The next explosion

...Within Serbia itself an ethnic mine field is waiting to explode...

...Kosovans, impoverished themselves, would have to make even greater sacrifices to unite with Albania...

...During the four decades of Enver Hoxha' s Communist tyranny in the neighboring state of Albania, secession and union with Albania proper was not an option...

...In 1990 leaders of the dissolved parliament met secretly and proclaimed the so-called "Kacanicka Constitution...

...However, a largely unemployed younger generation affected by secularism and Western values could quickly turn to violence...

...They have little in common with ethnic Albanians, neither language, religion, culture, nor script...

...They had been suffering virtual martial-law rule since their 1981 demonstrations for republican status within Yugoslavia...

...And now, there is an extra player in the wings...

...Today some Serbs speak in terms of a Christian crusade against resurgent Islam...

...Schooling has gone underground, with 400,000 children boycotting classes in favor of private home schools...

...They claim to have been in Kosovo long before the Slav migrations...

...The Albanians, too, have memories...

...Yet it is a price they seem willing to pay...

...All this despite their terror at giving Serbia a pretext for opening a new front in Kosovo and massacring them...

...In fact, Catholic Albanians in Kosovo are as firmly opposed to Serbs as are its Muslims...

...Since then there have been over 100 deaths and 10,000 imprisonments at the hands of the police...

...With sanctions against Serbia biting and disaffection spreading there, Milosevic could blitz Kosovo to provide a diversion...

...This May, they again ran the gauntlet of the security forces, risked arrest and ballot box confiscations, and elected their own parliament and president...

...After their fatal defeat at Kosovo in 1389 by the advancing Ottoman Turks, most Serbs, under the leadership of their bishops, moved north to the Danube plain...

...These Albanians live in colonial conditions in Serbia's impoverished deep south, particularly in the province of Kosovo, where 90 percent of the population is Albanian...

...Milosevic cashed in on Serb memories in a big way in 1989, the six-hundredth anniversary of the Serb defeat at Kosovo...

...The Albanians are only too aware of the fate of the Croats and Bosnians...

...In the nineteenth century, they established another Serb kingdom, which in turn became the leading protagonist in creating modern Yugoslavia...

...However, in no way could the plight of the Serbs be compared with the desperation the ethnic Albanians felt...

...For their part, Albanian Muslims are casual and syncretist...

...But in 1991 Albania repudiated Communist rule, and last October it recognized the clandestine Kosovo government...

...But Tito's death in 1980 left Kosovo's Albanians without a protector...

...As their brutal assaults on Croats and Bosnian Muslims show, Serbs have very long memories...

...Attendance and good performance has become a point of pride in the eyes of parents and pupils alike...

...After Serbs and Croats, they were Yugoslavia's third largest national group, but they have never had a republic of their own...

...They cannot forget how after both World Wars the European great powers allowed the creation of an "artificial Yugoslavia based on injustice and Serb hegemony," to quote Lush, instead of awarding Kosovo to the newly independent Albania...

...But communism reduced Albania to third-world status, and it is on the verge of total collapse...

...The essential issue of conflict is that Kosovo, an inland plateau surrounded by mountains, is both Old Serbia and inland Albania...

...Lush says that Kosovo is remarkable for its tolerance, and that there is no danger of so-called Islamic fundamentalism...

...The Serb president, Slobodan Milosevic, rode to power in 1987 on the crest of an emotive campaign to protect the 10 percent Serb minority in Commonweal Kosovo...

...To counter Serb aggressive tendencies, Tito (d...

...Serbs and Albanians now live in two different worlds...

...Nor can they forget how between the wars Serb-dominated Yugoslavia treated Kosovo as a colony, drove many Muslims to leave for Turkey, and tried to replace them with Serb settlers...

...They were gradually replaced by Albanians, most of whom converted to Islam...

...In 1990 both Muslim and Catholic clergy persuaded ethnic Albanians to renounce the 17July 1992:9 blood feuds that were draining the nation's life away...

...1980) granted autonomy in 1974 to two provinces within Serbia, multiethnic Vojvodina in the north, and Kosovo...

...He has the hardware...

...Pavle is now Serb patriarch...

...On the most contentious issue of all, last fall 6,000 teachers were fired for refusing to give up the Albanian curriculum for primary and middle schools...

...Serbia's 2 million-strong Albanian minority boycotted the elections on May 30...

...Albanians compare it to apartheid...

...Macedonia, strategically placed between Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria, is apprehensively waiting its turn, and even the little republic of Montenegro, which earlier this year voted to stand alongside the unreformed Communist Serbia in the rump of Yugoslavia, is reconsidering its options in the wake of the appalling carnage in Bosnia-Herzegovina and UN sanctions against Yugoslavia...

...They also spill over into Montenegro and into adjacent Macedonia, where numbering 700,000, they constitute about a third of the population...

...Serbs claimed they were suffering genocide at the hands of Albanians...

...They appropriated hospitals, Albanian radio, television, and newspapers, and 70 percent of the factories...

...The Serbs continued their struggle against the Ottomans as frontiersmen in the Hapsburg empire...

...They occupied the university, fired 100,000 government employees, including teachers and doctors, and brought many families to the brink of starvation...

...JANICE BROUN Janice Broun is Eastern European correspondent for News Network International...

...In 1990 the Serb parliament unilaterally revoked Kosovo's autonomy, abolished its government and legislature, and subjected the province to even more draconian military and police control, while supplying local Serbs with arms...

...Not until the late 1960s did Communist Yugoslavia inject capital to develop the backward province and build a university in Pristina...

...Moreover, Macedonia's restless Albanians also seem ready to secede...

...With the collapse of communism in Albania, the avowed aim of Kosovan Albanians is now reunion...

...To his credit, the Orthodox bishop, Pavle, an ascetic monk and a conciliator, highly respected by the Albanians, forbade his priests to get involved...

...The Albanian response has been marked by unity, self-restraint, and resourcefulness...

...and they regained Kosovo when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1913...

...Although an implacable atheist, he exploited the concern of the Serbian Orthodox church...

...Of its six former republics—Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro—three have already been internationally recognized: Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina...

...Under the academic, Ibrahim Rugova, leader of the 700,000-strong Democratic Alliance, they have virtually created a state within a state...

...This, as the Reverend Gjerji Lush of Albania's 5 percent minority Catholic church points out, was the first popular movement for democracy in Eastern Europe after Solidarity in Poland...

...In the last century, the Albanian independence movement was launched from Prizen in Kosovo in 1878...

...A year later, in September 1991, hiding their ballot boxes from Serb police, ethnic Albanians overwhelmingly endorsed it by referendum...

...Serbs from the north, most of whom had never set a foot in the region, were bused there for fevered rallies at which Milosevic's portrait was paraded like an icon...

...The Balkan powder keg is ready to explode...

...On closer examination, few Serbs had been murdered, but at the time there was a constant stream of Serbs moving north toward Belgrade as the result of surreptitious harassment and intimidation...

...During a visit to Washington last month, Albanian President Sali Berisha told President George Bush that he was deeply concerned about new threats against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo...

...With its splendid Orthodox monasteries, now beleaguered outposts in a region full of Albanians, Kosovo is the heartland of the Serb medieval empire...

...They also felt they were being outbred and offered inflated prices for their property by local Albanians, who had cash provided by a closely knit network of Albanian migrant workers abroad...