|
The Gazimestan speech was a speech given on 28 June 1989 by Slobodan Milošević, the president of Serbia at the time. It was the centrepiece of a day-long event to mark the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, which spelled the defeat of the medieval Serbian kingdom at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the annexation of most of Serbia's territory aside from the Serbian Despotate. The speech was delivered to a huge crowd gathered at the place where the battle had been fought, Gazimestan in Central Kosovo. It came against a backdrop of intense ethnic tension between ethnic Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo and increasing political tensions between Serbia and the other constituent republics of the then Socialist Federal Republic of 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 said that he had been misrepresented.〔International Criminal Tribunal, (transcript 020214IT, 14 February 2002 )〕 == Background to the speech == 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,〔David Bruce MacDonald, ''Balkan Holocausts?: Serbian and Croatian victim-centred propaganda and the war in Yugoslavia'', p. 65. Manchester University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-7190-6467-8〕 and a worsening economy led to a large number (around 100,000 between 1961-1987) of Serbs and Montenegrins leaving the area by the late-1980s.〔(Rise of Tension in Kosovo Due to Migration )〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Expert report by Audrey Helfant Budding given to the ICTY for the prosecution against Slobodan Milosevic, part 4 - Slobodan Milošević Trial Public Archive )〕 Slobodan 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. By June 1989, Kosovo was calm but its atmosphere was tense.〔Paulin Kola, ''In Search of Greater Albania'', p. 181-182. C. Hurst & Co, 2003. ISBN 1-85065-664-9〕 The speech was the climax of the commemoration of the six hundredth anniversary of the battle. It followed months of commemorative events which had been promoted by an intense media focus on the subject of Serbia's relationship with Kosovo. A variety of Serbian dramatists, painters, musicians and filmmakers had highlighted key motifs of the Kosovo legend, particularly the theme of the betrayal of Serbia. Public "Rallies for Truth" were organised by Kosovo Serbs between mid-1988 and early 1989, at which symbols of Kosovo were prominently displayed. The common theme was that Serbs outside Kosovo (and indeed outside Serbia itself) should know the truth about the predicament of the Kosovo Serbs, emotionally presented as an issue of the utmost national importance. Serb-inhabited towns competed with each other to stage ever-more patriotic rallies in an effort to gain favor from the new "patriotic leadership", thus helping to further increase nationalist sentiments.〔Mihailo Crnobrnja, ''The Yugoslav Drama'', p. 102. McGill-Queen's Press, 1996. ISBN 0-7735-1429-5〕 The event was also invested with major religious significance. In the months preceding the Gazimestan rally, the remains of Prince Lazar of Serbia, who had fallen in the Battle of Kosovo, were carried in a heavily publicized procession around the Serb-inhabited territories of Yugoslavia.〔Milan Milošević, "The Media Wars: 1987 - 1997", p. 110-111 in ''Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia'', ed. Jasminka Udovički, James Ridgeway. Duke University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8223-2590-X〕 Throngs of mourners queued for hours to see the relics and attend commemorative public rallies, vowing in speeches never to allow Serbia to be defeated again.〔Vamik D. Volkan, William F. Greer, Gabriele Ast, ''The Third Reich in the Unconscious: Transgenerational Transmission and Its Consequences'', p. 47. Psychology Press, 2002. ISBN 1-58391-334-3〕 At the end of the tour, the relics were reinterred in the Serbian Orthodox monastery at Gračanica in Kosovo, near Gazimestan. The 28 June 1989 event was attended by a crowd estimated at between half a million and two million people (most estimates put the figure at around a million). They were overwhelmingly Serbs, many of whom had been brought to Gazimestan on hundreds of special coaches and trains organized by Milošević's League of Communists of Serbia. The attendees came not only from Serbia but all of the Serb-inhabited parts of Yugoslavia and even from overseas; around seven thousand diaspora Serbs from Australia, Canada and the United States also attended at the invitation of the Serbian Orthodox Church.〔Olga Zirojević, "Kosovo in the Collective Memory", p. 207-208, in ''The Road to War in Serbia: trauma and catharsis'', ed. Nebojša Popov. Central European University Press, 2000. ISBN 963-9116-56-4〕 In addition to Milošević himself, the speech was attended by a variety of dignitaries from the Serbian and Yugoslav establishment. They included the entire leadership of the Serbian Orthodox Church, led by Patriarch German; the Prime Minister of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Ante Marković; members of the Presidency of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia; the leadership of the Yugoslav People's Army; and members of the rotating Presidency of Yugoslavia. Significantly, the event was boycotted by the Croatian member of the Presidency, Stipe Šuvar, as well as the United States ambassador and all ambassadors from the European Community and NATO countries with the exception of Turkey (which had a direct interest in the event as the successor state to the Ottoman Empire).〔Footnote on p. 101 in ''The War in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1991-1995'', ed. Branka Magaš, Ivo Žanić〕 After being escorted through cheering crowds waving his picture alongside that of Lazar,〔Michael Sells, "Kosovo Mythology and the Bosnian Genocide", p. 181 in ''In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century'', ed. Omer Bartov, Phyllis Mack. Berghahn Books, 2001. ISBN 1-57181-214-8〕 Milošević delivered his speech on a huge stage with a backdrop containing powerful symbols of the Kosovo myth: images of peonies, a flower traditionally deemed to symbolize the blood of Lazar, and an Orthodox cross with a Cyrillic letter "C" at each of its four corners (standing for the slogan Само Слога Србина Спашaва (''Samo Sloga Srbina Spašava'', "Only Unity Saves the Serbs").〔R. Scott Appleby, ''The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation'', p. 70. Rowman & Littlefield, 2000〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gazimestan speech」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|