BY ANNE HOWIE AND NATASHA TERLEXIS
MITROVICA, Kosovo, Yugoslavia -Shashivar Begu, secretary of the Union of Miners of Kosovo, is fighting for the reinstatement of the 2,750 miners here who were fired in 1990 for their part in opposing the Belgrade regime's withdrawal of autonomous status for Kosovo. Begu is Albanian, like 90 percent of this region's population of 2.1 million. The limited self-determination that had been won in 1974 was the closest thing that Kosovo Albanians have ever had to winning national rights - a republic where education and government are conducted in the Albanian language along with other tongues. "After the blood that has been spilled" in February assaults on Kosovo villages by Serbian forces, "our fight is for independence," Begu declared.

The regime of Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic has begun to implement a program of privatization of the substantial mineral wealth in Kosovo. "These mines have been ours for 50 years," Begu told these reporters in March. They were nationalized with the victory of the mass movement of workers and farmers, which in the 1940s fought arms in hand to free the country from Nazi occupation, and then went on to decisively confront the local landlords and capitalists. That struggle, in which working people of all nationalities fought together, gave the world a glimpse of the critical importance of the defense of national rights as the only road that can lead to the unity of the toilers throughout the Balkans.

The Kosovo Albanians, as well as those living in present- day Albania, western Macedonia, and southern Montenegro, are among the original inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula. All the Balkan nationalities were for centuries subjects of the Ottoman empire and had no borders between them.

Capitalist powers carve up Balkans
The national bourgeoisies that formed in the l8th and 19th centuries led the charge to form capitalist nation- states. They relied on the governments of Austria-Hungary and Italy, or Britain, France, and Russia in their competition for territory. It was these powers that finally carved up the contested Ottoman territories into puppet states and spheres of influence.

An independent Albania was declared on Nov. 28, 1912, in Vlore. But the weak Albanian bourgeoisie, rather than allow the continued peasant mobilizations necessary to carry out redistribution of the land, looked to the imperialist powers engaged in the Balkan Wars at that time for support.

At the London Conference in 1913, representatives of six imperialist powers (Britain, France, the United States, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia ) plus one Albanian formed a committee to organize the new rump Albanian state. It included only 800,000 out of 1.5 million Albanians. The new state eventually became a virtual colony of Italy, so that in 1939 Victor Emmanuel III of Italy also assumed the title of King of Albania. Supported by the victors of World War I, Serbia incorporated Kosovo along with the predominantly Albanian areas of present-day Macedonia and Montenegro, and it became part of the kingdom renamed Yugoslavia in 1929. Yugoslavia was a prison house of nations, dominated by the Serbian monarchy, in which Croats, Slovenes, and Montenegrins were treated as second-class citizens, while Albanians and Macedonians had virtually no national rights at all.

In the period between the two world wars, the capitalist government in Belgrade applied a policy of forced migration of Albanians out of Kosovo, primarily to Turkey, and organized the settlement of Serb families in Kosovo. Albanian-language schools and publications were forbidden. Without the enactment of a land reform, Kosovo, like the rest of southern Yugoslavia, remained economically underdeveloped. When the Nazi armies occupied the region in 1941, Yugoslavia was dismembered along national lines. Kosovo was occupied by Italian troops and annexed to Albania. The rest of Yugoslavia was occupied by the German, Bulgarian, and Hungarian armies. In the non-Serb areas, each occupier claimed to be acting in the interests of national liberation, against Serb domination. In Kosovo, as in Croatia and elsewhere, the puppet regime that was set up undertook "retaliation" against the Serb minority living in the region. For workers and peasants, however, the occupation simply meant that to their poverty and national humiliation was added the brutality of fascist puppet regimes and forced expropriation of their produce.

Partisan struggle unites toilers
Resistance, arms in hand, soon began to erupt here, as it did in neighboring Albania and Greece. The Partisan movement, a national liberation army, led a determined struggle by workers and peasants of every nationality in Yugoslavia, as well as prisoners of war and deserters from occupying armies, in a common struggle against fascism. Numbering 800,000 fighters by the end of the war, its program called for equality and mutual respect for all nationalities.

The Partisan movement was led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY), the only truly national party in the country claiming to speak for the rights of workers and farmers of all nationalities. Headed by Josip Broz Tito, it had become by the time of the war a Stalinist organization that did the bidding of Moscow and sought accommodation with Yugoslavia's capitalist classes rather than their overthrow.

In the face of the threatened invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany, Moscow sought an alliance with the French and British imperialists, and attempted to hold the struggles of workers and peasants around the world hostage to this deal. Soviet premier Joseph Stalin attempted to confine the struggle in Yugoslavia to a fight against the Nazi occupation, in alliance with the Serbian monarchists, known as the Chetniks.

