A. Plan of the Investigation
What political factors contributed to the idea of Albanian nationalism after the breakup of Yugoslavia that contributed to the Kosovo Crisis of 1999. To determine the political factors that contributed to Albanian nationalism, this investigation will focus on the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia, the social landscape of Kosovo after the breakup and the Kosovo Crisis of 1999. The views of the Albanians and Serbs will be examined to help develop a more contextual understanding of the rise of Albanian nationalism. Only the events that are relevant to the Kosovo War will be explored in this investigation.
To develop this investigation, I will look at a variety of sources including biographies of Slobodan Milosevic, research books on the conflict in Kosovo, and internet sources on Kosovo nationalism.
B. Summary of Evidence
The conflict between the Albanians and Serbs has been a continual issue since the fourteenth century. Ethnic conflicts rose again after the death of Tito who was the leader of Yugoslavia. Tito set up a national Yugoslav government and let the five Slavic nationalities (Serb, Croat, Slovene, Montenegrin, and Macedonian) govern their own part of Yugoslavia which suppressed any ethnic fighting (Andryszewski 14). After the death of Tito in 1980, ethnic conflicts began to come to surface again. Slobodan Milosevic gave a speech to the Serbs in Kosovo saying that “No one will dare to beat you again” (Andryszweski 18). In 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence from Yugoslavia which led to the outbreak of war since the Serb-dominated central government wanted to preserve the state. In 1995, the Dayton Peace Settlement was signed to end the war and Yugoslavia broke apart ove...
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Andryszewski, Tricia. Kosovo: The Splintering of Yugoslavia. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook, 2000
Print.
Malcolm, Noel. Kosovo: A Short History. New York: New York UP, 1998. Print.
Mertus, Julie. Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War. Berkeley, CA: University of
California, 1999. Print
Fromkin, David. Kosovo Crossing: American Ideals Meet Reality on the Balkan Battlefields.
New York, NY: Free, 1999. Print.
Carpenter, Ted Galen. NATO's Empty Victory: A Postmortem on the Balkan War. Washington,
D.C.: Cato Institute, 2000. Print.
Sigler, John C., III. "Albanian Nationalism." Albanian Nationalism. Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Raska and Prizren, n.d. Web. 27 May 2013. .
In 1992 (and with resolutions created earlier) Kosovo's Albanian majority also voted to secede from Serbia and Yugoslavia, hoping to unite with Albania. The conflict in Kosovo could be seen as t...
The last two decades of the twentieth century gave rise to turbulent times for constituent republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, eventually leading them to split apart. There were a number of damaging aspects of past history and of the political and economic circumstances that contributed to the breakup and eventually caused the situation to snowball into a deadly series of inter-ethnic conflicts. Yugoslavia was reunified at the end of the war when the communist forces of Josip Broz Tito liberated the country. Under Tito, Yugoslavia adopted a relatively liberal form of government in comparison to other East European communist states at the time and experienced a period of relative economic and political stability until Tito’s death in 1980. In addition to internal power struggles following the loss of their longtime leader, Yugoslavia faced an unprecedented economic crisis in the 1980’s. As other communist states began to fall in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, some former Communist leaders abandoned communism and founded or supported ethno-national parties, blaming the economic suffering on the flaws of communism and other ethnic groups. The ethnic violence that followed would not have been possible without the willingness of politicians from every side to promote ethno-nationalist symbols and myths through media blitzes, which were especially effective due to low levels of education in the former Yugoslavia. Shadows of the events of World War II gave these politicians, especially the Serbs, an opportunity to encourage the discussion and exaggeration of past atrocities later in the century. The ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia can be traced back to a series of linked damaging factors such as the de...
A new leader arose by the late 1980s, a Serbian named Slobodan Milosevic, a former Communist who had turned to nationalism and religious hatred to gain power. He began by inflaming long-standing tensions between Serbs and Muslims in the independent provence of Kosovo. Orthodox Christian Serbs in Kosovo were in the minority and claimed they were being mistreated by the Albanian Muslim majority. Serbian-backed political unrest in Kosovo eventually led to its loss of independence and domination by Milosevic. In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia both declared their independence from Yugoslavia soon resulting in civil war. The national army of Yugoslavia, now made up of Serbs controlled by Milosevic, stormed into Slovenia but failed to subdue the separatists there and withdrew after only ten days of fighting. Milosevic quickly lost interest in Slovenia, a country with almost no Serbs. Instead, he turned his attention to Croatia, a Catholic country where Orthodox Serbs made up 12 percent of the population. During World War II, Croatia had been a pro-Nazi state led by Ante Pavelic and his fascist Ustasha Party. Serbs living in Croatia as well as Jews had been the targets of widespread Ustasha massacres.
