Trading with the enemy in Mitrovica, Kosovo. - RUhosting

Conditions have improved and the death toll reduced, but the traditions changed slower. In the 1950's the
Serbian birth rate was almost the same as that of the Albanian population (41 per 1000 vs. 46 per 1000). But
Serbs urbanised faster than Albanians and people living in cities generally have a lot less children than
people living in rural areas. Also, Serbia had the highest abortion rate of entire Europe, 10 times as high as
Kosovo's abortion rate, which shows that some differences in culture had started to exist regarding attitude to
abortion between Albanians and Serbs which started to reflect in the demography. In short, in the 1950's the
birth-rate of both Albanians and Serbs was among the highest of Europe, but the Serbian birth-rate has
become very low due to urbanisation and higher abortion rates while the Albanian birth-rate has stayed
almost the same. This lead to an proportional increase of Albanians in Kosovo (Malcolm, 2002).
All these previously described factors would mount up to a turbulent 1980s in Kosovo. The changing
demography, the shift of more and more important positions to Albanians, the expansion of higher education
among Albanians, the feeling of Serbs that they were being pushed out of Kosovo would all come together
after Yugoslavia's president Tito's death in early 1980. March 1981 can be seen as a starting point of this, as
it saw a chain of Albanian protests. Most of these protests started out of general frustration over living
conditions but quickly became more political, even separatist. The authorities were alarmed and responded
harshly, resulting in at least 9 people dead and over 4000 arrested and sentenced. The authorities of both
Kosovo and Serbia blamed the events on 'counter-revolutionaries'. Tihomir Vlaškalić, a member of the
Serbian Central Committee pointed to the long-term mismanagement of Kosovo's economy as the root cause
of the problem. Sadly, he was ignored, despite all evidence being in favour of his argument. Kosovo had
become 5 times as poor as Slovenia, and the unemployment level in Kosovo was the highest in the entire
country. In this environment were jobs were scarce the still enduring ethnic-imbalance in jobs in favour of
Serbs and Montenegrins may have been extra frustrating for Albanians (Malcolm, 2002). Even though these
protests were bad enough to begin with, Malcolm (2002) argues that an even more damaging process was
starting to take place in inter-ethnic relations:
“But the most damaging effect of the political reaction in 1981 was the way in which it unleashed a new
round of accusations and counter accusations about Albanian and Serbian nationalism. The question of the
'flight' of Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo was raised publicly;..” “What might be called the culture
war was now in full swing”
Both the Serbian media and intellectuals got caught up in this and both were keen on presenting Kosovo
Serbs as victims of Albanian aggression. One popular theme of the Serbian media was, for example, the mass
scale rape of Serbian women by Albanian men. However, an independent team of Serbian lawyers and
human rights experts found in 1990 that the occurrence of rape or attempted rape in the 1980s was much
lower in Kosovo than in Central Serbia - in fact the lowest of entire Yugoslavia - and that in the great
majority of cases the assailant and victim were of the same ethnicity (Oberschall, 2000). These facts did not
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