"Dusan T.Batakovic. The Kosovo Chronicles " - читать интересную книгу автора

Bosnia-Herzegovina by Serbian troops" and that it was thus imperative to
execute the "persecution of Serbian Chetniks from Croatia, Dalmatia,
Slovenia, Vojvodina, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo". Renouncing
these regions any Serbian character at all, the CPY believed that these
provinces should be organized as separate federal units within the frame of
a future communist Yugoslavia. The stand to break up Yugoslavia was changed
in 1935, when the Comintern established a new course of struggle of the
"national front" against the danger looming from Nazism and Fascism in
Europe.² The CPY abandoned its decision on the annexation of
Kosovo and Metohia to Albania in 1940, at the Fifth National Conference in
Zagreb, at a time when Albania had been under Italian occupation for a year,
but even then, the "colonialist methods of the Serbian bourgeoisie" were
condemned and the need for the creation of a separate republic of Kosovo
emphasized - "the ethnic problem can be resolved by the forming of a free
labor-peasant republic of Kosovo after the Greater Serbian fascist and
imperialist regime is overthrown".³ By demonizing Serbian
domination in Yugoslavia, Yugoslav communists distinguished less and less
the bourgeoisie from the people - thus the idea to form a separate party for
Serbia was abandoned, although party organizations for the other Yugoslav
provinces were formed. Maintaining such a stand, the CPY received Nazi
Germany's attack on Yugoslavia in April, 1941.
1 K. Cavoski, KPJ i kosovsko pitanje, in: Kosovo i Metohija u srpskoj
istoriji, Beograd 1988, pp. 361-381. Cf documents in: Istorijski arhiv
Komunisticke partije Jugoslavije, Beograd 1949, vol. I-II, passim;
Komunisticka internacionala, Gornji Milanovac 1982, vol. VIII, passim.
2 K, Cavoski, op. cit., pp. 365-369.
3 V. Djuretic, Kosovo i Metohija u Jugoslaviji, in: Kosovo i Metohija u
srpskoj istoriji, p. 321
The CPY's ethnic policy in its struggle for power in the civil war
(1941-1945)
The Kosovo and Metohia question was raised again when the flames of war
spread on April 6,1941, throughout Yugoslavia: its army was forced to
unconditional capitulation 11 days later and its territory divided among
Hitler's allies. Owing to their loyalty to old allies France and Great
Britain, and for fomenting a putsch on March 27, 1941 (thereby practically
canceling any agreement with the Axis powers), the Serbs were punished as
the Third Reich's chief enemy in the Balkans by a division of the Serbian
territories: most of Kosovo along with Metohia, western Macedonia and
fringing areas of Montenegro were allotted to Albania, which had been under
Italian occupation for two years. Bulgaria was given a small part of Kosovo,
while its northern parts entered the composition of Serbia where a German
protectorate was established. Under a decree by King Vittorio Emmanuele,
dated August 12, 1941, Greater Albania was founded. An Albanian voluntary
militia numbering 5,000 men - Vulnetari - was set up in Kosovo and Metohia
to assist the Italian forces in maintaining order, but which carried out
surprise attacks on the Serbian population on its own.
Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and Metohia, who were declared by Italian
and communist propagandas as victims of Greater Serbian hegemony, received,
besides the right to hoist their own flag, the right to open schools in
their mother tongue. The patriarchal and tribal ethnic Albanian society in