A Voice For the Voiceless

MISSION

The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

Repression

Kosovo's autonomy came to an abrupt halt in the late 1980s as the nationalist president of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, built his campaign for a Greater Serbia. Aiming for Serbian unity within a Serbian state, he drew on the anti-Albanian sentiment in Serbia, as well as the Serbian minority in Kosovo.


Pro-Serb graffiti on a wall at the University of Prishtina.

In 1989 Serbia suspended Kosovo's autonomy, taking control of the police and court system. In the following years, Serbia tried to alter the ethnic balance in Kosovo in favor of the Serbian population. Serbian refugees from the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, for example,  were resettled in Kosovo.

The Albanian political structure of Kosovo was driven underground, and the Albanian economy marginalized. All public administration and publicly funded enterprises were placed under the direct control of the Serbian government.

Over 123,000 Albanian workers were fired from their positions in various fields, and they were forced to rely on farming, private businesses, smuggling, and foreign remittances in order to survive. Their old jobs were given to Serbian and Montenegrin immigrants, who eventually made up 70% of all industrial workers in Kosovo.

By mid-1995, half a million Albanians were facing food shortages. The Serbian authorities revised the lists of socially needy and struck off all Albanians, depriving almost 20,000 disabled Albanians of state support.

Serbian police with Albin Kurti, the Kosovar student leader, arrested during protests in late 1997. The students were demanding greater autonomy for Albanian language education.


Educational opportunities for Albanians were also severely curtailed. Thousands of Albanian teachers and professors were dismissed from their jobs, the University of Prishtina was closed to Albanians, and all teachers were required to sign loyalty oaths. Most subjects were required to be taught in the Serbian language, with special emphasis given to Serbian history and culture.

After a while, a form of apartheid developed in Kosovo. Place names were changed into Serbian, swimming pools and discos in were for exclusive Serbian use, and use of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was made mandatory in public. Regulations were even passed forbidding people from the two ethnic backgrounds from selling real estate to each other (although in practice Serbs were free to buy from Albanians.)

Eventually, all the Intimidation and abuse became routine. The Albanian-language press was intimidated and in some cases banned. Journalists and human rights activists were harassed and jailed. Serbia hampered the distribution of humanitarian aid in Kosovo by international relief organizations.

In July 1993, a human rights monitoring team from the CSCE (now OSCE-the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) was expelled. Meanwhile, incidents of police harassment, violence, and assassinations multiplied. The right to due process was often denied. Prosecution on the basis of ethnicity, imprisonment, torture and execution of activists while in detention were all widely documented by the Helsinki Watch Committee and other international human rights groups.