History lesson
Sir: Sir Alfred Sherman's contributions to your correspondence columns remind me of the Dormouse at the Mad Hatter's tea party: just when you think he has finally gone back to sleep, up he pops with a state- ment even sillier than the last one.
After ticking you off for being 'weak on history' (Letters, 24 April), he then announces that Serbs were the majority in Kosovo when they seized it in 1913. This is historical nonsense. The Albanian majority there was recorded by a succession of ethnographers from the 1860s to the 1910s: Lejean, von Hahn, Muir Mackenzie and Irby, von Sax, Weigand, Barbarich, Brails- ford, Durham. Brailsford estimated that Kosovo was two-thirds Albanian in 1906; Ottoman statistics of 1910 for the vilayet of Kosovo (an area including part of northern Macedonia) put the Albanians at 60 per cent, the rest being Turks, Macedonians and Serbs.
Ethnic cleansing did take place in Koso- vo and north-eastern Albania, but it was the Albanians who were cleansed. As the Carnegie Endowment's report (1914) put it: 'Houses and whole villages reduced to ashes, unarmed and innocent populations massacred . . . such were the means which were employed by the Serb-Montenegrin soldiery, with a view to the entire transfor- mation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians.'
Sir Alfred's attempt to compare the Serbs today to the Czechs in the 1930s is breathtakingly back-to-front. It is the Serbs who are destroying a state in order to seize more Lebensraum. He sneers at 'this most artificial of constructions, a sovereign Bosnia'; is he so weak on history that he cannot remember which famous historical figure held the same view about Czechoslo- vakia in 1938?
Noel Malcolm The Daily Telegraph, 1 Canada Square, London E14
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