Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War

Rating:
Summary: A Different Outlook
Review: Mertus has found a new way to analyze how the elite can transform a conflict. Her theme of the "Truths" resonates strongly throughout the book. Her unbiased view and in-depth discussion left me wanting more. My interest in the subject of Balkan history grew from reading this title.

Rating:
Summary: A Different Outlook
Review: Mertus has found a new way to analyze how the elite can transform a conflict. Her theme of the "Truths" resonates strongly throughout the book. Her unbiased view and in-depth discussion left me wanting more. My interest in the subject of Balkan history grew from reading this title.

Rating:
Summary: A bedtime story
Review: So, Slobodan Milosevic has been toppled.. Guess that means all will now be peaceful in Kosovo!

Well, no, actually..and this book will tell you why.

Written just before NATO's 1999 air campaign over Kosovo, Julie Mertus illuminates the process by which trust between Serbs and Kosovars became impossible. It hints at Phillip Gourevitch's reflection that "power comes when you convince your enemy to inhabit YOUR version of HIS story".

That struggle, each wanting the "correct" version of history to stand, lies at the heart of all Balkan conflicts of the last ten years.

Through innumerable interviews with the ordinary people of Kosovo, Serbian and Albanian, Julie Mertus reveals how competing myths came to be, and how they then contributed to an environment where terrorism and atrocity became - ultimately - a logical choice.

She does not go back to the mythology surrounding the 1389 defeat of the Serbian Prince Lazar at Kosovo Polje - the rallying point for Milosevic. (Covered already in Noel Malcolm's "Kosovo: A Short History). Mertus shows how events within our generation created defining national stories.

Two quick examples.

In 1990, thousands of schoolchildren fell ill. The ethnic Albanian understanding: they were deliberately poisoned, probably with Sarin gas, by Serbian authorities. It was proof of the evil Serbs would be willing to do to Albanians. The UCK (Kosovo Liberation Army) recruited youths with the argument that without resistance, they would all be poisoned again.

The Serb response to the same event was that it was mass hysteria at best, or at worst a deliberate plot by ethnic Albanians to generate international sympathy against them, the Serbs. It proved the extent of the Kosovars' untrustworthiness, their deviousness.

There could be no common ground between those views. Which story you believed, defined you.

Similarly, there is the case of Djordje Martinovic, a Serbian peasant who turned up at hospital with a bottle in his rectum and a story about being assaulted in his field by "masked men". Although later apparently recanting his story, and confessing his "assault" had been a botched act of self-gratification, for Serbs it became a rallying point. Dismissing the recantation as an Albanian plot, Serbs were only too happy to believe that this, the violation of an honest peasant in an act with echoes of the old Turkish practice of impaling, was the extent to which ethnic Albanians would not hesitate to stoop. Martinovic quickly returned to his original story. He remains on the list of Serb martyrs to this day.

Today, Kosovo remains in an effective state of partition, nearly all its former Serb population living above the divided city of Mitrovica. Without the presence of KFOR troops, armed conflict would be inevitable. It is not their religion, or even their language, that divides Serb from Kosovar. It is the incompatability of the stories they tell. Since this book was written, both sides have volumes of fresh grievances, accentuating their enemy's inhumanity and highlighting their own victimhood. These stories, nearly all with some grain of truth, are now being woven themselves into the complex fabric of national myth.

Brilliantly, painstakingly and without taking sides, Prof. Mertus has given us a vivid account of how events become remembered. She gives us the template to understand better all the intractable conflicts of our times.

Rating:
Summary: Balanced and informative
Review: This book analyzes the gradual rise in ethnic tensions in Kosovo, a region of the former Yugoslavia ruled by Serbia but populated primarily by Albanians, in the years between the death of Tito and the collapse of Yugoslavia.

The focus is rather narrow. The author makes no attempts to tell the full story of the Serbian-Albanian conflict over Kosovo, which has roots in the Middle Ages, or to discuss the recent developments since the 1999 war.

What she does do, and do quite well, is describe in detail the conflicts of the period she does discuss, and the way in which Serbs and Albanians saw the same events in narratives so entirely opposed that even discussing their differences, much less resolving them, was extraordinarily diificult. In addition to her own analysis, Mertus includes extensive sections where both Serbs and Albanians discuss these events in their own words.

The period in question doesn't lack for events that each side can narrate to its own purposes. It begins with mass demonstrations of Albanians for equal rights (or for secession from Yugoslavia) and also includes the mass poisoning of Albanian children (or a mass hysteria, or deliberate hoax), the murder of several Serb soldiers of the Yugoslav Army by a mentally ill Albanian recruit (or a large Albanian conspiracy), a Serbian farmer who suffered vicious sexual humiliation from a gang of Albanian thugs (or concoted a hoax to hide his own sexual proclivities), etc.

The greatest strength of this book is its fairness. Much of the literature relating to the Yugoslav wars of the past decade is thinly disguised propaganda for one side or the other; this book genuinely seeks the truth, but notes that where each side is so wrapped in its own narratives of key events, finding out definitively what really happened can be almost impossible.

One target audience for this book is people doing nation building or related NGO work in undeveloped countries generally, not merely Kosovo or the Balkans. Mertus provides an added chapter discussing lessons from the work that her own and other NGOs carried out in Kosovo, and how such lessons can apply to other areas.