Kosovo: A Short History - Hardcover

Malcolm, Noel

4.03

397 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333666127 ISBN 13: 9780333666128

Publisher: Macmillan, 1998

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Review:

Kosovo, a 55-mile-long plateau in southern Serbia bordering Albania and Macedonia, should by all rights be a historical and political backwater. A Bulgarian geographer who visited Kosovo during World War I remarked that it was "almost as unknown and inaccessible as a stretch of land in Central Africa." The observation would prove ironically fitting by the 1990s, as Central Africa and Kosovo both became sites of widespread genocide, fuelled by ethnic hatreds, of the deepest international significance. Noel Malcolm, a British historian and journalist who has written extensively about the Balkans (including a companion volume of sorts on Bosnia) provides an overview of Kosovo's long-standing cultural divisions in his "short history" (although, at more than 500 pages, a not so short book).

Readers following the war in Kosovo through newspaper and television coverage may well ask why ethnic Albanians and Serbs are struggling so violently to command the small region. Kosovo, Malcolm explains, is the birthplace of Serbian nationalism; the defeat of Serbian forces there in 1389 by Turkish troops became emblematic of the fall of the Serbian empire, as it led to Turkish domination of the Balkans. Contemporary warriors of Serbia are, in Malcolm's eyes, evidently attempting to reverse the course of history by reclaiming the land from its Turkish conquerors--but in the absence of the Turks, they'll take it from the Albanians (the largest ethnic group among Kosovo's inhabitants) whose ancestors converted to Islam when the Turks ruled the region. Malcolm's lucid text shows again and again that the ethnic conflict in Kosovo is less a battle over bloodlines and religion than it is one over differing conceptions of national origins and history. "When ordinary Serbs learn to think more rationally and humanely about Kosovo and more critically about some of their national myths," he concludes, "all the people of Kosovo and Serbia will benefit--not least the Serbs themselves."

Synopsis:

The situation in Kosovo is different to that of the rest of Yugoslavia. Trapped between Albania and Serbia, the tensions between these two are, it seems, "ethnic", as two groups with different languages, cultures and religions vie for political autonomy. By the early-1980s Kosovo had reached a state of permanent crisis and military occupation, and it became the main focus for the revival of Serbian nationalism. This book traces the history of Kosovo and examines the Yugoslavian conflict, and the part played by Western Europe in its destruction. Noel Malcolm is the author of "Bosnia".

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