The Gazimestan speech () was given on 28 June 1989 by Slobodan Milošević, then president of Serbia, at the Gazimestan monument on the Kosovo field. It was the centrepiece of a day-long event to mark the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, which was fought at the site in 1389.
The speech was delivered to a crowd of an estimated million or more attendees, and came against a backdrop of protracted ethnic tension between ethnic Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo and increasing political tensions between SR Serbia and the other constituent republics of the then SFR Yugoslavia caused by the anti-bureaucratic revolution.
The speech has since become notorious for Milošević's reference to the possibility of "armed battles", in the future of Serbia's national development. Many foreign commentators have described this as presaging the collapse of Yugoslavia and the eventual Yugoslav Wars. Milošević later claimed that he had been misrepresented.
Background 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,MacDonald, David Bruce. Balkan Holocausts?: Serbian and Croatian victim-centered propaganda and the war in Yugoslavia, pg. 65. Manchester University Press, 2002; and a worsening economy led to a large number (around 100,000 between 1961–87) of Serbs and Montenegrins leaving the area by the late-1980s although there is no official, non-Serbian, data regarding that issue.
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.Kola, Paulin. In Search of Greater Albania, pp. 181–182. C. Hurst & Co, 2003;
The speech was the climax of the commemoration of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. 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 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 to gain favour from the new "patriotic leadership", thus helping to further increase nationalist sentiments.Crnobrnja, Mihailo. The Yugoslav Drama, p. 102. McGill-Queen's Press, 1996;
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", pp. 110–11 in Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia, ed. Jasminka Udovički, James Ridgeway, Duke University Press, 2000; 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.Volkan, Vamik D., William F. Greer & Gabriele Ast. The Third Reich in the Unconscious: Transgenerational Transmission and Its Consequences, pg. 47. Psychology Press, 2002; At the end of the tour, the relics were reinterred in the Gračanica Monastery 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 from Serbia but also 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.Zirojević, Olga. "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;
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 German, Serbian Patriarch; the Prime Minister 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. 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; 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 "S" (rendered as "С" in Cyrillic) at each of its four corners, standing for the slogan (, ).R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation, p. 70. Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
Content The message Milošević delivered in the speech was essentially one that he had already been promoting for some time. On 19 November 1988, he had told a "Brotherhood and Unity" rally in Belgrade: "None should be surprised that Serbia raised its head because of Kosovo this summer. Kosovo is the pure centre of its history, culture and memory. Every nation has one love that warms its heart. For Serbia it is Kosovo."'Naša Borba, 14 June 1996.
A similar theme characterised his speech at Gazimestan. Anthropologist Edit Petrović comments that Milošević sought to combine "history, memory and continuity", promoting "the illusion that the Serbs who fought against the Turks in Kosovo in 1389 are somehow the same as the Serbs fighting for Serbian national survival today".Edit Petrović, "Ethnonationalism and the Dissolution of Yugoslavia", p. 170 in Neighbors at War: anthropological perspectives on Yugoslav ethnicity, culture, and history, ed. Joel Martin Halpern, David A. Kideckel. Penn State Press, 2000.
According to James Gow, the objective was to further Milošević's political campaign, which was "predicated on the notion of redressing this mood of victimisation and restoring the sense of Serbian pride and, most important of all, power".Gow, James. The Serbian Project and Its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes, pg. 10. C. Hurst & Co. Publishers (2003);
At the beginning of the speech, Milošević mentioned the battle and concluded that it is "through the play of history of life"Quote from the English translation by the National Technical Information Service of the US Department of Commerce. Reprinted in The Kosovo Conflict and International Law: An Analytical Documentation 1974–1999, ed. Heike Krieger, pp. 10–11. Cambridge University Press, 2001; . online version in Milošević's official website that "Serbia regained its state, national, and spiritual integrity" (referring to the constitutional changes that reduced autonomy of Serbia's provinces and strengthened the central rule) at the battle's anniversary. He continued by saying, "Today, it is difficult to say what is the historical truth about the Battle of Kosovo and what is legend. Today this is no longer important".
Milošević placed his speech in the context of the history of Yugoslavia since the World War II in which Serbia's influence had been restricted by constitutional arrangements, diluting its power. That had been a long-running controversy in Serbian politics, particularly after Kosovo and Vojvodina were granted influence over Serbia under the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution. Vjeran Pavlaković posited that Milošević sought to make "clear parallels between the Battle of Kosovo and the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution, both considered to be defeats in the Serbian national consciousness."Ramet, Sabrina Petra & Vjeran Pavlaković, Serbia Since 1989: politics and society under Milošević and after, p. 13. University of Washington Press (2005); He maintained that disunity among Serbian political leaders meant that they were "prone to compromise to the detriment of its own people, a compromise that "could not be accepted historically and ethically by any nation in the world ... here we are now at the field of Kosovo to say that this is no longer the case".
Milošević presented Serbian victimisation as the result of poor political leadership and spoke of how "the Serbian leadership [had] remained divided, prone to compromise to the detriment of its own people" and asserted: "The fact that in this region they are a major nation is not a Serbian sin or shame; this is an advantage which they have not used against others, but I must say that here, in this big, legendary field of Kosovo, the Serbs have not used the advantage of being great for their own benefit either."
Milošević signalled that the passiveness would change: "Thanks to their leaders and politicians and their vassal mentality they felt guilty before themselves and others. This situation lasted for decades, it lasted for years and here we are now at the field of Kosovo to say that this is no longer the case... Serbia of today is united and equal to other republics and prepared to do everything to improve its financial and social position and that of all its citizens. If there is unity, cooperation, and seriousness, it will succeed in doing so."
He stated: "Serbs have never in the whole of their history conquered and exploited others. Their national and historical being has been liberational throughout the whole of history and through two world wars, as it is today. They liberated themselves and when they could they also helped others to liberate themselves."
Afterward, he spoke about unity and Serbian multiethnicity: he emphasised that "unity in Serbia will bring prosperity to the Serbian people in Serbia", and also to "each one of its citizens, irrespective of his national or religious affiliation".