CCTS
Newsletter 12

Review of Howard Clark, Civil Resistance in Kosovo, Pluto Press, London, 2000.

By Michael Randle

Could the liberation of Kosovo from political domination and repression by Milosevic's Serbia have been achieved without war? Howard Clark's well researched account of the nonviolent struggle in the country between 1989 and 1999 suggests that this might have been possible. However, it would have required earlier and more vigorous reaction by the outside world, and probably a more proactive strategy on the part of the resistance, as indeed some of its members and constituent elements had called for.

Clark is well placed to write this account. His engagement with Kosovo dates back to the beginning of 1992 when War Resisters International (WRI) - of which he was co-ordinator from 1985-1997 - and the Prishtina Council for Human Rights were planning a seminar on nonviolent action. It proved impossible to hold this, but in 1994, WRI and Peace Brigades International (PBI) fielded a Balkan's Peace Team to work in co-operation with radical anti-war groups in the region. Since then he has paid many visits to Kosovo, met the people most directly involved in the nonviolent struggle, and kept abreast of the literature on Kosovo, including the internal debates about how the civil resistance might be extended and made more effective. He is also conversant with theoretical studies of nonviolence, and studies of its application in various countries.

One of the cardinal propositions of proponents of civil resistance has been that rulers, even dictators, or a foreign occupying power, depend ultimately for their viability on the co-operation of the subject population. Unfortunately, that hardly applied in Kosovo where the Milosevic regime would have liked nothing better than to see the Albanian population disappear altogether. (The Palestinians, and Tibetans face a similar dilemma.) This did not deter the Kosovo Albanians from conducting a campaign of civil resistance for over a decade and achieving some remarkable successes. Clark chronicles these achievements and pays tribute to the restraint and discipline shown by the population in face of extreme provocation. He argues, however, that for the resistance to have had a chance of achieving its wider goals, and perhaps preventing the situation deteriorating to the point where outside military intervention became all but inevitable, would have required a more active, and strategically planned, nonviolence.

The decade of resistance - a successor to earlier campaigns, notably in 1981 - began in November 1988 with a march by 3,000 miners from the Trepca mines to the provincial capital Prishtina where they were joined by an estimated 300,000 protesters from across the country. This was in response to moves by Belgrade to introduce a new constitution that would deprive Kosovo of its status as an autonomous province. The following February, as the Serbian parliament was due to vote for the new constitution, a sit-in strike by 7,000 miners sparked off a general strike which shut down schools and factories. Milosevic responded by declaring a State of Emergency, and addressing a huge Serb rally in Belgrade at which he pledged to fight to ensure that Kosovo would be an integral part of Serbia. In Croatia and Slovenia, however, there were demonstrations in support of the Kosovo Albanian position, and a reported million Slovenes signed a declaration warning that Yugoslavia faced the choice of acceding to the Albanians' legitimate aspirations or permanent military occupation and the extinction of democracy. Despite all this, and continuing protests in Kosovo, the new constitution was forced through. In March 1989, with tanks outside the parliament building, and military helicopters overhead, the members of the Kosovo assembly endorsed it.

In the following three years the Serbian parliament passed a raft of laws and decrees aimed at establishing direct rule from Belgrade, promoting Serb immigration and Albanian emigration and ultimately at changing the ethnic composition of Kosovo where the Albanians then constituted around 90 per cent of the population. Thus, responsibility for policing was transferred to the Serbian Ministry of the Interior, Kosovo's constitutional and judicial systems were integrated into that of the Republic of Serbia, the information media was likewise brought under the control of Belgrade, a uniform educational curriculum was introduced into the schools, and Serbian controlled municipalities were established.

In addition there were mass sackings. By 1991, 45 per cent of Albanians in employment had lost their jobs, and ultimately perhaps 90 per cent would do so. The sackings included doctors and others in the medical profession, municipal officials, teachers, and - more surprisingly on the face of it - industrial workers, including 94 percent of Albanian miners, 90 per cent of chemical workers and nearly 60 per cent of metal workers. These mass sackings, particularly of industrial workers, demonstrated that the Milosevic regime was determined to push through an ideologically driven programme regardless of the consequences for the Kosovan, or indeed the Serbian, economy. In these circumstances, strikes and other forms of economic non-cooperation would have limited impact except as demonstrations of dissent.

