Serbian Nationalisation Anamnesia

Paradition of the newly published book:

Skender Latifi, It was: Chat with Latinka Perovic, Serbian historian, politician and intellectual, Multimedia Centre, Pristina 2021]

“That's how it was” is the book Skender Latifi's conversation with Serbian historian and politician Latinka Perovic (1933). Perovic is an extraordinary personality of intellectual and publicistic life in Serbia. It has published a series of capital works on social and political history of

Serbia and the region are noted with intelligent and honest comments on current developments in the region.

In the dialogue with Latinka Perovovic, Skender Latifi provides review of the main themes and themes of Latinka Perovovic's monument work so that they can make it closer for the Albanian reader, since her books are not translated into Albanian. Albanian researchers and readers with the publication of this book have the opportunity to get acquainted with the author of an exemplary work by the Corps of contemporary Balkan history, which is unfortunately unknown and consulted in expert circles.

Otherwise, Latinka Perovic has been a prominent protagonist of Serbian and Yugoslav politics in a period of major experiments in the former Yugoslav federation. It's about the end of the '60s and the beginning of the early '70s of the XX century when the Yugoslav federation attempted to restructure and turn from a central federation, where central stages have been evidently more powerful than the constituent republics of the federation, in a decentralised structure that would look more confederates: empowered federal entities and, in many vital ways, lost the central power.

Furthermore, in this reconstruction of Yugoslavia, additional powers over the central bodies won not only the Federation's six republics, but also the two autonomous provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina, which nominally remained part of the Republic of Serbia, but actually received the status of constitutional entities with almost as much rights as the other six republics, including the right of veto in the federal Assembly, as the highest legislative body in the state.

However, the two provinces were not appointed as the republic, which also denied self-determination status in 1991, at a time when the Yugoslav federation was disbanded and the republic's autonomous federal entities were declared independent states, apart from Montenegro, which, like Kosovo, would later be declared an independent republic in 2005, respectively 2008.

Latinka Perovic's political career has been very successful, especially in the period 1968 1972, when she was elected secretary of the League of Communists of Serbia and with LKS Chairman Marko Nikezic, was a bearer of reform and political and economic liberalisation of Serbia.

Latinka Perovic's political career has been suspended in 1972 after the federation's central power instance -- led by Josip Broz Tito, the eternal president -- undertook a “corrective operation in Serbia and Croatia, praising that the mass popular Movement in Croatia (Maspok), led by Savka Dabciq Kucar and Mika Tripalo, as well as liberal policies of Marko Nikesic and Latinka Perovic in Serbia -- are endangering the timing and survival of Yugoslavia.

Indeed, the problem with the leaders of the Communist League in the two empty republics of the Yugoslav federation of Croatia and Serbia consisted that they had seriously understood the need for reforming the political and economic system, while Tito and the Communists' old guard quickly investigated that this process was marginalising and depleting power, so they disagreed with the changes. Tito and the Communist Guard, as founders of the federation, were more easily reconciled to the country's decentralisation, even Yugoslavia's confederalism, but not the installation of real democracy and which would inevitably lead to the demonization of the LKJ power.

The sin of the leaders of Croatia and Serbia, as well as Slovenia (last ones remained unpunished), was that they understood decentralisation even as a chance for democratisation.

After leaving power, Latinka Perovic will no longer deal with active politics, but devotes himself to modern and contemporary Serbian political and intellectual history studies, publishing a set of capital books. Some of the titles for these volume studies are:  From centralism to federalism: P KJ on national issue (Zagreb 1984);  Serbian Socialists of the 19th Century; Vll 1-3 (Belgrade, 1985 and1995);  Planned Revolution: Russian Blankism and Jacobinism (Belgrade 1988); Circle closure: Consumptions of Division 1971-1972 (Sarajevo 1991); Serbian-Russian revolutionary ties: Contributions to the History of Population in Serbia (Belgrade 1994); Amid anarchy and autism: Serbian society in the upper X centuries IX-XI (Belgrade 2006);  The dominant and unwanted Elite: Marking on intellectual, political elite in Serbia by century XIX to XX century (Belgrade 2015) etc.

Latinka Perovic's studies stand out with critical approach to the trend of political developments in Serbia. It continues the tradition of Serbian socialist thought of the XIX and XX (Svetozar Markoviq, Dimitrije Tucoviq, etc.) that have openly distanced themselves from the expansionist and hegemmonistic policies of Serbian elites and the Serbian Orthodox Church, which in all phases of developments, caused the confrontations of the Serbian state and people with neighbours.

The critical approach of the political left against hegemoneist policies has failed to dominate Serbia, so it has followed and caused Serbia's successive failures to become the hegemone power of the region. In this context, although no longer specifically dealing with Serbian-Albanian relations, Latinka Perovic's consistent stance on the Kosovo issue should be mentioned even when it was politician and even on the research level.

