Annus Horribilis.1989 in the Balkans
Annus Horribilis.1989 in the Balkans

Summary/Abstract: The annus mirabilis 1989 in East-Central Europe including the GDR was paralleled by an an-nus horribilis in Southeastern Europe: In Yugoslavia’s Socialist Republic of Serbia the sta-tus of its two autonomous provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo, was cancelled, and in predom-inantly Albanian-populated Kosovo an apartheid-like Serbian occupation regime was in-stalled; in Romania the policy of forced urbanization, played down as “systematization”, which in particular threatened the national minorities, was stepped up; in Bulgaria, the vi-olent assimilation policy towards the country’s large Turkish minority, initiated in 1984, re-sulted first in violent protests, then in a refugee wave to neighboring Turkey; in Albania, En-ver Hoxha’s brutal and isolationist dictatorship was continued after his death in 1985 by his widow Nexhmije and his successor Ramiz Alia; and Greece was politically paralyzed by two consecutive elections resulting twice in a stalemate between the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and the oppositional conservative Nea Demokratia

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