Stevan K. Pavlowitch is emeritus professor of history at the University of Southampton, UK. His latest book is A History of the Balkans, 1804–1945 (Longman, 1999).
Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War
by julie a. mertus
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999. 378 pages
Hardback: US $55. Paperback: US $19.95
Most of the earnest conflict resolution and human rights specialists—not to mention the “war tourists”—who went to Kosovo were armed only with what was supposed to be “factually true”. They had little awareness of how the truth was actually perceived by the Albanians and Serbs themselves.
That is what Julie Mertus, professor of law at Ohio Northern University and human rights consultant, discovered after she went to Kosovo in 1993 to document Serbian oppression of ethnic Albanians. The backbone of her book consists of over 150 interviews conducted in Kosovo and inner Serbia in the years 1993–8. They focus on how people remember specific events: the student demonstrations in 1981, the Martinovic “impalement” case in 1985, the Paracin barracks massacre in 1987 and the alleged poisoning of Albanian schoolchildren in 1990.
Mertus’s main aim is to provide an analysis of such events as personal experience and myth. In doing so she realises that what she calls “Truths”—the personal, subjective understanding of historical events—are more important than “truths”—the expression of “objective, historical reality”, as epitomised in Ranke’s belief that historians should tell “how it really was”. It is the personal interpretation, she says, that really enables us to understand “how wars start in the Balkans”.
Such Truths “can become so firmly a part of one’s existence, that to tell people to cast them away is to tell them to tear a layer off their skin” (p. 3). When such an identity is seen to be threatened, victimisation may lead to a fight for survival. In a situation of economic, social, political and even cultural insecurity, against a background of general dissent and frustration, and in a struggle for survival and power at all levels of society, fears grounded on events as they are remembered, refashioned and retold can be manipulated.
Selected verbatim interviews are encased, chapter by chapter, in a well-grounded analysis of the Kosovo problem since the province attained quasi-republic status in the early 1970s. The result yields what the author calls a micro-understanding of the history of Kosovo over the past two decades. A reader more familiar with less “micro-examined” representations of local perceptions will be interested, for instance, to realise with the author the shock felt by Serbs (whose willingness to sacrifice themselves for Kosovo, rhetoric notwithstanding, was less widespread than believed abroad) at the 1981 student demonstrations in Kosovo, and later at Slovenia’s alignment with the struggle of Kosovo’s Albanians. Serbs generally could not understand why Albanians wanted more, when they had been granted so much, nor later why Slovenes were turning against Serbia.
Unfortunately, the book is an unblended mix of genres. Analysis and interviews alternate in section after section, but the combination fails when reportage-type descriptions intrude. For example, “Someone brings in a cup of coffee and a glass of water for each of us, and then leaves. Afrim takes a sip of coffee. He shifts his chair and leans forward” (p. 80). And again, “Even before I open my mouth, earrings and glasses mark me as a foreigner. As we approach police roadblocks, I slip them into my pocket” (p. 165). Mertus’s personal musings are equally unnecessary: “I wonder what kind of life Mirita would have if not for the 1981 demonstrations ... I learn over time that Mirita’s real love is poetry ... women’s rights” (p. 87). Terminology and methodology are repetitively and endlessly explained from case to case, from chapter to chapter, until they lead to confusion.
There are “historians”, not least in the case of Kosovo, who suffer from a selective reading of “truths” until they reach their own “Truth”. True historians, however, have long known the difference between what J. H. Plumb, as far back as 1969, called the “Past” (Julie Mertus’s “Truth”, with a capital T), which he saw as enslaving, and “History” (the author’s “truth”, with a small t), which he deemed to be liberating. Plumb was mistaken only in assuming “the Death of the Past” (the title of his 1969 book). Thirty years later, we know that his “Past” is very much alive—at least in Kosovo.
All the same, what is perhaps obvious to historians is not always so to those who busy themselves with finding a solution to the Kosovo issue, particularly those who carry out the fieldwork. They are reminded by the author that the roots of the conflict there are far from simple, that it is not just the result of ancient hatreds and that it is not particularly “Balkan”. Mertus also advises them to read the local media in order to understand what local people believe, not just the New York Times, Le Monde or the Guardian.
The trouble is that even those respectable Western papers (let alone the lesser media which simplify drastically) are not always above coming to their own Truths. Furthermore, the “micro-history” or myths peddled since the 1970s—the understanding of which is essential—are still connected to the “macro-history”, the successive waves of Albanian/Ottoman and Serbian/Yugoslav rule.
Mertus’s book at times suffers from a blurred macro-historical vision which leads to vagueness. Right from the start, we are told that “when using the term Kosovo, this book refers to the geographic area that has long been known as Kosovo” (p. xviii). In fact, only the Ottoman Vilayet of Kosovo (1877) and the Yugoslav Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija (1946) ever defined an area, and the two were certainly not coterminous. We are also told that when Mertus now refers to Yugoslavia, she means “Serbia proper, Kosovo, and Montenegro” (ibid.). What about Vojvodina?
Again, the so-called 1937 “Memorandum on the Expulsion of Albanians” by the historian Vaso Cubrilovic, quoted from a copy on file with Mertus (pp. 286–7), was no published memorandum “addressed to the [non-existent] royal Serbian government” (p. 37), but an unpublished lecture given to a restricted audience. Neither was a census taken in Yugoslavia in 1939 (p. 315). It is also inaccurate to say that flying a Serbian or a Croatian flag in 1978 would have been met by a jail sentence, whereas an Albanian flag was permissible (p. 20), and so forth.
A real historical howler, however, occurs when Mertus says (pp. 45–6) that the lawyer Stevan Moljevic wrote in 1981 of a “homogeneous Serbia that had to embrace the whole ethnic territory on which Serbs lived”. Mertus adds, “These words would never have appeared in Tito’s days.” But Moljevic actually wrote the document in June 1941 during the German occupation. He had close ties with General Mihailovic’s underground movement and was writing about the borders of a Serbian unit in a restored Yugoslavia after the Second World War. The document was published, but not written, in 1981.
As an analysis of what people actually believed, Mertus’s book is a useful corrective to the grand rhetoric about “ancient hatreds”. It is a valuable reminder that the driving force of fear is not a particularly Balkan, but a potentially universal, phenomenon (by “Balkan”, the author presumably means “former-Yugoslav”). It is intended as a primer of “do’s and don’ts” for non‑governmental organisation activists in zones of conflict. Despite the book’s flaws, it does succeed on this level and all would-be peacebuilders should study it.
Writing in July 1998, before the NATO-led war in Kosovo, Mertus says that “the only workable options for Kosovo are independence or division ... Perhaps a less drastic solution would have been possible had the international community answered Albanians’ earlier cries for help. Now it is too late” (p. 282). Perhaps. Perhaps the whole of Yugoslavia could have been saved, independent as it was, rather than divided and fought over, had the international community thought of answering cries for help that were uttered in that communist non-aligned state, cries for a way out of its one-party and pharaonic–oligarchic rule through a genuinely democratic alternative rather than through keeping Titoism afloat until, and even after, the end. Now it is indeed too late.
As human rights activist Vesna Pesic told the United States Institute of Peace in 1996, what was once Yugoslavia “was politically unequipped to protect its citizens [Serbs and Albanians alike, as well as all others] because it had no non-violent instrument at its disposal to neutralize and pacify these types of conflict” (p. 13).
