Byzantine Blog

Nora Beloff on Forgotten Kosovo, the Not-So-Distant Past

Following is an excerpt (pp210-214) from Nora Beloff’s book “Tito’s Flawed Legacy: Yugoslavia & the West Since 1939,” published by the Westview Press in Boulder CO, 1985, about the Kosovo province’s not-so-distant past, during the rule and after the death of Yugoslavia’s communist leader Marshall Tito, an ethnic Croat.

Tito died May 4, 1980. Beloff first visited Kosovo in 1979.

Tito’s Flawed Legacy, Chapter 6: Neither Brotherhood nor Unity

After 1968, Kosovo obtained the lion’s share of the federal development funds which became its principal source of investment. [...]

The Pristina college, which had previously been a branch of the University of Belgrade, acquired its own independent status after the 1968 disturbances and, before books were available, it proceeded to build itself a grandiose gold-domed library. At its peak in 1980, it enrolled 45,000 students, so becoming one of the largest in Europe. [...] After 1968 the Albanian language replaced Serb as the first in teaching, and a large number of professors and textbooks were brought in from Tirana [capital of neighboring Albania], storing up trouble for the future. (A. Pipa and S. Repishli, Studies on Kosovo, East European Monographs, New York 1984.)

Within a Decade 100,000 Serbs Ethnically Cleansed from Kosovo

The suddenly demoted Serb minority was seriously threatened by Tito’s transfer to [Albanian, Mahmud] Bakali of the police and the administration. Though a rigorous censorship was enforced to keep the facts from the rest of Yugoslavia, within a decade over 100,000 Serbs were induced or harassed into leaving and the police stood idly by while Serb homes were destroyed and cemeteries desecrated. Visiting Kosovo, Tito warned against nationalists and irredentists: “All these foes have the same aim: to try and provoke dissatisfaction among the Albanians in Kosovo and to sow discord among the multiracial population.”

Large Scale Violence Erupts After Tito’s Death

And indeed, soon after he died, violence erupted again and on a much larger scale. What started as a university demonstration against canteen food developed quickly into a politically inspired insurrection. Army units recruited from all parts of the Federation were rushed in, and after a show of force and several weeks of curfew, order was at least superficially restored. Belgrade reported nine fatal casualties and Tirana reported 1,000. As outside observers were excluded and as neither capital respects “bourgeois” objectivity, the true number remains unknown.

The situation was still explosive when I visited Pristina for the second time in the summer of 1983. Bakali had been ousted from his job but remained free to roam around the city and was warmly applauded wherever he appeared. [...]

Kosovo Albanians Boast About Efforts to Create “Pure Albania”

The censorship was lifted after the 1981 riots and reports began being published about Albanian efforts to eliminate the Serbs in order to create “a pure Albania.” In one almost “pure” Albanian village, the head of the last remaining Serb family had been murdered and his widow and children threatened. A delegation of Serbs called on the President of Serbia, Gen. Ljubisic (formerly Tito’s Defense Minister, later the Serb member of the collective presidency) to seek protection and compensation for the bereaved family. They were told he could not intervene as this was an internal Kosovo affair.

Part of Pec Monastery, the seat of the Serb Patriarch, was burnt down by Albanian terrorists. A local priest told me of the Church’s gratitude to the Communist authorities for financing the reconstruction, but at the same time nuns were informing my Serb driver that village boys threw stones at them and poisoned their cattle. The arsonists were never caught. [...]

Annexation of Territories to Create Greater Albania

But on Kosovo’s demand for its own republic Tito was adamant, and after hearing of continued troubles despite the economic largesses, he paid a visit to Pristina in 1979, to denounce nationalist irredentists. [...]

The Kosovo irredentists are claiming not only republic status for their province but also the annexation of many neighbouring localities where the Albanians are now in a majority and which include Tetovo, Macedonia’s second biggest city.

So much for Kosovo Albanians being “oppressed for decades” by the Vile Serbs who, according to the Western mainstream media, have created “an apartheid” in their southern province, aimed at destroying ethnic Albanians in every way conceivable.

Nora Beloff, Formidable Expert on Eastern Europe and Former Yugoslavia

Nora Beloff (1919–1997), the first woman appointed the Chief Political Correspondent way back in 1964, was a British reporter and author with formidable knowledge about Eastern Europe in general and former Yugoslavia in particular. She joined Reuters in 1945, after working for the French Section of the British Political Intelligence Department. In 1947, she became the Paris Correspondent of The Observer. During the 1950s she served as the newspaper’s political correspondent in Moscow and Washington. She left Observer in 1976 to become and independent reporter, writing mainly on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Nora Beloff’s books include: The General Says No (1963), an account of Britain’s first abortive attempt to join the Common Market; Transit of Britain (1973), a discussion of Britain’s changing role in the postwar world; Freedom Under Foot (1976), her protest against the enforcement of trade union membership for journalists proposed by Michael Foot; No Travel Like Russian Travel [published in the U.S. under the title Inside the Soviet Empire: Myth and Reality] (1979), describing her journey by car across the Soviet Union which ended by her being arrested; Tito’s Flawed Legacy (1985), laying out the post-WWII realities in Tito’s Yugoslavia, built largely at the expense of Serbs, upon the maxim “weaker Serbia, stronger Yugoslavia,” and her last, unfinished book about the forceful break-up of former Yugoslavia, titled Yugoslavia, an Avoidable War (1997).

A three hour documentary based on Nora Beloff’s last book is well worth the time for anyone who wishes to get an objective insight into what really went on in and around former Yugoslavia during the 1990s (Yugoslavia, an Avoidable War documentary, Part 1, Part 2).