I used to like visiting the Decani monastery in Kosovo because the Serbian monks who lived there were young and urbane: they talked about reconciliation and seemed to represent the best of Serbia. In one corner of the monastery is a tomb containing the bones of knights who fell at a fateful battle in 1389, the Battle of Kosovo Field. In another, a fresco shows a curious flaming sun. In better times, UFO enthusiasts used to visit the monastery, believing that the fresco depicted an alien spacecraft over medieval Serbia. The monks used to laugh.
The last time I was there, Serbian soldiers came to the monastery. Father Sava, the gentle monk who spoke for the brothers, ran to tell them to leave their guns at the gate. We were in the library, watching. One of the soldiers stayed outside, guarding the guns. Suddenly the afternoon peace was broken by a blast of firing. At first we thought that the soldier had been shot. In fact, a unit of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had jumped out on to the road and attacked a van carrying local power plant workers, Serbs and Albanians. One man died.
A few days later, close to Decani, I was driving with a friend when we saw those tell-tale plumes of smoke in the clear blue sky. A village was burning. Then we saw women and children tumbling down a hill. We stopped our rental car-with Belgrade number plates-and jumped out. Horrified women moved to shield their children. They thought that we were Serbs about to gun them down.
At the monastery, the monks looked after Serbs driven from KLA-held areas. When fighting devastated local villages, they distributed food to Albanians, too. Father Sava told me that ten years ago he, like most Serbs, had believed in Milosevic. But he had heard the president's famous speech at Kosovo Field on 28th June 1989, the 600th anniversary of the battle against the Ottomans, and realised that Milosevic was going "the wrong way."
With hindsight we can see that the gathering on Kosovo Field, a few miles outside Kosovo's capital, Pristina, was the beginning of a new chapter in Yugoslav and Serb history. Milosevic, who had just abolished Kosovo's autonomy and become president of Serbia, was conjuring up the ghosts of Serbian nationalism in a way which would destroy Tito's country, leave tens of thousands dead and uproot millions.
What is it about Kosovo, this wretched patch of land with two million souls? Decani, with its frescos and royal tombs, speaks of an age when Kosovo was a different land. In the middle ages, most of its people were Serbs, or at least Orthodox Christians on their way to developing a national identity as Serbs. Like elsewhere in Europe at that time, monarchs sought immortality by erecting churches and monasteries. As Kosovo was then the Serb heartland, many of these places are there, even if most of the Serbs have gone.
By 1389 the Serbs were a disunited people ruled over by a number of feuding nobles. Under Lazar Hrebeljanovic, the Serbs, allied to Bosnians, Albanians and others, took a stand at Kosovo Field against the Ottoman Turks (who also had Serbs fighting for them). In military terms the battle was probably a draw. But the Lazar myth, preserved in epic song and sung by Serb peasants during more than 500 years of Ottoman occupation, told of a noble but futile struggle in which Lazar chose to die rather than live in subjugation (Serbia was actually incorporated into the Ottoman empire 70 years later). The peasants then went to church (at places like Decani), and saw the kings of vanquished Serbia preserved in fresco beside Christ. The lines blurred. Just as Christ would one day be reborn-so would Serbia.
In the meantime, 500 years of Ottoman rule changed the contours of "Serbia." Serbs migrated north-some to Croatia-while Albanians settled the fertile plains of Kosovo. The land of Serbian churches was changing. But the epics stayed the same, hence the notion of Kosovo as the Serb "Jerusalem."
Following an uprising in 1804 Serbia began to emerge again as an entity in its own right, on the border between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. This new Serbia, based on Belgrade in the north, grew in size and in independence from the Turks. In 1878, it was formally recognised at the Congress of Berlin. Then, in the first Balkan war of 1912, Serbia, along with Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria, divided up the remains of the Balkan part of the Ottoman empire. As part of that division, the Serbian army realised the national dream and swept down upon Kosovo.
For the Serbs of Kosovo, the return of the Serbian army was liberation; for the Albanians, now the majority, it was a conquest by a foreign power. Albanian nationalism had been born in Kosovo at a congress in 1878 (the League of Prizren) which called for autonomy within the Ottoman empire for Albanian speakers. The return of the Serbs meant that Kosovo could not unite with the emerging Albanian state to the east. Thus was born the modern cycle of revenge which has gripped Kosovo ever since.