The most influential body promoting the civil resistance campaign was the Democratic League of Kosova (LDK) founded in December 1989 and led by Ibrahim Rugova, but it was also strongly supported - with some dissenting voices - by existing civil society bodies, like the Writers Union and the Prishtina Students Union, (UPSUP), and by others that sprang into existence between December 1989 and February 1990 including the Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms (CDHRF), the Social Democratic Party, the Youth Parliament - later to become the Parliamentary Party of Kosovo (PPK), the Union of Independent Trade Unions of Kosova (BSPK), a Green Party and a feminist group. These constituted a loose alliance known as the Kosovo Alternative. Towards the end of 1990 the LDK and these other organisations and groups formed a Co-ordinating Council of Political Parties to ensure the maximum unity in the struggle.

The decision to adopt a nonviolent form of resistance was taken for essentially pragmatic reasons. Kosovo was weak militarily and from 1991 onwards the wars in Croatia and then Bosnia, with their accompanying massacres and mass expulsions, demonstrated the likely consequences of a military confrontation with Serbia. A positive argument for the nonviolent strategy was the success of the 'people power' revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989.

Four main objectives were identified. To contest the legitimacy of the institutions imposed by Serbia and assert the legitimacy of those supported by the Albanian population; to maintain disciplined restraint in the face of violence; to maintain and foster the Albanian community, including its social, economic and intellectual life, and to mobilise international support.

At the constitutional level, the elected Albanian members of the Kosovo Assembly redeemed their earlier capitulation when most of them occupied the Assembly Building in June 1990 and demanded as a first step the recognition of Kosovo as an equal unit within Yugoslavia. On July 2 - the same day that Slovenia declared its independence - all but nine of them attempted to meet again in the building, and, when they were prevented from doing so, assembled in the street outside and voted for a new independent status for the country. In September of the following year, they met in the town of Kacanik, adopted a new constitution for the country and voted for a referendum on independence, duly organised by the Co-ordinating Council. Over 87 per cent of the Albanian electorate took part, 99.87 per cent of whom voted for independence. The Assembly members then met again, amended the Kacanik constitution and declared Kosovo's independence. The Co-ordinating Council also appointed a founder member of LDK, Bujar Bukoshi, as Prime Minister to head a government in exile in Tirana.

These moves were followed up In May 1992 by elections organised by the Co-ordinating Council in which again the overwhelming majority of the Albanian electorate took part. The LDK , more of a national movement than one party among the others, obtained 76 per cent of the vote and 96 of the 100 single constituency seats. However, 42 seats were allocated on the basis of proportional representation and this ensured that other tendencies were represented. Seats were also left vacant for Serbs and Montenegrins(who did not take part in the elections). Rugova, as the only candidate for president, won 99.5 per cent of the vote. Although the Serbian authorities made no serious attempt to stop the elections taking place, they deployed the police to prevent the Assembly members from holding their scheduled first meeting at a Muslim Seminary in June and trashed the premises.

The downside of the overwhelming victory of Rugova and the LDK in the elections was that the Co-ordinating Council from then on was sidelined. This would have mattered less if the parliament itself had been able to function. Unfortunately, it did not. It failed to meet in plenary, and although it set up a number of commissions, most of these produced nothing. The LDK, Clark comments, behaved after that as if it were the only true representative of the national interest of Kosovo and its decision-making debates became ever more opaque.

One policy adopted at an earlier point by the Co-ordinating Council that attracted much criticism was the boycotting of the December 1990 Federal elections, and subsequent Federal and local elections. The policy was criticised by some members of the democratic opposition in Serbia and by foreign politicians on the grounds that it aided Milosevic's design and that only the full participation of ethnic minorities could counter the prevailing ultra nationalism and create a democratic, multi-ethnic polity. The Albanian counter-argument was that the elections were for an Assembly that had unconstitutionally usurped the functions of Kosovo's own Assembly and imposed discriminatory legislation against Albanians. The clearest signal they could give, therefore, of their rejection of this usurpation was a boycott of the Federal Parliament. A study by the French historian Jacques Semelin of the civil resistance in Occupied Europe during World War II tends to support the validity of their decision. (See Jacques Semelin, Unarmed against Hitler, Praeger, 1993).

