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Concept
Gazimestan speech
Summary
The Gazimestan speech (Говор на Газиместану) was given on 28 June 1989 by Slobodan Milošević, then president of Serbia, at the Gazimestan monument on the Kosovo field. It was the centrepiece of a day-long event to mark the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, which was fought at the site in 1389.
The speech was delivered to a huge crowd, and came against a backdrop of intense ethnic tension between ethnic Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo and increasing political tensions between SR Serbia and the other constituent republics of the then SFR Yugoslavia caused by the anti-bureaucratic revolution.
The speech has since become famous for Milošević's reference to the possibility of "armed battles", in the future of Serbia's national development. Many commentators have described this as presaging the collapse of Yugoslavia and the bloodshed of the Yugoslav Wars. Milošević later claimed that he had been misrepresented.
In the years leading up to the speech, Kosovo had become a central issue in Serbian politics. The province had been given extensive rights of autonomy in the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution and had been run by the province's majority-Albanian population. The reassertion of Albanian nationalism, discrimination against Serbs by the province's predominantly Albanian police force and local government, and a worsening economy led to a large number (around 100,000 between 1961–87) of Serbs and Montenegrins leaving the area by the late-1980s although there is no official, non-Serbian, data regarding that issue.
Milošević had used the issue to secure the leadership of the League of Communists of Serbia in 1987, and in early 1989, he pushed through a new constitution that drastically reduced the autonomy of Kosovo and the northern autonomous province of Vojvodina. This was followed by the mass replacement of opposing communist leaders in the provinces, called the Anti-bureaucratic revolution. Many Albanians were killed in March 1989 when demonstrations against the new constitution were violently suppressed by Serbian security forces.
Official source
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