Much of this cycle has taken place within living memory. In 1912, the Serbs killed or banished those Albanians who resisted them. In 1915, as the Serbian army retreated across Kosovo, chased out by the Austro-Hungarians and Germans, the Albanians took their revenge. In 1918, when they returned, the Serbs took theirs. Meanwhile in the same year, Yugoslavia was created, made up of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia (then including Macedonia). Kosovo had no independent existence. During the 1920s, the Serbs-or the new Yugoslav authorities-suppressed Albanian rebellions and tried to implant Serbian settlers. In 1941, when most of Kosovo became part of an Italian-ruled Greater Albania, the settlers were driven out and thousands of Serbs were killed.
Also in 1941, Serbian officers mounted a coup against the Yugoslav government after it reluctantly signed up with the Nazis. Tito and his partisans fought a rugged rearguard action against the Germans and a bitter civil war against German-supporters in Croatia (the Ustashas) and Serbia (the Chetniks). Few Kosovo Albanians joined the partisans. Some, however, did join, after a conference in 1944 declared that the future communist Kosovo would have the option of uniting with Albania. It was not to be. The disaffected Kosovo Albanians felt betrayed; and they were not trusted to govern the province after the war.
Indeed, such was the discontent at Kosovo's reincorporation into Yugoslavia that for some years after 1945, Kosovo was under martial law. By the late 1960s, however, Tito began to allow the Albanianisation of the province. And by 1974, this Serbian province had become a Yugoslav republic in all but name. It had its own assembly, police force and local government. In fact it had all the prerogatives of the other Yugoslav republics, like Croatia or Slovenia, bar one-it did not have the right to secede.
Because no one then imagined that any republic would try to secede, this right was academic. However, because Kosovo Albanians were a large non-Slav minority in the "land of the south Slavs," and had resisted incorporation into Serbia and Yugoslavia in 1912, 1918 and 1944, it was thought imprudent to give them this right. Tito-himself half-Croatian and half-Slovenian-had to walk a tightrope. He wanted to satisfy the Albanians, but did not want to provoke the Serbs. In 1971, he had already faced an outbreak of Croatian nationalism which rattled the whole country.
Yugoslavia's 1974 constitution gave the six republics (plus Serbia's provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina) significant theoretical autonomy, but Tito remained the final arbiter, the real law in the land. In 1980, after he died, things began to change. Local politicians began to put theory into practice; in Kosovo there was unrest.
Students in Pristina demanded republican status for the province. Large demonstrations in 1981 spilled over into violence. The authorities suspected the influence of "Enverists," with links to Enver Hoxha's Stalinist Albania. In fact, most students were not interested in Enverism or any other "ism." They just wanted to believe that one day Kosovo would no longer be part of Yugoslavia and that all Albanians might live in one state. Many of the agitators spent several years in jail. When released many went into exile, disappearing among the gastarbeiter communities in Germany and elsewhere. In 1982, a group of them formed a tiny party called the Popular Movement for Kosovo (LPK). In Kosovo itself, it operated with a secret cell structure and distributed leaflets calling for an insurrection.
But the Albanians were not the only ones who were unhappy. Kosovo's Serbs, now only 10 per cent of the population, felt abandoned. Freed from the constraints of Titoism, the church and intellectuals began to complain that Kosovo's Serbs were being persecuted. Many felt that they had no future in the Albanian-run province and moved to Serbia proper. Most went for economic reasons. But as communist power began to wane, the Serbian Question-and the fate of the Serbs of Kosovo-began to figure in political debate.
Leading that debate was Dobrica Cosic, a Serbian writer. As far back as 1968 Cosic had upset the authorities after warning that the Kosovo Albanian and Vojvodina Hungarian leaders were "separatists," and that promoting Bosnia's Muslims to the status of a Yugoslav "nation" was wrong. In 1985, a group of 16 academics began work on a document known as the Memorandum, which aimed to examine the state of Serbia and the Serbs. Although Cosic was not one of the academics, he was the inspiration. Leaked to the press in 1986, most of the Memorandum was rather dull. However, when discussing the Serbs of Kosovo and of Croatia (then 12 per cent of its population), its language became shrill. It stated that, over the last 20 years, 200,000 Serbs had been forced to leave Kosovo. "Faced with a physical, moral and psychological reign of terror, they [the Serbs] seem to be preparing for their final exodus." In its most inflammatory paragraph, the Memorandum added: "The physical, political, legal and cultural genocide of the Serbian population in Kosovo is a worse historical defeat than any experienced in the liberation wars waged by Serbia from the First Serbian Uprising in 1804 to the uprising of 1941."
One source of anger was Kosovo's constitutional status. Serbs argued (in a Balkan version of the West Lothian question) that it was unfair that Kosovo had a say in the running of Serbia, where Serbia had no say in the running of Kosovo. In other words, Kosovo could (and did) vote against Serbia at the federal level, but Serbia was powerless to remedy the parlous situation of the Serbs in Kosovo.
