$Unique_ID{COW04130} $Pretitle{299} $Title{Yugoslavia Chapter 2B. Ethinic Groups} $Subtitle{} $Author{Patricia A. Kluck} $Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army} $Subject{serbs serbian croatian percent ethnic albanians population 1970s war government} $Date{1982} $Log{} Country: Yugoslavia Book: Yugoslavia, A Country Study Author: Patricia A. Kluck Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army Date: 1982 Chapter 2B. Ethinic Groups Serbs Serbs, in the early 1980s, were the most dispersed of Yugoslavia's nations. Although concentrated in Serbia proper, they accounted for a substantial percentage of total population in Vojvodina, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Croatia. Serbs' distribution reflected many of the vicissitudes of Balkan history and played a pivotal role in the country's complex ethnic relations in the 1970s. Vojvodina presented few problems; Serbs constituted a clear and growing portion of that province's populace, while the Hungarian minority-through the combined effects of emigration and a low birthrate-declined. In Croatia and Bosnia the situation was more complex. Serbs were a significant minority in Croatia; they were the single largest ethnic group in Bosnia but were outnumbered by an increasing margin by the combined total of Croats and ethnic Muslims. A concern for the fate of Serbs outside the republic proper conditioned Serbian reactions to efforts at decentralization. It was evident in Serbian nervousness at any possible Croat-ethnic Muslim alliance in Bosnia. Part of Serbian alarm at the resurgence of Croatian nationalist sentiment in the late 1960s-early 1970s was the memory of Serbian suffering at Croatian hands during World War II (see The War: Occupation and Resistance, ch. 1). Kosovo-at the center of the medieval Serbian kingdom and the core of much of Serbian cultural heritage-was the Serbs' greatest concern in the early 1980s. Between 1961 and 1981 Serbs dropped from roughly 23 percent to slightly more than 13 percent of the province's population; at the same time, Albanians rose from two-thirds to over three-quarters of all inhabitants of Kosovo. In part the Albanian high birthrate accounted for the province's changing ethnic portrait; the exodus of Serbs from the province, however, was more worrisome to Serbian officialdom. There had been a trickle of Serbs, mostly white-collar workers, displaced by the growing Albanian presence in local industry and government administration from the late 1960s onward. At the time of the March-April 1981 Kosovo riots, the trickle became a stream, not just of former civil servants and intelligentsia, but of farmers apprehensive of the growing Albanian nationalist fervor (see Albanians, this ch.). A series of nineteenth-century peasant revolts formed the basis of modern Serbian national consciousness. Serbs viewed themselves as a nation-at-arms; World War I culminated centuries of armed resistance against foreign overlords. They saw themselves as liberators of Croatia and Slovenia-nations that had proved unwilling or unable to defend themselves against Austria-Hungary and whose loyalty was suspect. Serbia's monumental losses in World War I reinforced its tendency to see the Yugoslav government as its own dearly won bailiwick. The per capita loss of fighting men was two-and-a-half times that of France and three times that of Britain and Italy. The army casualty rate was 40 percent of those under arms. Losses to battle and epidemic disease amounted to one-fifth the total population. The kingdom's Serbian political elite were excessively centralist, accustomed to rule and disinclined to share the spoils of power. There were, on the eve of World War II, two Croatian and two Slovenian generals in the army; the rest-161 generals in all-were Serbs or Montenegrins. In 1941, of 1,500 military cadets, 1,300 were Serbs. Serbs dominated the civil bureaucracy as well; in 1939 they held 100 percent of the higher administrative posts in the office of the premier, 89 percent of those in the Ministry of the Interior, 82 percent of those in the foreign service, 96 percent in education, and 85 percent in justice. Concern about the Serbian reaction to policies balancing participation in government by the various ethnic groups dominated Serbian-regime relations in the post-World War II era. Serbs were major participants in the Partisan liberation movement; their sufferings at the hands of Croatian Fascists appalled even the Nazis (see The War: Occupation and Resistance, ch. 1). Both circumstances led the communist regime to react vehemently against any sign of resurgent "greater Serbia hegemonism." Sentiments at all comparable to those of Serbs in the interwar kingdom drew sharp criticism from the authorities-as for example a 1980 offering by a Serbian poet in a Serbian Orthodox magazine complaining at the Serbs' sufferings in World War II, and as the poem's refrain noted, ". . . what has it all got us?" (see Religion, this ch.). By the same