The Split between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in 1948 occurred due to a conflict of interest between Josip Broz Tito and Joseph Stalin, the respective leaders of the Nations. Through this essay my aim is to highlight the causes of the dispute and then discuss the consequences of the split for both the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
U.S. Involvement in Kosovo War has been waged in the Balkans for thousands of years. Yugoslavia has been divided, reunited, divided again, undergone wars and been through depressions. Each country within the Yugoslavia region has experienced hardships due to a failing economy, poor leadership, and civil wars. In the past few years, a major upheaval in the political structure and the disputes concerning land between the different religions and ethnicity's has caused a civil war. The country and ethnic group of this recent dispute is Serbia and Kosovo. The Albanian Kosovars want their independence from Serbia, while the Serbs consider Kosovo the location in which their cultural and ethnic identity is placed. The United States became involved in the Balkan conflict in the end of 1998 ("Kosovo" 1). U.S. involvement in Kosovo is making matters worse for the innocent people of Kosovo. Kosovo, a small area in the center of the former Yugoslavia, is playing an important role in the Balkan conflict. In the summer of 1998, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) decided to launch a guerilla warfare attack on Serbia in attempts to liberate themselves and gain their cultural rites. The President of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, is refusing to allow Kosovo to break away from Serbia without a fight. Kosovo is a site of great emotional significance to the Serbs; it is the site of a historic defeat by the Ottoman Empire in the 14th century. From this defeat, Kosovo became the cradle of Serbia's cultural and ethnic identity. Milosevic began an ethnic cleansing campaign in which he killed thousands of ethnic Albanians. NATO forces, as well as the United States, began stepping in in the winter of 1998. The United Sta...
...s it liable and unique. It is descriptive and provides a lot of information but in the same time it is also analytical because it presents different aspects and primary sources of the Serb’s history. The parts of the book which relate to the origins of the First World War and the Balkan crisis are focused on the conflict between Serbia and Austria-Hungary, so it does not analyze all origins of the War, but it does analyze in depth the influence of Balkan nationalism for the outbreak and provides a large number of evidences for his arguments. The book compares and contrasts political and cultural history of Serbs and it is credible and objective. Relating to the First World War he also provides many primary sources and perspectives of different scholars. The book is authoritative and it is easy to notice that Corovic is an acknowledged expert on the subject.
Velikonja, Mitja. "In Hoc Signo Vinces: Religious Symbolism in the Balkan Wars 1991-1995." Springer 17.1 (2003): 25-40. Print.
...osnia and Kosovo. The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies v. 25,( 2000): p. 489-510
- Review in detail the key players that were involved in the split of the nations by religious reasons. This includes Milosevic.
Since February of 1998, President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia has conducted a military campaign against the people of Kosovo, which is a province of Serbia. It is here where the Balkans already strained ethnic mix boils over. The majority of Serbia is Greek Orthodox Christian while the majority of Kosovo is Muslim. This ethnic mix has always been strained and Milosevic has ordered his army to conduct an ethnic cleansing campaign to drive out the Kosovo Muslims and kill those who don’t leave. This campaign of terror is designed to destroy an entire culture and it has come very close to doing just that. In a little over a year, over 650,000 refugees have fled Kosovo telling stories of murder, rape, robbery, and torture. This is essentially what the Nazi’s did to the Jews, Gypsies, and Homosexuals at the beginning of the Holocaust. After the Holocaust, the world community said never again, yet little more than 50 years later we have turned a deaf ear on the plight of the Kosovo Muslims.
Gagnon, V. P. (2004). The myth of ethnic war: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
4 The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was denoted to the acts of violence and armed conflict spurred on by President Slobodan Miloševic who was in pursuit to create an ‘ethnically pure Greater Serbia’; after the western condemnation of the bombing of Dubrovnik and Vukovar in Croatia, western governments although late to action declared in 1992 ‘a deliberate policy of genocide as “ethnic cleansing”’ which led to the deployment of peacekeeping forces. Jane M. O. Sharp, ‘Dayton Report Card’, International Security, 22 (Winter, 1997-1998), 101-137 (pp. 101-02).
Milosevic’s main goal in Kosovo was to expel Kosovo Albanians population in an effort to ensure continued Serbian control over the province. Du...
From its birth in 1918 to its death in the 1990’s, Yugoslavia has always been a whole. Yugoslavia was kept together by it’s diplomacy and their good reputation and achievements during the administration led by Tito. As a result of his death, neighbors that lived in peace for decades turned on each other, ethnic hatred was occuring and republics were declaring independence one after the other. The country was gradually falling apart. There were many reasons for the breakup of Yugoslavia but one of the most important one was realism which basically deals with politics.
These tensions, only highlighted by the war, are an unfortunate but large part of Bosnian culture as a whole. The three main ethnic groups of Bosnia are Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats, with 48.4%, 32.7%, and 14.6% populations respectively (CIA World Factbook). Their intense nationalistic attitudes and vastly different religious heritages cause animosities between the groups that go back beyond the times of nations. Bosniaks are generally Muslim while Croats are Roman Catholic and Serbs are Christian