Noel malcolm kosovo campaign

The Yugoslav crisis began in Kosovo, and it will end in Kosovo." One can hear this saying repeated almost anywhere in the former Yugoslavia; it is one of the few things on which all parties to the conflicts of the 1990s seem to agree.

It was in Kosovo, in 1987, that a little known communist apparatchik called Slobodan Milosevic discovered what a powerful weapon Serbian nationalism could be. It was through his exploitation of the Kosovo issue that Milosevic was able to take over the party machine in Serbia, extend his power to other parts of the federal Yugoslav system and, in the process, set off a Croatian and Slovenian counter-reaction that led, by 1991, to the break-up of the Yugoslav state. And it is in Kosovo today, with its 90 per cent majority of ethnic Albanians living under the quasi-apartheid system of Serbian rule (imposed by Milosevic when he stripped the province of its autonomous status), that the greatest unresolved problem of modern Balkan politics is to be found.

No one knows how the story will end in Kosovo. Possible final destinations include autonomy, partition and independence, and the means of arriving at them range from peaceful negotiation or international imposition to civil disobedience, violent intifada and full-scale war. It is arguably the area with the worst human rights abuses in 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.

In the west, the popular view of the recent wars in Croatia and Bosnia was always that these were "ethnic conflicts," created by the bubbling up of obscure but virulent ethnic hatreds among the local populations. This approach was essentially false: it ignored the primary role of politicians (above all, the Serbian nationalist-communist Milosevic) in creating conflict at the political level, and indeed it ignored the fact that the wars themselves were launched not by ordinary civilians but by armed

Noel Malcolm.Kosovo: A Short History. New York: New York University Press, 1998. xxxvi + 492 pp. $28.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8147-5598-3.

Reviewed by Thomas Emmert (Gustavus Adolphus College)
Published on HABSBURG (May, 1999)

Challenging Myth in a Short History of Kosovo

In the conclusion to his new history of Kosovo, Noel Malcolm observes: "Whether Kosovo is brought, in the end, to a peaceful solution, or plunged into a conflict potentially even more deadly than that which was created in Bosnia, will depend to a large extent on the ability of ordinary Serbs to challenge the fixed pattern of thought which has held them in its grip for so long ... When ordinary Serbs learn to think more rationally and humanely about Kosovo, and more critically about some of their national myths, all the people of Kosovo and Serbia will benefit--not least the Serbs themselves" (pp. 355-56). Clearly the few months between the publication of Malcolm's history and the terrible tragedy that has unfolded in Kosovo these past few weeks were not enough time for Serbs to challenge their "fixed pattern of thought" about Kosovo. But, of course, this alone would not have prevented the disaster we are witnessing today. For any challenge to have been effective it would have had to include the removal of Milosevic from power. It would also have had to assume that some opposition figure in Serbia could lead the new critique of the nation's myths. None of this happened nor is it likely to happen in the near future.

Perhaps it is somewhat unorthodox to begin a review with a critique of the author's effort at prophecy in his conclusion, but it is important to note that Malcolm's essential idea in that conclusion is critical to the entire study. This is a solid history which is, nevertheless, shaped by the author's own overriding determination to challenge Serbian myths. If the author's conclusion as summarized above seems to have a certain Op-Ed quality to it, one finds a similar