token, authorities feared an anti-Albanian backlash to the 1981 Kosovo riots. Serbs had the sense of having sacrificed much and gained little but increased demands by the intransigent Albanians; "greater Albanian hegemonism" was the Serbian complaint. Croats Despite substantial linguistic similarity and a common Slav background, Croatia's cultural traditions and political heritage contrasted dramatically with Serbia's. The Roman Catholic Church preserved Croatian national identity during the centuries of Venetian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian rule. Despite the church's ultramontane loyalties and Latin liturgy it gave Croatia a literate clergy who both used Croatian as the language of pastoral work and preserved it as a literary tongue from the Counter-Reformation to the nineteenth century. Roman Catholicism imbued nineteenth-century Croatian nationalism with the cultural ethos of Western Europe. As with many Balkan peoples, language and religion acted as unifying forces linking educated and uneducated Croats alike. Writers, scholars, commercial interests, well-to-do farmers, and timber producers spearheaded the nineteenth-century Croatian nationalist movement. Croatian nationalism, influenced by French revolutionary thought (through a brief period of Napoleonic rule), gained impetus from Hungary's aggressive Magyarization drive in the late nineteenth century (see The Croats, ch. 1). Hungarian insistence on Magyar as the language of public life alienated the growing intelligentsia. Transportation policy undermined Croatia's flourishing trade with the Dalmatian Coast and antagonized traders and large landowners. Agricultural policies and taxation impoverished the peasantry. Croatian political leaders devoted their political energies to opposing whatever government was in power to counter the Magyarization drive. The same tactics underlay their participation in the interwar kingdom. The Croatian Peasant Party, the leading party, made occasional attempts to join whatever Serbian cabal might be in power, but its efforts were erratic, unpredictable, and, not surprisingly, unsuccessful (see The Yugoslav Kingdom, 1918-41, ch. 1). In the Croatian view the kingdom was no less "a prison of nations" than the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been. Serbian rule merely exploited Yugoslavia's advanced, European-oriented northern half for the "Balkan primitives" of the south. Had there been any lingering doubt about Croatian disenchantment with Serb domination-they regarded the kingdom as little else-World War II dispelled it. Roughly half the population ruled by the Croatian puppet state were Serbs. The ustase (see Glossary) were vehemently Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Serbian; their avowed policy was to convert one-third of the Serbs, deport another third, and "eliminate" the rest. The regime closed all Serbian Orthodox Primary Schools, outlawed the Cyrillic alphabet, and ordered Serbs to wear colored arm bands. In the early 1980s Croats were Yugoslavia's second largest ethnic group. Although the economic reverses of the 1970s dealt harshly with the republic's economy, Croatia remained one of the most prosperous regions of Yugoslavia. Croatian nationalist sentiment intensified in the late 1960-early 1970s. The issues underlying the "Croatian crisis" were those frequently troubling multinational Yugoslavia-the authority of the federal government vis-a-vis that of individual republics and the extent of Serbian preponderance in government. Croats wanted greater control of republic finances, especially their own substantial foreign exchange earnings. President Josip Broz Tito's personal intervention resolved the immediate crisis; and a substantial portion of the 1970s constitutional reforms death with questions implicitly raised by the Croatian demands (see The Development of the Contemporary Political Order, ch. 4). Beyond the issues themselves was the disturbing tendency for Croats to regard every social, economic, and political question as a reflection of nationalist sentiment. Issues focusing on banking and economic development policy generated more general and (apparently) popular concerns with possible Serbian dominance and manifestations of anti-Serbian feeling. Cyrillic roadsigns were defaced; there were Serb-Croat brawls. Matica Hrvatska, a Croatian cultural organization suppressed in 1972, multiplied its membership and demanded, among other things, separate Croatian membership in the United Nations (UN). Students at Zagreb University elected a Roman Catholic-nationalist student rector. Authorities found the prospect of a mass movement led by elements of a disenchanted Croatian intelligentsia profoundly disconcerting. Occasional manifestations of what the authorities referred to as "nationalist hatred" surfaced in Croatia in the late 1970s-early 1980s. Emigre organizations dedicated to an independent Croatia engaged in a terrorist campaign mostly against Yugoslav diplomats. Professor