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Title: Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War by Julie A. Mertus ISBN: 0-520-21865-5 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: June, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A bedtime story
Comment: So, Slobodan Milosevic has been toppled.. Guess that means all will now be peaceful in Kosovo!
Well, no, actually..and this book will tell you why.
Written just before NATO's 1999 air campaign over Kosovo, Julie Mertus illuminates the process by which trust between Serbs and Kosovars became impossible. It hints at Phillip Gourevitch's reflection that "power comes when you convince your enemy to inhabit YOUR version of HIS story".
That struggle, each wanting the "correct" version of history to stand, lies at the heart of all Balkan conflicts of the last ten years.
Through innumerable interviews with the ordinary people of Kosovo, Serbian and Albanian, Julie Mertus reveals how competing myths came to be, and how they then contributed to an environment where terrorism and atrocity became - ultimately - a logical choice.
She does not go back to the mythology surrounding the 1389 defeat of the Serbian Prince Lazar at Kosovo Polje - the rallying point for Milosevic. (Covered already in Noel Malcolm's "Kosovo: A Short History). Mertus shows how events within our generation created defining national stories.
Two quick examples.
In 1990, thousands of schoolchildren fell ill. The ethnic Albanian understanding: they were deliberately poisoned, probably with Sarin gas, by Serbian authorities. It was proof of the evil Serbs would be willing to do to Albanians. The UCK (Kosovo Liberation Army) recruited youths with the argument that without resistance, they would all be poisoned again.
The Serb response to the same event was that it was mass hysteria at best, or at worst a deliberate plot by ethnic Albanians to generate international sympathy against them, the Serbs. It proved the extent of the Kosovars' untrustworthiness, their deviousness.
There could be no common ground between those views. Which story you believed, defined you.
Similarly, there is the case of Djordje Martinovic, a Serbian peasant who turned up at hospital with a bottle in his rectum and a story about being assaulted in his field by "masked men". Although later apparently recanting his story, and confessing his "assault" had been a botched act of self-gratification, for Serbs it became a rallying point. Dismissing the recantation as an Albanian plot, Serbs were only too happy to believe that this, the violation of an honest peasant in an act with echoes of the old Turkish practice of impaling, was the extent to which ethnic Albanians would not hesitate to stoop. Martinovic quickly returned to his original story. He remains on the list of Serb martyrs to this day.
Today, Kosovo remains in an effective state of partition, nearly all its former Serb population living above the divided city of Mitrovica. Without the presence of KFOR troops, armed conflict would be inevitable. It is not their religion, or even their language, that divides Serb from Kosovar. It is the incompatability of the stories they tell. Since this book was written, both sides have volumes of fresh grievances, accentuating their enemy's inhumanity and highlighting their own victimhood. These stories, nearly all with some grain of truth, are now being woven themselves into the complex fabric of national myth.
Brilliantly, painstakingly and without taking sides, Prof. Mertus has given us a vivid account of how events become remembered. She gives us the template to understand better all the intractable conflicts of our times.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Different Outlook
Comment: Mertus has found a new way to analyze how the elite can transform a conflict. Her theme of the "Truths" resonates strongly throughout the book. Her unbiased view and in-depth discussion left me wanting more. My interest in the subject of Balkan history grew from reading this title.
Rating: 5
Summary: a wonderful book that will cause a person to think.
Comment: Julie Mertus has done a fine job of writing from her on the spot investigations of what she found during her interviews.
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Title: Kosovo : A Short History by Noel Malcolm, University Pres New York ISBN: 0060977752 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 July, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Kosovo: War and Revenge by Tim Judah ISBN: 0300097255 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Road to Kosovo: A Balkan Diary by Greg Campbell ISBN: 0813337674 Publisher: Westview Press Pub. Date: March, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation by Laura Silber, Allan Little ISBN: 0140262636 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia by Tim Judah, Timothy Judah ISBN: 0300085079 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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