Imagining Kosovo: A Biased New Account Fans Western Confusion

Noel Malcolm's previous books include a biography of a twentieth-century Romani an violinist and composer, a volume engagingly called The Origins of English Nonsense, a history of Bosnia, and a life of a sixteenth-century Venetian heretic who studied rainbows. Since he seems to select his literary targets at random, it is tempting to dismiss Malcolm as a popularizer or charlatan. But in Kosovo: A Short History, Malcolm emerges as a talented amateur historian, trying hard -- the book has 1,154 endnotes and a bibliography in a dozen languages -- to produce a serious book about Serbia's southern province, with its almost 90 percent Albanian majority. He is only partly successful.

Can there really be a history of Kosovo? Malcolm recognizes at the outset that there is "something rather artificial about writing the history of territory, as a unit." But he argues that Kosovo has a geographical identity and is an important cultural crossroads. Alas, his account is marred by his sympathies for the Albanians and his illusions about the Balkans.

Kosovo was a central part of medieval Serbia, and Serbian kings built magnificent monasteries and churches there, many of which still survive. Still, Kosovo never had recognized boundaries. In the mid-fifteenth century, after its conquest by the Ottoman Turks, it became an ill-defined region within their empire. In the late nineteenth century, the Ottomans established the vilayet or province of Kosovo, but it encompassed a rather different territory than today's Kosovo. Although after the First Balkan War of 1912 it was again part of Serbia -- called then and now by Serbs Kosovo-Metohija -- it did not become an autonomous administrative unit. Nor did it achieve such status after World War I, when Montenegro and the South Slav provinces of the former Austria-Hungary joined Serbia to form Yugoslavia, which, until 1929, was officially called the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

Only after the defeat of the Nazis in World War II did Kosovo achieve autonomy. During the war, the communist-led Partisan Army fought against Germans and other occupiers of Yugoslavia, as well as against rival Yugoslav military formations. While the Partisans were multinational and advocated tolerance and federalism, their Yugoslav foes were extreme nationalists who often collaborated with the fascist enemy. Some leaders of the Serbian royalist Chetniks, for instance, planned to "cleanse" the Serbian lands of non-Serbs. Their designs were foiled in 1945, and Kosovo began receiving self-rule. At first it was a mere oblast (region), but in 1963 it became a pokrajina (province), like Vojvodina in Serbia's north. In the early 1970s, the old Partisan leader, Josip Broz Tito, and his ruling Communist Party virtually transformed Yugoslavia's federation of six republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia) into a confederation. For the first time, Kosovo, together with Vojvodina, achieved a high degree of autonomy and became in some respects -- such as separate representation in the federal state and party bodies -- coequal to the republics. These changes were finally codified in the 1974 constitution, which some constitutional experts argue conferred on the republics a last-resort right of secession; no one, however, claims that it accorded such a right to provinces.

Except, implicitly, Malcolm. He sometimes calls ethnic Albanians from Kosovo "Kosovars," a misnomer often employed by Western journalists and diplomats. There is no difference between Albanians in Kosovo and those in Albania, Serbia proper, Montenegro, the Republic of Macedonia, or Greece. Kosovar identity is as much an artificial construct as Kosovo itself. It is bizarre to name as Kosovars those Albanian-speakers who live in Kosovo next to the Albanian border, while keeping the name Albanians for those who live in Serbia proper, sometimes more than 60 miles from Albania.

Today Kosovo's approximately 1.8 million Albanians are demanding independence from Serbia, often with weapons in hand. The appearance of an almost 500-page-long "short history" of Kosovo calling them Kosovars can only help their cause. Readers will believe that Kosovo is a well-established historical-political entity and forget that Albanians are a minority within Serbia and Yugoslavia and not a nation, which would have the right to self-determination. Since Malcolm does not hide his sympathies for the Albanians and their struggle for independence, this effect was probably deliberate.

YES, ANCIENT HATREDS

Malcolm entered the field of Yugoslav studies with his Bosnia: A Short History. Published in 1994 in the middle of Bosnia's brutal civil war, this well-written book was an instant success. Not only did it fill the gap in Western knowledge about the most central republic of the former Yugoslavia, it also eloquently championed restoring Bosnia's unity and reintegrating its Muslims, Serbs, and Croats, who had been separated by war and ethnic cleansing. Malcolm maintained that Bosnia had a continuous history for almost a thousand years and was a distinct geopolitical entity even while incorporated into the Ottoman Empire, Hapsburg Austria, and Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, many of his misconceptions about Bosnia persist in his Kosovo sequel.