The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

In 1981, one year after Tito’s death, students in Prishtina demonstrated
for better food at the university canteen. Workers all over Kosovo joined
them, and demanded higher wages. The police shot into the demon -
stration and killed thirteen people. The persecution, arrests and torture
of Albanians became an everyday occurrence, they were dismissed
from all important positions and their children expelled from the schools,
since they were no longer allowed to speak Albanian. The deaths in Kosovo
aroused no indignation in the country. In the national pecking order
in Yugoslavia, Albanians were just one rung above the Roma people.
Their demand for the status of a republic was misinterpreted and condemned
as separatism; their poverty was unimportant. Instead, of a
wave of support and helpfulness, an avalanche of Serbian nationalism
was unleashed which labelled the Albanians in Kosovo as intruders.
Later, Miloševic´ would very rapidly destroy the Yugoslav system, without
anyone trying to stop him. The others responsible are those who accepted
the shots at the demonstrators and the persecution of the Albanians
with no great uproar, in fact without any protest. Special police units
from all parts of Yugoslavia participated in the ensuing hunt for the “separatists”.
All those then in leadership must take responsibility for the
fact that all Albanians were treated as terrorists.
Unfortunately, this attitude was also supported by the Serbian Orthodox
Church. In 1945, the communist regime had banished all religious communities,
Christian and Muslim, from public life and nationalized their
property. Now the Orthodox Church returned with a vengeance – in education,
in culture and in the Serbian national consciousness. The clergy
celebrated the “Kingdom of Heaven”, invoked in memory both of the
Serbs killed in Kosovo by the Ottomans 600 years earlier and in the Sec -
ond World War by the Croatian Ustaša. The remains of Prince Lazar, killed
at the Battle of Kosovo, were carried from village to village, from town
to town, along the boundaries of the future Greater Serbia. The church
ideologues fixed three criteria for determining the national boundaries:
recognized ethnically pure Serbian areas, areas with a “Serbian spirit”,
such as Kosovo, where a Serbian kingdom had been founded in the
tenth century and where a number of orthodox monasteries are located,
and areas where there are Serbian graves.
89