A Balkan Tragedy
Liliana Brisby
KOSOVO: A SHORT HISTORY by Noel Malcolm Macmillan, £20.00, pp. 442 Noel Malcolm's eagerly awaited history of Kosovo — the first of its kind — does not disappoint. Like his acclaimed history of Bosnia four years ago, it comes at a time when another bloody quarrel in the wake of the disintegration of former Yugoslavia is threatening the peace and security of Europe. Malcolm brings to the task his formidable equipment as a historian, which enables him to do justice to a very complex subject. His astonishing linguistic prowess (he can read both the original sources and the existing historical literature in every Balkan language) confers authority to his interpretation of the controversial evidence he sifts and evaluates. In the process, 1,500 years of Balkan history, from Roman Empire and mediaeval Byzantium to Ottoman conquest and modern times, are brilliantly illuminated in geographic, ethnic, demographic and political terms as a backdrop to the flare-up of the Kosovo problem.
As in the case of Bosnia, the historian's accusing finger points at the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, who used the issue of Kosovo to advance his career from little-known Communist Party apparatchik to demagogic political leader. In respect of Kosovo, however, Great Serbia's aspirations for territorial aggrandisement had a longer history. Between the world wars, the Serb anti-Albanian colonisation programme in Kosovo was bent on inducing Albanians to leave through terror, dispossession and cultural discrimination. Earlier, the conquest of Kosovo by the advancing Serbian troops in the 1912 Balkan war against Turkey had prompted the following observation by the Vienna correspondent of a Ukrainian newspaper, Lev Bronstein (better known in history as Leon Trotsky):
The Serbs in Old Serbia in their national endeavour to correct data in the chronological statistics that are not quite favourable to them, are engaged quite simply in systematic extermination of the Muslim population.
In 1914, the international enquiry set up by the Carnegie Endowment concluded that the destruction of whole villages and indiscriminate slaughter by Serbian- Montenegrian soldiery had been aimed deliberately at changing the character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians.
An emphasis on the uncanny resemblance of Serb policies and rhetoric today to those of the 1920s and 1930s does not prevent Malcolm from establishing with equal objectivity the other side of the story which goes back many centuries. He leaves no doubt that in mediaeval Kosovo the Albanians were 'a minority. His history impresses above all with his fastidious analysis of the complicated historic, political and demographic processes which transformed this minority into today's 90 per cent majority.
Bulgarian tsars held sway over the region from the middle of the 9th to the early 11th century and Byzantine emperors until the final decades of the 12th. But with the reign of King Dusan in the 14th century the mediaeval Serbian state and the dominance of the Serbian Orthodox Church reached their apogee. Although the latter was not founded in Kosovo, the fact that the Serbian Patriarchate moved its seat to Pec when its original home in central Serbia was burned down, is a fundamental justification of Serbian claims to religious and cultural hegemony over Kosovo. The great battle of Kosovo in 1389 against the Ottoman armies looms even larger. Its defining importance may have been in the climate of the 19th-century revivals of the Slays seeking liberation from Turkish rule, but it has become 'a totem or talisman of Serbian identity.' Malcolm deftly disentangles myth from reality surrounding this battle, in which both the Serbian ruler Prince Lazar and Sultan Murat lost their lives — although some would cavil at his too ready dismissal of important elements in the folk-literary epic tradition. To speculate, for instance, that one of the most colourful larger-than-life heroes of the Slav folk epics, Marko Kraljevic (celebrated by the Bulgarians as Krali Marko), may have fought on the Turkish side strains verisimilitude.
In his approach to Ottoman rule, Malcolm holds that its heritage, including the heritage of Islam, belongs to the culture of all Balkan peoples. He corrects the bias in the nationalist historiographies of individual Balkan countries which were for half a millenium its conquered subjects by arguing that at least in its first phase until the 17th century, the Ottoman Empire exhibited more tolerance and administrative efficiency than most of its contemporary Western states. With refer- ence to the decried system of the tribute of Christian peasant boys to be raised as Janissaries or servants at the Imperial Court, he points out that no less than 42 Grand Viziers in Ottoman history were of Albanian (including Kosovar) origin, so that the Ottoman Empire's ruling class became an ethnic mixture of all its peoples. On the other hand, he sees the glaring economic incompetence of the declining Ottoman state in its neglect of mining in a region containing the greatest Zoncentra- tion of mineral wealth in the whole of south-eastern Europe.
Does this exemplary history of one of the great strategic and cultural crossroads of Europe help towards a solution of the acute ethnic conflict which is rending the region today? If anything, it proves the irrelevance of historical arguments, both genuine and spurious, which fuel the present controversy. Would the English feel entitled to claim Calais because they once held it for over 200 years? After all, Kosovo in its present politico-geographical borders did not even exist until 1945. Despite the cruel abuses of Tito's communist police state, especially before the fall in 1966 of his strongman, the Serbian Minister of the Interior Aleksander Rankovic, Tito is given credit by many Kosovars for having reversed the colonisation programme with its suppression of the Albanian language in pre-war Yugoslavia when he established the Autonomous Region of Kosovo-Metohia.
Under the Constitution of 1974, Kosovo's status was raised further to virtual equivalence with the six republics of the Yugoslav federation. Paradoxically, Tito thus still points to a more promising approach to the Kosovo problem than nationalist extremism revived by the ambitions of his successor in post- communist Serbia.
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