Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

FATEFUL WEAKNESSES 29
partly reactionary-communist, partly reactionary-nationalist groups, combining
their own peculiar visions of communism with romantic views about national
unification. They had taken for their model the stone-age communism of
Albania’s Enver Hoxha, without even understanding it. They believed that by
taking over this model and through the unification of Albanians, the economic
and national questions of all Albanians could be solved. 83
It was not the authorities in Kosovo who opposed the contacts with Albania. In
1972, the representatives of Kosovo agreed, at the all-Albanian Orthography
Congress in Tirana, to adopt the Tosk literary language which was used in
Albania. In the late 1970s, a group of professors from Tirana, mainly in the
natural sciences, was teaching at the University of Priština. It was the regime of
Enver Hoxha in Albania which was against any widening of contacts; the Hoxha
regime was concerned lest the freer, more open atmosphere in Kosovo, where
religious practice was free, could have a disintegrative effect on Albania.
Refugees from Kosovo were isolated and locked up in Albania, and often turned
over to the Yugoslav authorities.
In the course of a visit to Albania in 1982, I was able to verify that a verbally
duty-conscious national solidarity with Kosovo was being professed, but that the
atmosphere was characterized by distrust and aversion. Sofokli Lazri, the former
chief editor of the party organ Zeri i Popullit and later director of the Institute for
Foreign Policy, said that Mahmut Bakalli himself had told him that Tito had
given the Kosovar Albanians a free hand in the development of relations with
Albania; in this regard, Bakalli observed that the construction of this relationship
had to be accompanied by a general improvement in relations between Albania
and Yugoslavia. This had awakened the suspicion in Tirana that Tito wanted to use
the Kosovar Albanians to soften the regime in Albania. The result was distrust in
the relationship. Albania—as Lazri said—did not want to get directly involved in
Kosovo; this problem had to be solved within the framework of Yugoslavia, and
Albania was interested in a stable Yugoslavia. It was not possible to confirm any
direct sympathies on the part of the demonstrators in Kosovo for the Enver Hoxha
regime; the national impulse was decisive. 84
From whatever side one considered things, one was driven to the conclusion
that it was hard to characterize the Kosovo demonstrations of 1981, in contrast to
those of 1968. Meanwhile, these latter demonstrations had a catastrophic effect
on the situation of Kosovo’s Albanians, as well as on the entire subsequent
development of Yugoslavia. The reaction of the Albanian leadership in Kosovo
was equally catastrophic. In their firm faith in a federal, socialist Yugoslavia and
in their categorical view that the future of Kosovo was indissolubly linked with
socialist Yugoslavia, they reacted to the irrational mutiny of parts of their
younger elite against the Yugoslav path with counterforce. The province’s
leaders believed they could wash the “stain” of the demonstrations from their
garments, in order to rejoin the Yugoslav socialist ranks once more. The
leadership’s administrative methods weakened the solidarity and thus also the
capacity for political resistance on the part of the Kosovar Albanians within the