The task of maintaining disciplined restraint in the face of provocation was combined with systematically recording, publicising and protesting against abuses. The CDHRF was one of the organisations in the forefront of this work. When an incident took place, its activists, or those from one of the other new groups, would go to the area, record the details, and explain to people the rationale for the policy. Working in the same direction was the declaration in 1990 For Democracy, Against Violence co-ordinated by the Association of Philosophers and Sociologists (UJDI) - a Yugoslav wide organisation - the CDHRF and local LDK organisers which gathered 400,000 signatures. At the same time symbolic and semi-resistance took place which served to strengthen the morale and unity of the people - from the sounding of factory hooters and car horns at a specific time on a 'day of sorrow', to five-minute street protests, to thousands of people putting lighted candles in their balconies. 'What was emerging,' Clark comments about this period, was a set of methods and organisational structures to identify violence with the Serbian oppressor while restraining counter-violence from the population, to strengthen social solidarity while emboldening the population to use the limited space available to communicate their defiance.'

The building up from below of educational, medical, cultural and social institutions despite police harassment and a dearth of facilities, was a truly remarkable achievement. An education system of some kind was maintained at every level, from primary to higher education, though over time, as Clark points out, it faced increasing problems. The alternative medical service could not match the official one in relation to serious illness or operations, but at the level of supplying basic medicines, or diagnosing and treating common ailments, it rivalled and even outperformed it. These services and institutions were paid for from a system of voluntary taxation, supplemented by contributions from the diaspora. Perhaps even more important in terms of achieving self-help and social solidarity, was the campaign to end a practice which more than any other had weakened and divided the Albanian community, namely the blood feud. By the late 1980s this practice - which obliged the young men of a family to revenge the death of, or insult to, another family member - threatened the lives of some 17,000 men. On the initiative of a group of students in CDHRF, 1990 was declared the Year of Reconciliation, and during it 500 campaigners visited villages every weekend to persuade victims' families to grant a 'magnanimous pardon' to the offenders - the sole means within the tradition of ending the feud. Between 1990 and 1992, some 1,000 feuds involving death, 500 of wounding, and 700 other disputes were resolved.

Mobilising international support was a major goal of the resistance from the beginning. It was aided by a large diaspora, especially in the US, by the clear-cut nature of the oppression and by the self-restraint shown by the population. Militating against it up until the time of the Dayton Accords, was the pre-occupation of international actors with the wars in neighbouring Croatia and Bosnia. However, the US lobby especially had some notable successes, and thanks to its influence Ibrahim Rugova and another leading activist, Veton Surroi, attended Congressional hearings on human rights abuses. In turn, Congressional representatives visited Kosovo at various times, and in 1993 decided to provide Kosovo with humanitarian aid. At grassroots level, trade unions, and peace and human rights organisations, were mobilised to protest against the repression. However, prior to 1998, the Kosovo Albanians had more success in eliciting statements of support from bodies with moral authority than persuading states with an interest in the area to take strong action. One apparent success was the statement in 1992 by the outgoing US President Bush to the effect that Kosovo would not be allowed to become another Bosnia and his threat of US air-strikes. However this gave a misleading impression of the importance the US attached to the Kosovo question and raised false expectations.

The Albanian civil resistance, then, achieved many of its defensive /constructive goals during the first half of the 1990s. Not only had social solidarity and community life been maintained, and the conditions in Kosovo been widely publicised internationally, but war, and the extremes of violence witnessed in Croatia and Bosnia, had been avoided. In addition, Milosevic's project to induce and bully the Albanians to leave, and entice Serbs and Montenegrins to come in in their place, had been a total failure - Serbs continued to leave Kosovo and by the mid-90s constituted an even smaller proportion of the population than in 1989. However, in the absence of tangible progress towards the goal of independence, or even of a process which would restore substantial autonomy and end the repression, the patience of the population was bound to come under strain. Increasingly the cautious, defensive policy of Rugova and the LDK was questioned.

