Kosovo

Description

Following the death of [Yugoslavian] President Josip Broz Tito in 1980, the gradual disintegration of communist Yugoslavia created a power vacuum that allowed extreme nationalist movements to undermine the country’s stability and social cohesion. In Kosovo, the ethnic Albanian Muslim majority and the ethnic Serbian orthodox Christian minority had engaged in nationalist political struggles throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These developments facilitated the rise of Slobodan Milosevic’s virulently nationalist Socialist Party of Serbia and allowed Milosevic to assume the presidency of Serbia in 1989. In the same year, Milosevic annulled Kosovo’s provincial autonomy in language and education, and asserted Serbian political and cultural hegemony from Belgrade. Political divisions deepened after the collapse of the Yugoslav Communist Party in 1990 and the abrogation of the federation’s one-party system. As head of the Serbian Socialist Party, Milosevic continued to rally nationalist sentiment using his control of the state media, through which he promoted the idea of a “Greater Serbia” that would incorporate the ethnic Serbian regions of other Yugoslav republics. In July 1990, Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian political leaders declared independence. Serbian authorities countered this unconstitutional development with intensified repression in Kosovo, including the closing of Albanian-language newspapers, the renaming of Albanian streets in Serbian, and the introduction of compulsory Serbian curricula in Kosovar Albanian-majority educational institutions.