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Chapter One

Nationalism and Political Power

in Kosovo: From the Sultanate

to Slobodan Miloševic (1912-1986)

The Serb of today looks at [Kosovo] as part of his birthright, and of its recapture the young men see visions and the old men dream dreams.... Ineradicably fixed in the breast of the Albanian ... is the belief that the land has been his for all time. The Serb conquered him, held him for a few passing centuries, was swept out and shall never return again. He has but done to the Serb as he was done by.

~Edith Durham, High Albania (1909)

Kosovo in Albanian), a small and, up until the end of the second millenium, remote region of Southeastern Europe, is historically renowned as the area where a mainly Slavic army failed to defeat expansionist Ottoman Turk forces in June 1389. That legendary battle, which occurred on the so-called Field of Blackbirds at Kosovo Polje, marked the terminal phase of the Serbian medieval state. In military terms, the battle is now thought to have been a draw, and it would actually take another seventy years for the Turks to conquer Serbia. For most of the roughly six centuries between the Ottoman conquest and present times, ethnic conflict between Kosovo's two principal ethnic communities, the Albanians and Serbs, has been deep and persistent. It would be inaccurate, however, to explain such conflict as a product of primordial or immutable "hatreds" that constitute the entire fabric of ethnic relations in the region. Thus, periods of nonviolent Serb-Albanian interaction, and even, at times, intergroup cooperation at both the mass and elite levels, also formed an integral part of the region's history. Indeed, the fact that episodic interethnic coexistence and also violent intergroup conflict, have both been features of Kosovo's history, is an important dimension of the complex South Balkans that is frequently lost in the contemporary swirl of contending interests and propaganda about the region.

Both Albanians and Serbs alike regard Kosovo as part of their national patrimony, a critical zone in their early historical development as peoples, and also seminal in their respective nineteenth century national awakenings. This dual claim to Kosovo has been at the core of conflict between the two ethnic communities. For most Albanians, the Serbs are relatively recent interlopers in the Balkan peninsula whose medieval control of Kosovo hardly serves as a basis for Serbian claims of permanent territorial ownership. Ismail Kadare, a leading Albanian writer and poet expresses the emotional character of Albanian-Serb differences over the "facts" regarding Kosovo.

Any discussion on Kosovo today begins with the cliché: `sacred territory for the Serbs'; `the cradle of the Serb nation'.... The core of the [Serb] mythology goes as follows: at the time of the Battle in 1389, the Serbs were in a majority in a region that was at the heart of their Kingdom; the Albanians only came into the territory after the Battle. This is a crude distortion and its effect in any public discussion on TV or elsewhere is to preempt any Albanian from putting across a different view or attempting some clarification of history.... The Battle of Kosovo was not a confrontation solely between Serbs and Turks. It was a battle fought by all the people of the Balkans united against an invader. All the histories list the names of the Balkan peoples who fought alongside one another against a common disaster: Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, and Romanians.... The Battle, which should have been preserved in memory as a symbol of friendship between the Balkan peoples, was appropriated exclusively by criminal Serbs to serve their purposes.

In contrast, most Serbs hold Kosovo in special regard because it is the site where their state was first created and flourished (from the twelfth to the fifteenth century), a development that occurred well before the Albanians--who had settled in the Balkan peninsula earlier than the Serbs--contemplated such a state-building goal. "Kosovo is the cradle of the medieval Serbian state," the Serbian writer Dobrica Cosic points out, "with Christian relics which have a high artistic value. Kosovo is the source of major epic poetry and is the precious receptacle of the Serbs' spiritual identity. It is not a piece of land, it is the Serb identity. With the loss of Kosovo [near the end of the twentieth century], the Serb people has been spiritually mutilated." Albanians not only came late to the process of state-building, but are also often viewed by Serb ultranationalists as a primitive people who accomplished little through their own energies, failed to appreciate the benefits of Serb "civilization," and who after, in large part, embracing the religion of the Ottoman conquerors, ruthlessly collaborated in the subjugation of the area's non-Islamic population. Thus, throughout and beyond the apogee of Ottoman rule, many Serbs have regarded the period of Islamic control over the Balkans as a joint Turkish--Albanian enterprise, in which non-Muslims, although enjoying a measure of ecclesiastical autonomy, were--depending on the period and the region of imperial rule from Constantinople--subjected to various measures of cruelty, discrimination, and repression. Indeed, in Serbian popular imagination, the Albanians are often substituted for the Ottoman Turks when assigning responsibility for the Serbs' 1389 military setback in Kosovo. For the Serbs, the battle of Kosovo was not just a defeat to be avenged, but also an event to celebrate the valor of the Serbs exhibited in defending Orthodox Christian and "Western" civilization. As such, the myth of Kosovo evolved into a "philosophy of suffering," a case of national victimization, the "Serbian Golgotha," sentiments that became central features of Serbian political culture. As one Serbian author has described it, the myth of Kosovo

