yugoslavias implosion

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ChApter 3
Albanians have been the majority population in Kosovo. After being
part of the Ottoman Empire for five hundred years, Kosovo was liberated
and reclaimed for Serbia in 1912, according to the Serbs, or was
reoccupied, according to the Albanians. Such contrasting views set
the stage for cycles of violence and reprisal throughout the twentieth
century.
This twentieth-century history repeated a pattern established
long before, a pattern evident during Ottoman rule and reinforced
by the state frontiers delineated in the nineteenth century. As a commission
of independent intellectuals from Belgrade whose intention
was to demystify official Serbian statements about Kosovo commented
in 1990, “Kosovo has traditionally been the scene of revolt,
expulsion, ‘induced’ as well as forced emigration, colonization,
punitive expeditions and, of course, violence. In this process previous
domination by one side was always held out as the pretext and the
justification for domination by the other.” 315
In 1913, the International Balkans Commission of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace published a report that
explained the causes and described the conduct of the Balkan Wars
of 1912–13, and concluding that the conflict had been “fanned by virulent
nationalisms.” 316 The Serbs’ objective was the destruction of
non-Serbs, and they used brutal methods to pursue that goal. Dimitrije
Tucović, leader of the social democratic movement in Serbia, 317
wrote about these atrocities at length, specifically the massacre at the
village of Luma (now in Albania) in 1913:
The reserve officers, who had received the order to burn the village
down and to put all they found in it to the knife, resisted in vain; they
315 Report of the Independent Commission, Kosovskičvor: drešiti ili seći? (The
Kosovo knot: to untie or to cut?), Chromos, Beograd, 1990 .
316 Report of the International Commission, To inquire into the causes and conduct
of the Balkan Wars, published by the Endowment, Washington, D .C ., 1914 .
317 Tucović died in World War I in the battle of Kolubara, in 1914, as an officer of the Serbian Army .