Azem vllasi biography of albert
The Principle of Secrecy and the Difficulty of Institutional Critique in Kosovo
09 2007
Sezgin Boynik
1.
In order to analyze current and innovative contemporary art in Kosovo we have to go back to the beginning of the nineties, where the cultural roots of the present situation are found. At that time, and also before it,, contrary to typical avant-garde theories, these cultural roots were not related to art as an autonomous sphere. In Kosovo contemporary art has always been an ad hoc engagement with political and social circumstances. Seen only from this perspective, the contemporary art of Kosovo can be understood as highly political. But what I will try to show here is that this ad hoc (or immediate) engagement has a potential to be misunderstood and misinterpreted as radical institutional critique.
In the beginning of the nineties, when Kosovo Albanians were faced with extensive social repression and completely erased from official representations, there were quite a few contemporary art events organized in Pristina as well as in other cities in Kosovo. These exhibitions, which were mainly the usual modernist metaphorical representations, were important in the sense that they could represent “Albanian culture” within the realm of aesthetic representations; the very existence of these exhibitions was enough to show that a trace of “Albanian culture” exists in Kosovo. Of course these exhibitions were underground.
2.
As it is commonly known, Kosovo, which was an autonomic and autonomous region of the Republic of Serbia, and which had been enjoying extensive political rights in Yugoslavia since the constitution of 1974, lost these achieved rights in the beginning of the nineties. The new constitution, which was composed by the Serbian nationalist policy, excluded all the rights of Albanian self-representation. The constitutional change in the beginning of the nineties was executed in all the republics of Yugoslavia. This meant a suspension of Yug The year of 1989 is known as the annus mirabilis, in which the fall of the Berlin Wall heralded the collapse of communism in Europe. While for some 1989 announced the beginning of a new age, for others it meant a return to the past. In the year in which the peoples of Eastern Europe looked towards their joint European future, Serbia’s gaze was fixated on a point in the past and the long gone year of 1389. In Yugoslavia, the events of 1989 suggested the potential dissolution of the country, while the central topic that year was Kosovo. A short look at the chronology of events provides an insight into what happened that year in and with Kosovo, but also with Serbia and ultimately Yugoslavia. In the summer of 1988, Serbia and Montenegro were swept along on a wave of what was referred to as a “happening of the people”, that is mass protests, by means of which the party regimes in Vojvodina, Kosovo, and Montenegro were overthrown, only to be replaced by supporters of Slobodan Milošević, who had seized power in Serbia in the autumn of 1987. Even though they had been incited by Milošević and the groundwork for them meticulously laid by the media, the protests of 1988 had the character of a “people’s revolt”, while the outcome of these mutinies was presented as the “people’s will”. In 1989, the “happening of the people” continued, with an “anti-bureaucratic revolution” ending in victory, as young politicians loyal to Slobodan Milošević rose to power in Montenegro in January of that year. February and March brought unrest to Kosovo, the consequences of which would be felt throughout the year. It all started with the miners’ strike in Stari Trg (Stantërg) in Trepča (Trepça), Kosovo, sparked by the expulsion of Azem Vllasi from the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia on 20 February. Vllasi had been the President of the League of Communists of Kosovo since 1986. He had remain The Albanians of Kosovo in Yugoslavia – the Struggle for Autonomy Case study 2 In his memoirs, Fadil Hoxha recollects how terrible he felt when Milivoje Bajkić had yelled at him for writing the recruits’ names in Albanian while they were mobilizing men to fight for Yugoslavia’s final battles.1 Being slammed for using his mother tongue, he claimed, had made him aware of the unitarist tendencies that were becoming evident among the Serbs in Yugoslavia. This fear of unitarist approaches, a pejorative term meaning Serbian centrist tendencies, was prevalent among the internationalists, who opposed the formation of one nation from all the nations in Yugoslavia.2 Kosovo was incorporated into Yugoslavia rather than Albania because of the influence that the Serbian communists had, because of the indifference of Tito on this matter, and ultimately because of the inability of the Albanian Partisans to do anything about it. At a meeting in Belgrade in 1944, Fadil Hoxha recalls, Edvard Kardelj had transmitted Tito’s decision to the former, that it was perhaps best to leave Kosovo as part of Serbian territory to appease the Serbs, whose insurgence at such a time would cause a great deal of trouble.3 At one point, even the Montenegrin Marko Vujaćić had argued to Tito that the Dukagjini Plain (Metohija in Serbian) belonged to Montenegro, but Djilas had countered this argument by drawing attention to the fact that if the Dukag Kosovo 1989: The (Ab)use of the Kosovo Myth in Media and Popular Culture
List of Kosovo Albanians