Gallup Opinion Poll Eastern Europe:
Kosovo crisis
update: CEE opinions about possible NATO intervention is Kosovo
In March, 1998 Gallup Organizaton conducted the first Gallup Kosovo Poll on the ground of the former Yugoslavia. At that time there wasn't an all-out war in the Serbian province Kosovo, nevertheless the tensions were extremely high. Mass demonstrations were held in streets of Pristina, and Yugoslavian-Serb police recently attacked the village of Decani. Some thirty Albanian casualties of the war were just buried.
Many international experts and organization fear that the war can easily spread out from the small province of Kosovo, involving other Balkan states, such as the descendent states of ex-Yugoslavia, Albania, Montenegro, Bulgaria and further to South, Greece and Turkey -- the two ruthless neighbors – causing even more human tragedy and societal breakdowns at the very end of the 20th Century.
In the history of opinion polling there are very few public studies made right after a war. One of those is the Gallup Bosnia Peace Poll, conducted in summer of 1996. This poll may contributed to face the challenges of the Dayton agreement, showing the extent of actual show-off among the warring nations.
But there is no any known survey, which was conducted during a war. Gallup decided to take the challenge and right now we are working to organizing our fieldwork to conduct the history's first War Tracking Poll in Kosovo.
One of the main conclusions of our Peace Poll in Bosnia, that a major factor in generating and maintaining hostility among people is to prevent the communication with each other, and replace this inter-group communication by centralized myth-creation of the »OTHER«, »as we – US – see it«. Gallup hopes to help with its reputation and experience to open up channels through which the people will be able to communicate with each other. Gallup's mission is: Let people be heard. We are committed to let those Serbian, Albanian and other people heard whose voice is too weak to hear in the gunfire.
See our report on the March study here