356 The Presidential Years
a decision, as the Belgrade rumor mill had it, undertaken because Tito wanted
to please the Arabs. The exasperated Serbs were sure that the move was aimed
to weaken the Orthodox presence in the Balkans; the marshal, they said, wanted
to bring back the old Comintern order as a way to destroy Yugoslavia.^506 These
suspicions were fostered by the policy carried out in Kosovo towards the mostly
Muslim Albanians (population about a million) after the fall of Ranković, which
was less repressive than the one implemented by the UDBA in 1945. The more
tolerant atmosphere could not appease the Kosovo Albanians, who after decades
under a police regime wanted to emancipate themselves from Belgrade. On 27
November 1968, just before the Albanian and likewise the Yugoslav national
holiday, student demonstrations erupted in Prishtina and in other cities of the
province, which gave rise to a popular revolt that spread to Albanian areas in
western Macedonia the following month.^507 The protesters carried banners
with slogans such as: “We want a constitution; Long live Hoxha, We want
union with Albania.”^508 The Yugoslavs attributed the organization of the revolt
to Tirana and decided to suppress it with violence. Subsequently, vast adminis-
trative reforms were instituted that favored the “Shiptars” (as the Albanians
were derogatorily called), but that only temporarily calmed the situation with-
out truly satisfying anybody. It certainly did not satisfy the Albanians, who saw
themselves as being in a sort of colonial dependence on Belgrade, nor the
Serbs, who considered Kosovo the cradle of their nation and were well aware of
their hate: “We have given them their own administrators, a university, the
Albanian flag, their language—but they want more.... The Albanians should
be told that we will defend Kosovo, even with tanks, if necessary.”^509
In Serbia, a nationalistic surge was evident during Christmas 1968, which was
celebrated with more vehemence than it had been seen since 1941. “With the
Orthodox faith, we confirm our Serb identity,” wrote Dobrica Ćosić, noting that
the populace, disillusioned with the Yugoslav ideal of all southern Slavs living in
a single state, was discovering the concept of Greater Serbia. In his opinion, this
was necessary to save the Serbs from chauvinist Croat policy and from Slove-
nian economic hegemony, the aim of which was to reduce Serbia to a colony.^510
Executive BureauThe authorities tried to overcome these tensions with the liberalization of the
system. Although liberalization had been discussed since 1967, it ground to a
halt because of growing inflation and other difficulties caused by the failure of
economic reform.^511 It gathered momentum at the end of 1968, when a series
of constitutional amendments were voted in that recognized equality between
the Yugoslav “nations” (Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Macedonians, Slovenes, Mon-
tenegrins) and the “nationalities,” as the ethnic minorities were called (Alba-
nians, Hungarians, Italians, etc.). In this context, the rights of the autonomous