Word: kosovo
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...called autonomous provinces-that have their own languages, religions and cultures. The Soviets might try to exploit the traditional hostility between the Serbs and the Croats; together they constitute more than 60% of Yugoslavia's 22 million people. Another potential trouble spot is the southern province of Kosovo, the country's poorest region, where friction is developing between Serbs and the rapidly exploding ethnic Albanian population. Two months ago, 50 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo were charged with fomenting political unrest. This could conceivably serve as a Soviet pretext for stirring up trouble in Yugoslavia, as could the thinly...
...have had a cohesive influence. "People have been concentrating on a better standard of living instead of hating their neighbors," says a Western diplomat in Belgrade. But a severe economic downturn could aggravate the glaring inequities, and consequent animosities, between the developed northern republics like Slovenia and hinterlands like Kosovo. Lately the economy has been ailing. Unemployment, estimated at more than 13%, is growing. The current annual inflation rate is estimated at 35%, compared with 14% in 1978. Productivity has slowed, and workers, under the self-management system, have voted themselves inflationary wage increases. Worst of all, the country...
...fulfill their religious obligations, a group of well-to-do Yugoslav Moslems made a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina and then visited Baghdad before returning to the Serbian province of Kosovo. Most brought gifts from Iraq. Yugoslav health officials suspect that some also brought back variola major, the most virulent form of smallpox. Two weeks after their homecoming -variola's incubation period-several of the travelers came down with smallpox, triggering an epidemic that has infected 155 and killed at least 28 in just a month. Only now is the outbreak being brought under control...
Postponed Politics. To fight the threat of contamination, hospital visiting privileges were suspended in some parts of the country and a joint session of the federal and Serbian Parliaments was postponed. Foreign tourism fell off sharply. Kosovo was placed under a strict quarantine, and travel from the province was forbidden to all who had not been successfully immunized. When Vuko Dragasevic, Secretary of Labor and Social Welfare, tried to enter Macedonia from Kosovo, he was stopped at the border even though he had a vaccination certificate. He is an official in charge of the nationwide immunization program...
Meanwhile, German officials called a smallpox alert after a Yugoslav worker from Kosovo, newly arrived in Hannover, came down with the disease. He was immediately put in isolation, and officials rounded up 665 people known to have had some contact with him. They were being held in quarantine while the search went on for the 666th and last person believed to have been exposed...