served as a political program in demands for freedom, unification and [an] independent state, as a patriotic motive when it was necessary to strengthen the confidence in one's own devices, as a war cry when it was necessary to show heroism. It was used in developing moral principles, judging good and evil. On the other hand, it nurtured irrational notions ... it promoted reconciliation to one's fate, fatality and necessity of sacrifice by promising the `Kingdom of Heaven,' it favored death over life ... its role was fatal when it became [a] lifestyle or political program.

In their most emotional and extreme versions, both Serb and Albanian perspectives on Kosovo are often exaggerated, and replete with inaccuracy. For example, relations between Albanians and Turks were not only characterized by frequent cooperation against the Serbs, but also by Albanian-Turk rivalry, and an ongoing pattern of Albanian rebellion against Ottoman power. Indeed, in 1908-1909, Serbs and Montenegrins would assist Albanians in an uprising against Turkish control, while a substantial number of non-Muslim Albanians were enlisted to assist the forces of Serbia-Montenegro in the Balkan wars. Misrepresentations also characterize pro-Albanian interpretations of Kosovo history, which often downplay or glibly dismiss the discrimination and other injuries suffered by Serbs and other non-Muslims under Ottoman rule. Thus, compared to many other authoritarian and imperial regimes, the level of religious toleration and self-government by ethno-religious communities within the Ottoman empire was often impressive. But such relative benefits were hardly a compensation to its subject non-Muslim peoples such as the Serbs, who generally possessed only a second-class citizenship behind Turks, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians of the Muslim faith, and other Islamic communities, and could not erase the deeply engrained negative sentiments stimulated by the reality of such discriminatory rule. Self-confident about the primacy of their claim to Kosovo, Albanians often underestimate or ignore historically shaped Serbian anxieties about living as a political minority in Balkan state units. Moreover, exaggerated claims of intergroup coexistence and tolerance in the history of Kosovo and the Ottoman-controlled Balkans, have often led to a mistaken optimism in current policy-making expectations regarding the prospects for harmonious Serb-Albanian relations. That optimism, just as the policy consequences of the antipodal pessimism that assumes modern Balkan violence is the inexorable outcome of hatreds shaped in the Middle Ages or the early Ottoman period, is one of many issues discussed more fully in the conclusion of this study.

In any event, throughout the twentieth century reciprocal ethnic stereotypes, nationalist myths, and contending collective mindsets, such as those historically exhibited by both Albanians and Serbs, have remained enduring features of the Balkan landscape. More importantly, nationalist ideologues and political activists in the Balkans have typically exploited such perceptions and beliefs in order to mobilize support of their respective ethnic constituencies, and also to legitimate their quest or exercise of power. Such nationalistically rationalized patterns of rule have routinely crystallized into a system of ethno-political stratification, that is, the positioning of ethnic groups on a hierarchy of political power that itself, over time, influences perspectives between and among different ethnic, confessional, and cultural communities.

In the case of Kosovo, the alternating sequence of political domination between Albanians and Serbs, and the strong animosities dividing the two groups, generated in part by the experience that each ethnic community endured under the control of the other, is crucial to an understanding of contemporary conflict in the region. Moreover, the focus of this book--consideration of the emergence, evolution, and eventual demise of the Miloševic regime--is closely connected to the alternation of ethnic elites in Kosovo, and particularly how successive nationalist authorities exercised brutal, discriminatory, or exclusivist policies towards members of ethnic groups who previously held power. In order to provide a historical context for the book's subsequent discussion of the Miloševic regime's development, the present chapter surveys the changing dynamics of power and elite control in Kosovo from the collapse of Turkish rule during the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), to the twilight years of the Titoist regime in the mid-1980s.

