The Yugoslav State Security Service and Physical Violence in Socialist Kosovo

Year 2021, Issue: 6, 101 - 130, 30.06.2021

Isabel Stroehle

Abstract

As the movement toward decentralization in Yugoslavia accelerated following the Brioni Plenum of 1966, the Kosovo branch of the League of Communists sought to support its demands for an expansion of the province’s autonomy and Albanian nationality rights by revealing so-called "deformations" (“deformations”), including violence of the state security service in Kosovo province. While it formally succeeded in that effort, on a local level this strategy undermined the political legitimacy of Yugoslav Communist rule in multiethnic Kosovo. Using court case files and documented interrogations of security service officials by party commissions, the article first reconstructs one of the most-debated incidents of extreme state violence in Yugoslav Kosovo: the confiscation of weapons from villagers in 1955–1956. The article then explores, using archival materials of the League of Communists of Kosovo and Serbia, the ways in which the Kosovar Communist leadership debated the state security and intelligence agencies’ excessive use of violence a decade later The author argues that the leadership’s aspiration to reshape the memory of the earlier phase of Yugoslav Communist rule in Kosovo through releasing selected pieces of information caused outrage locally and undermined the leadership’s effort to legitimate its rule more fully, particularly as the promised lustration failed to materialize. The moralizing discourse of the leadership, as opposed to legal accountability, merely emphasized this failure and ultimately contributed to narratives of victimisation at the hands of the national “Other.”

Keywords

Kosovo, socialist Yugoslavia, state violence, nationality policy

Thanks

The Gerda Henkel Foundation generously supported archival research in Belgrade and Prishtina as part of a PhD research grant for my dissertation on socialist Yugoslav rule in practice in Kosovo, 1945-1974, which I completed at the Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich. I am grateful to the staff of the Archive of Kosovo (Arkivi i Kosovës) and the Archive of Serbia (Arhiv Srbije, Železnik) for their kind assistance. Jan Behrends, Thomas Lindenberger and other participants provided helpful comments at the First Annual Conference of the Centre for Contemporary Research project on “Physical Violence in Late Socialism”, held at IOS Regensburg in April 2012. Sabine Rutar encouraged me to write this paper and kindly provided me with edits and insightful comments.

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