Franjo Tudman, a historian and former Partisan general, gave a series of interviews to Croatian emigre journals and received a three-year sentence for "hostile propaganda" in 1981. In similar circumstances Vlado Gotavac, a Croatian writer, was charged with saying that Croats were subject to "political, social and cultural subjugation." Slovenes Situated at the point where the Balkan and Italian peninsulas meet the European continent, Slovenia is at the juncture of the Germanic, Latin, and Slav cultures. The Slovenes were among the least numerous and westernmost of the Slav peoples; their ethnic survival under nearly 600 years of German hegemony was a tribute to, if nothing else, sheer tenacity. The Slovenes were unique among the nations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in lacking virtually any history as a sovereign state. Slovenia lacked an indigenous nobility and, until the nineteenth century, a significant petite bourgeoisie. As with many of the East European Slavs, Slovene ethnic consciousness grew with the Reformation/Counter-Reformation emphasis on vernacular languages as vehicles for proselytization. Awareness of their linguistic uniqueness laid the groundwork for a Slovene sense of cultural identity. Even in the late nineteenth century the lower ranking Roman Catholic clergy, Slav to the man, were critical in fostering ethnic identity among the mass of Slovenes as well as maintaining the Slovenian language in the face of Germanization efforts in the schools. Intellectuals trained by the Catholic clergy spearheaded the movement for Slovene cultural identity in the nineteenth century. They were responsible for establishing Slovenian as a literary language. Theirs was explicitly an apolitical effort, however; even in the ferment of the 1840s the Austrian police reported the Slovenian provinces free of political malcontents. Only during the Balkan wars (1912, 1913) was there agitation for a political union outside the empire. Slovenia was the most economically favored region in the interwar kingdom. Widespread primogeniture had limited the land fragmentation typical of the Balkans. Slovene peasants did not lack their share of distress in the 1920s and 1930s, but they were, as a group, middling farmers. The Roman Catholic clergy, which was active in Slovenian politico-economic affairs, was particularly so in the countryside. They organized credit and marketing cooperatives freeing Slovene families from the pernicious indebtedness that afflicted rural Yugoslavia. Slovenian readiness to negotiate and compromise served them well in the interwar and post-World War II eras alike. Slovenes were, in fact, an indispensible ingredient in the parade of coalition governments of interwar Yugoslavia. The Habsburg tradition of local autonomy resulted in the Slovenes having a highly trained corps of administrators. Linguistic distinctiveness staved off Serbian bureaucrats who flooded into Croatia instead. Even as the numerically insignificant Slovenes feared being engulfed by Germanic hordes under Habsburg rule, post-World War II demographic trends have been disquieting for contemporary Slovenes. The republic's portion of total population dropped from 8.8 percent in 1953 to 8 percent in 1981. Slovenia's rate of natural increase averaged roughly two-thirds that of the nation as a whole in the 1960s and 1970s. Slovenes maintained a strong sense of cultural continuity into the 1970s. They remained profoundly Roman Catholic. Polls consistently found Slovenia to have the lowest percentage of atheists; more Slovenes than any other national group favored an increase in the clergy's activity in social affairs. The region's general level of prosperity remained high throughout the socialist era; in the 1970s it ranked first or second among the republics in terms of average monthly income and first in percentage of the economically active population employed outside the private agricultural sector. It had the highest literacy rate, the lowest proportion of the population without any schooling, and the highest rate of participation in vocational educational programs. Slovenia's concern with government policy and decentralization have been similar to Yugoslavia's other developed regions. In the nationalities crises of the early 1970s the Slovenian leadership was less unyielding than the Croatians. The growing realization in Slovenia that the republic relied on the south for raw materials and protected markets made for a certain community of interests with low income regions. Slovenia was center stage during the 1969 "roadway crisis." The dispute centered on the allocation of funds to road-building projects in Serbia and Croatia instead of the much-needed link between Ljubljana and Nova Gorica. The republic leadership protested vigorously, and the Slovene public voiced its disapproval in mass demonstrations. Montenegrins Montenegrins were numerically the smallest of the Yugoslav nations; their share in the population was a declining