Page 857 - Kosovo Metohija Heritage
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viet republics. The notion of a “3-tribe nation,” of the unity of the Yugoslav “tribes,” and their aspiration toward unity, had already been changed by 1923 to the idea of Yugoslavia as the fruit of the “imperialist war” and the “Versailles sys- tem” according to the views of the Comintern and the Bal- kan Federation, a branch of the Comintern, in which the Bulgarians played a leading role. Not five years after the creation of Yugoslavia, the Third National Conference of the YCP formulated a definite thesis on “Serbian hegemo- ny” as the internal imperialist basis and essence of the Yu- goslav state, where all non-Serbian nationalities (albanian was mentioned as one) were being oppressed and destroyed. emphasizing the right to self-determination, in principle the right to “uniting with one’s national state,” was also rec- ognized. The 5th Congress of the Comintern in 1924 passed a decision dissolving Yugoslavia as a state and opposing its future constitutional revision or reorganization, consider- ing that Yugoslavia was one of the spearheads of anti-Sovi- etism and counter-revolution. Under the Comintern deci- sion, the solution lay in secession by Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia, and their formation as independent states. True, on the intra-Party level, the YCP did oppose this, but never once did it, or any faction within it, dispute the initial prem- ise, especially where it touched on Serbia as an “oppressor.” The Comintern decisions contain calls for tactical differ- entiation between the nationalism of “oppressed nations” and that of “oppressor nations” with the result that the fight against “Serbian nationalism” becomes the main task of the Yugoslav Communist Party, and particularly the Ser- bian Communists in Serbia. at the same time, help should be given to every separatist, anti-Yugoslav and anti-Serbian nationalist movement in Yugoslavia (5th expanded Plenum of the Comintern international Committee, 1925).
The idea of dissolving Yugoslavia was worked out in fine detail in decisions of the YCP’s 4th Congress (Dresden, 1928). according to these decisions, Yugoslavia was to dis- solve into individual separate states—Croatia, Montene- gro, Macedonia, and Slovenia, (Serbia was not mentioned), while the Hungarian and albanian national minorities were to break away, because their lands had supposedly been “annexed” by the Serbian bourgeoisie. Cooperation was sought with the Greater-albanian Kosovo Committee (just as support was offered to the Croatian Ustashas in Lika, 1932). Thereafter, combinations of the number of “inde- pendent” states and the manner and consequences of the dissolution of Yugoslavia constantly altered, but even in 1934 the Serbs in Yugoslavia outside Serbia (and explicitly in Kosovo) were still looked upon as “occupiers” who must be “driven out.”
The turnabout in Comintern, or rather Soviet policy, in favor of a “Popular Front” in 1935, when the danger from Fascism became all too apparent, also led to changes in YLC policy toward the Yugoslav state in order to reach a coalition of anti-Fascist forces: the integrity of Yugoslavia had to be protected, future relations between the Yugoslav
The Kosovo Question— Past and Present
nations were to be put on a federal basis, and the Fascist separatism of the Ustashas and pro-Bulgarian VMRO (in- ternal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization) was now condemned. This change of tactics (as this turnabout was defined in the YLC of the time) still did not mean any revi- sion of the basic tenet that the chief enemy was “Greater- Serbian hegemony.” in distancing itself from the Comin- tern, the Yugoslav Communist Party was slow to abandon the cornerstone of its views on relations between the Yu- goslav nations. This was evident at the 5th National Confer- ence of the YCP in Zagreb (1940). achievement of the right to self-determination, with the right to secession, was re- served for the future, yet the albanians of Kosovo and Me- tohija and even those of the Sanjak continued to be consid- ered an “oppressed minority,” a people tyrannized by the Serbian bourgeoisie.
in the course of the National Liberation War the whole complexity of the League’s political inheritance, including the albanian question, was thrown into relief. Since 1939 the YCP had been trying to help the Communists of alba- nia to organize their own party—which came into being in 1941. However, in late 1943 there was already a visible pen- etration of ideas on a Greater albania in the albanian Com- munist Party leadership and the country’s National Libera- tion army, but also in the movement led by the Yugoslav Communist Party in Kosovo. The attitude of albanian Com- munists toward the nationalist and quisling organization Balli Combetar, which was founded on the idea of gather- ing together all albania’s national forces under German occupation and on such slogans as “an ethnic albania,” was echoed in the conclusions of the Conference of the Provin- cial National Liberation Committee for Kosovo and “Duk- adjin” (the albanian term for a territory wider than Meto- hija). This meeting was held outside Yugoslavia in the town of Bujan in northern albania over New Year, 1944. Thread- ing its way through these conclusions was the old formula- tion about the desire of albanians in Kosovo and Metohija for secession, or, more precisely, for union with their na- tional state albania.
The conclusions from this Conference were opposed to the decisions of the 2nd anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation (aVNOj) held in jajce on 29 November, 1943. Criticized by the YCP’s Central Committee in March 1944, they were, nonetheless, at no time explicitly revoked. at the time the YCP pursued a policy based on the constitu- tional and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia as an interna- tional subject. Between the 1st (1942) and 2nd (1943) Ses- sions of aVNOj, we learn from sources available today that there was already a clear prospect of disagreement with Stalin’s policy. Consequently, the Yugoslav line followed by the YCP during the war was not an implementation of a new Soviet tactic, but the expression of its own emancipa- tion. Both legally and politically, the decisions of aVNOj, refusing to recognize the occupiers’ partition of Yugosla- via, while making no mention of the future autonomy of

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