None of this was anything that politicians of good will could not have solved. Instead, Slobodan Milosevic entered the story. He was then head of the Serbian communist party's central committee, living in the shadow of his friend and mentor Ivan Stambolic, president of Serbia. Stambolic asked Milosevic to go to Pristina to assess the situation. Milosevic went to Kosovo and saw the future. Seizing the emotive issue of the Kosovo Serbs, he began his transition from communist to nationalist, from second-fiddle politician prone to depression (both his parents had committed suicide), to leader of a Serbia reborn-a Serbia which would no longer be weak for the sake of a strong Yugoslavia.
Milosevic betrayed Stambolic, took his job and abolished Kosovo's autonomy. In Kosovo the move was resisted by the Albanians, but the Serbs were euphoric. At one of the giant rallies "of truth" that Milosevic held at the time, he said: "We shall win the battle for Kosovo... We shall win despite the fact that Serbia's enemies inside and outside the country are plotting against it."
On 20th February 1989, Albanian miners tried to stall the reimposition of Serbian rule in Kosovo. Their strike failed, but during the course of it, Slovene President Milan Kucan declared that Yugoslavia was being "defended" by the miners. This shocked the Serbs; they respected the Slovenes and had no historic quarrels with them. Suddenly Serb paranoia seemed justified. Enemies were all around: the Slovenes were insolent, the Croats fascists, the Albanians treacherous separatists. Everyone could shut up or get out; everyone got out. The reimposition of Serbian power in Kosovo thus sparked a cycle of competitive nationalisms which led to the break-up of a 23m-strong state, and to war. Milosevic struck a deal with Kucan so that Slovenia could leave Yugoslavia-as long as it supported Serbia's argument that if Croatia seceded, it could not take its Serbs with it. With Milosevic now arming the Croatian and then the Bosnian Serbs, the war for Greater Serbia began.
Because the cancer which killed Yugoslavia began in Kosovo, everyone expected that if there was to be a war, it would begin there. The Albanians had fought the Serbs several times over the previous 70 years, so their decision not to fight in the early 1990s was not one born of passivity. It was a shrewd choice.
Kosovo Albanian politics was then dominated by the Democratic League of Kosovo, led by the academic Ibrahim Rugova, an uncharismatic man who had studied in France and whose trademark is a silk scarf. At first Rugova's party stood for the restoration of autonomy, but with the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991, he declared Kosovo's independence and became president of the Republic. Unlike Slovenia or Croatia, Kosovo had no means to make its independence real. So Kosovo became a looking-glass world. Most Albanians had resigned or been thrown out of their state jobs, including teachers and doctors. A parallel teaching and medical system was set up. Rugova drove around Pristina in a big black Audi, just like a real president. Abroad, mostly in Germany, he liaised with his government-in-exile, headed by a former surgeon called Bujar Bukoshi.
Apart from lobbying western governments, Bukoshi was charged with collecting a 3 per cent income tax from the 500,000 Kosovo Albanians who lived and worked abroad. Bukoshi also had to consider the proposals he was receiving from Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic. With the 1991 war in Croatia and the war which began in 1992 in Bosnia, both leaders implored him to open a southern front against the Serbs. The idea was rejected.
Rugova was a pacifist, but he was also a realist. In 1992 he said: "The Serbs want a pretext to attack the Albanians and wipe us out. It is better to do nothing and stay alive than be massacred." A majority of Kosovo Albanians endorsed this. They were horrified by the ethnic cleansing campaigns which accompanied the Serb seizure, first, of one third of Croatia and then of almost 70 per cent of Bosnia. They were right to be horrified. Who would have predicted the brutality of the war: the Serbian sieges of Vukovar, Dubrovnik and then Sarajevo; the camp at Omarska in Bosnia; or General Ratko Mladic's supervision of the murder of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims following the fall of the enclave of Srebrenica?
Rugova did not give up on independence. He thought that since there were so few Serbs left in Kosovo, it was inevitable; but an uprising was impossible because there was no way to import enough arms. Also, Kosovo's Albanians had some sympathy for Milosevic's project of uniting all Serbs in one state. National unity was, after all, what they wanted for themselves. If Milosevic succeeded in creating a Greater Serbia, including the Krajina region of Croatia and Serb parts of Bosnia, then the international community could hardly oppose the secession of Kosovo from Serbia and its union with Albania.
