IT IS YUGOSLAVIA BEING DEFENDED IN STARI TRG
Gathering in support of the Kosovo miners (video in slovenian language)
Speech by the President of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Slovenia, Milan Kucan

Ljubljana, Cankarjev dom, 27 February 1989


“Let us raise our voices, to stop the slide into a state of emergency and a bloody civil war, to express our firm conviction that sooner or later victory will be claimed by the will of the people, the nations and national communities who wish to live in Yugoslavia in harmony, peace and coexistence. We may forget our personal differences at this moment when we feel that in Stari trg it is not just the rights of the local miners, not just the rights of the Albanian community and the autonomy of Kosovo, not just the rights of the inhabitants and the local communists that are being defended, but also the AVNOJ Yugoslavia and the equal position of all the republics and nations, including Slovenia, within it. All of us therefore feel that the tragedy of the miners would also be our own defeat, it would also be a very vocal indication that minority peoples and national communities were now being squeezed, first to the margins and then out of the country or even who knows where,” said President Kucan at the gathering in solidarity with the Kosovo miners in Stari trg, who had locked themselves into the mine and were on hunger strike in protest at the withdrawal of a considerable degree of jurisdiction from the autonomous region of Kosovo under the new Serbian constitution.