Kosovo: a Short History

National Review, July 20, 1998 by J.B. Kelly

Kosovo: A Short History, by Noel Malcolm (New York University Press, 492 pp., $29.95)

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.