The Face of Kosovar Albanian Nationalism: A Violent and Volatile Transformation of the Balkan Political Landscape

Despite the fact that Aeschylus warned us that "in war, truth is the first casualty," time and again history repeats itself in oversimplified explanations. While there is no denying that any war produces immense human suffering, it is human suffering that more often than not is used to justify war. A simple Internet search on war casualties reveals a wide array of estimates. Every side to a conflict tends to minimize its own battle casualties, maximize the battle casualties of the other side, refuse or minimize the number of noncombatants it killed, and maximize the number of noncombatants killed by the other side. For example, estimates of the casualties of the conflict in Bosnia vary from 25,000 to 280,000 killed.¹ Anxious to reveal the truth, pundits adopt one or another figure depending on which truth they are trying to reveal. In the process, pundits become belligerent themselves. Commenting on the Yugoslav wars, one author notes that "media co-belligerents, pushing relentlessly for more aggressive action, supposedly in the interest of stopping ethnic cleansing and killing, played into the hands of parties with a political agenda that assured and produced far more ethnic cleansing and killing."² The distorted presentation of suffering is then matched by distorted explanations of war causation. The outbreak of war is often attributed to cultural differences and never to cultural similarities about war. Although all cultures seem to be similar in the way they view war, war is still presented as the result of cultural incompatibilities traced through centuries of history.

In this essay we argue that the violence in Kosovo is rooted in Yugoslav policies implemented since World War II, and not, as some would argue,³ to interethnic hatred traced back to the 1389 battle of Kosovo Polje, where a Muslim Ottoman army defeated a Serb-led Christian force, putting an end to the medieval state of Serbia.⁴ Regardless of what transpired during the fourteenth century, the argument can be made that no state has ever willingly surrendered part of its territory, at least not without compensation, and Serbia is not an exception. In accordance with this view, the medieval kingdom of Serbia, in control of the territory in 1389, was not an exception either; it did not willingly surrender itself and its territory.

A thorough review of the political situation in Kosovo since World War II indicates that conflict there would most likely have occurred even if the battle of Kosovo Polje had never taken place. By extension, had both Serbians and Albanians handled the Kosovo situation differently after World War II, and particularly since 1981, widespread violence in Kosovo would have been avoided regardless of the fact that the battle of Kosovo Polje did take place. There is definitely a correlation between the 1389 battle and the violence of the past decade, but a cause-and-effect relationship cannot be established. The bottom line is that states are not inclined to surrender any part of their territory. The fact that Kosovo is considered an integral part of the modern Serbian state and that many if not all Serbs regard Kosovo as part of their "ancestral homeland"⁵ only reinforces state resilience to hold on to territory and protect the state's territorial sovereignty. The countless number of monasteries and Serbian Orthodox churches in the region hardens the national resolve to hold onto territory, and in this sense, to also hold onto a specific part of history. The fact that the region is also called the "cradle of Serbian culture and spirituality . . . the very essence of Serbian spiritual, cultural identity and statehood since the Middle Ages"⁶ provides a powerful symbol for mobilizing public support toward maintaining the state's territorial integrity.

Serbia's president, Boris Tadic, illustrated this clearly when he said that the "independence of Kosovo is unacceptable to me, and for all Serbia."⁷ Regardless of how one interprets the nationalistic overtones of this statement, the reality is that Tadic's remarks raise the important...