Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo
The ethnic conflicts in the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo are often bewildering to readers without a grounding in the tangled history of the Balkans. Miranda Vickers, the leading English-language student of Albanian history, does much to clarify the situation with this thorough account of the tiny region, a fertile, mountain-ringed plateau whose Serbian name means something like "place of the blackbirds." That bucolic place name, however, does not speak to the violence that has been visited on the land for centuries.Kosovo, as Vickers writes, has long been a place where different cultures--Slavic, Albanian, Jewish, Turkish, and Central Asian--have met and, at times, either peacefully coexisted or battled bitterly. The lines of division, Vickers proves again and again, have never been clearly drawn. The debate in the 1990s, as it was in the Middle Ages, is over which group has the clearest ancestral claim to Kosovo: the Muslim Albanians, who make up about 90 percent of Kosovo's population and trace their roots to the ancient Illyrians, hold that it is theirs, while Orthodox Serbs, defeated by the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, similarly claim that their long presence in the region gives them dominion over it--a claim that, Vickers writes, "derives purely from history and emotion." History and emotion are powerful motivators, of course, as demonstrated by the Serbian nationalists who now seek to thwart ethnic Albanian attempts to unite Kosovo with Albania itself. (The issue is complicated, Vickers contends, by the presence of many Serb fighters in the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army who are not native to the region, but mercenary veterans of the now-dormant civil war in neighboring Bosnia.) After centuries of inhabiting parallel worlds, in Vickers's useful metaphor, these two groups are now drawing on the memories of centuries of conflict to shape the present. The result is a continuing legacy of bloodshed and hatred that has captured the attention of the world.--Gregory McNamee