yugoslavias implosion

“genocide” for the first time, implying an ongoing campaign against
the Serbs in Kosovo. The spc played a prominent role in the preparations
for the commemoration of the 600th anniversary of the Battle
of Kosovo at Gazimestan in Kosovo and at Krka Monastery in Croatia.
The spc saw these events as the “most significant events in the
more recent history of the Serb people,” a revival of Serbian cultural
and national consciousness, and the “awakening of the giant of the
Balkans.” 313
Serbian nationalism fueled efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to recentralize
the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (sfry) under Serbian
domination or to create a new state entirely—one that would
welcome only Serbs. Kosovo, the Serbian nationalists were clear,
must be part of that state, but demographically Kosovo was no by no
means purely, or even predominantly, Serbian. Indeed, the Serbian
proportion of the population of Kosovo was declining. In earlier decades
of the twentieth century, Belgrade had tried and failed to create
a Serbian majority in Kosovo: first, through nationalization and
colonization in the 1920s after the creation of the First Yugoslavia;
and later by expelling the Albanians and Muslim population to Turkey
between 1945 and 1966. 314 In the 1990s, alarmed at increases in the
Albanian population and the effects of the 1974 Constitution, Serbian
nationalists began to cast about for new solutions to the “Albanian
question.”
THE ALBANIAN QUESTION
Ever since the Yugoslav state was founded, Serbs have grappled
with the Albanian question. Serbia views Kosovo as its holy land
and the cradle of Serbdom, yet since the mid-nineteenth century,
313 Radmila Radić, Crkva i “srpsko pitanje”, Srpska strana rata,
ed . Nebojša Popov, Beograd 1996, p .281 .
314 However, about 250 .000 Muslims from Yugoslavia emigrated to
Turkey (Branko Horvat, Kosovsko pitanje, p . 62), of which about
100 .000 were Albanians (Noel Malcolm, Kosovo, p . 323),
195
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