Drama of Balkans Is Long, Turbulent--and Cruel

It is said that history is written by the victors. But the vanquished have their story too. And when written by them, history can be perverted into a justification for relentless revenge.

In the Balkans, one day’s winner is the next day’s loser. Each side has a story that lives forever, and the sheer weight of history propels a struggle over a harsh land that otherwise would seem to have little to offer.

The bleak mountains of Serbia’s southern province, Kosovo, have been the stage for a long and turbulent Balkan drama of rebellion and repression, war and exodus--and occasionally, compromise and co-existence.

Graveyards for failed insurrectionists and defeated conquerors, Kosovo’s hills and plains have changed hands from Ottoman pashas to Nazi collaborators and Communist strongmen. Each regime attempted to shape the lives and prejudices of its subjects, and eliminate some of them altogether.

For Serbs and Albanians, who both claim the Los Angeles County-sized region, Kosovo symbolizes themes of suffering and injustice. Over centuries, these threads have been woven together, and both peoples assert a right to the land based on ancestry, demographics and mythology.

While the events unfolding today are starkly clear--Serbian forces are brutally driving hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from their homes--it is far less clear how Kosovo arrived at this point.

Even historians disagree on basic facts, for historical truth is in the eye of the beholder.

A community remembers those events that best suit its image of itself. A community that feels persecuted harks back to its days of lost glory and persecution, never its days as persecutor.

And so Serbs now wonder with indignation how their World War II allies, the U.S. and Britain, can possibly be bombing them--ignoring, as the Serbs do, the estrangement of the last decade as their republic became a pariah state. And Kosovo’s Albanians prefer not to remember the many years when they were very much in charge of their destinies. Such recognition might undermine their self-portrait as the eternal underdog.

War in the Balkans also has been characterized by unforgiving cruelty and the expulsion or flight of entire populations.

The burden of history, however, does not mean that the people of the Balkans are destined to wage war. Nothing need be inevitable about conflict and bloodshed. Rather, Balkan rulers--and sometimes outsiders too--have managed to use history to exploit old wounds as well as raw, new feelings.

Today’s war in Kosovo is about many things, but foremost it is a dispute over who should rule the land and who may live there, and with what rights and protections. It is about irredentism and power. Religious and ethnic differences are an overlay, a pretext for drawing lines and a vehicle for appealing to hatreds.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic used Kosovo to come to power. He needs to hold on to it to maintain his rule. The Albanians of Kosovo want to govern the land and eventually become a part of Albania proper--where people speak their language and share their culture.

Albanians consider themselves descendants of the Illyrians, an ancient people who originally occupied a region bordering the Adriatic Sea. As such, they say, they are the original inhabitants of Kosovo.

Serbs, however, claim that when their Slavic ancestors arrived in Kosovo in the 6th and 7th centuries, the area was largely uninhabited. The Christian Orthodox monasteries that dot Kosovo are testament to their medieval Serbian kingdom, as is the Serbian patriarchate seated in the western Kosovo city of Pec.

These arguments may seem esoteric and remote to outsiders, but they give both Serbs and Albanians cause to claim Kosovo as their home. For peoples struggling to find living space in a perpetually troubled neighborhood, such a sense of identity is a matter of survival.

For Serbs, the claim took on added emotion with the invasion of the Ottoman Turks in the 14th century. By 1343, the Serbs under King Stepan Dusan had conquered territory that included most of what is today Albania. But, riven by discord and divisions, Balkan rulers--especially the Serbs--failed to mobilize quickly enough to halt the Ottoman onslaught.

Epic Serbian poetry recounts the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Polje, the “Field of the Blackbirds.” Ottoman Turks killed Serbian Prince Lazar on the battlefield and eventually spread their empire over all of Serbia. Thus began nearly five centuries of Turkish domination of Serbia and the Balkans.

As the Serbian legend goes, Lazar is visited by an angel in the form of a falcon on the eve of battle and offered a choice between a heavenly or earthly kingdom. He declares that it is better to die in combat than live in shame. He is killed, but only after entering a covenant with God that establishes the Serbs as a chosen people.