The 1995 Dayton Accords which ended (for the time being) the war in Bosnia, proved to be a watershed. Many in the Albanian community felt that what is loosely, and rather optimistically, termed the 'international community' would now focus its efforts on Kosovo, and were encouraged when the US opened up an information office in Prishtina. But this proved an exception. Kosovo had been left out of the Dayton agreement, and once it was signed, all but an outer wall of sanctions against Serbia were lifted. The EU granted diplomatic recognition to the rump Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) comprising Serbia and Montenegro, despite the continuing anomaly of Kosovo - and indeed of Vojvodina which had similarly been stripped of its autonomy in 1989. Above all, the West treated Milosevic as one of the guarantors of Dayton.

Some drew the conclusion from this that the 'international community' would only take decisive action in response to war and its accompanying outrages, and from the Spring of 1996 the Kosova Liberation Army (UÇK) began to claim responsibility for sporadic guerrilla attacks, including four almost simultaneous attacks one day in April which claimed the lives of two policemen and three Serb civilians. But others, while not necessarily ruling out an armed insurrection, proposed an alternative policy of 'active nonviolence'. At a tactical level, this implied protests and demonstrations of a more confrontational character; at the strategic level, it implied a concerted effort to undermine Milosevic's power base in Serbian society and transforming international antipathy for his regime into more decisive action against it. Some critics of the LDK, including notably Adem Demaci - later to become the main political representative of the UÇK - also argued for a shift away from the maximalist demand for total independence in favour of an alternative such as Kosovo having equal status as a republic.

Among the actions proposed in 1996 as part of a shift to active nonviolence were the convening of the banned Kosovo parliament, and the nonviolent occupation of schools and universities. Actions of this kind, could have confronted Belgrade with the classic dilemma they are in fact designed to pose to illegitimate authority. If the authorities do nothing, the protesters gain their objective. If they use excessive force to stop them, the injustice and latent violence of the situation is dramatised in a way that does maximum damage to the authority and legitimacy of the opponent. This in turn can provoke international outrage and galvanise outside governments to take stronger action, erode support for the regime internally, and possibly create splits in the ruling elite. Thus confrontational 'dilemma demonstrations' in Kosovo could have meshed with the broad strategy to change the will, and undermine the power, of the Milosevic regime.

However, in a highly patriarchal society with a top-down style of decision making in political as in family life, challenging the chosen course of action of the established leader was a difficult task. Moreover, moving to a more active nonviolence was a higher risk policy and required a degree of unity only possible if the LDK gave it its blessing. This it was reluctant to do. The LDK Council, meeting in May 1996, ignored the proposal to re-convene the parliament and instead, two days later, just before its existing mandate was due to expire, Rugova signed a presidential decree extending it for a further year. Plans put forward by the Kosova Parliamentary Party (PPK) in 1996 for the nonviolent re-occupation of schools and universities at the start of the new school year were thrown into confusion when it was announced in September that Rugova and Milosevic had signed an agreement on education under which Albanian students and teachers would return to the schools. This was never implemented. And when the student leaders went to Rugova to inform him of their plans to organise public protests to secure the re-opening of the university, he dissuaded them from going ahead.

By the end of 1996 , the policies of Rugova and the LDK were being opening challenged. Adem Demaci joined the PPK as its leader, and 550 students addressed a petition to Rugova calling for the re-opening of school buildings and criticising the state of Albanian politics. These developments coincided with renewed pro-democracy demonstrations in Belgrade in November and December following Milosevic's annulment of the local election results. However, with a few important exceptions, the LDK leadership displayed 'an exaggerated lack of interest' in the pro-democracy demonstrations, even when a mass meeting in Belgrade took the unprecedented step of observing a minutes silence for a Kosovo Albanian teacher who had died in police custody. True many of the demonstrators and their leaders were as insistent as Milosevic that Kosovo was an integral part of Serbia. But the restoration of democracy was likely to open up new possibilities for dialogue and progress, as indeed the two vice-chairmen of LDK, Fehmi Agani and Hydajet Hyseni, argued at the time.

