yugoslavias implosion

1990, he had insisted in meetings with members of the new Serbian
regime that “Kosovo cannot be kept” and that it was a historical fact
that “Serbs are moving north, they are vacating the south.” He had
argued that the Serbs should “leave the south but keep control only
over the coal and some holy shrines in Kosovo such as Gračanica
Monastery and Gazimestan,” and suggested that a plan to partition
Kosovo and Metohija ought to be “worked out in secret and then
activated at an opportune time.” 449
Discussing the future of Kosovo, Ćosić told a meeting of the
Holy Synod in November 1998 that “Kosovo as territory is lost. We
ought to fight to preserve the Christian monuments and the remaining
Serbian enclaves there.” He believed that the “outlying municipalities
containing the Serb population ought to be attached to the
mother country where they once were” and that the purpose of the
wars fought in the previous decade was to create a new Serbian state
spreading to the northwest:
A period of territorial-ethnic recomposition and consolidation of Balkan
space is upon us, a period of forced adaptation we shall have to
accept as a fact of life. The epochal changes being wrought have led the
Serb people into a position where they will have to press together on a
territory where they can live, which they can cover with their civilization,
and where they will pose no threat to anyone. Even a calamity like
this is beginning to bear something useful, i.e. the settling down of these
regions in ethnic terms. The Serb people are integrating (hopefully just
that) and homogenizing; they are consolidating and rounding off their
living space within emerging ethnic borders. This change is dictated by
the establishment of a nation state whose territory can be disputed only
by aggressors. In other words, we are forced to create a state commensurate
with our own size and strength. 450
we cannot win .” As quoted in Slavoljub Đukić, Lovljenje vetra, Belgrade, 2001 .
449 Ćosić as quoted in Borisav Jović, Poslednji dani SFRJ (The Last Days of the SFRY), p . 194 .
450 Slavoljub Đukić, Lovljenje vetra, Belgrade, 2001 . p . 252 .
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