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Serbia.  During that period of enhanced autonomy, ethnic

Albanians exercised almost complete control over Kosovo's

provincial administration, but many Serbs complained of

pervasive discrimination in employment and housing, and of

the authorities' unwillingness to protect them from anti-

Serb violence.

Kosovo after Tito

By 1981, official census data pegged Kosovo's ethnic

Albanian population at 77.5 percent.6   The same year, in

the wake of Tito's death, riots broke out in Kosovo as

ethnic Albanians demanded full republic status within the

Yugoslav federation.  In the course of the violence, Serbs

and Montenegrins in Kosovo were beaten, their homes and

businesses burned, and their shops looted.7   Also, a myste-

rious fire was set at one of Serbia's most cherished reli-

gious shrines, the Pec Patriarchate in Kosovo, a complex

of medieval churches and the historical seat of the patri-

arch of the Serbian Orthodox Church.8   The civil unrest was

eventually quashed by the communist authorities, but

thousands of Serbs fled Kosovo following the violence.

Throughout the rest of the 1980s the Serbian Orthodox

Church in Kosovo and Serbian civic groups documented

numerous cases of harassment, intimidation, vandalism,

destruction of Serbian monuments and churches, and attacks

on Serbian priests, nuns, and civilians by ethnic

Albanians.  As historian Noel Malcolm reports,

In the mid-1980s the Serbian Academy of Sciences

commissioned a survey of 500 households of Serbs

who had migrated to inner Serbia from Kosovo.

Many of the people interviewed thought that there

was a political dimension to the deterioration of

conditions for the Slavs in Kosovo. . . . When

giving the reasons for their migration, 41 per-

cent mentioned "indirect pressure" from the

Albanians, and 21 percent referred to direct

pressure: that last category was composed of ver-

bal abuse (8.5 percent), material damage (7.5

percent) and personal injury (5 percent).9

While the number of cases of abuse against Serbs

varies by source, historian Miranda Vickers has concluded

that "many Serbs and Montenegrins who decided to leave

Kosovo [in the 1980s] had experienced intimidation, pres-

sure, violence, and other severe abuses of their human

rights because of their ethnicity."10   Similarly, historian

Richard West notes that while ethnic Albanians from Kosovo