[PEN-L:6819] Gregor Gysi letter to Slobodan Milosevic

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Barkley wrote:
>     I think that this is a very interesting letter.
>Unfortunately we all must face another hard fact.
>Part of the fact that Milosevic has won (nor more
>"petulance," Louis, now I'll just call him a schmuck
>and a mass murdererer (would the 200,000+ of the
>Croatian-Bosnian war be alive if he had died of a
>heart attack in 1986?)

Barkley, you leave out enormous gaps in your account of the Balkan
problems. Milosevic's attack on Kosovan autonomy did not come out of the
blue. It was preceded by at least 7 years of mounting tensions in which
Kosovars had made life miserable for the average Serb, to the point of
driving many from the province.

This is from a December 25, 1983 NY Times article by David Binder:

====
During 1982, the Serbian parliament, party councils and press were bursting
with expressions of concern over the steady migration of Serbs out of the
autonomous province of Kosovo, the southern plateau region abutting
Albania. The pain was almost palpable as report followed report of the
flight of thousands of families of Serbs and their mountain cousins, the
Montenegrins, leaving more and more of the land in the hands of the
burgeoning Albanian minority. The Serbs were keening, not only because
Kosovo was the birthplace of the Serbian nation a thousand years earlier,
but also because, across the Sava River, the rich Vojvodina flatlands
appeared to be drifting away from the control of Belgrade as the large
Hungarian minority and a disaffected population of Serbs asserted
themselves politically. In the Belgrade cafes, Serbs began to speak
sardonically of ''Narrow Serbia,'' - that is, Serbia without Kosovo and
without the Vojvodina.

At a soccer match in Belgrade this October, fans of the Pristina team from
Kosovo started chanting ''E- Ho! E-Ho!,'' for Enver Hoxha. About the same
time, a post office was bombed and an electric power plant, sabotaged.
''Kosovo is finished as Serb territory, that's for certain,'' said Milutin
Garasanin, a distinguished archeologist at Belgrade University.

Such, it appears, is the outcome of the 1981 Pristina University riots in
support of political independence that sparked an uprising by the Albanians
all across Kosovo and in ethnic Albanian communities dotted around Serbia,
Montenegro and Macedonia. Kosovo Serbs were warned by their ethnic Albanian
neighbors to get out, and some were physically harmed. What had begun
centuries ago as a gradual drift of Serbs northward out of Kosovo ended in
a frightened exodus - authorities put the total at some 13,000 people in
three years, although off the record, officials suggest the number is more
like 70,000. Token efforts were made by Belgrade authorities to escort the
fearful back to their homes, but few wanted to live in armed settlements in
a hostile land.
====

As far as Croatia and Slovenia are concerned, they had opted for
capitalism. In reality, Serbia was stuck in the middle. The prosperous
republics were prepared to split, while the least prosperous province was
to become even more aggressively anticommunist as the national treasury was
diminished by the secession of Croatia and Slovenia. The Kosovars, who are
largely peasant in social composition, adopted a form of nationalism that
was in keeping with most of the anti-Soviet secessionist movements in the
1940s and 50s. Like the Ukraine, the Albanian nationalists were militantly
anticommunist. Although the KLA has a reputation for some kind of Maoism, I
would suspect that the Khmer Rouge is closer to Maoism than these bandits.

Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)