Re-conquest and Internal Colonialism: 1912-1940

In the fall of 1912, during the First Balkan War, the newly independent Serbian state re-conquered the Kosovo region from Turkey, thereby achieving a goal that had long been at the core of the Serbian national mindset. Indeed, even before they had failed to stop the Ottoman incursion into the Balkans at the battle of Kosovo, the Serbs had established the first Patriarchate of their Orthodox Church in Kosovo at Pec in 1346. Soon after the battle, legends and religious iconography concerning the fourteenth-century conflict with the Turks became an important underpinning of Serb mythology. As a result, over the next five and a half centuries memories of Kosovo and latent Serbian ethno-nationalism became inextricably linked. It is, therefore, hardly accidental that during the first part of the nineteenth century, the recovery of Kosovo became a central feature in the awakening of Serb national consciousness, including Serb state-seeking aspirations. Thus, only 34 years before the Balkan Wars, during negotiations at the 1878 Congress of Berlin--which recognized Serbia's de jure independence from Ottoman rule (technically achieved a few months earlier under the Treaty of St. Stefano)--Serbian politicians were anguished when they were forced to accept territorial borders that denied them control of Kosovo (only partially and temporarily occupied by Serb troops during the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878). At the same time, however, Montenegro, already de facto an independent kingdom, and composed largely of Slavic inhabitants that constitute a branch of the Serbian ethnic family, was legally recognized as a sovereign state and allocated a small slice of Ottoman-controlled northwestern Kosovo, much to the chagrin of the Albanians. Still, at this point in time, the Serbs of Serbia and their ethnic kinsmen in Montenegro, were not yet territorially connected in one state. The recapture of Kosovo in 1912 was the source of enormous jubilation to the Serbs, who were by now also linked to their Montenegrin brethren in a military alliance. Serbian and Montenegrin authorities also had some success in enlisting Kosovo Albanians--particularly of the Orthodox and Catholic faiths--to join in the anti-Ottoman alliance during the Balkan wars. Serbian troops not only sang "On to Gazimestan," referring to the site of the 1389 battle, but soldiers are said to have reverentially removed their peasant moccasins ( opanke ) when crossing the battleground, and sometimes to have taken bits of soil as a remembrance of the occasion. A journalist chronicling this history and travelling with the Serbian army wrote that: "Mass was held today at Kosovo, and a requiem for Lazar [the King who led the army against the Ottomans in 1389] in the place that he was killed ... the first Christian Orthodox Mass at this site after more than 500 years." As a result of its victories in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, Serbia doubled its territory from 48,300 to 87,300 square kilometers, and increased its population from 2.9 million to 4.4 million. But the socio-economic toll on the country was horrific, and together with subsequent losses in World War I, would have an important influence in strongly reinforcing the already deeply felt sense of victimization characterizing Serbian political culture.

But by fulfilling their national dream and militarily seizing Kosovo at the end of 1912, Serbia had temporarily extinguished the hopes of Albanian state-seeking forces. Indeed, it was in Kosovo at Prizren in 1878 that the Albanians had established their first national movement, which aimed at achieving, if not full state independence, at least a unified Albanian zone within the Ottoman Empire (hopefully by linking four Turkish administrative units into one political entity). From 1908 to 1912, Albanian insurgents had successfully waged a rebellion against the Turks, and eventually were promised a quasi-independent status for their ethnic community in the Balkans. That Albanian entity, or virtual state, would have included the territory of Kosovo. In brief, during the late nineteenth century, and the first decade of the twentieth century, Kosovo had become the epicenter for efforts by Albanian intellectuals and political activists to reawaken "Albanianism" as a basis for state formation. Thus, while Serbia celebrated the conquest of Kosovo in 1912, and, together with Montenegro and Greece, also managed to temporarily seize parts of northern Albania, the disparate consequences for Serbs and Albanians associated with the end of Ottoman power in the Balkans opened a new chapter in interethnic antagonism. The Serbs' long-awaited revenge for their fourteenth-century national "defeat" by the Turks was accomplished, but at the expense of Albanian nationalist goals, and the traumatic territorial division of the area's ethnic Albanian population. Instead of becoming part of the independent Albanian state established in November 1912, Kosovo was reincorporated into the Serbian Kingdom. This new reality seriously exacerbated the preexisting Serb-Albanian ethnic conflict, spawning episodes of intercommunal violence that would wax and wane throughout the entire twentieth century.

