Kosovo/Kosova As Seen, As Told Parallel Kosovo Albanian administration in Kosovo After the Kosovo Assembly was dissolved in June 1990, an attempt was made by 114 of its 180 deputies on 2 July to declare Kosovo independent from Serbia and a full republic within the SFRY. This move was declared illegal by both Serbia and the SFRY, so on 7 September 111 of the deputies, meeting secretly in Kacanik/Kacanik, proclaimed an independent Republic of Kosovo. Criminal charges were subsequently brought against them. That December, Kosovo Albanians boycotted elections to the Serbian parliament. In September 1991 the Kosovo Assembly deputies, still resisting Serbian efforts to declare their activities illegal, organized a referendum on sovereignty in which they reported an 87 per cent turnout and almost 100 per cent voting in favour. A provisional coalition government formed in October, and given diplomatic recognition on 22 October by Albania. It claimed to run its own police forces and to support its activities by collecting taxes from the Kosovo Albanian population, but had to act clandestinely to avoid the arrest of its members by Serbian police and security forces. The first parallel elections organized in Kosovo did not take place until May 1992. By this time the wars of the Yugoslav succession had begun, the SFRY had ceased to exist, four of its constituent republics had declared their separate independence, and Serbia and Montenegro had joined in forming in April 1992 a new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). Within the FRY structure, both Vojvodina and Kosovo and Metohija (as it was officially called by Serbia) were officially designated as autonomous provinces, but the confrontational situation in Kosovo meant that Kosovo Albanians continued to boycott Serbian and FRY federal assembly elections, while there was no official Kosovo assembly and Serbia condemned any parallel elections among the Kosovo Albanian community as illegal. In the May 1992 parallel elections the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), founded in September 1990 and led by Ibrahim Rugova, won most of the seats in a 130-member "constituent Republican Assembly", and Rugova was declared to be President of the Republic of Kosovo. The attempt to hold an inaugural assembly session was abandoned in June, however, in the face of action by the Serbian security forces to seal off the building. Thereafter, international attention turned mainly to the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. At the outset of that conflict, the role of Serbia was generally seen by the international community as that of a bellicose protagonist. By the time of the Dayton peace agreement for Bosnia-Herzegovina in November 1995, however, the Milosevic regime in Serbia was regarded as a factor in bringing about a negotiated solution, and UN sanctions imposed on the FRY were revoked once that solution had been put in place. In Kosovo, Rugova's approach of seeking a peaceful settlement did record one apparent success, an agreement in 1996 that an Albanian educational curriculum should be restored. This had yet to be implemented, however, and student demonstrations had been met with violent suppression, by the time the second parallel elections were organized in March 1998. These elections once again produced an overwhelming majority vote in favour of Rugova as president, although this was partly because groups http://www.osce.org/kosovo/documents/reports/hr/part1/ch1.htm (4 of 8)12/5/2003 11:48:35 AM