Based on the triangulation of oral history interviews, print media, and the archives of the Yugoslav State Security Service and the League of Communists, this paper examines the securitisation of Albanians in late-socialist Croatia and the construction of what the secret police termed the “Albanian complex.” The student demonstrations in Kosovo during the spring of 1981 transformed Albanian labour migration in Croatia: within a year, it shifted from being an institutionally invisible process—largely ignored by the authorities for decades—into a securitised phenomenon that drew the rapt attention of officials at all levels of government, from the municipal to the federal. The official Yugoslav interpretation of the Kosovo demonstrations as “counterrevolutionary” and an illegitimate expression of nationalist excesses prompted a surge in anti-Albanian sentiment across Yugoslavia. The security service closely monitored the activities of alleged “irredentists,” including in Croatia. Albanians were portrayed as the ultimate "other": socially and politically deviant nationalist private business owners, who had amassed considerable personal wealth in the private sector, yet were paradoxically also depicted as economically marginal outsiders living on the fringes of proper socialist society. Both modes of representation were anathema to the mainstream of Yugoslav (and Croatian) socialist morality, yet this securitisation did not stem numbers of migrants which grew exponentially during the 1980s.
