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War in Kosovo: Milosevic´s Bloody Track

© Peter Weber

Ever since he took his first steps as Serbian leader, the Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic has never changed his attitude and his results have always been the same. When Milosevic came to power as leader of the Serbian Communist Party in the late '80s he first became known to the world for his repressive action against the Albanian minority in the Serbian province Kosovo.

Up to that moment his country, the Yugoslavian Federal Republic, was still one of Europe's biggest nations with 22 million inhabitants. In the decade after state founder Josip Broz Tito's death, after some years of ominous calm, many observers began to believe that the fears for the dissolution of the Yugoslavian federation were somehow exaggerated. By the end of the decade it seemed that the precarious equilibrium of Tito's creation would continue by simple inertia. The landslide started only in 1989, when Slobodan Milosevic took action against the Albanian minority, who lost all of the few autonomies Tito had granted them to counterbalance the extremes of Serbian nationalism. This step was to become the spark that set the house on fire.

Serbian oath in Kosovo

When Milosevic started his political career as leader of the Serbian Communists, destiny had decided that this ideology was already in decline all over Europe. Thus, as a young and ambitious leader, he was forced to seek some kind of legitimisation in other fields and he found it in the renaissance of Serbian patriotism. Milosevic publicly celebrated his conversion in the summer of 1989, when he went to the battlefield in Kosovo, where 600 years earlier the medieval Serbs had lost their lives, their battle and their state to the Ottoman Empire of the Turks. Milosevic promised that never again would the Serbs let themselves be maltreated by other nations. Since then he has always continued to stir up the nationalistic sentiments of his countrymen, never to reap anything but destruction and war.

When he cancelled the autonomy of Kosovo, Milosevic destroyed the complicated equilibrium of barriers invented by the Yugoslavian state founder Tito to contain the Serbian quest for supremacy. Thus, the Kosovo battlefield re-ignited the fire that would lead to the complete dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, leaving a trail of blood and destruction.

The end of Yugoslavia

In fact the other Yugoslavian nations were not willing to accept the Serbian hegemony anymore. Slovenia and Croatia were the first having enough of the new Serbian chauvinism and declared their independence. As a reaction the Yugoslavian army sent in their tanks. The Slovenians quickly threw them out, but in Croatia the conflict escalated and some provinces mainly populated by Serbs remained under Yugoslavian control until 1995, when Croatia's new conservative president Franjo Tudjman finally regained control of them.

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