one. Politically and culturally their closest affinity lay with the Serbs; like them the Montenegrins were Orthodox believers, spoke Serbo-Croatian, and used the Cyrillic alphabet. In those events shaping modern Yugoslavia, Serbs and Montenegrins played comparable roles. Both defined cultural identity in terms of struggle against the Turk. Montenegro maintained a tenacious and tenuous hold on autonomy in the face of recurrent Ottoman incursions (see The Montenegrins, ch. 1). Traditional society was one of shifting alliances among warring clans, each made up of patrilineally related extended families withstanding the predations of both Turks and rival clans. It was a politically decentralized society where loyalty to one's kin, expressed in a commitment to family honor, was paramount. Warfare and raiding were endemic, personal courage and success in combat the preeminent male virtues. The extended family in its most traditional form existed well into the twentieth century; bride theft and blood feuds were, if not commonplace, by no means uncommon. In the mid-1970s a socialist observer could still complain that the "old patriarchal peasant-like mentality and consciousness" was obstructing the revolutionary changes in Montenegrin social life. Montenegrins were merged with other "Serbo-Croats" in interwar censuses; and neither language nor religion permit them to be distinguished from Serbs. Nonetheless the best indications are that they played a significant role in, if nothing else, the army. Montenegrins were prominent in communist and Partisan organizations; they were subsequently disproportionately overrepresented in the higher reaches of officialdom. Some 15 percent of the leaders of federal administrative bodies were Montenegrins in the early 1970s-over three times their share of the Yugoslav population. In keeping with their long-standing military tradition and their Partisan record, they comprised nearly one-fifth of the generals of the YPA. Their representation in the officer corps, while less marked, was still greater than their proportion of total population. The Montenegrin-Serb alliance has been, with few exceptions, close throughout the socialist era, and Montenegro has normally been a firm supporter of federal government policy. Montenegrin Communists, however, had a rate of expulsion from the LCY for pro-Soviet (or Cominform-Communist Information Bureau-see Glossary) sympathies following the country's 1948 break with Stalin far higher than other republics. One in six Montenegrin Communists was expelled in contrast with one in twenty Croats, one in twenty-three Bosnians, and one in thirty-one Macedonians (the Serbs never published their expulsion rates). In 1974 a group of Communists, largely Montenegrins, was accused of forming a secret pro-Soviet party. A 1969 Montenegrin decision to build a monument to the priest-bishops who ruled the country until 1851 precipitated protests by the Serbian Orthodox Church, which owned the proposed site. The Montenegrins countered by accusing the church of trying to deny their existence as a separate nation. The exchange led to a vehement campaign to encourage Montenegrin culture, which was followed, in the wake of the Croatian crisis, by a purge of the more extremist elements. Montenegro benefited particularly from development policy: per capita investment has been higher than the national average and higher than the less developed regions' average as well. Industry grew dramatically following World War II; by the late 1970s fifty-seven of every 1,000 inhabitants worked in industry (nearly five times the 1952 rate). The number of persons engaged in agriculture accounted for 72 percent of the populace in 1948; but only 35 percent in 1971. Life expectancy by the early 1970s had risen some twenty years. Many of the problems typical of the less developed regions, nonetheless, were Montenegro's too. Small, fragmented family plots earning less than two-thirds the average income of agricultural workers dominated agriculture. Much investment was inordinately capital-intensive. The region suffered from low prices for its raw materials in the early 1970s, and development had left pockets of Montenegro poor and untouched. Ethnic Muslims Most (roughly 90 percent in the 1970s) of Yugoslavia's ethnic Muslims lived in Bosnia and Hercegovina. They comprised a growing portion of the republic's population. Their rapid increase was less a matter of natural increase than undercounting in earlier censuses when ethnic (Bosnian) Muslims were classed as Serbs, Croats, Serbo-Croats, or Yugoslavs. Muslims, as a class, were disproportionately represented among the privileged under Ottoman rule. In the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries (then under Austro-Hungarian hegemony) they accounted for 90 percent of all landowners with tenants and half the urban population. They suffered from the Turkish decline, and substantial numbers fled to Turkey. The 1918 land reform eroded the economic resources