Kosovo? But we know all about that . . .
You may know vaguely that Kosovo is a Serbian province with an Albanian Muslim majority, but you don't know why, do you?
Well, er, no. But the Balkans are so complicated . . . You can't explain all that history in 700 words, can you?
Watch me. We'll take up the story as the Byzantine Empire crumbles at the end of the 12th century. The province, then populated by Albanians and some Serbs, was conquered by the Serbian emperor Stevan Nemanja. As the empire expanded to take in Albania, Macedonia and Greece, Kosovo's central position made it the administrative and religious heart of Serbia, its towns and monasteries developing advanced legal and literary traditions. It represented all that was great about the Serbian golden age.
Had to be downhill from there, didn't it?
By the 1370s the Serbian ruler, Lazar, had become concerned about the Ottoman Empire looming on the horizon. In defence, he attempted to unite all the Christian kingdoms in south-east Europe against a possible Ottoman invasion. This worried Sultan Murad I so much that he invaded. Sweeping through the Balkans, the Turks joined battle with Serbia at Kosovo Polje - "the field of blackbirds" - on 15 June 1389. This battle is more than history to the Serbs: it is national legend. They lost. Nowadays, the Battle of Kosovo is remembered as a titanic struggle between good and evil, Christians and Muslims; and, inevitably, good Serbs versus bad Muslim Kosovars.
So Kosovo is just a replay of 1389?
Except the Albanians actually fought on Serbia's side. Lazar lost his life in the ferocious struggle, during which the Serbian aristocracy was annihilated. The Serbs were revenged when a knight, pretending to kneel in homage to Murad, jumped up and stabbed him in the neck. Not exactly cricket, but fair game in the Balkans. The moral, taught to all Serbian children, is that "it is better to die in battle than live in shame". The Albanian and, soon after, the Bosnian aristocracy took a more practical line, converting to Islam.
Which must have looked like collaboration to the Serbs . . .
Right. The Turkish occupation lasted 500 years, forcing hundreds of thousands of Serbs out of Kosovo. The Albanians rebelled whenever they could, but their majority was steadily building up. By the 19th century, as Ottoman rule collapsed, the biggest land-grab of modern European history was on. To forge a nation, every Balkan people needed a Great Power to fight their corner. The Serbs allied with their fellow Orthodox Slavs, the Russians, who wanted a port on the Mediterranean. To try to stop this, most other powers backed the Albanians to create a buffer state along the entire Adriatic coast. The Russians demanded as compensation the Albanian province of Kosovo for the Serbs. They got it.
Can we get to the 20th century, please?
Oppressed by the Serbs, the Albanian minority in the new kingdom of Yugoslavia, supported the Italians in the second world war. A puppet "Greater Albanian" state was briefly declared, while the Serbs, being Slavs and therefore "sub-human" according to the Fascists, were persecuted. The Serbian stream out of Kosovo continued unabated after the war, mostly due to poor economic conditions, and by the 1980s only 10 per cent of Kosovo was Serbian. As unemployment rose, the atmosphere was ripe for nationalism. The Kosovar Serbs began to demonstrate, blaming the Albanians for all their problems. A Communist official from Belgrade, sent to quieten down the Serbs in 1987, unexpectedly took their side. "No one should dare beat you," he declared. Thus was Slobodan Milosevic made a Serbian nationalist hero overnight. As his popularity grew, he took near total control of the Serbian media, portraying the Albanians (and other nationalities) as bloodthirsty criminals bent on destroying Serbian communities. His timing was impeccable: at a rally at Kosovo Field, exactly 600 years after the battle, he set forth his ideas of Serbian nationalism to a crowd of over a million Serbs. They would finally avenge their shameful subjection. Yugoslavia's break-up had begun.
Duncan Parrish
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