Kosovo: A Short History, by Noel Malcolm

I love Peace

If we needed any reminder of what is at stake in the present crisis over Kosovo, Noel Malcolm offers us, on the first page of his new history, a chilling forecast. "It is arguably the area with the worst human-rights abuses in the whole of Europe, and certainly the place where, if war does break out, the killing and destruction will be more intense than anything hitherto witnessed in the region." A grim prospect, indeed, especially coming on the heels of the war in Bosnia, the origins of which Malcolm has already outlined for us in his admirable Bosnia: A Short History.

As with his earlier study, Malcolm opens his historical account with the migration of the Slavs into the Balkans in the declining years of the Roman Empire. The Roman hegemony was succeeded by that of Byzantium, at least in name, for the Serbs, Albanians, and Vlachs were a turbulent people, not readily subjugated. One of the great obstacles that Malcolm runs up against is the absolute dearth of historical material about events in Kosovo from the ninth to the fourteenth century--five hundred years, of which virtually nothing is known other than the extension of Serbian control over Kosovo in the early thirteenth century.

The veil begins to lift in the late fourteenth century--by which time the Serbian state itself was breaking up--with the semi-mythical battle of Kosovo Polje, a few miles northwest of Prishtina, in 1389, when a combined Serbian-Bosnian army was defeated by an Ottoman force under the command of Sultan Murat I. Almost nothing is known for certain about the battle, apart from the fact that both Murat and the Serbian commander were slain; yet the Serbs persist to this day in celebrating it as one of the glorious moments in their history. Malcolm has an enjoyable time examining and exposing as fraudulent the myths the Serbs have woven around Kosovo Polje over the centuries, an exposure which will doubtless be accorded a surly reception in Belgrade.

The last vestiges of Serbian control over Kosovo vanished in the middle of the fifteenth century, after the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Thereafter Kosovo remained an Ottoman possession for four and a half centuries. Signs of discontent, even sporadic rebellions, were manifested from time to time; but the Kosovars in general remained loyal to the Ottoman Sultan. Even the so-called League of Prizren, set up in the wake of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 to press for greater local autonomy, was essentially a Muslim religious movement which did not question the Sultan's ultimate authority. Even so, it did not escape retribution from Constantinople. The Sublime Porte acted quickly to suppress the League, and the Kosovars remained quiet and well-behaved for the next thirty years.

Turkish rule over Kosovo ended in 1912, when Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro all went to war with the Ottoman Empire. The Serbians quickly overran Kosovo, and over the next two years, by a policy of systematic butchery and destruction of property, they gave the Albanian inhabitants a foretaste of what was to be their lot under Serbian rule in the years ahead. A respite was afforded the Kosovars by the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, when the Austrians occupied the northern half of the country, and the Bulgarians the southern. But the postwar settlement placed the Kosovars once more under the rule of Belgrade, when the province was incorporated in the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Thousands of Serbian and Montenegrin colonists were settled in the province, riding roughshod, in most cases, over the Albanians' property as well as their civil rights.

Much the same fate befell Kosovo during the Second World War. After the German invasion of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941 the province was divided between Italy and Bulgaria, the lion's share going to the Italians, who were then more or less in control of Albania. In the course of the war the bulk of the Serbs and Montenegrins in the country fled or were driven out. Only a minority of them returned after 1945, making up around 12 per cent of the population. By 1991 they accounted for only 11 per cent, while the Kosovar Albanians accounted for 82 per cent, a discrepancy due in large measure to the Albanians' higher birth rate. (Serbia, by way of contrast, boasted--if that is the right word--the highest abortion rate in Europe.)

Malcolm does not believe that Tito treated Kosovo too badly. Perhaps, being a Croat, Tito had some sympathy for non-Serbian minorities. All the same, his years as dictator saw the implementation of a deliberate anti-Islamic policy in Kosovo: madrasas (Koranic schools) were closed down, the shari'ah courts were suppressed, and the Dervish orders were outlawed. Yugoslavia had been reconstituted after 1945 as a federation of six republics. Kosovo was declared an "autonomous region," although remaining a constituent part of Serbia. The new Yugoslav constitution of 1974 gave Kosovo a status almost equivalent to that of the six republics, though not quite. To have categorized Kosovo as a republic might well have opened the road to secession, perhaps even to the unification of Kosovo with Albania. So it remained constitutionally part of Serbia, the Kosovars being classified as a nationality, not a nation.

The screws were turned on Kosovo after the death of Tito. Serbian propaganda in the 1980s depicted the Kosovars as a mob of ruffians and rapists who were making life unbearable for the Serbian colonists in their midst. This alleged persecution of the Kosovar Serbs provided the theme that Slobodan Milosevic, then seeking an issue that might help propel him into the presidency of Yugoslavia, lost little time in appropriating. It served him well. After winning the presidency he moved to amend the Serbian constitution in the spring of 1989 so as to reduce Kosovo's autonomy and to invest Serbia with control over the region's judicial system, as well as ultimate authority over its social, economic, and educational institutions. A year later the provincial assembly and government were dissolved by order of Belgrade, most of the Albanian Kosovars holding government posts were dismissed, and the majority of Albanian doctors practicing in the provincial hospitals were discharged. To add to these various insults the Serbs embarked upon a propaganda campaign at the time of the Serbian attack on Bosnia in the spring of 1992, conjuring up the specter of a vast Muslim conspiracy to undermine the Yugoslav federation. For the Muslim Albanians of Kosovo it was the last straw.

It has to be confessed that Noel Malcolm's book is not an easy read--for this reviewer, at least--which makes one look a little askance at the praise which has been bestowed upon it by numerous reviewers in the British press. (The exception, which must have caused Malcolm some amusement, was a sour appraisal by Douglas Hurd, the Conservative former foreign secretary, who had been roasted by Malcolm in his earlier book for his, Hurd's, limp-wristed approach to the Bosnian conflict.) Although Kosovo is a work of considerable scholarship, it is not without some minor flaws, more particularly in its references to Islamic institutions. For instance, it is not correct to speak of Muslim "clergy" or Islamic "theology"; and the shari'ah is more a system or codification of law, tout court, than of religious or canon law. But these are small errors in a work on Balkan history, mere slips of the pen which do not detract in any substantial way from the overall worth of Malcolm's book.

Mr. Kelly is an historian of the modern Middle East.

COPYRIGHT 1998 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group