BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
The fight for national self-determination of the Albanian
majority in Kosova is historically progressive, up to
supporting the right to separation - independence. The
Albanian struggle for national rights it rooted in the
struggle against imperialist domination. It is crucial to
defending the gains of the Yugoslav revolution of the 1940s
and advancing a course that can unite all working people of
Yugoslavia.
The Balkans region, which had been held as part of the Ottoman empire, was carved up by the capitalist powers in Europe - Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia - in 1912-13.
Following the imperialist slaughter of World War I, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was formed in 1918 by the union of six republics - Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. The country, whose name was changed to Yugoslavia in 1929, was dominated by the Serb monarchy and subservient to imperialist interests, first British and French and by the 1930s increasingly German.
National oppression was enshrined in law. Croats, Slovenes, and Montenegrans were treated as second-class citizens. Albanians in Kosova, which was incorporated as a province of Serbia by the monarchy, had no national rights. Albanian-language schools and publications were forbidden.
During World War II, Yugoslavia was invaded by the German army and its allies in 1941 and chopped up along national lines. Kosova was occupied by Italian soldiers and the rest of Yugoslavia was held by German, Hungarian, and Bulgarian troops.
Armed resistance to the imperialist occupiers soon developed led by the Partisan movement, a national liberation army led by the Communist Party. Its central leader was Josip Broz Tito, who later became head of state. The Partisans drew on workers and peasants of all nationalities and creeds.
The Partisan movement, which grew to a force of 800,000 fighters, spearheaded a struggle by workers and peasants against fascism under a banner that called for equality and mutual respect for all nationalities.
The massive mobilization of working people from every nationality during the struggle against the Nazi occupation led to the overthrow of the landlords and capitalists and the establishment of a workers and peasants government in 1945. This happened despite the instructions of the Stalin regime - which wished above all to maintain an alliance with London and Washington - and the desires of the Moscow-trained leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party.
The new government ordered the confiscation of nearly 80 percent of industry, most banks, and almost all large commercial enterprises. Workers and farmers gained from the land reform, which confiscated the property of the big landlords. The people of Kosova won limited autonomy and the Albanians made some gains in language rights and education.
A workers state, deformed by Stalinism
By the late 1940s, the workers and farmers government had
distributed land to poor peasants, nationalized the means of
production, and established economic planning and a state
monopoly of foreign trade - in short establishing a workers
state. The mobilizations that advanced these anticapitalist
measures, however, did not halt political power from being
consolidated in the hands of a privileged bureaucratic layer.
The initial gains of the revolution were soon undermined by the Stalinist misleadership of the Tito regime, which had opened up the country's economy to imperialist loans and investments. An economic crisis developed in Yugoslavia that was provoked by the worldwide capitalist economic crisis in 1974-75 and by the bureaucratic, anti-working-class methods of planning and management of the government. Economic and social inequalities and national prejudices grew once again as a result.
Kosova remained behind in economic development compared to other regions. In 1980 unemployment in Kosova was three times the national average. Albanians, who comprise 90 percent of the 2.1 million people in Kosova, face widespread discrimination.
As the world capitalist crisis widened, economic and social pressures on Yugoslavia led to disintegration of the Stalinist regime as each wing of the bureaucracy sought to gain control over more resources using nationalist demagogy. The Stalinist rulers in Belgrade launched their chauvinist campaign in Kosova in response to protests by Albanians for better economic conditions and an end to second-class treatment.
Some 500,000 people marched in Pristina for social equality in November 1988. Three months later around 1,300 zinc and lead miners occupied the mines, putting forward similar demands.
Faced with continued mobilizations by workers and students, the government of Slobodan Milosevic revoked Kosova's autonomy status in 1989, which had been won in struggle 15 years earlier. The following year, the regime dissolved the parliament in July and imposed direct rule by Serbian police.
In August 1990 the miners organized an eight-day strike demanding the return of autonomy status. The mines had been nationalized with the victory of the 1945 Yugoslav revolution. In recent years Milosevic government has sought to sell off the substantial mineral wealth of Kosova, which includes coal, silver, bismuth, gold, zinc, and lead.
Since late 1997 the Belgrade regime has stepped up its repression against the Albanians in Kosova. The crackdown began as a response to protests by students and others demanding the reopening of the Albanian-language University of Pristina, which had been shut in 1991. Finding no alternative to ending the assault by Belgrade, the demand for independence has deepened among the majority of Albanians.
"The denial of national rights... weakens rather than strengthens the defense of a workers state," notes the 1990 Socialist Workers Party resolution "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War," published in New International no. 11. "Once Stalinism had transformed the Soviet Union into the opposite of a voluntary federation of workers and peasants republics, its breakup, its disintegration from within, was inevitable. This became a precondition to a new advance of the worldwide struggle for national liberation and socialism." The same holds true in Yugoslavia today.