of those who remained. None of this had much impact on most ethnic Muslims, however, who were of the humbler strata of rural society. They were peasants eking out a living and facing many of the same constraints their Christian counterparts did: rural overpopulation and unfavorable terms of credit did not spare the Muslim peasant in the early twentieth century. Ethnic Muslims were concentrated in the northwest regions of Bosnia. This pattern changed to one of Serbian-Muslim villages to the south and east and Croatian-Muslim ones westward toward Dalmatia. Even within ethnically mixed areas the rule was segregation into Serbian, Croatian, or Muslim neighborhoods. The Muslim intelligentsia had an ambiguous relationship to interwar Yugoslavia's governments. They suffered from Serbia's hegemony and Belgrade's barely concealed view that Muslims were the chief impediment to Serbian dominance in Bosnia. Nonetheless the seemingly endless coalition cabinets of the 1920s relied on Muslim participation, and Muslim leaders exploited Serbian electoral weakness to their own advantage. Because Croats regarded them fundamentally as Croats of Islamic persuasion, Muslims suffered significantly less than Serbs in the Croatian fascist state. A number of prominent Muslim leaders were compromised by their complicity with the fascist government. Their most consistent enmity during World War II focused on the Serbian Cetniks (see Glossary). Many Muslims entered the ranks of urban entrepreneurs, traders, and craftsmen after losing their landholdings in the interwar era. The postwar era found them underrepresented in the upper echelons of government and among artists, technical specialists, and enterprise managers. Limited surveys in the late 1960s found ethnic Muslims clustered in a variety of traditional crafts (goldsmithing and coppersmithing, for example) and modern services (auto, television, and radio repair). Those of a religious bent benefited from the government's relatively benign tolerance toward organized religion as well as Yugoslavia's desire to impress Arab nations with a "showcase" Muslim community. The situation worsened in the late 1970s-early 1980s with stern warnings to Islamic leaders of the perils of pan-Islamic nationalism (see Religion, this ch.). Observers suggested that the regime's concern may have had less to do with Islamic fundamentalism, than with forestalling any Croat-Muslim coalescense to the disadvantage of Bosnia's minority Serbs. Macedonians The central government's recognition in 1945 of Macedonians' equal legal status with Yugoslavia's other nations was a benchmark in that region's long-standing discord. Neither the Greeks nor the Bulgarians recognized the Macedonians as a distinct ethnic group in the late 1970s. For the Bulgarians, Macedonian was simply a dialect of Bulgarian, and the region itself was part of Greater Bulgaria liberated in the Russo-Turkish War of 1878, only to be lost through the diplomatic chicanery of the great powers at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Western Macedonia's division between the Serbian kingdom and Greece was a major bone of contention in the first and second Balkan wars. Bulgaria reluctantly renounced its claims to western Macedonia following World War II. Nonetheless that country sporadically asserted that Macedonians were not a separate nationality but a Bulgarian minority within Yugoslavia-a claim Belgrade found implicitly irredentist. The controversy waxed and waned in the 1950s and 1960s. Debate heated up in the late 1970s on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of the Treaty of San Stefano (1878-1978) and continued into the early 1980s in Skopje and Sofia publications (see The Macedonians, ch. 1). Serbia's policy of aggressive centralization bred considerable discontent in the region in the interwar era. Much like the Croats, Macedonians found the overweening Serbian hegemony intolerable. Bulgarian troops entering Macedonia in 1941 were welcomed as liberators. Sofia Fascists soon pursued policies as offensive as Serbia's previous ones. In general Macedonia benefited from Belgrade's post-World War II policies. The region's status as a separate republic gave the intelligentsia a separate state government apparatus, league of communists, and academic establishment. Given the salience of language and ethnic identity in Eastern Europe, the recognition of Macedonian as the republic's national language and the 1948 publication of its first grammar gave added credence to the Communists' commitment to a truly multinational Yugoslavia. The formation of the Macedonian Orthodox Church assuaged fears of Serbian domination in that quarter (see Religion, this ch.). The proportion of Macedonians in the army officer corps and the high command was at parity in the early 1970s. Macedonia's reaction to central government development policy and the resurgent nationalism of the 1970s was more complex. The region's poverty in interwar Yugoslavia was extreme even for