Ramiz Sadiku: A case study in the industrialisation of Kosovo

Abstract

RAMIZ SADIKU IS A MANUFACTURING ENTERPRISE in Kosovo, Yugoslavia's Albanian populated province. It was established at Pec in the 1960s to supply automotive components for the Zavodi Crvena Zastava at Kragujevac in Serbia, of which it is a subsidiary. Zastava is Yugoslavia's dominant automotive manufacturer. It started assembling motor vehicles in 1954, but its development ever since has been plagued by supply-side failures and line stoppages. Only once in its history has the volume of cars produced been curtailed by demand deficiency, and then only briefly in 1974. At all other times total output has been constrained solely by its own effective capacity or that of its domestic suppliers. Ramiz Sadiku is one of those suppliers, and a particularly unsatisfactory one, whose unreliability and low-grade output have contributed to Zastava's own underperformance. Kosovo is Yugoslavia's poorest province, in a country with acute regional problems. Since 1957, resources have been poured into the province, to try to industrialise it and close the development gap. Despite this effort, the development gap has widened seriously. Ramiz Sadiku was put into Kosovo as an express act of development policy. This case study1 examines the background to the development and expansion of Zastava's troublesome subsidiary, the causes of its dysfunctionality, and of Zastava's inability to put Ramiz Sadiku in good order (or failing that, to find a less unsatisfactory supplier). The broader intention is to throw new light on the failure of Yugoslavia's economic policies in Kosovo. The information on Ramiz Sadiku on which this study is based is necessarily fragmentary. The most useful source was Zastava's internal newspaper, Crvena Zastava. To some extent, this reports the Kragujevac view of Ramiz Sadiku as a problem supplier, which could impart an outsider bias to the information. But Crvena Zastava is also the newspaper of the entire Zastava group, which includes Ramiz Sadiku. So reports concerning Ramiz Sadiku, like those from any other division of the Zastava enterprise, were supplied from the subsidiary itself. Much of the evidence of its shortcomings emanated from these reports, in which the