Post by Bozur on Mar 6, 2008 14:21:25 GMT -5
Kosovo (& Bosnia) as an instrument of national policy
Author: Olga Popovic Obradovic
Uploaded: Thursday, 06 March, 2008
It seems relevant to reprint this essay by the late Serbian historian, first published in English in Bosnia Report three years ago, on the way in which Kosova has been instrumentalized throughout Serbia's modern history as a 'mobilizing agent for territorial expansion' - including into Bosnia-Herzegovina
Kosovo represents a constant in a Serbian national policy that is concerned with far greater and far more serious territorial aspirations than Kosovo itself. From the very beginning of Serbia’s formation as a national state, the unification of all lands which in one way or another are considered to be Serb was and remains the essence of its state idea. This state idea came to be called ‘avenging Kosovo’ or in today’s speech ‘regaining Kosovo’. The policy of ‘avenging Kosovo’ has always implied territorial wars that were not limited to Kosovo. In the 20th century in particular, when - following the enthronement of the Karađorđević dynasty in 1903 - the realisation of the projected Great Serbia was initiated, Kosovo became the symbol and the most powerful mobilising agent for this territorial expansion: a historical area with which the expansion of the Serbian state was to begin but would not end. As the famous Father Milan Đurić of the National Radical Party thundered in the Serbian parliament before the First World War, the task of Serbian teachers has always been ‘to teach children about the [Kosovo] pledge and about the heroes of Kosovo ... to educate the youth about how they, as future citizens, will atone for Kosovo and create Great Serbia. The Serbian people have slaved and fought ... so that they could avenge Kosovo and liberate shattered Serbdom... We must not remain idle when the heart of the Serbian people is being torn out of its bosom... Bosnia, the old Serbian kingdom, and Herzegovina, the duchy of St Sava...’ This was said in 1908, in response to Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Following several wars, Serbia - inspired by the Kosovo myth and the slogan of ‘avenging Kosovo’ - arrived in the Yugoslav state in 1918. The slogan temporarily lost its function, but was not forgotten. It was kept in historical memory and revived at moments of Yugoslav state crisis. At the end of the 20th century, when Serbia once again turned to re-defining the Serb national interest, ‘avenging Kosovo’ became once again the national-political formula designed to legitimise the project of territorial expansion - regardless, as before, of whether such territorial aspirations were based on historical or on ethnic principles, and directed once again to the south and west.
The most recent re-composition of the Yugoslav area began after the historic 8th session of the Serbian Communist party’s central committee, when the Kosovo issue was once again placed on the agenda by Serbia’s categoric demand that Kosovo be re-integrated into the Serbian constitutional order. As soon became clear, Kosovo was a means to open the constitutional question in Yugoslavia, but not the basic and certainly not the final aim,. Amendments to the Serbian constitutions were adopted in 1989 with physical repression of the Kosovo Albanians and under conditions of a state of emergency. The 8th session signalled in fact a radical alteration of Serbia’s official policy towards Yugoslavia: a radical rejection of the policy of seeking an inter-Yugoslav consensus in favour of Serbian domination of Yugoslavia, if need be at the price of genocide. The slogan ‘avenging Kosovo’ became once again a war cry. The ideologues of centralism, who at that time filled the Serbian media, insisted that a confederal or consensual Yugoslavia meant a war that would end with alteration of the borders between Hungary and the Adriatic Sea, a war that could cost over one million lives. This terrible threat on the part of the Serbian elite soon became the Yugoslav reality. ‘Avenging Kosovo’ ended as revenge against Yugoslavia.
Bosnia and Kosovo
It is important to be constantly reminded of the role that Kosovo has played in the Serbian national programme, in which Kosovo was the instrument not the aim of the national project, because this role remains actual to this day.
At the start of 2003, two years after the fall of Milošević’s regime, Serbia again re-opened the question of state borders in the Balkans. Using Kosovo once again, it threatened that Serbia would seek redefinition of the Dayton accords, and an extensive re-drawing of international borders, if Kosovo continued to insist on independence. Deputy prime minister Čović explained his government’s position in the following words: ‘If they [the Albanians] want independence, then we [the Serbs] want partition of Kosovo.’ He repeated for the umpteenth time the idea of Kosovo’s partition, which the Serbian nationalists led by Dobrica Ćosić had adopted in the second half of the 1960s. In other words, Serbia responded to Kosovo’s demand for independence with a list of its territorial aspirations, on which Bosnia-Herzegovina has always occupied the most important place. It was an attempt to trade Kosovo for the Republika Srpska part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. But this policy of territorial re-composition, involving the partition of Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina, calls into question state borders throughout the region. Serbian nationalists and ideologues of the national project find it increasingly difficult, in fact, to hide Serbia’s old tendency to treat Macedonia too as part of its state territory. If one adds to this Montenegro as ‘the second Serbian state’, then it becomes clear that Serbia does not accept the existing state borders as final; that it is counting on a new redrawing of ethnic borders. There is no doubt that the current Serbian state strategy, like the one that prevailed before 5 October, rests on the principle of non-recognition of the so-called AVNOJ borders, i.e. the borders defined in the 1974 Yugoslav constitution. Only in this way can Kosovo and Republika Srpska be treated as equal.
This text has been translated from a longer version in Helsinška povelja [Helsinki Charter], Belgrade, February 2005, and first appeared in Bosnia Report 43/4, January-April 2005.
www.bosnia.org.uk/news/news_body.cfm?newsid=2375