The Kosovo War, 25 Years Later: The Serbian Ascendancy

Okay, so we’ve talked about Bosnia and how that set things up for the Kosovo War. Now, what happened in Kosovo that made NATO want to get involved there?

Back when Serbia was part of Yugoslavia, Kosovo was a “special autonomous province” of Serbia. This meant that it had limited self-rule and its own regional legislature. Since the majority of Kosovars were ethnic Albanians, this means that under Communist Yugoslavia, Kosovo’s politics and its economy came to be dominated by Albanians. The Serbs — who were a majority in Serbia as a whole, but a minority in Kosovo — came to resent this.

The situation got steadily worse through the 1970s and 1980s, because the Albanian majority kept growing. In broad numbers, in the years after WWII Kosovo was about 65 t0 70% Albanian, 25 to 30% Serbs, and 5% others. By the 1980s those numbers were more like 80% Albanian, 15% Serbs, and 5% others. Partly this was because the socially conservative Albanians had larger families. Partly it was because of differential emigration, with Serbs easily able to move to Serbia proper in search of better jobs and opportunities, while Albanians were more likely to stay in Kosovo. In any event, as the Serbs within Kosovo became more outnumbered, Kosovo became more and more of a rallying cry for Serb nationalism.

— Really, “rallying cry” doesn’t quite cover it.  The Serbs convinced themselves, not just that Serbs in Kosovo were losing political and economic power, but that they were being oppressed and persecuted by the Albanians.  As Yugoslavia collapsed, late 1980s Serbia went into an orgy of nationalist outrage and anti-Albanian hatred.  Every incident between Serbs and Albanians, however minor, was blown up and distorted into proof that the Serbs were “being beaten” by Albanian criminals and rapists.  It was this wave of outrage and hatred that Milosevic first rode to power.

This all came to a head in 1989, when Serbia revoked Kosovo’s autonomous status and took over direct rule from Belgrade.  I mentioned that Kosovo had an autonomous regional legislature; this was annulled by the simple expedient of surrounding the building with the Army and pointing guns and tank barrels at it until they voted to surrender all their powers to the Serbian national legislature in Belgrade.

Now, from 1988 to 2000, the utterly dominant figure in Serbia was Slobodan Milosevic.  He wasn’t a dictator, quite.  Rather, he was a relentlessly illiberal ethno-nationalist populist of a sort that seemed quite odd in the end-of-civilization 1990s, and has become depressingly more familiar since.

Milosevic’s government was generally corrupt and kleptocratic. However, for Albanians in Kosovo, it was also brutally oppressive.  From 1989 onwards, the Milosevic government embarked on a program of “re-Serbianization”.  Albanians were dismissed from all management positions in state-owned enterprises (which is to say, all businesses of any significance) and replaced with Serbs. Albanians were completely purged from the police, the judiciary, and the upper ranks of the civil service. The University of Pristina, which had been the center of Kosovar Albanian intellectual society, was turned into a Serbian university, with Serbian professors, administrators, and students replacing the Albanians.   All major media were under Serbian control; the public use of the Albanian language was dramatically curtailed.  Albanian towns ceased to receive money for things like road maintenance and fixing utilities, while Serbian towns got new community centers.  Protests and strikes were brutally suppressed, and strikers and union members were fired.

Unsurprisingly, all of this caused Kosovo’s economy to crash hard: unemployment surged and household income collapsed.  But almost all of this pain was felt by the Albanians, so it didn’t matter.

Two points about all this.  The first is that there was a strong element of performative cruelty to Serbian policy.  Milosevic’s government could — in theory — have established Serb dominance in Kosovo with a much gentler hand.  Having centralized political power out of the province, there wasn’t an overwhelming need for firing and purges.  But the goal was not just to “protect” the “threatened” Serb minority in Kosovo; it was to punish the Albanians.

Albanians refer to this period of Kosovo’s history as “the Serb Occupation”.  Nobody else calls it that, because legally Kosovo was still part of Serbia.  Here I’m calling it the “Serbian Ascendancy” as a deliberate callback to the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, particularly the high Ascendancy of the 18th century.  A province dominated ethnic and religious minority, supported by a much bigger and more powerful neighboring country; the majority locked out of political power and most paths to economic advancement, with limited access to education and de facto second class citizenship; a rubber-stamp Parliament / legislature that could do nothing but approve measures passed in Belgrade / London.  It’s a bit familiar.  Of course, the English were able to keep this going in Ireland for over a century.  The Serb Ascendancy in Kosovo lasted just over a decade, for reasons we’ll shortly discuss.

A second point: then and later, some observers tried to present this as a “clash of civilizations” between Christian Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Albanians. This was, by and large, nonsense. While religion made a comeback in post-Communist Serbia just as it did everywhere else in the Communist world, it wasn’t a significant driver of the Kosovo conflict. Neither group was particularly religious. Even at the time, a common joke was that “Kosovo is a fight between people who never go to church on Sunday and people who never go to mosque on Friday”. It’s also worth noting that a significant minority of Kosovar Albanians were Catholic, not Muslim. It made no difference; the Serbs treated them exactly the same.  It was an ethnic conflict, not a religious one.

