In February 1989, armed with a new constitution which abolished Kosovo's autonomy (and, a year later, its stunned government), Milosevic quelled a miners' hunger strike and proceeded to institute measures of discrimination against the Albanians in the province. Discrimination was nothing new to Kosovo. The Albanians themselves initiated such anti-Serb measures following their new gained constitutional autonomy in 1974. Now the tide has turned and thousands of Albanians who refused to sign new-fangled "loyalty vows" were summarily sacked and lost their pension rights (the most sacred possession of "Homo Socialismus"). Albanian media were shuttered and schools vacated when teacher after teacher refused to abide by the Serb curriculum. After a while, The Serbs re-opened primary schools and re-hired Albanian teachers, allowing them to teach in Albanian. But secondary schools and universities remained closed. These acts of persecution did not meet with universal disapproval. Greece, for instance, regarded the Albanians as natural allies of the Turks and, bonded by common enmity, of the Macedonians and Bulgarians. Itself comprised of lands claimed by Albania, Greece favoured a harsh and final resolution of the Albanian question. There can be little doubt that Macedonia - feeling besieged by its Albanian minority - regarded Milosevic as the perfect antidote. Macedonia actively assisted Yugoslavia to break the embargo imposed on it by the Western powers. Milosevic was not, therefore, a pariah, as retroactive history would have it. Rather, he was the only obstacle to a "Great Albania". Within less than a year, in 1990, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) was able to claim a membership of 700,000 members. Hashim Thaci ("Snake"), Sulejman Selimi ("Sultan") and other leaders of the KLA were then 20 years of age. Years of Swiss education notwithstanding, they witnessed first hand Kosovo's tumultuous transformation into the engine of disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation. It was a valuable lesson in the dialectic of history, later to be applied brilliantly. The leader of the LDK, the forever silk scarfed and mellifluous Dr. Ibrahim Rugova, compared himself openly and blushlessly to Vaclav Havel and the Kosovar struggle to the Velvet Revolution. This turgid and risible analogy deteriorated further as the Kosovar Velvet was stained by the blood of innocents. Dr. Rugova was an unfazed dreamer in a land of harsh nightmares. The Sorbonne was never a good preparatory school to the academy of Balkan reality. Rugova's ideals were good and noble - Gandhi-like passive resistance, market economics, constructive (though uncompromising and limited to the authorities) dialogue with the enemy. They might still prevail. And during the early 1990s he was all the rage and the darling of the West. But he failed to translate his convictions into tangible achievements. His biggest failure might have been his inability to