In Kosovo, more than 31% of all those over 10 years of age were illiterate (in 1979) and its per capita income was less than 30% of the national average. Infant mortality was 6 times that in Slovenia. Kosovo was an African enclave in an otherwise Europe-aspiring country. Caught in the pernicious spiral of declining commodity prices, Kosovo relied on transfers from Yugoslavia and from abroad for more than 90% of its income. Inevitably, unemployment tripled from 19% in 1971 to 57% in 1989. As a result, the Federal government had to quell 3-months long, paralysing riots in 1981. Riots were nothing new to Kosovo - the demonstrations of 1968 were arguably worse (and led to constitutional changes granting autonomy to Kosovo in 1974). But this time, the authorities, reacted with tanks in scenes reminiscent of China's Tiananmen Square 8 years later. The hotbed of hotheads was, as usual, the University in Pristina. Students there were more concerned with pedestrian issues such the quality of their food and the lack of facilities than with any eternal revolutionary or national truths. These mundane protests were hijacked by comrades with higher class consciousness and loftier motives of self- determination. Such hijacking, though, would have petered out had the cesspool of rage and indignation not been festering so ebulliently. Serb insensitivity backed by indiscriminate brutality led to escalation. As the years passed, calls for the restoration of the 1974 constitution (under which Kosovo was granted political, financial, legal and cultural autonomy and institutions) - merged into a sonorous agenda of "Great Albania" and a "Kosovo Republic". The Kosovar crowd was never above beatings, looting and burning. The hate was strong. Yugoslavia's ruling party - the League of Communists - was in the throes of its own transformation. With Tito's demise and the implosion of the Soviet Bloc, the Communists lacked both compass and leader. His natural successors were purged by Tito in the 1960s and 1970s. The party wasn't sure whether to turn to Gorbachev's East or to America's West. The Communists panicked and embarked on a rampage of imprisonment, unjust dismissals of Albanians (mainly of teachers, journalists, policemen and judges) and the occasional torture or murder. Serb intellectuals regarded this as no more than the rectification of Tito's anti-Serb policies. Serbia was the only Republic within the Federation, who was dismembered into autonomous regions (Kosovo and Vojvodina). "Getting back at Tito" was a strong motive, commensurate with Serb "the world is against us" paranoia and siege mentality. Milosevic, visibly ill at ease, surfed this tide of religion-tinged nationalism straight into Kosovo, the historical heartland of Serb-ism. Oppression breeds resistance and Serb oppression served only to streamline the stochastic nationalist movement into a compartmentalized, though factious, underground organization with