AHC WI: 90% ethnic Serbian Kosovo

With a POD from 1900 AD onward, have Kosovo get a ethnic Serbian majority of +90%.

What if Kosovo had a population that was +90% ethnically Serbian?

There are several possibilities for a Kosovo where Serbs constitute a higher share of the population than in OTL. Some possibilities are.
1. No Yugoslav dissolution: This way the conflict that spured Serbian emigration from Kosovo would be prevented.
2. Voluntary emigration of non-Serbs sometime onward from 1900 AD. Emigration from Kosovo would have different pull and push factors. The emigration from Kosovo may be voluntary but "pushed" by represion.
3. Expulsion of non ethnic Serbs.
 
Last edited:
Kingdom of Yugoslavia goes forward with the proposed OTL forced population transfer with Turkey, and 240 000 K-Albanians are evicted.
https://books.google.fi/books?id=Z5wvJPAaEtEC&pg=PA32&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Tito is killed during the invasion of Yugoslavia, and Partisans remain a fragmented force with Chetniks being the Allied go-to resistance force.
After the war the Chetnik Yugoslavia and communist Albania are in bad terms from the start, and Chetniks avenge the K-Albanian collaboration with Italian and German occupation forces and the later 1950s K-Albanian insurgency by committing widespread ethnic cleansing and colonization of the province.
 
You could cheat a bit and go back to a PoD before 1900. At the time of the 1878 war, Kosovo was around 50-60% Serb and 30% Albanian. The violent demographic changes that culled the Serbian population and created an Albanian majority happened during the last few decades of Ottoman rule.

So, if Kosovo was annexed to Serbia in 1878, you'd have a slight Serbian majority. And one can easily imagine this slight majority transformed into a majority of 80-90% through a combination of peaceful methods and ethnic cleansing.

If the PoD has to wait until 1912, it gets a lot harder. By that point, the Serbian population in Kosovo fell to 25%. And the kingdoms of Serbia (1912-1918) and Yugoslavia (1918-1941) were not willing to use the kind of large-scale ethnic cleansing that might have passed in 1878.
 
Wouldn’t the first POD depend on how Yugoslavia remains intact?
If Yugoslavia persists without internal conflict then the Serbs living in Kosovo who OTL fled after Serbia lost the region would remain in Kosovo, therby increasing the Serbian population in Kosovo. On the other hand a different dissolution of Yugoslavia might increse the Serbian proportion of Kosovo's population if Albanians are forced out instead. There are still Serbs in Kosovo but their numbers are lower than they were due to emigration. Albanians Kosovars have also been emigrated but the proportion of Albanian Kosovars who emigrate is lower than that of Serbian Kosovars.
 
You could cheat a bit and go back to a PoD before 1900. At the time of the 1878 war, Kosovo was around 50-60% Serb and 30% Albanian. The violent demographic changes that culled the Serbian population and created an Albanian majority happened during the last few decades of Ottoman rule.
What happened?
 
If Yugoslavia persists without internal conflict then the Serbs living in Kosovo who OTL fled after Serbia lost the region would remain in Kosovo, therby increasing the Serbian population in Kosovo. On the other hand a different dissolution of Yugoslavia might increse the Serbian proportion of Kosovo's population if Albanians are forced out instead. There are still Serbs in Kosovo but their numbers are lower than they were due to emigration. Albanians Kosovars have also been emigrated but the proportion of Albanian Kosovars who emigrate is lower than that of Serbian Kosovars.
Perhaps Prince Paul remains in power and keeps Yugoslavia neutral while implementing reforms that make Yugoslavia more federal.
 

Vuu

Banned
Tito croaks at the end of WW2, some other dude replaces him. Instead of emulating the USSR and trying to give almost everyone their own thing. It results in a ludicrous project to scramble everyone to produce a Yugoslav identity. Seeing that Serbs made the plurality of Yugoslavia and that in such a scenario they'd completely dominate it, everyone else would mostly assimilate. Actually, any scenario where Tito doesn't get to power will do it

I'm reading a book about the area, made by this Russian dude. In his recordings, Metohija was already pretty Albanian even during the 19th century. According to some charts, Albanians also were scattered all the way to Nis (though those are inaccurate, nobody lived there and they just colored in the blanks between villages consisting of 3 shacks and a mill)

But not very hard really
 
You would have to reverse the demographic trends, the Kosovo and Northern Ireland conflicts were "wars of the womb". Serbian nationalists celebrate the 1389 Battle of Kosovo and the region's historical role in Serbian history (like Kievan Rus is to Russian history), but the difference in birthrates meant that Albanians far outnumbered Serbs after a few generations. By the late '80s, the demographic facts on the ground was far out of sync with a political order built on the area's historic role and prior demographics.
Unless you make reliable birth control available before 1960, somehow change the socioeconomic conditions, or use population transfers the conflict is probably unavoidable.

Rapid demographic change was the major cause of the Northern Ireland conflict as well. Higher Catholic birthrates created a situation where the Protestants eventually became a minority in Northern Ireland, and the protestants' attempts to preserve their prior political dominance resulted in the violence and the troubles. Demographic stability in terms of each group's relative size is probably a prerequisite for peace.
 
Economic issues were the main reason to K-Serb population moving northwards, as the industrial heartland of Yugoslavia was there, and K-Serbs were able to employ themselves easily.

The non-Slavic K-Albanians were always the most discriminated Yugoslav minority after the Ashkali, Egyptians and other Roma groups. K-Serbs elsewhere in Yugoslavia were country hicks, whereas K-Albanians outside Kosovo were mostly only employed as summertime icecream salesmen.

Ironically an enlarged Yugoslavia/Balkan Federation including Albania could also work, as Albanian industrial growth would draw the K-Albanian population southwards.
 
What happened?

Basically a bunch of Kosovo Serbs were forced to leave their homes. This wasn't an Ottoman government action per se - rather, a bunch of Albanian gangs and cliques which the Ottoman Hamidian government didn't care to stop. Similar to Kurds vs Armenians in Hamidian Anatolia, but a little less violent.
 
Top