In 1997 the newly elected presidency of the student's union, (UPSUP) decided to organise a series of actions demanding the re-opening of the university buildings. In September of that year hundreds joined hands and walked for an hour each evening through the streets of Prishtina and other cities and towns during the traditional evening stroll - the korzo - and the students announced plans for mass demonstrations at the start of the new academic year on 1 October. Rugova, and senior foreign diplomats who came down specially from Belgrade, urged the organisers to postpone the protests until after the elections in Serbia. This time the UPSUP decided to go ahead despite Rugova's disapproval, a decision, according to the newspaper Vreme which 'shook the Albanian political scene to its roots where the patriarchal principle of subordination largely defines the rules of the game.' 15,000 students took part in the demonstration in Prishtina watched by some 30,000 supportive onlookers. They confronted the police lines in silence for over an hour before the latter moved in using truncheons and teargas. Ten simultaneous protests took place in other towns and cities, the two largest of which attracted 10,000 participants. All were brutally dispersed by the police.

The Belgrade authorities were nevertheless the losers. Rugova himself now praised the actions of the UPSUP, and the Western diplomats who had previously gone to the student leaders to warn them against taking their proposed action went out of their way to cultivate them. Officials from the US and several European governments denounced the police actions, and messages of support and solidarity arrived from around the world, including some from groups in Belgrade. It was a striking example of the possibilities of the 'dilemma demonstration' and of how a more active nonviolence if pursued intelligently at an earlier point might have tilted the balance of forces in favour of the resistance.

Following the demonstration, students from Belgrade contacted UPSUP and sent a delegation to Prishtina to observe the second protest there on 29 October. This was a further indication of the leverage that well-planned confrontations could exert. The second demonstration was attended by 15, 000 students, as was a further action in late December. The final UPSUP demonstration in the series took place in March1998 when the students attempted to move into the Mechanical Engineering Faculty in accordance with a prior agreement. However, by this time the overall situation had changed dramatically following the guerrilla attacks by the UÇK, the massive and disproportionate response by Belgrade, and the Drenica massacres in February-March. Police blocked the passage to the Faculty, and the demonstrators faced a hail of stones from Serb students inside the building. The civil resistance campaign had been sidelined.

In an important chapter, Clark examines 'Pointers for an Alternative Strategy', drawing on some of the suggestions and initiatives by groups in the 'Kosova Alternative', examples from other historical instances of civil resistance, and propositions about strategic nonviolence from researchers in the field. After Dayton, he argues, the movement needed a phase of re-mobilisation, including experimenting with a wider range of tactics, revamping its rather parochial news bulletin, and reconstructing the organisation to include forums where activists from various overlapping constituencies - women, youth, students, the disabled and so forth - could make their voices heard and contribute to the evolution of tactics and strategy. New tactics could have been tried out in small scale actions by well trained groups. The reconvening of the 1992 parliament, which many activists urged Rugova to do, would have been an ideal dilemma demonstration and possibly shifted the diplomatic discourse internationally from realpolitik to the avowed concern for democracy. Unfortunately, Clark argues, the LDK began to seem more interested in running Kosovo as a state than waging a struggle.

Clark discusses also Gandhi's emphasis on a constructive programme - self-organised efforts at transforming one's own society as an integral part of the nonviolent campaign. There were certainly important elements of this in the civil resistance in Kosovo, notably in the campaign to remove blood feuds. But there was an absence of a clear economic strategy. A boycott of some specific Serbian product or products, for instance, might have been feasible, along the lines of Gandhi's call for a boycott of foreign cloth, particularly if the product was one that could be produced locally. This could have been part of a programme of economic revival. Comparing the Kosovo resistance with the Palestinian Intifada, Clark notes the role in the latter of the initiatives to renew the household economy. In Kosovo a project to develop a range of small 'incubator enterprises' - was actually proposed by a former federal economist in 1995. This might have helped both to build self confidence and to reduce dependence on Serbia.