In this book of dialogue with Skender Latif, we have a detailed fragment of this conspiracy where, after Latif's question that What has been the position of Serbian liberals in the '60s and '70s century. XX to resolve the Kosovo issue?, she answers:  “We were actually for Kosovo to gain the status of the republic. As soon as the convention we were elected to at the helm of the party in Serbia ended, it came to demonstrations in Kosovo in 1968. Marco Nikezqi had gone to Tito and said: We don't support any expectations against Kosovars, we're talking about all the cases, because no one can force us to return to the end of 1912. We don't want to live under our parents' mortgage. We were then very present in Kosovo with party work. It was that time when Serbian residents had begun to lose their dominance, and the loss of this dominance was interpreted as the threat of Serb survival in Kosovo. We had the attitude that the Constitution with confederation principles was good. How we liberals in Serbia thought the equality of Kosovars at the time would have better illustrated it by remembering an event. At a convention in Kraguyevc in 1971, Marco Nikezqi told me: Yes, would it not be good for some Albanian intellectuals to speak at the Albanian convention? That would be good for us, but I believe that the climate in Serbia was so that the Albanian speech would not be accepted well. So he would only present a provocation of the” situation. We believed in the necessity of emancipation (of Serbian society ʹS.L.), but we also knew there was discrimination and depression against Albanians, that they lived in terrible setbacks. ”

This fragment reflects a perhaps crucial point in restoring the Kosovo issue at the centre of the crisis in Serbian Albanian relations, which will also affect the Yugoslav federation's destiny.

In 1968, two conflicting directions had been unveiled in dealing with the Kosovo issue, which could no longer be expected to be left in margins and as a permanent burden in managing Kosovo's major developing impasse along with other parts of Yugoslavia, which created an explosive imbalance. The semi-functional paces were no longer functioning: the nationalist Serbian elite, who had infiltrated even the communist League, seemed to have found that additional investments in the Albanian cultural and economic emancipation would lead to Kosovo's imminent departure from Serbia and Yugoslavia.

In May 1968, Serbian writer Dobrica Qosiq, who claimed the role of father and “kamdjik of the Serbian national conscience”, gave a rebellious speech in the Plenum of the Central Committee of the LKS, demanding that Kosovo and Albanians be no longer favoured, such as constitutional amendments that advanced Kosovo's position in the federation. He said openly that Kosovo was practically lost for Serbia, and that it is perhaps the last moments when perhaps a turn will be made for Serbia to continue controlling Kosovo.

In that Plenum Qosiqi with some academic co- thinkers was expelled from the central LKS Committee, where the impression was made that another line of position of Serb communists was reaffirmed, traditionally thinking that historic injustice had been done to Kosovo Albanians when Serbia, in the Balkan wars and after the World War I.

Marco Nikezic's liberal stance and the Latinka Perovich, which reminds us of this second, had allowed for a time to strengthen the anti-Cosic option, and that even fixed Yugoslavia's confederacy process with the adoption of the 1974 Constitution, even though Serbian liberals left power in 1972.

While Tito was alive, he died in 1980, the Qosiqian opposition has tried to block the affirmation of Kosovo's newly extended autonomy status, where the instance of the republic of Serbia no longer had the right to direct interference in Kosovo's internal affairs.

After Tito's death, it was a matter of days and weeks when discontent, as well as Albanians, who did not like the 1974 compromise -- Kosovo was also legally loved as the federation's seventh republic. The Serbs, on the other hand, had the annulment of the 1974 Constitution to turn Kosovo into status of the conquered country and the colony.

In Skender Latiff's interview with Latinka Perovitch you'll find a lot of information and reflections on the subjects that I flung into this introduction. They can help us have more realistic sustainabilitys for the difficulties of the processes that have occurred in the meantime, which even further keep Albanian relations in a Limbo of frozen conflict, where rational approaches and mediating world powers cannot create the critical moment leading us out of the historical blockade.

Since the years of last century, when the Kosovo crisis began, relations between Albanians and Serbs have deteriorated so much that in Serbia, as in Kosovo, the prevailing opinion of these relations is that of centuries-old hostility, which is practically a chronic and incurable state. It is thought that we have always been and will always be hostile to one another. This opinion goes even up to the conviction that dialogue efforts and the creation of better neighbourly reports are in vain, and it assumes that we are in a struggle, where the current situation is that of the truce that can last for a while, but that one day will return to war with high fatality.

The lessons they learn about the actuality of the two caboons preaching the eternal war are as follows: the role of KFOR providing NATO's defence presence in Kosovo is welcomed, but this competition is likely not permanent, so we must prepare for new battles and wars.

Various catastrophic scenarios are predicted and predicted as the outcome of KFOR's mission, new regional and global wars...

However, today we are not in the situation what it has been in the years of BAR70, when it has not been possible to formalise the Republic of Kosovo, but it has been given the time for Serbia to convince that it can easily overturn demographic reality as well as emancipating Kosovo Albanians for self-government and co-existence with the minority communities of Kosovo.

Today we have other biases: the republic and independence are internationally affirmed facts so that we can be calm about the course of the process. Under pressure is Serbia, it must comply with reality.

Latinka Perovovic is one of those voices of reason that has great impact on the districts of second Serbia, which rationally engages in good neighbourly reports with all neighbours, and primarily Albanians.

(November 2020)

Taken from Albanian Post.