The Popular Protests of Kosovo Albanians and the Serb—Slovene Conflict

Abstract

The success of the antibureaucratic revolution, revealed in the high levels of mobilization and its far-reaching political consequences, raised the alarm among Kosovo Albanians. As the support in some republics for the opposition of Kosovo’s high officials to constitutional reform faded away, the most powerful reaction came from the grass roots. The protest march by the miners from Stari Trg triggered massive demonstrations in Pristina in November. As authorities continued to ignore the protesters’ demands, the miners started a hunger strike and thus set off another wave of protests, including a general strike, in February. In response, the federal state Presidency declared a state of emergency in Kosovo. The events served as a trigger for wider confrontation between Serbia and Slovenia on both the elite and mass levels, the real source of which was their conflicting views about constitutional reform in Yugoslavia. The mobilizational wave ultimately ended in state repression in late March, following violent exchanges between security forces and groups of Kosovo Albanian protesters. Overall, the high levels of conflict at elite and mass levels surrounding the peak of the antibureaucratic revolution and Kosovo Albanian protests, that is, between September 1988 and March 1989, had important implications. The salience of national identity in relation to other forms of political identity sharply increased, and the former was shaped in an increasingly exclusionary fashion in the course of the events.