Buxhovi: Rugova opposed Milosevic as early as 1989

Historian Jusuf Buxhovi believes that June 28, 1989, at Gazimestan marked the beginning of the end of the Serbian myth of Kosovo, as well as of the hegemonistic policy of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime.

He recalls that Milosevic’s speech that day opened the chapter of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, while Ibrahim Rugova’s response, published in the German magazine Der Spiegel, signaled the failure of Serbian policies.

According to Buxhovi, the historical conclusion of this confrontation was Kosovo’s liberation and the declaration of independence on February 17, 2008, although, as he stresses, Serbian clerical fascism continues to try to keep the Kosovo myth alive through the marking of Vidovdan.

Full text:

THE FABRICATED MYTH OF KOSOVO, SERBIAN CLERICAL FASCISM, AND THE STATE OF KOSOVO…

Thirty-seven years ago, at Gazimestan, before a Serbian crowd of one million people, Milosevic, with the declaration that “after six centuries, we again find ourselves in battles and before battles. They are not armed battles, although such things should not be excluded yet,” opened the bloody chapter of the destruction of Yugoslavia, with tragic consequences for its peoples.

That day, at the Gazimestan platform, before the disintegrating Yugoslav presidency and the eyes of a world bewildered by what was happening to Tito’s legacy, the Serbian “vozhd” was promoted, reincarnated from Lazar of Kosovo to restore “Serbian historical glory” and, as was said, “the mission of the Serbs to defend European civilization” (understood to mean from the Albanians, the occupiers of Serbia’s holy lands)!

At the same time, somewhere near Gazimestan, Dr. Ibrahim Rugova, then chairman of the Kosovo Writers’ Association, in a historic interview for the German magazine Der Spiegel, among the very few, in the name of the intellectual, historical, cultural, and political conscience, although without its mandate, responded to Milosevic’s threats against Albanians and others at the clerical-fascist celebration of Serbian Vidovdan.

In short, Dr. Rugova’s response to Milosevic, in what was then the most influential German and European weekly, was that on March 23 of that year, Milosevic, with tanks and under a state of emergency, destroyed Kosovo’s autonomy as a federal unit. By doing so, he staged a coup against the Yugoslav constitution. This act is seen by Albanians as the reoccupation of Kosovo, after that of 1945. On this occasion, Rugova warned the Serbs that “whenever a small people, and the Serbs are such a people, have tried to impose hegemony in the Balkans, they have ended tragically.”

Thus, the Serbian clerical-fascist orgy of June 1989 ended exactly as Dr. Rugova had predicted in the German magazine. But from today’s historical perspective, Gazimestan brought to the fore two of its most important actors, who marked eras in opposite directions.

On one side was Milosevic, its loser, who in 2003, as president of the Yugoslav remnant, ended up at the International Tribunal in The Hague for war crimes against humanity, where he also died during the trial in 2006.

On the other side was Dr. Ibrahim Rugova, the historic leader of the Albanians, who, with the founding of the LDK on December 23, 1989, and with the mandate of the free vote from the presidential and parliamentary elections of 1992 and 1998, took on the historic responsibility of active institutional peaceful resistance, with the parallel state, up to the armed one, which brought NATO’s military intervention from March 24 to June 10, 1999.

It can be said that the history between the demystification of the fabricated Serbian myth of Kosovo for hegemonistic aims and Kosovo’s liberation from it, with the epilogue of the independent state of Kosovo declared on February 17, 2008, had the beginning of its end on June 28, 1989, in Gazimestan.

Nevertheless, this extraordinary historical leap has left behind the spirit of Serbian clerical fascism, which on every Vidovdan tries to keep alive in Kosovo the medieval myth of “Kosovo as Serbia’s historic cradle,” even though reality, the state of Kosovo, and the Western orientation of the Albanians have rendered it obsolete to the point of anachronism!