Kosovo/Kosova As Seen, As Told KOSOVO / KOSOVA As Seen, As Told PART I : The OSCE-KVM human rights operation (Chapter 1) Contents Previous Next KOSOVO: THE HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL BACKGROUND In the early 20th century Kosovo and western Macedonia, emerging from the dismantling of the Ottoman empire in south-eastern Europe, were the main areas of collision between Albanian and Serb nationalist aspirations. The Albanian national revival, under way since the foundation in 1878 of the League of Prizren, aimed at uniting the areas of mainly Muslim Albanian-speaking populations. The Serb focus was on history and symbolism rather than on contemporary demographics. Serbian historians held the Kosovo area to be the cradle of their civilization, where some of the defining events relating to their sense of nationhood had taken place, notably the final and unavailing stand made by Prince Lazar against Ottoman forces at the Battle of Kosovo Polje in June 1389. The Orthodox monasteries of Kosovo were of great significance in their religious and cultural identity; Pec/Peja in particular was the seat of the Serbian Patriarchate. Serbia, itself an independent principality only since 1878, after centuries of almost uninterrupted Ottoman rule, gained control of Kosovo in 1912 as a result of the First Balkan War. The Albanian state which came into being at this time thus did not include territory where some 800,000 Albanians lived. Only briefly during the Second World War, when the area was conquered by Italian and then German forces, was an Albanian vassal state allowed to administer most of Kosovo (1941-44). Movements of population during this period are a matter of much dispute. From 1912 onwards, Serb families were moved into Kosovo in considerable numbers, the wealthier Albanians living there were dispossessed by land reforms, and possibly as many as half a million Albanians were moved out. Conversely, it is frequently asserted by Serbs that hundreds of thousands of Albanians moved into Kosovo between 1941 and 1945. Under communist rule in post-1945 Yugoslavia, Albanians were recognized as a minority nationality, with legal rights to education in their own language and protection for cultural institutions. Kosovo, as part of Serbia, had a degree of home rule, extended in 1968. Autonomous province status The 1974 Constitution - the third of the period of the rule of Marshal Tito - was a major step in the devolution of government and economic power to the republics - Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, http://www.osce.org/kosovo/documents/reports/hr/part1/ch1.htm (1 of 8)12/5/2003 11:48:35 AM