struck.
Because, then, how does the matter stand with Corsica, or with Brittany or Scotland, or Catalonia, to mention only the examples of Western Europe? Can they self-determine peacefully? How should minorities within certain states that live in compact territories where they are in fact the majority? Does national law and the right to self-determination enter the corpus of basic human rights? What attitude should be taken towards national referendums that have secessionist aims?
The current international order stems from rights won through wars and has a host of frozen issues and conflicts that could be addressed to self-determination, but the current order does not allow it. Should it remain like this? Should Kosovo, which in every aspect, both geographically and ethnically and as a cultural area, is a separate entity, at all costs remain under Serbia?
1912: Serbian occupation of Kosovo.
The European powers, with the Treaty of Versailles, sanctioned Serbia’s occupation of Kosovo in 1912 after Albanian rebels had effectively liberated it, successfully ending one of the many uprisings against the Ottoman Empire, within the framework of which Kosovo had been until then.
Moreover, in 1912 the Albanian leadership of Kosovo went to Belgrade and offered Serbia free passage of its army through Kosovo, on the condition that the war with Serbia to end in a way that the Albanians would remain free, but, as contemporary sources testify, Serbia turned against the Albanians, disarmed them, and organized punitive expeditions.
Serbian Social Democrat Dragisa Lapčević gave this testimony in 1914: “Instead of Serbia, which had been fighting for its own liberation for so long, doing everything possible to ensure that the Albanians also enjoyed freedom – Serbia led its army and marched through Albania, to reach the Adriatic Sea with the desire to subjugate the Albanian people and put them under the yoke of slavery.” [5]
Even Leon Trotsky, who closely followed the Balkan wars as a reporter, noted what the true form of the Serbian army’s action in Kosovo was. Among other things, a note of a conversation with a Serbian Chetnik has been preserved: “…And what are you doing now in Ferizovic, among the Albanians? – I ask. – Roasting chickens and killing Arnauts. But we’re tired of it – he adds with a yawn, accompanying his words with a gesture of weariness and boredom…”[6]
End of 70-year Serbian jurisdiction over Kosovo
Should the Albanians of Kosovo, who did not enter Serbia of their own free will or determination, but by force, always be its citizens, even if all generations of Albanians in this century have had negative experiences with Serbian regimes? Can Serbia have a permanent mandate over the territories it gained after the First World War or is that mandate subject to revision?
If Serbia, after 70 years of jurisdiction over Kosovo, has not managed (because it simultaneously had unrealistic appetites to swallow the whole of Yugoslavia or because Tito’s communist regime later prevented this) to ethnically colonize Kosovo, because today the demographic ratios are even more unfavorable than in 1918 (then Albanians constituted about 65% of the Kosovo population, and today they are about 90%), will the new Europe again give Serbia a chance to ‘improve’ this omission, especially since the colonization of Kosovo and the displacement of Albanians are publicly declared goals of Serbia? (Written in March 1992).
Source
https://gazetametro.net/meta-kontesti-i-konfliktit-shqiptaro-serb-ecje-e-bute-mbi-kaos/
(Essay from Shkëlzen Maliq’s book “Albanians and Europe”, published in 1994.)
