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Chapter 4 • Nicola Mai
Kosovo would need much more space than the present paper would allow,
some of its key features should be examined, as they are significant and
often recurring themes in the interviews and narratives.
In particular, the emergence of social antagonism in Kosovo should be
understood in relation to the politics of the Yugoslav State concerning the
status of Albanians. Their experience in Yugoslavia follows a history of
prejudice and exclusion at the political level, an all-important area in a
Communist state. Because of their unwillingness to deny their religion and
their perceived implicit “non-Yugoslavian-ness”, Albanians were severely
restrained from joining the Communist Party, and therefore barred from
the levers that controlled the most crucial state apparatus. Even when some
Albanians did manage to enter these places of influence, their roles and
voices were diluted and disproportionate to their demographic and cultural
hegemony in Kosovo. Moreover, as a consequence of the process of
further Serbianization of Kosovo, which was inaugurated with Slobodan
Milosevic’s rise to power in 1989, thousands of Albanians were dismissed
from public employment and party membership. 2
Finally, because of their exclusion from the party-state-dominated centralized
economy, the Albanians came to be at the helm of the informal economic
sector, which they organized and managed. They also resorted to
emigration to Western Europe (mainly Germany or Switzerland) and to
America, to a much greater extent than the Serbs. Gradually, the Albanians
accumulated private fortunes, which contrasted sharply with the policies
and ethics of a supposedly egalitarian regime from which they had been
excluded in the first place. This could not but generate animosity and tension
between the various social actors and groups.
In Kosovo, the fact that Serbs were in control of all of the key political
positions, meant that they were in a position of domination. Although
Albanians were officially granted full political participation, they were
only allowed to express their cultural identity through a formally deethnicized,
but actually and increasingly Serbo-centric cultural and political
order. On the other hand, because of their privileged position in the
informal and private economy (which had come as a consequence of their
marginalization or exclusion from the institutional public sector and state
controlled formal economy) and of their widespread resort to emigration,
the Albanians found themselves in a position of stark economic superiority,
in a period of deep economic crisis in Kosovo. Despite this, their situation
at the margins of political institutions placed them in a very weak
position within an ever Serbianizing and exclusive Yugoslav state. Within
this context, it becomes important for the purpose of present research to
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