Milošević had used the issue to secure the leadership of the League of Communists of Serbia in 1987, and in early 1989, he pushed through a new constitution that drastically reduced the autonomy of Kosovo and the northern autonomous province of Vojvodina.

A variety of Serbian dramatists, painters, musicians and filmmakers had highlighted key motifs of the Kosovo legend, particularly the theme of the betrayal of Serbia.

In the months preceding the Gazimestan rally, the remains of Prince Lazar of Serbia, who had fallen in the Battle of Kosovo, were carried in a heavily-publicized procession around the Serb-inhabited territories of Yugoslavia.

[6] Throngs of mourners queued for hours to see the relics and attend commemorative public rallies, vowing in speeches never to allow Serbia to be defeated again.

They were overwhelmingly Serbs, many of whom had been brought to Gazimestan on hundreds of special coaches and trains organized by Milošević's League of Communists of Serbia.

They included the entire leadership of the Serbian Orthodox Church, led by German, Serbian Patriarch; the Prime Minister Ante Marković; members of the Presidency of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia; the leadership of the Yugoslav People's Army; and members of the rotating Presidency of Yugoslavia.

[9] After being escorted through cheering crowds waving his picture alongside that of Lazar,[10] Milošević delivered his speech on a huge stage with a backdrop containing powerful symbols of the Kosovo myth: images of peonies, a flower traditionally deemed to symbolize the blood of Lazar, and an Orthodox cross with a Cyrillic letter "S" (rendered as "С" in Cyrillic) at each of its four corners, standing for the slogan Само Слога Србина Спашaва (Samo Sloga Srbina Spašava, lit.

[13] According to James Gow, the objective was to further Milošević's political campaign, which was "predicated on the notion of redressing this mood of victimisation and restoring the sense of Serbian pride and, most important of all, power".

[15] Milošević placed his speech in the context of the history of Yugoslavia since the World War II in which Serbia's influence had been restricted by constitutional arrangements, diluting its power.

Vjeran Pavlaković posited that Milošević sought to make "clear parallels between the Battle of Kosovo and the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution, both considered to be defeats in the Serbian national consciousness.

[15] He devoted a large part of the speech to the divisions by stating, "Yugoslavia is a multinational community and it can survive only under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it".

"[15] The middle of the speech took a markedly different line from the nationalist expressions which bookended it; Louis Sell describes it as sounding "as if it was written by his wife" (Mirjana Marković, who was known for her hardline communist views).

(referring to a key element of the Kosovo myth of Serbia sacrificing itself in defending Christian Europe against the encroaching Muslim Turks).

[17] That was to be an important theme in Serbian nationalist rhetoric during the Yugoslav Wars: Thomas A. Emmert, writing in 1993, commented that since the day of the speech, "Serbs have not failed to remind themselves and the world that they are fighting for the very defense of Europe against Islamic fundamentalism.

The nationalist sentiments expressed by Milošević were a major break with the late Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito's anti-nationalist approach and, as Robert Thomas commented, "it effectively acted as a symbolic repudiation of the Titoist legacy".

[22] British journalist Marcus Tanner, who attended Gazimestan, reported that "representatives [of Slovenia and Croatia]... looked nervous and uncomfortable" and commented that the outpouring of Serbian nationalist sentiment had "perhaps permanently destroyed any possibility of a settlement in Kosovo.

Although the speech's advocacy of mutual respect and democracy was described as "unexpectedly conciliatory", the contrast between Milošević's rhetoric and the reality of his widely-criticized policies towards the Kosovo Albanians was also noted.