The ferocity of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 was a further stimulant to Serb-Albanian conflict. One of the most fascinating accounts of the actual course of military activity and civilian suffering during the wars was offered by the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, who covered the war as a journalist for a Ukrainian newspaper. Trotsky, drawing on his own experience in the region, and also other eyewitness accounts, not only treats the war as a story of how "Turkish despotism" was overcome, but also how the various Balkan states--Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece--utilized "their own barbarous methods [in] destroying that despotism." Trotsky's revolutionary Marxist political agenda was to reveal how the large and small capitalist countries (Russia and the "Balkan dynasties"), who either supported or carried out the war against Turkey, were compromised by the atrocities committed during the struggle. But he also provides an important glimpse of the character and political context of the 1912-1913 wars. He concludes, for example, that the "Bulgars in Macedonia, and the Serbs in `Old Serbia' (Kosovo), in their national endeavor to correct data in the ethnographical statistics that are not quite favorable to them, are engaged quite simply in systematic extermination of the Muslim population in the villages, towns and districts." But Trotsky extensively quotes from the observations of a Serbian officer, who claimed that "responsibility for atrocities lies, however, only to a minor extent with the regular forces." Rather he blames irregular militia elements (chetniks), a mixture of "intellectuals, men of ideas, nationalist zealots," as well as "isolated individuals.... thugs, robbers" and those "who had joined the army for the sake of loot. They sometimes came in handy because they held life cheap--not only the enemy's but their own as well."

Trotsky also relies upon the same officer's description of the Albanians. Thus, although the Serb officer acknowledges the Albanians' "courage," he adds that such "bravery of theirs is of a quite particular sort.... They throw themselves impetuously into an attack, reckless of the consequences, smashing everything they can, utterly ruthless in their onslaught and in slaughtering the vanquished." As for the atrocities against Muslims committed by the irregular militia, Trotsky points out that such undisciplined activity caused the Serbian Army command to "disband them [the militia] even before the end of hostilities, although the Bulgarian Army command did not do likewise."

Serbia's long-awaited reintegration of Kosovo was soon interrupted by the destabilization and widespread destruction of Southeastern Europe during World War I. The young Serbs whose "tyrannicide" in Bosnia would precipitate the First World War in 1914 were in part motivated--as so many other Serbian activists in the decades of the preceding century--by the Kosovo myth's heroic notion of expelling the foreign enemy from Serbian soil. But in the course of battle, Serbia was once again forced to cede control of Kosovo to foreign powers, this time Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria. Many of the Albanians of Kosovo, who had been under Serbian rule for only a few years, viewed the new occupying forces as liberators. Serbian authorities had treated Albanians of the Muslim faith particularly harshly between 1912 and 1914, and many had been forcibly converted to Catholicism or Orthodoxy. Meanwhile, the heavy loss of human life among Serbian civilians fleeing from Kosovo, together with the brutality inflicted by the occupation armies and authorities of the Great Powers on the Serbs throughout the South Balkans, provided a fresh impetus to Serbian nationalism and revanchism. John Reed, the American journalist, later famous for his observation of and association with the Russian revolution, visited Serbia in 1915, and commented on the Serb view of Kosovo and Macedonia:

The secret dream of every Serb is the uniting of all the Serbian people in one great Empire ... every peasant soldier knows what he is fighting for. When he was a baby his mother greeted him `hail, little avenger of Kossovo' ... when he had done something wrong his mother reproved him thus: `not that way will you deliver Macedonia!'.... Now Kossovo is avenged and Macedonia delivered, within the lifetimes of these soldiers who listened to their mothers and never forgot their `brothers, numerous as grapes in the vineyard.' An old officer that we met later said, with a sort of holy enthusiasm: `we thought that this dream of a great Serbia would come tree--but many years in the future, many years. And here it is realized in our time! This is something to die for!"

Travelling and interviewing throughout Southeastern Europe, Reed observed that "the salient characteristic of Balkan peoples is bitter hatred of the nearest aliens." He also expressed concern about the future of the Serbs, with their ethnic pride that he had come to admire, and their recent struggle for independence (1804-1878): "While such a stock, with such a history, with the imperialistic impulse growing daily, hourly in the hearts of her peasant soldiers, into what tremendous conflicts will Serbia's ambition lead her!"

