Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

96 THE BEGINNING OF THE END
rank members. The leadership of the Democratic League, with Rugova at the
helm, held to a policy of nonviolence, which was more or less forced upon them
anyway, because the Albanian population of Kosovo had almost no weapons and
Albania showed little enthusiasm for allowing itself to be dragged into a conflict
in Kosovo. The international community showed ever greater inclination to
forget about Kosovo, conceptualizing the situation variously as an internal
Serbian problem or as a humanitarian problem or perhaps as a minority question.
But the Kosovo question cannot be reduced to any of these formulations:
Kosovo’s position, described in the Yugoslav constitution of 1974 as a
constituent factor of Yugoslavia, included its independent participation in the
sovereignty of the common state. Therein lay an element of Kosovo’s own
sovereignty. Any effort to resolve the Kosovo problem will have to proceed from
this essential fact.