Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War [Paperback]

Julie A. Mertus (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520218655 | ISBN-13: 978-0520218659 | Publication Date: August 9, 1999 | Edition: 1

Julie Mertus provides one of the first comprehensive looks at the explosive situation in Kosovo, where years of simmering tensions between Serbs and Albanians erupted in armed conflict in 1998. In a profound and detailed study of national identity and ethnic conflict, Mertus demonstrates how myths and truths can start a war. She shows how our identity as individuals and as members of groups is defined through the telling and remembering of stories. Real or imagined, these stories shape our understanding of ourselves as heroes, martyrs, conquerors, or victims. Once we see ourselves as victims, Mertus claims, we feel morally justified to become perpetrators.
Based on a series of interviews conducted in Kosovo, Serbia proper, and Macedonia, this book is one of the first extended treatments of the years leading to war in Kosovo. Mertus examines the formation of Serbian national identity, and closely scrutinizes the hostilities of the region. She shows how myth and experience inform the political ideologies of Kosovo, and explores how these competing beliefs are created and perpetuated. This sobering overview of the region provides a window into a complex struggle whose repercussions reach far into the international community.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An essential document for understanding the crisis in Kosovo, this hard-hitting study blends political analysis, history and interviews that Ohio Northern University law professor Mertus conducted in Kosovo, Serbia proper and Macedonia between 1993 and 1998. Mertus, who completed this book just months before the NATO bombing campaign began, argues that the international community's years of inaction pushed the Kosovo Albanians away from a posture of passive resistance to Serb repression and toward militant demands for an independent state. She establishes a systematic pattern of human rights abuses perpetrated by Serb police and paramilitary forces against Kosovo Albanians since 1989, and she shows how Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, employing state-controlled media, used Serbian claims to Kosovo (whose population is 90% ethnic Albanian) to build his power base while whipping up nationalist sentiment into fervid hatred of Kosovo Albanians. Western perceptions that Islamic fundamentalism must lie at the heart of the Kosovo Albanian movement for autonomy are off the mark, argues Mertus, because the Kosovo Albanians are both Muslim and Christian. She structures her revealing narrative around a number of polarizing events, including the 1981 Kosovo Albanian student demonstrations, which erupted into a populist revolt, and the alleged poisoning in 1990 of thousands of Kosovo Albanian schoolchildren (variously blamed on Serbs or Albanian separatists). Her study concludes with broad recommendations to humanitarian, relief and conflict-resolution groups working to rebuild shattered Kosovo. Photos. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Mertus (law, Ohio Northern Univ.) believes that the current conflict in Kosovo has its origins in recent history and media reports that spread fear, not in the far past. She draws a sharp distinction between truth as fact (what actually happened) and the perception of truth in people's minds (what they believe happened). The latter is much stronger in coloring how groups view each other after any conflict. Like Mertus's previous book, The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia, this title is based largely on interviews in the region, conducted between 1993 and 1995 with individuals who were students (grade school through university) in 1981. In all cases, the readiness of one group to assume the worst about the other indicates how difficult conflict resolution in this part of the world will be. Mertus concludes with observations on the types of nongovernmental organizations working in the region and recommendations on how they should act in the shadow of such deep-seated perceptual differences. Specialized collections should consider this book.AMarcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (August 9, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520218655
• ISBN-13: 978-0520218659
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #712,355 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #42 in Books > History > Europe > Serbia

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A bedtime story, October 27, 2000

By 

hugh riminton - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War (Paperback)

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.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is facinating. I could not put it down!, June 17, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War (Paperback)

This book is exceptional in the clarity of the author's thinking. It not only forces the reader to confront the myths surrounding the Kosovo situation but also invites one to apply the writer's perceptiveness and logic to the myths prevailing in the reader's country, wherever he or she may live. The author's personal encounters with the people of Kosovo add a poignancy to her analysis that is all the more compelling in light of the current happenings there. I could not put it down until I finished it.

16 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic, July 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War (Paperback)

This is an utterly fantastic book. It gives faces to the conflict in Kosovo. Ms. Mertus does a fantastic job of describing the underlying causes of Kosovo. This is not a history book. This is a focus on the modern causes, the modern "Truths" which caused the slaughter and the hatred. Absolutely phenomenal. You won't find another book giving this much information on the mindset of the local population. This book deserves 10 stars.