The defeat of the Central Powers in World War I opened the way for politicians from victorious Serbia to spearhead the formation of a broader South Slav or "Yugoslav" state, in what was initially termed the "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes" (and beginning in 1929 the "Kingdom of Yugoslavia"). Kosovo was re-liberated by Serbia, but not without a heavy loss of Albanian life at the hands of the returning Serbian army. Administratively, Kosovo became an integral part of the Serbian-controlled sphere within the new and highly centralized Kingdom. Revealingly, Kosovo, together with most of present day Macedonia, comprised part of a single administrative unit termed "South Serbia" by the authorities in the new state. Meanwhile, Montenegro, whose royal dynasty had been deposed by its citizens (prompted and assisted by the regime in Belgrade), also joined the new South Slav Kingdom in 1918. Thus, for the first time since the medieval period, Montenegrins were politically and territorially united with other Balkan Serbs within a single independent state unit.

The ethnically Serbian royal dynasty and political oligarchy that would control interwar Yugoslavia eagerly welcomed the opportunity to begin systematically implementing Belgrade's control over "liberated" Kosovo for the first sustained period since the fourteenth century. Kosovo, after all, had enormous historical significance for the Serbs, and also for the Montenegrin branch of the Serbian ethnic community, that went far beyond the region's small size and population (approximately 11,000 square kilometers, with a population of approximately 439,000 in 1921 and 552,000 in 1931). But at the beginning of the interwar period, approximately two-thirds of Kosovo's inhabitants were ethnic Albanians, nearly three-quarters of whom belonged to the Muslim faith. Only about one-quarter of the region's population were ethnic Slavs, overwhelmingly Serbs, who were adherents of the Orthodox faith. Regrettably, the suffering experienced by both the Serb and Albanian ethnic communities during the Balkan wars and World War I poisoned relations between the two groups at the very time they were beginning a period of mutual coexistence in a single post-Ottoman state framework. The attitude of the new Kingdom's authorities in Belgrade toward the future structure of power in Kosovo only exacerbated difficulties that were already quite evident.

Adopting an official strategy toward cultural diversity that accorded Serbs the paramount position in the area, Belgrade's central government set out to "Serbianize" Kosovo through demographic engineering and political manipulation. In the same way that the Ottoman authorities up to 1912 had encouraged the colonization of Kosovo by Albanian Muslims from elsewhere in the Balkans, the Yugoslav regime during the 1920s sponsored the migration of Serbs and Montenegrins into the region as a means "to correct the national composition of the area." In 1928 the top administrator responsible for the colonization of South Serbia claimed that in some places the central government's policy had significantly changed the "ethnic composition of the entire region," noting that in 1913 there were areas in which "there had been not a single Serbian inhabitant." By 1940 approximately 18,000 Slavic families had been settled in Kosovo, many relocated from impoverished areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro, as a reward for their service to Serbia in the World War.

Although labeled as a "national minority" in interwar Yugoslavia, the Albanian population of the country was denied any legitimate political symbols or channels for the expression of their corporate identity as a separate ethnic group. Albanians could risk voting for one or another of the Muslim political parties, as many did during the more liberal period of interwar rule (1918-1928). But any advocacy of union with neighboring Albania, or support for the political autonomy of the Kosovo region and the Albanian population within the Yugoslav state, was regarded by the authorities as outright subversion. The fact that Kosovo was of considerable significance to the history and goals of "greater Albanian nationalism" only made Serbian politicians more intransigent in their treatment of minority issues. All leading positions of administrative authority in the region were in the hands of ethnic Serbs appointed by the central government. The intention of the regime in Belgrade was not to aggressively assimilate the overwhelmingly non-Slavic population, i.e., by conversion to the Serbian nationality in a cultural or religious sense, but rather to maintain and expand the presence and political hegemony of the Serbs in Kosovo while suppressing any trace of non-Serb national consciousness. Faced with brutal and heavy-handed treatment, first from the Serbian and Montenegrin armies during the wartime liberation of Kosovo (during 1912 and 1917-1918), and later from the local gendarmerie, many Albanians fled the country while others resorted to traditional forms of Balkan guerrilla resistance against governmental authority. One of the most popular anti-regime organizations among the Kosovars in the early post-war years was the Kachak movement, composed mainly of Albanian emigrants receiving support from Italy. Employing tactics that resembled a bandit organization as much as a national liberation movement, Kachak leaders launched attacks on Serb officials, and offered a refuge for young Albanians who refused to cooperate with the authorities. Such Albanian rebel bands were not effectively suppressed by the regime until the mid-1920s, after the mass detention of family members who could only be ransomed by the surrender of their outlaw relatives. These measures, predictably, only increased anti-Serb sentiments. Thus, many discontented Albanians throughout the interwar years continued to join the various organizations advocating union with Albania. The majority of Kosovars, however, adopted a substantially passive role towards the Serb authorities, and waited for a future opportunity to express their opposition to, and secure some type of autonomy from, Belgrade's control.