This was not to be. In August 1995, disaster struck the Serbs. Rearmed with US support, the Croats brutally drove 200,000 Serbs from Krajina in three days. In the weeks that followed, the Serbs lost much of western Bosnia. Bombed by Nato, they agreed to talk peace at Dayton, Ohio. There they reached a deal for Bosnia, and Milosevic agreed to hand back eastern Slavonia, the last Serb-held part of Croatia, to the Croats. Western leaders thought the Balkan wars were over.
Not quite. In Kosovo, the effect of Dayton was traumatic. EU countries rewarded Milosevic for signing up to the deal by recognising his new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, comprising Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. Kosovo Albanians realised that they were not to be rewarded for eschewing violence. Some people had been warning for years that this was going to happen. The LPK, whose members had been regarded as madmen, suddenly began to look serious. In late 1992 and early 1993 the LPK set up a fledgling guerrilla group at secret meetings in Macedonia and Pristina. The KLA, then a tiny group of men who occasionally shot Serb policemen, began to make itself felt. But every time there was an attack, Rugova denounced it, saying it was a Serbian police ploy designed to discredit his passive resistance. He thus earned the KLA's eternal enmity.
In fact, the KLA's activities were marginal until, in 1997, Albania's armouries were thrown open in the chaos following the pyramid banking disaster. It was a blessing for the KLA-1m Kalashnikovs for ?10 each. The gastarbeiter began to switch their funds from Bukoshi's coffers to those of the Homeland Calling fund run by the LPK.
Meanwhile in the village of Prekaz, a local tough called Adem Jashari had become associated with the KLA. On 28th February 1998 the Serbs decided to get him. A week later, Jashari's extended family of some 80 people was dead. Rage spread across Kosovo. The KLA found itself trying to control an uprising which it had not anticipated so soon. Village militias began to form, and clan elders decreed that now was the time to fight the Serbs. Whether they were KLA or not, they soon began to call themselves KLA. Thus a small guerrilla movement found itself wedded to an older tradition of Kosovar uprisings.
At first, the KLA occupied solidly ethnic Albanian areas in the countryside, while the Serbs, uncertain what to do, did not fight back. When they did, last July, the KLA melted into the hills rather than try to face a much better armed enemy. The Serbs took revenge, burning villages and driving out the inhabitants.
In October, concerned that 250,000 people now camped on the hills or in the woods would freeze to death, Richard Holbrooke, the architect of Dayton, negotiated a deal with Milosevic. It envisaged a drawing down of Serbian forces, the introduction of international "verifiers," and the beginning of dialogue.
But, as the Serbs pulled out of certain areas, the KLA returned. However, US-led diplomacy led to two rounds of talks in France which aimed to secure a three-year interim agreement on autonomy, after which a conference would decide on the final status of the province. Reluctantly, the KLA signed up; they were worried about independence, but encouraged by that part of the deal which promised a Nato-led implementation force in Kosovo. They thought that because the accord discussed at Rambouillet, outside Paris, talked of a new police force, the KLA men could "disarm" only to rearm as policemen the very next day.
Even the best-informed Serbs assumed that Milosevic would sign. There would be argument over detail, but few expected him to call Nato's bluff. Why did he not sign? Perhaps he and his entourage wanted their place in history. In 1914 Serbia stood up to the Austro-Hungarian empire, defying its ultimatum to let its police inspectors conduct an investigation into the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. In 1941 Serbia stood against Hitler. Moreover, although not a Serb, Tito followed this tradition by standing up to Stalin in 1948-and winning. It is still unclear where Milosevic's actions will lead. Maybe he plans to resettle the Krajina and Bosnian Serb refugees in Kosovo. I doubt it will work. Everything Milosevic does seems to start well, then turns to dust. Even if the KLA are driven out they will fight on from Albania, nourished by an army of dispossessed.
For now, the Serbs have rallied round. Middle-class anti-Milosevic Belgrade is indignant that Nato is bombing them. But when Belgraders organise rock concerts against the bombing, they beg a big question: Why weren't you organising concerts when Serb guns demolished Vukovar? Where were you when Serbs murdered Muslims and Croats in Omarska? Where were you when Serb snipers picked off children in Sarajevo? And what did you do when 8,000 men were killed after the fall of Srebrenica-in the name of the Serbs?
My friend Goran Gocic, a film critic for Dnevni Telegraf (whose anti-Milosevic owner has just been murdered in the streets of Belgrade), says that Nato is bombing Serbia to avenge its humiliation. He may be right. So now the whole of Europe, and the US too, has been sucked into Kosovo's infernal cycle. Where will it end?