Okay, so: it’s possible to divide the Ascendancy into two periods.  For the first few years, 1989-1995, Kosovo was oppressed but not particularly violent.  Bad as things were for the Kosovar Albanians, they could have been much worse. There was no war. The Serb police were notoriously brutal and corrupt, ordinary citizens were subject to arbitrary arrest and harassment, and troublemakers were likely to be beaten or tortured, but there were no mass murders or massacres. The Albanians saw mass unemployment, skyrocketing poverty, and dramatically decreased access to health care, education, and basic services, but there wasn’t mass famine. Albanians were mostly locked out of higher education, elected office, and the civil service, but nobody was being ethnically cleansed.

Through this period, the Albanians mostly relied on peaceful and non-violent resistance, under the leadership of Ibrahim Rugova. Rugova is a controversial character, but he probably delayed the eventual spiral of resistance -> violent oppression -> more violent resistance by several years. Whether this was ultimately a good thing… well, as I said, he’s controversial. But anyway, from 1989 to 1995 Kosovo was miserable and oppressed, but relatively peaceful.

After 1995 things began to change. One reason was demographics.  Albanians continued to have more children than Serbs, and Serbs continued to emigrate.  Attempts by the Milosevic government to “correct the demographic imbalance” by encouraging Serbs to move to Kosovo went nowhere.  There’s a story about a busload of Serb refugees from Bosnia, realizing the bus was going to Kosovo: they mutinied, commandeered the bus and took it to Belgrade instead.  The Serb population of Kosovo continued to decline both in absolute and relative terms, leading to the sardonic joke that “The Serbs would do anything for Kosovo, except live there”.  In 1989 Albanians had outnumbered Serbs about five to one; by 1996 this was probably six to one, with eight or ten to one looking likely within another generation.  At some point there would simply not be enough Serbs to make minority rule feasible.  By 1996, the Milosevic government was openly considering the other side of the equation: “correcting the imbalance” by reducing the number of Albanians, either peacefully or otherwise.

Meanwhile, the Dayton Agreement had come and gone. As noted in the previous post, Dayton solved the problem of the war in Bosnia.  But it completely ignored Kosovo. The Kosovar Albanians felt, not unreasonably, that they’d been ignored and abandoned by the West. Rugova’s prestige took a hit; nonviolent resistance had accomplished nothing. Voices favoring more violent methods began to be heard. In 1996, the embryonic Kosovo Liberation Army made its first moves, with a handful of attacks on Serb policemen and particularly oppressive and unpopular Serb officials. These attacks were not particularly well planned or coordinated, but they alarmed the Serbs and provoked a crackdown — which of course gave the KLA even more credibility with ordinary Albanians.

I’ll pause and note here that, in this as in so many other instances, the Serbs had pickled a rod for their own back.  By locking Albanians out of higher education and most non-menial jobs, they had created a huge pool of unemployed and angry young men.  By restricting police jobs to Serbs, they had made sure that large areas of the province were under- or un-policed.  (And most Albanians spoke Serbian, while very few Serbs spoke Albanian, so much of Albanian society was opaque to Serb law enforcement anyway.)  And by their punitive all-stick-no-carrot approach to inter-community relations, they’d prevented the emergence of a class of evolues or collaborators with a vested interested in the status quo.  So the preconditions for a guerrilla movement were there from day one.  In retrospect, it’s mildly surprising that it took six or seven years to emerge.

A second driver of violence came in 1997 when the government of neighboring Albania, just over the border, suddenly collapsed.  “Collapse” here does not mean in the parliamentary sense.  For reasons beyond the scope of this blog post, Albania was thrown into complete anarchy for several weeks. During this period, the local armories were all looted. Albania was full of these armories, because the Communist dictator Enver Hoxha had believed that in the event of invasion, the people would need to be armed quickly. When they were looted, tens of thousands of weapons suddenly came available — rifles, pistols, submachine guns and light machine guns, grenades. For a while, you could walk into any village market in rural northern Albania and buy grenades for a dollar apiece, a pistol for ten dollars or a rifle for twenty. Since the border between Albania and Kosovo was fairly porous, thousands of Kosovars did just that. Suddenly Kosovo was awash in guns.

So the security situation in Kosovo began to slide rapidly downhill. The Serbs became more paranoid and oppressive; human rights violations got worse; the economy slumped; and the Albanians became ever more resentful and more inclined to ignore Rugova and support violent action against Serb rule.

But up to early 1998, two and a half years after Dayton, Kosovo still was /relatively/ peaceful. And — up until early 1998 — the rest of the world wasn’t really paying much attention to Kosovo.

And then in the spring of 1998 the Serbs decided to eliminate a local KLA leader named Adem Jasheri.