yugoslavias implosion

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ChApter 1
While serving as a member of the Serbian lcy Central Committee
in the late 1960s, and wielding considerable influence both within
the party and outside it, Ćosić was the first to publicly oppose “Albanian
nationalism,” which consisted of demands for greater equality
for Yugoslavia’s ethnic Albanians. At the fourteenth session of the
League of Communists of Serbia Central Committee, Ćosić challenged
the fundamentals of the party’s national policy. This marked
the beginning of the switch from Yugoslavism to the advocacy of
Serbian unity. Ćosić and the historian Jovan Marjanović impugned
Albanian demands as a manifestation of nationalism, Albanian centralism,
separatism, and anti-Serbdom; they were expelled from the
Central Committee in May 1968.
Ćosić advanced the thesis that ethnic Albanians as a nation
had the right to unite and should be supported to that end. Aware
that Serbia was no longer able to keep Kosovo under its control, he
argued that Serbs had the same right; he suggested that a division
of Kosovo would be the best solution for Serbia. Ćosić believed that
Serbia should be content with the acquisition of Vojvodina and that
it had no demographic potential to hold its own against the ethnic
Albanian population’s explosion in Kosovo.
Following his 1968 expulsion from the Serbian lcy Central Committee,
Ćosić firmly embraced the nationalists to become the chief
middleman between the nationalists and the dogmatic wing in the
party. The Serbian Literary Society, which Ćosić presided over in
1969–71, and the Praxis Movement threatened the existing regime and
President Tito. These groups favored a nationalistic and/or dogmatic
(Stalinist) attitude toward political developments in Yugoslavia.
The Serbian Literary Society became the bastion of the Serbian
nationalist opposition, insisting that any major changes should
be postponed until after Tito’s death in the hope of raising the Serbian
question then without much of a problem. After becoming its
autora (Group of authors), (Belgrade: Helsinki Committee for human Rights in Serbia, 2008)