The elite structure of Kosovo during this period reflected both the area's extreme backwardness, and also the pattern of political domination in the province. Indeed, it is difficult to even point to a very sizeable or truly indigenous elite in the region. The end of Ottoman power and wartime chaos witnessed the exodus of Turkish officials from Kosovo, along with many Albanian Muslims from urban areas who had either served in the region's civil administration or had been members of the small mercantile community (skilled artisans, small merchants, etc.). As a result of elite and mass out-migration during this period, the population of Kosovo actually decreased by about 60,000 between 1913 and 1920. This vacuum was soon filled by an influx of Serbian civil, military, and police officials, together with a contingent of skilled technicians to run the region's minuscule industrial structure. Meanwhile, many of the largest and choicest tracts of agricultural land previously owned by Turkish and Albanian families were divided by the authorities among the new Serbian and Montenegrin colonists. For example, Nikola Pašic, one of the country's first prime ministers (formerly the prime minister of Serbia), appropriated 3,000 hectares of land for himself near one of the region's most historic sites.

The most striking characteristic of Kosovo's elite structure between the two world wars was not so much its small size, but its ethnic composition. A largely imported Serbian intelligentsia, itself undergoing the first stage of elite development, was ruling the region's population, composed largely of Albanian peasants and proletarians. This pattern of a regional ruling class drawn from one ethnic group, and a subordinated class from another ethnic background, closely resembles what has been described as a system of "internal colonialism," and is typically found in states with marked regional economic disparities. The most distinctive feature of internal colonialism is the attempt by a more modernized core group from one culture to establish a persistently discriminatory system of stratification upon less modernized groups from other cultures. In this way a system of objective cultural differences is superimposed upon--or merged with--class divisions, thus creating what has been termed a "cultural division of labor." Many dimensions of the internal colonialism model were exhibited in the elite structure and ethnic politics of the Kosovo region at this time. One might even say that a good deal of Albanian group consciousness and "reactive" political nationalism up to and beyond 1940 resulted from the prevailing cultural division of labor in Yugoslavia. Indeed, to extend the model further, the status of the Albanians in interwar Yugoslavia was not unlike the colonial position earlier accorded the Serbs by their Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian imperial rulers in different sections of the Balkans. Thus, the pre-1912 Serbian "national liberation movement" against foreign predominance in the cultural division of labor could also be considered an example of reactive ethnicity. The success of Serbian arms during 1912-1913, and again in 1918, had simply established a new pecking order in the South Balkan subregion.

The educational system, a key factor in political and economic development, both reflected and reinforced the colonial status of "South Serbia" and its predominantly Albanian population. The central authorities in Belgrade were primarily concerned with the political mission of Kosovo's school system, namely, cultivating loyalty to the new government in Belgrade, and not with expanding educational opportunities. The language of instruction was Serbian, and every effort was made to restrict the development of an Albanian national consciousness. But with only about 30 percent of eligible children actually receiving an education in the region, the school system did not actually play a significant a role in the political socialization process. Over 90 percent of the Albanian population was illiterate and only about two percent of the eligible Albanians were enrolled in secondary schools. There were no higher education facilities in the region, and only a handful of Albanian students attended universities elsewhere in Yugoslavia or abroad. While the interwar regime had a better record than their Turkish predecessors regarding educational development, such progress still had little effect on modernization or elite formation in Kosovo.

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Serpent in the Bosom

0813329027

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