To Serbs, it matters little that some historians regard the 1389 battle as a draw and not a defeat, and say that it was far less important than an earlier 1371 engagement at the River Marica, where the Turkish victory was decisive. Nor does it seem to matter that the story of Lazar’s glorious sacrifice probably began in the imaginations of several 19th century Serbian writers.

Lore celebrates the defeat at Kosovo Polje because it portrays the Serbs as valiant martyrs shielding Christendom from the Muslim Ottomans. Then as now, symbolism and passion were more important than historical record.

As the late dissident Yugoslav writer and politician Milovan Djilas once told an interviewer: “If there had been no battle at Kosovo, the Serbs would have invented it for its suffering and heroism.”

The migration of Serbs into Kosovo and Albania under Dusan was reversed during the Ottoman Empire. Albanian farmers and shepherds, pressured to convert to Islam, began settling in the valleys of Kosovo.

Fleeing Islam and Ottoman reprisals, Serbs began migrating northward in large numbers in the late 17th and the 18th centuries. As violent anti-Serbian and anti-Christian sentiment grew, so did Serbian nationalism. But nationalism grew among the impoverished Albanians too.

Serbs and Albanians spent years fighting Ottoman occupation, and then each other. Two Balkan wars at the beginning of this century, marked by massacres and massive expulsions, set the tone for today’s violence.

Leon Trotsky, just a few years before he helped Lenin launch the Bolshevik Revolution, was Pravda’s correspondent covering the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars.

“The horrors actually began as soon as we crossed into Kosovo,” Trotsky wrote in one dispatch. “Entire Albanian villages had been turned into pillars of fire, dwellings, possessions accumulated by fathers and grandfathers were going up in flames, the picture was repeated the whole way to Skopje. There the Serbs broke into Turkish and Albanian houses and performed the same task in every case: plundering and killing.”

The Balkan Wars ended with Serbia--soon to be part of a kingdom that later became Yugoslavia--in control of Kosovo, and with the creation of an independent Albanian state to the southwest.

The history of this century is of cyclical violence: Serbs repress Albanians, who respond with terrorist acts and armed resistance, which triggers deeper repression, which inspires greater resistance.

During World War II, many Kosovo Albanians sided with the Nazis who occupied Yugoslavia. Thousands of Serbian and Montenegrin settlers were rounded up, deported to labor camps or murdered. Their homes were burned to the ground.

Marshal Josip Broz Tito’s Communist Partisans recruited other ethnic Albanians with a promise that Kosovo would be allowed to join Albania after the war. When it became clear that was not true, a revolt cost many lives.

Under Communist rule, Kosovo remained an impoverished, backward province where Serbian-Albanian relations fluctuated between violence and compromise. After 1967, however, Albanians were granted more rights, and eventually, autonomy. Kosovo’s dwindling Serbs felt threatened.

By 1981, ethnic Albanians in Yugoslavia accounted for half the world’s Albanians and about 78% of Kosovo’s population. With Serbs continuing to leave to escape violence or pursue better opportunities, and with the ethnic Albanians giving birth at the highest rate in Europe, the demographic shift continued through the 1980s.

Slobodan Milosevic rose to power in 1987, stirring the passions of Kosovo, and in so doing, ignited all of the Yugoslav federation. The reemergence of strong Serbian national feelings worried other ethnic groups such as the Slovenes, Croats and Bosnian Muslims, who increasingly saw their future outside the federation.

In short order, Kosovo became a police regime. Ethnic Albanians lost their jobs. Many fled. Those who stayed set up parallel but inferior education and health care systems and boycotted elections.

Even at the beginning of this decade, armed Kosovo Albanians, who ultimately formed the core of today’s Kosovo Liberation Army, controlled some of the more remote villages. Serbian police steered clear.

Elsewhere, torture and arbitrary arrest of ethnic Albanians by Serbian police intensified, even as the Albanians grew disillusioned with their leadership. Many more frustrated and angry men took up weapons. To them, the choice seemed stark--status quo and nothing, or armed revolt.

The goal of Milosevic now is equally stark: to rid Kosovo of its Albanian population.

And so Kosovo, and the Serbs and Albanians who can never untangle their history, face a defining moment.

Wilkinson, The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau chief, reported on the Balkans from 1995 to 1998.