Kosovo/Kosova As Seen, As Told Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia - which made up the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). However, Tito had long been occupied with the problem of Serbia's weight within the SFRY. It was by far the largest republic, with over nine million inhabitants - 40 per cent of the total population. The 1974 Constitution addressed this issue by giving nearly one-third of Serbia's inhabitants a large degree of autonomy, in the provinces of Kosovo (where the population was 90 per cent Albanian, totalling some 1.7 million and rising) and Vojvodina (the home of a 400,000-strong Hungarian minority). While they were defined as autonomous provinces of Serbia rather than given full republican status, Kosovo and Vojvodina were recognized by the 1974 Constitution as constituent members of the federation. Their leaders thus had separate membership of the rotating collective state presidency which took over after the death of Tito in 1981. The autonomous provinces each had their own central bank and separate police, educational systems and judiciary, a provincial assembly as well as representation in the Serbian parliament, and most importantly a provincial communist party, in Kosovo's case the League of Communists of Kosovo. In 1981, demands by Kosovo Albanians for full republican status (notionally including the right to secede) gathered impetus in mass protests, but the demonstrations were countered by a hardline response. The federal army was deployed and a state of emergency was declared in the province. As unrest continued over the next seven years, according to official figures 7,000 Kosovo Albanians were sentenced to short prison terms, and over 1,750 more received longer sentences, of up to 15 years, in connection with nationalist activity. The Serb nationalist backlash Although it was mainly Albanian activists and protesters who were being subjected to human rights violations in Kosovo post-1981, including arrest and imprisonment - by law enforcement bodies still at this stage mainly staffed by Albanians - the Serbs of Kosovo saw themselves as the disadvantaged minority there. Complaining of discrimination, of violent attacks upon them going unpunished, and of the domination of political and economic life by the Kosovo Albanian community, Kosovo Serbs had already been migrating from the area in growing numbers since the 1960s. Petitions began to circulate, and Kosovo Serbs' resentment was galvanized into protest and resistance following the sensational publication in a mass circulation newspaper in September 1986 of the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences. An unfinished draft of an academic paper, the Memorandum ranged over issues including an alleged conspiracy against Serbia by Slovenia and Croatia. Such divisive nationalism was heresy in the SFRY and was duly denounced across the country. Its effects were nevertheless explosive, and nowhere more so than in Kosovo, where the Memorandum warned Serbs that they faced total genocide unless they could reverse the "Albanianization" of the province. 24 April 1987 was a critical day for Serb nationalism and for the future of Kosovo. Slobodan Milosevic, a prominent figure in the republican communist party, the League of Communists of Serbia, had gone to Kosovo for a dialogue with the local Serbs about their grievances. While he was in Kosovo Polje/Fushe http://www.osce.org/kosovo/documents/reports/hr/part1/ch1.htm (2 of 8)12/5/2003 11:48:35 AM