The titanic force of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants under arms proved stronger than the leaderships of either Stalin or Tito, eventually pushing the CPY leadership to reject an alliance with the British imperialists and the Yugoslav monarchy. Up until World War II the CPY did not raise the need for self-determination of those nations oppressed within the borders of Yugoslavia. By 1942, however, under pressure from the masses of toilers Tito was writing in the party's newspaper Proleter, "The current national liberation struggle and the national question in Yugoslavia are inseparably connected. The CPY will never depart from the principle... [of] the right of every nation to self-determination including secession."

Partisan leader Svetozar Vukmanovic (General Tempo) was assigned to strengthen the development of armed units in the areas of Macedonia and Kosovo. "To battle Macedonians, the holy battle for the liberation of your people!" he wrote in his first appeal. "You began your struggle at a time when the illusion was still cherished amongst the broad masses of Macedonian people that the German imperialists and their Bulgarian servants had come as `liberators' from Great Serb tyranny. Today, though, the Macedonian nation is finding that the regime of Great Serb tyranny has only been replaced by a regime of Great Bulgarian tyranny.... Macedonia has only changed its overlords."

Proposals for Balkan federation
In June 1943 representatives of the Yugoslav, Greek, and Albanian partisans proposed founding a Balkan Supreme Command in order to coordinate operations between the three liberation armies. This step would also "remove all difficulties and open the path to the formation of a Balkan Confederation, once the fascist forces of occupation in the Balkans have been expelled." But word came from Tito "not to set up a Balkan headquarters because it is politically inappropriate at the moment," Vukmanovic later explained. The Greek representative likewise never received approval to co-sign the agreement from the Communist Party in the leadership of the Greek Partisans.

The meeting of partisans from three nations had also resolved that in the Kosovo region and in the predominantly Albanian areas of Western Macedonia, "The National Liberation Army of Albania and Yugoslavia simply has to act as one body." It called for the Albanian partisans to send detachments to the area. Acting together, Albanian, Kosovan, and Serb units would "guarantee to the peoples of Kosovo and Metohija that they will decide their future for themselves," said the joint declaration. Again the CPY stepped in against the idea of Kosovo seceding from Yugoslavia to Albania in the name of preserving the unity of the national liberation struggle in Yugoslavia.

The push toward unity in action reflected the wishes of many fighters on the ground. Although it was not conducted formally, de facto collaboration across the borders was widespread. Touring the region in 1943, Captain McDonald of the British government mission observed, "One of the most characteristic features...is the active cooperation of Macedonians, Kosovars, Greeks and Albanians, without any signs of suspicion or intolerance between them."

Stalinists oppose self-determination
As victory drew near, the Anti-Fascist Council of People's Liberation (AVNOJ), the umbrella organization at the helm of the armed struggle, was laying the basis for a postwar government. Its local committee in Kosovo called a congress in December 1943 to set up a civilian authority in the region.

The body of 49 delegates, 40 of whom were Albanians, hailed the formation of the New Yugoslavia and resolved that "Kosovo and Dukagjin [Metohija] form a region in which the Albanian inhabitants preponderate: they, as always, still wish to be united with Albania. The only way for the Albanians of Kosovo and Dukagjin to unite with Albania is through common struggle with the other nations of Yugoslavia against the invaders and their forces, because this is the only way to win freedom, when all nations, including the Albanian, will be free to choose their own destiny, with the right of self-determination including secession." The CPY leadership responded with heavy criticism and instructed its members locally not to proceed with the formation of an Anti- Fascist Council, a local governing body.

Despite the CPY's opposition to their self-determination, by the end of the war there were 50,000 Albanian partisans under arms. These partisans openly revolted against the return of Kosovo to Yugoslavia. Just six weeks after the departure of German troops, Kosovo again found itself under military rule, by 30,000 some fighters of the People's Liberation Army. The military administration established tribunals and summary executions, drowning the revolt in blood.

These policies of the Tito leadership closely parallel those enforced by Stalin in the Soviet Union starting in the late 1920s. Stalin enforced the worst forms of Russian chauvinism in the name of creating a "Soviet Nation." This went counter to the proletarian example set by the Bolsheviks in the early years of the Russian Revolution. V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik party saw the right to self- determination - including secession for the nations oppressed by tsarism - as the only possible road to forging an alliance between the workers and farmers of the oppressed and the oppressor nations. That voluntary alliance could be the only basis for a federated union of soviets.

Workers and farmers in Kosovo benefited from the land reform and the nationalization of industry carried out following the overthrow of the landlords and capitalists and the establishment of a workers and farmers government. About 95 percent of cultivated lands passed into the hands of working peasants, and a progressive taxation system was introduced. In 1948, some 3,100 medium to large enterprises were nationalized, practically the whole of Yugoslav industry. By the late 1940s, a workers state had been established even though deformed at birth by Stalinist domination.