the Balkans. Serbs-the vast majority of the rural populace-gained their freedom only in the twentieth century, and then only to become sharecroppers under the most straitened circumstances. Like neighboring Kosovo it was an impoverished agricultural region. While Macedonians-leery of possible Serbian preponderance-favored decentralization in the 1960s, it was on the assumption that there would be continued efforts to funnel development funds to the region. Albanians Yugoslavia's largest national minority was its Albanian community, in 1981 numbering some 1.6 million, nearly 7 percent of the population. Most Albanians were concentrated in Kosovo where they constituted roughly 80 percent of the population; another quarter million resided in neighboring Macedonia and Montenegro. All told, an estimated one-third to one-half of all Albanians lived in Yugoslavia-making them one of the largest potentially irredentist communities in the world. Albanians were, in addition, Yugoslavia's largest non-Slav ethnic group, and Kosovo beyond a doubt was the country's poorest region. Poverty and ethnic distinctiveness added to astronomical population growth were hardly a felicitous combination for the Albanians. Kosovo itself was significant in the historical and cultural heritage of both Serbs and Albanians. For Serbs the region was the core of their medieval kingdom, the scene of their final defeat at the hands of the invading Turks in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, and the location (at Pec) of the Serbian patriarchate's seat. For the Albanians, Pristina was a center of rising Albanian nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Albanians, even more than other non-Serbs, were excluded from power in interwar Yugoslavia. Their poverty and almost complete inexperience in government made them unlikely allies for the dominant Serbs in any event. That they were not Slavs made their adherence to Islam seem more compromising, more "Turkish" to Serbs. Albanians' lot improved dramatically following Rankovic's dismissal in 1966. Kosovo became an autonomous province in 1968; Albanians had extensive control of the local political administration, and cultural and educational organizations (see The Process of Government, ch. 4). Pristina University, founded in 1970, was Yugoslavia's third largest university by 1980. Its enrollment expanded nearly seven times in the decade and was transformed from being a disproportionately Serb student body to one predominantly Albanian. Nonetheless Kosovo's per capita economic growth dropped further behind even the less developed regions and contributed to growing instability in the ethnically sensitive region. Kosovo in the 1970s was still a region of marginal family farms, accounting for nearly 90 percent of the arable land and comprising 70 percent of the republic's population in 1972. It was as well a region of massive social change. Urban growth far outstripped housing and services. The population explosion fed into rising under- and un-employment and rural overpopulation; 11 percent of the population was employed compared to 26 percent nationally. More than half the population was under nineteen years of age; one-third was in school. Women in secondary schools and universities grew from virtually nil in the early 1960s to nearly one-third of all enrollment in 1981. At the same time the authority of those who traditionally maintained order-family elders and religious leaders-declined. While the number of Albanians holding higher academic degrees rose, the preponderance of graduates in the liberal arts gave Kosovo little of the technical expertise it needed. Employment opportunities for Albanian speakers were limited in Serbo-Croatian regions. The dramatic increase in educated Albanians contributed less to an indigenous intelligentsia than to unemployed academics. Nationalistic fervor along with the conflicting loyalties of Serbs, Montenegrins, and Albanians gave the regime considerable cause for disquiet. There was unrest among Albanians in 1968 and 1980; in 1981 poor living conditions at Pristina University sparked the most serious violence to date. Much about these disturbances caused grave concern to the authorities. Albanians wanted full status as a republic-a demand that would be difficult to negotiate with Serbs (see The Domestic Political Agenda, ch. 4). Moreover some demonstrators suggested that the proposed Kosovo republic ought to include Albanians in Macedonia and Montenegro too. Some extremists even voiced secessionist sentiment calling for a "Greater Albania." Rioters included not only students, but workers, peasants, and even Communist Party members. Those sought in connection with the unrest, according to official sources, were hiding in villages, suggesting a measure of at least tacit popular support. Authorities also feared ethnic backlash and rising violence as Serb and Montenegrin farmers fearful for their safety barricaded their villages against possible Albanian incursions.