Another relevant Gandhian concept is that of swaraj - self-rule beginning at a personal level, extending through the local to the regional and national levels. It stresses, too, the notion of interdependence, and Clark argues that the goals of the movement could have been recast to focus on transitional possibilities which would allow for some form of independence or federation. The possibilities could include a form of cantonisation or system with spheres of autonomy for each ethnic group, for example in education and culture. These could be ways, as Clark puts it, of helping Serbs to let go of Kosovo. By contrast, indifference to Serb concerns, both in Kosovo and FRY, not only limited the possibilities of putting pressure on the regime but could prejudice the long-term chances of establishing a multi-ethnic society. (Today, obviously, the chances of building such a society are slender indeed.) Such changes in strategy and tactics, and a shift of emphasis to the process of change rather than so exclusively to the final goal, would have required a debate at every level of society and hence changes in the method of consultation and decision-making, moving away from the dominant organisational concept of a hierarchically controlled mass struggle and towards the empowerment of a range of groups and constituencies.

The strategy pursued by the LDK was strong defensively but relatively weak in terms of efforts to undermine Milosevic's support and power base in Serbian society. Given that the Serbian regime did not depend to any great extent on the co-operation of the Kosovo Albanians, the forging of tactical alliances with elements in the society on which it did depend ought to have been a strategic priority, despite the difficulties involved. There were opportunities to do so. By the mid-1990s, the Church, which had played an important role in fostering Serb ultra-nationalism, had become disillusioned with Milosevic, and the Church in Kosovo itself was beginning to look for a modus vivendi. Leading Serb intellectuals in the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (SANU) concluded by the mid-1990s that the notion of 'reclaiming Kosovo' was an illusion and again some were looking for a way forward. These shifts in the thinking of certain influential elements in Serbian society offered opportunities to the Albanian movement which were not sufficiently exploited. There were also anti-war and other groups in Serbia who were open to dialogue but whilst some meetings and discussions did take place between people from these groups and Kosovo Albanians in various organisations, including LDK Youth, the LDK leadership as a whole did not conceive such dialogue, or, in general, communicating with Serbian society, as part of the civil resistance strategy. Nor were efforts made to undermine the loyalty of the police and army, even though in 1998 Serb parents' protest stopped the deployment of new recruits to Kosovo, and in 1999 many Serbs refused the draft or deserted.

Clark acknowledges that the Albanians were unlikely to have had a major impact on the Serb regime and Serb society even if they had tried harder to achieve that, but argues that it was nonetheless important to be open, to multiply contacts, to keep probing to see if a different moment had arrived. Where an alternative nonviolent strategy was more likely to have made a difference was at the international level. An earlier, more intelligent, response by outside powers might have averted the catastrophic escalation of the conflict and the eventual war of intervention by NATO in 1999. However, Clark acknowledges that 'there are times when it is too late to speak of "non-violent alternatives"', and by the Spring of 1999 that point had probably been reached in Kosovo. Nevertheless, NATO's strategy of high-altitude bombing had more to do with saving its own face and defeating and punishing Serbs than in protecting the Albanian population.

In a final chapter, Clark reflects on the potential of civil resistance in the light of the experience in Kosovo. This includes a discussion of the divergent criteria proposed by researchers from different schools of thought for the success of civil resistance, the criteria for assessing a right of secession, the varying, often complementary, roles of conflict prevention, conflict resolution and civil resistance, and the response of the 'international community' to campaigns of civil as against military resistance. 'The war in Kosovo,' he writes, stands as an indictment of international confusion on the right of self-determination and of the inadequacy of international preventative mechanisms, an indictment of international policy forged through media manipulation, and on media journalists that, as Belgrade Women in Black put it when journalists were falling over each other in pursuit of the "shadowy" UÇK, "Nonviolence is not News"'. There is a particularly interesting discussion of Michael Ignatieff's views on self-determination and when outside states should encourage or restrain the break-up of states. Clark is critical of Ignatieff's approach on the grounds that it is based on realpolitik rather than standards and principles, and depends too heavily on a prescience by the international powers which is often available only in hindsight.

Since the book went to press, a combination of the ballot box and civil resistance has finally overthrown the wily and ruthless Milosevic. His regime will not be the last to succumb to people power, and nor will Kosovo be the last crisis which poses critical dilemmas for outside states. This book deserves to be widely studied for its analysis of the mistakes of the international community in dealing with Kosovo, its account of the civil resistance there, and its insights into how nonviolent action can be conducted to greater effect.

(February 2001)

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