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Yugoslavia Coming Apart: Talks With Her Writers
| Article
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18588 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
7,821 Words |
| Author
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Milne Holton
Milne Holton is professor of English and comparative
literature at the University of Maryland. Among his
publications are Serbian Poetry from the Beginnings to the
Present (with Vasa Mihailovich) (Yale Slavic Series, 1988) and
Austrian Poetry Today (with Herbert Kuhner) (Schocken Books,
1985). |
In recent years, events in Yugoslavia have been somewhat overshadowed by the dramas being played out by its neighbors. But what news there was has been curiously contradictory. On the one hand, beginning in 1988 (to choose a rather arbitrary starting point), there were reports of political unrest during the trials of four Slovene nationalists who were accused of the theft and disclosure of military secrets. The trials were accompanied by public protests led by writers and poets in Ljubljana, Slovenia's capital. From the Kosovo, a region in south Serbia that was once the center of Serbia's medieval empire but now is populated by a more than 90 percent majority of ethnic Albanians (non-Slavs and mostly Muslims), there has been, for the last four years, a steady drumbeat of accounts of incidents involving violent ethnic struggles between the Albanians and the Yugoslav militia (traditionally comprised of Serbs). Threats of violence hung over the celebrations of the six hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, an event in June 1989 that was attended by a million ethnic Serbs from all over the world. As it turned out, nothing serious happened.
Indeed, after the celebrations, an uncertain peace of sorts came to the region for a few months, but it soon ended. The Albanians remained dissatisfied with their position as an ethnic minority within a Serbian republic--the Kosovo, an "Autonomous Region," is, in spite of the decentralizing reforms of the Yugoslav constitution of 1974, still really only a part of Serbia. And Serbs began to demonstrate in Belgrade, Yugoslavia's capital, in support of Slobodan Milosevic, then head of the Communist Party there, a popular and highly vocal leader who gave voice to the long-repressed ethnic pride of his people. Curfews and bans against public assembly were imposed in the Kosovo, but then charges appeared in the Slovene and Croatian press that the Serbian militia was using violently repressive measures and--quite ominously--that Yugoslav army units (again the army had long been said to be dominated by Serbs) were present and active in the Kosovo. But then Milosevic resigned as party chief to accept Serbia's presidency, a move that to some who follow events in Yugoslavia, seemed at the time to have been evidence of a loss of power. As things turned out, such was not the case.
In the fall of 1989 Yugoslavia's premier, Ante Markovic, instituted stringent economic reforms designed to stabilize the dinar and to halt the run away inflation that had been the overwhelming fact of life in the country for a number of years. The dinar was revalued and tied to the German mark, and inflation seemed for a time to be brought under control. The Constitutional Party lost its unique position in Yugoslav
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