Is Kosovo Real? The Battle Over History Continues

WHAT ANCIENT HATREDS?

By Noel Malcolm

Readers who have followed Aleksa Djilas' writings on Bosnia over the last six years will not have been surprised by his systematically hostile and misleading treatment of my book, Kosovo: A Short History ("Imagining Kosovo," September/October 1998). But they may still have been puzzled by some aspects of his review, such as his desire to belittle me personally.

In his very first paragraph he refers to some of my other books and says it is "tempting" to dismiss my work in those fields as that of a "charlatan." Why this immediate resort to a personal slur, when he has clearly never seen the books (apart from the one on Bosnia) and knows nothing of my scholarly reputation in other fields? In the next sentence he magnanimously concedes that my book on Kosovo is the work of a talented "amateur historian": again, why the patronizing gibe, when he knows from the book's cover that I have a doctorate in history and have taught at Cambridge University for seven years?

The answer can be found in Djilas' method of argument. Readers of my book know that I present and analyze a mass of factual evidence, carefully referenced to sources drawn from the whole range of existing literature in what Djilas, with characteristic inaccuracy, calls "a dozen languages." (The correct figure is 20.) A serious critic trying to disprove my findings would surely present some counter-evidence, but Djilas never does. Instead, he simply makes ex cathedra pronouncements that I am wrong and he is right. This rhetorical method requires an audience primed to believe that I am at best an amateur and at worst a charlatan, while Djilas is the real expert, superior in both knowledge and objectivity.

But is this so? Djilas is a sociologist, with no historical training, no known expertise, and no published work in the fields of Ottoman, Albanian, or earlier Balkan history. He has written one book in a broadly historical format, a study of the development of the Yugoslav political system between 1919 and 1953. What sets that study apart from most accounts of twentieth-century Yugoslavia, however, is its total lack of interest in Kosovo. In its 259 pages Djilas does not devote a single paragraph to Kosovo, even though the book claims to cover "the national question" of Yugoslavia during the period.

If Djilas' judgments are not based on superior knowledge about Kosovo, they are certainly not grounded in superior political objectivity. Readers who think of him as a liberal intellectual on the basis of his 1980s Western journalism may not have noticed the major change in his approach since he began revisiting Belgrade in 1990 and returned to live there permanently in 1993. From almost the start of the Bosnian war he has been advocating the dismemberment of Bosnia (which means rewarding the ethnic cleansers with the land they have cleansed); exculpating, in effect, the cleansers by implying that their mass murders and expulsions were to a large degree just the products of deep historical causes; suggesting an overall moral equivalence between Alija Izetbegovic, who tried to defend Bosnia, and Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, who launched a war of destruction against it; and buttressing his argument with the unhistorical and undocumented claim that Bosnian Islam was "particularly harsh" and discriminatory throughout the Ottoman period.

VATICANOPHOBIA

Despite some deprecating remarks about nationalism in the abstract, Djilas' position on these issues is indistinguishable from mainstream Serbian nationalism. Therefore, I was not surprised to see that several points in his review were apparently derived from two polemical attacks on my book by British and American Serb nationalist lobbies in the Times Literary Supplement -- points to which, as he must know, I have already replied. He complains about the "half a dozen Albanians" thanked in my acknowledgments. Djilas does not divulge, of course, the one specific thing for which those Albanians are thanked -- namely, supplying me with copies of hard-to-find books and articles. What makes this complaint especially absurd is that, as Djilas must know from my previous reply on this point, many of the works I obtained from those people were actually by Serb authors.

Similarly, he offers as evidence of my "bias" the fact that I have consulted libraries and archives not in Orthodox countries, such as Greece and Bulgaria, but mainly in Catholic ones, such as Austria and Italy. This categorizing of archives not by their objective relevance to the subject of research but by the creed of the country in which they are situated has the authentic whiff of Serb nationalist Vaticanophobia. If Djilas were familiar with the works of serious Serbian scholars on the Ottoman period of Kosovan history, he would know that the archives on which they have depended (apart from ones in Istanbul and Ankara) are precisely the ones I have used, in Vienna, Venice, Rome, and the Vatican. There is nothing of remotely comparable importance in Greece or Bulgaria (apart from some medieval documents on Mount Athos, available in published collections). Sadly, Serbia itself possesses no archive properly covering that long period of Serbian history. Most early documents that have survived in Serbia, and many from the modern government archives, have been published, and I have consulted them in print. As for books published in Greek and Bulgarian relating to the history of Kosovo, there are few of these and I have read most of them.