Rally and Summit

By Muharem Bazdulj for Kosovo Online

There are days, weeks, and months when history accelerates and intensifies. Looking back at 1989, particularly its final quarter, it’s astonishing how much happened in such a short time. While some major media outlets recently marked the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been virtually no public commemoration on December 2 and 3 of the famous Malta Summit, where Bush and Gorbachev effectively ended the Cold War.

On one hand, this could be because the West is only now beginning to understand, belatedly, that its arrogant triumphalism after the Wall fell—until the formal dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR—is not unrelated to the current war between Russia and Ukraine. It’s hard to imagine a politician more inclined toward compromise than Gorbachev. It’s also hard to imagine anyone else agreeing to the reunification of Germany, withdrawing troops from Eastern Europe, and formally supporting America’s attack on Iraq, all while receiving virtually nothing in return.

At the joint press conference in Malta, Gorbachev declared: “The world is leaving one epoch and entering another. We are at the start of a long journey toward an era of lasting peace. The threats of force, mistrust, and psychological and ideological struggles must become things of the past.” This speech thrilled the entire West; everyone was elated because, even a year earlier, when reform processes in the USSR were well underway, no one expected such a swift resolution.

There was even a touch of poetry—perhaps poetic justice—in the whole affair. The seeds of the Cold War were sown with the famous division of spheres of interest at Yalta. If history indeed rhymes, where else could the Cold War have ended but Malta?

Since Yalta, where the East and West calculated their interest in Yugoslavia into a "fifty-fifty" formula, the country’s peculiar position during the Cold War seemed almost predestined. From 1945 to 1948, Yugoslavia appeared to be firmly aligned with the East; from 1948 to 1953 (Stalin’s death), it seemed to be leaning toward the West. Then, Tito’s meeting with Khrushchev solidified a genuine "fifty-fifty" stance, particularly evident from 1961, with the First Non-Aligned Movement Conference.

The late Dušan Bataković often quipped that democratization in Yugoslavia was hindered because Stalin died too early, and Tito too late. This "fifty-fifty" Yugoslavia became irrelevant after the Cold War—irrelevant to everyone but its own peoples, who were evidently unprepared. Every wall falls on someone, and the Berlin Wall fell on Yugoslavia.

In this context, it’s worth remembering early December 1989 in Yugoslavia. The 46th anniversary of the Second AVNOJ Session and the 71st anniversary of the founding of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes—the first Yugoslavia—had just passed. As the global East and West drew closer, Yugoslavia’s own East and West drifted further apart. On December 1, 1989, a “Truth Rally” was scheduled in Ljubljana. However, despite being self-proclaimed as Yugoslavia's most democratic part, Slovenian authorities banned the rally. Not only that, but Slovenian police arrested around thirty Serbs who attempted to attend, accusing them of “disturbing public order,” including several Serbian Orthodox Church priests. The next day, Serbia began boycotting Slovenian products, and some companies cut ties with Slovenian partners.

Simultaneously, the crime pages of newspapers were filled with reports from Kosovo and Metohija. Here are just a few examples: Serbian nuns from the Holy Trinity Monastery near Musutiste complained of new violence and harassment by local Albanians in early December 1989. Abbess Ilaria stated: “We face many difficulties, but the worst is the attacks by Albanians from nearby villages. They openly cut down our forests, steal our harvest. They’ve killed several pigs and stabbed a bull in the stomach. The Suva Reka municipality treats this Serbian monastery with indifference.” The nuns themselves had been physically attacked multiple times by Albanian thugs, but complaints to authorities about the violence went unanswered.

A few days later, reports detailed an attack by a local thug, Kujtim Hamza, on Miomir Savić, as well as statistics from the Istok municipality in Metohija, showing continued Serbian emigration under pressure. In the past three years alone, 18 Serbian families and 532 individuals had left the municipality; in the last nine months of 1989, four families and 50 individuals had departed.

As the global West experienced growing optimism and celebration of its triumph in the following two to three years, all negative trends in Yugoslavia escalated toward their breaking point.