Topic summary
Gazimestan speech
- League of Communists of Serbia
- Presidency of SR Serbia
- 8th session
- Anti-bureaucratic revolution
- Gazimestan speech
- 1990 constitution
- 1991 protests
- Karađorđevo meeting
- 1991–1992 anti-war protests
- Croatian War
- Bosnian War
- 1992 constitution
- Sanctions
- Insurgency in Kosovo
- Dayton Agreement
- International trips
- Education agreement
- 1996–97 protests
- Kosovo War
- NATO bombing
- Overthrow
- Trial
- Death
- Bosnian genocide case
- Mirjana Marković(wife)
- Marko Milošević(son)
- Marko Milošević(grandson)
- Borislav Milošević(brother)
The Gazimestan speech (Serbo-Croatian: Govor na Gazimestanu / Говор на Газиместану) was given on 28 June 1989 by Slobodan Milošević, then president of Serbia, at the Gazimestan monument on the Kosovo field. It was the centrepiece of a day-long event to mark the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, which was fought at the site in 1389.
The speech was delivered to a crowd of an estimated million or more attendees, and came against a backdrop of protracted ethnic tension between ethnic Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo and increasing political tensions between SR Serbia and the other constituent republics of the then SFR Yugoslavia caused by the anti-bureaucratic revolution.
The speech has since become notorious for Milošević's reference to the possibility of "armed battles", in the future of Serbia's national development. Many foreign commentators have described this as presaging the collapse of Yugoslavia and the eventual Yugoslav Wars. Milošević later claimed that he had been misrepresented.