But the mobilizations that won the war and pushed through the anticapitalist transformation could not prevent the consolidation of Tito's Stalinist regime. As political power was more and more concentrated in the hands of a privileged social layer in Yugoslavia, Kosovo's toilers were pushed farther away than those of other nationalities from exercising political power. The Albanians of Kosovo and the fight of the Albanian nation as a whole to unify became a chip in the power struggle over the Balkans between Belgrade, Moscow, and Tirana.

In the Yugoslav constitution of 1946, Kosovo was given only limited regional autonomy. Although important gains were made in the area of language and education, the key area of internal security and all managerial appointments were to be controlled from Belgrade. Using the pretext of suppressing Albanian irredentism, longtime chief of the Federal Police Alexander Rankovic, ordered police pressure on Albanians to emigrate. Between 1954 and 1957 some 195,000 Albanians left for Turkey.

Resistance to national oppression
Simmering resistance in the region flared into mass actions in 1968 and continued into the early 1970s. In the late '60s antibureaucratic struggles rose throughout Yugoslavia that also opposed the U.S.-led war in Vietnam, in the face of official government neutrality. Demonstrations in Kosovo began again to raise the demand for a Kosovo Republic. It was these mobilizations that led to the 1974 revision of the Yugoslav constitution, which recognized Kosovo as an autonomous province within the Republic of Serbia. All residents could now elect a parliament with veto on all issues effecting Kosovo. The Albanian flag came into official use and Albanian-language education became available up to university level. The University of Pristina, where instruction was offered in Albanian and Serbian, had already been established in 1970.

Beginning in 1952, Kosovo was accorded priority in the allocation of funds as an underdeveloped region within Yugoslavia. After 1968, favorable conditions for borrowing from federal banks were instituted. The affirmative action funds used in Kosovo, despite bureaucratic mismanagement and abuse, did advance industrial development, especially in mining.

Tito, however, had opened up the Yugoslav economy to foreign investment and loans from imperialist bank trusts, acting through institutions like the International Monetary Fund long before other regimes in Eastern Europe adopted similar policies. So when the 1974-75 worldwide recession hit, the shock waves sent the Yugoslav economy into drastic decline. Kosovo and other areas that lagged behind the rest of the country in economic development were especially hard hit. National inequalities widened as a result.

On the eve of the mass mobilizations of 1981, Slovenia was six times more developed than Kosovo; at the end of World War II that ratio had been 3 to 1. In 1975 Kosovo's per capita income was 33 percent of the national average. Five years later, it stood at 29 percent. Unemployment was three times the Yugoslav average, and farmers were leaving the countryside in growing numbers looking for jobs in the towns.

In the struggles against the devastating effect of the economic downturn, demands for national rights assumed increasing importance. What started on March 11, 1981, as student protests against poor living conditions at the university dorms turned to mass demonstrations by April 2 of that year demanding republican status. The next day the Yugoslav Army moved in with tanks and armored personal carriers and instituted marshal law for the first time since 1945, resulting in an official count of 12 dead and 150 wounded. Some 140 people were tried and sentenced to a total of 999 years for offenses ranging from writing "Kosovo Republic" on a wall to belonging to an organization seeking secession. While martial law was lifted two months later, the security forces never left the outskirts of the main towns.

Tensions remained high, leading to another round of mass demonstrations in 1989 and yet another clampdown and declaration of martial law. The official count was 28 dead. The 1989 decision by Serbia's national assembly to rescind key aspects of Kosovo's autonomy was an important step in the consolidation of the Milosevic regime in Belgrade and the preparation for an offensive in Slovenia, Croatia, and then Bosnia. While Belgrade fired the opening shots in each of these conflicts, each regime fought for control of territory and resources to maintain the parasitic existence of the layers of the ruling caste loyal to them. And each side sought imperialist collaboration towards the restoration of capitalism, hoping to find itself at the helm.

Faced with continued mobilizations by workers and youth in Kosovo, including strikes by the miners and others, the Serbian government suspended Kosovo's parliament in July 1990 and imposed direct rule through its own police force. The current explosion in the struggle for self-determination is the latest attempt to throw off the yoke of the regime in Belgrade.

The struggles of working people throughout the Balkans, born from the ravages of World War II, led to victorious revolutions in Albania and Yugoslavia. The revolutionary upsurge in Greece was defeated due to the betrayals of the Stalinist misleadership. These mass movements of the oppressed posed once again the possibility of creating a federation of socialist and equal Balkan states. For the first time, they also posed the possibility of uniting the Albanian people across the borders drawn by imperialism after the Balkan Wars and World War II. This window of opportunity was closed by the Stalinist leaderships in Moscow, Belgrade, and Tirana.

The struggle for national rights has flared up once again and has now objectively become a part of the resistance of the toilers of Yugoslavia, including in Serbia itself, against the imperialist-led attempts to restore capitalism. Through this struggle a new leadership can emerge that will reknit the continuity with the Bolsheviks and the best traditions of the Yugoslav revolution.  
 
 
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