Post by rex362 on Feb 16, 2013 10:26:51 GMT -5
forget that she is Croatian and that its from 1990's ...and forget your serbian and me Illyrian
The Curse Of Kosovo
new internationalist
issue 247 - September 1993
The curse of Kosovo
Branka Magas digs up the roots of Serbian racism
in a myth about a medieval war.
The current slaughter in the former Yugoslavia began under the
sign of a myth about a battle fought 600 years ago. In 1389 at the
Battle of Kosovo Field a multinational Christian force was defeated by
its Ottoman foe. This was part of the expansion of the Ottoman Empire
that eventually spent itself at the gates of Vienna some three centuries
later. What actually happened in the Battle of Kosovo is a matter of
dispute. But its importance to all the people of the region is
undeniable: Bosnians, Serbs and Albanians all commemorate it in their
folk songs. Yet it was only the Serbs who turned the defeat on Kosovo
Field into a powerful national myth.
This happened in the second half of the nineteenth century when
Serbia became an internationally recognized kingdom and was able to
contemplate the ‘liberation of ancestral lands’ – the sandjak
of Novi Pazar, Kosovo, Macedonia – from Ottoman rule. Since much of this
territory was inhabited by non-Serbs, it was necessary to reinterpret
the Kosovo battle as an exclusively Ottoman-Serb affair. The aim was to
present the Albanians in particular, ethnically dominant throughout the
Kosovo region, as usurpers of Serbian historic territory. They were
portrayed as a ‘people without history’: a barbarian tribe genetically
incapable of cultural or political development. Serb-Albanian conflict
was thus built into the very foundation of the Kosovo myth. Indeed, from
its early days the Serbian state practised a policy of mass expulsion
and/or forced assimilation of non-Serb populations, thereby turning an
ethnically heterogeneous region into a homogeneous Serb one.
The Kosovo myth is a textbook case of how national history is
often reinvented in response to contemporary political needs. It implies
that Serbs were the original masters of this part of the Balkans and
that their great empire (itself actually fleeting and multinational in
character) was extinguished on Kosovo Field. The reconquest of Kosovo,
by implication, was not just a matter of revenge for the past, but a
precondition for the very existence of the Serbs as a free people.1
The mythical reworking of the Kosovo battle also ignored the fact
that the Ottoman side included the Sultan’s Christian vassals, some of
them ethnically Serb – the conflict was presented instead as one between
Christianity and Islam. And the strongly religious character of the
Kosovo myth is what separates it from other national myths developed in
the region during the nineteenth century.
According to the ‘classic’ Serb version, the defeat on Kosovo
Field had a spiritual cause: Tsar Lazar’s conscious preference for a
‘heavenly’ rather than an ‘earthly’ empire. His choice made the Serbs by
extension into a ‘heavenly’ people, a people chosen by God. The Serbian
Orthodox Church survived the ensuing centuries as the only Serb
national institution in both Ottoman and Habsburg lands. Other key
components of national integration – such as codification of the
vernacular as the printed language, or political independence – were
acquired by the Serb nation only in the nineteenth century.
The Serbian Church was thus a state in embryo – a spiritual state
in anticipation of a secular one. Whereas in Russia the church always
remained subordinated to the secular authorities, in the Serbian case
the church substituted for the state, preparing the ground for its
eventual rebirth. When the multifaith state of Yugoslavia came into
existence at the end of World War One the Church remained the most
jealous guardian of Serb state and nation, imparting a strongly mystical
dimension to Serb nationalism that has even survived modernization. It
is here that critical intellectuals in present-day Serbia have found the
seeds of Serb fascism.
Yugoslav nationalism took over the spiritual aspect of the Kosovo
myth. Yugoslav nationalists hailed the creation of the south Slav state
as an historic revenge against the original defeat in Kosovo and as an
affirmation of the state’s divine origin. Here is how the prominent
sculptor Ivan Mostrovic, ironically a Croat, rendered the Kosovo myth
way back in 1915: ‘Kosovo is a crown of thorns borne by the suffering
Yugoslav nation... There, on Kosovo, its Tsar spoke to God the night
before the battle and chose the heavenly kingdom as the only eternal
empire, thus making himself and hence also his people eternal... Only
one soldier of this holy army remained, his eyes gouged out by the
Turks. This farsighted blind gusle-player... set off among his enslaved
people, preaching to them that justice is gained not by arms but by
sacrifice and repentance... and the whole of the Yugoslav nation has
become Tsar Lazar’s soldiers.’2
In 1986, a year before Slobodan Milosevic came to power, the
Kosovo myth resurfaced to mobilize Serbs for an all-out conflict with
other Yugoslavs. Tsar Lazar’s bones were dug up and carried in
procession through the cities and villages of Serbia, where they were
waited upon by Communist functionaries. Several hundred prominent
intellectuals signed an anti-Albanian petition, in which the aggressive
content of the Kosovo myth was revealed to the full. The Serbian Academy
of Arts and Sciences produced a notorious memorandum, which in essence
was nothing but a revamped version of the myth. It was a call to arms
against the racial Other – the Albanian Barbarian, the Muslim Infidel,
the Ustasha Croat, the Slovene Servant of Austria, the Turncoat
Montenegrin – behind whom stood ‘century-old’ enemies such as the
Vatican, Lenin with his policy of national equality and of course the
‘decadent’ West. All were charged with the attempted murder of the
Serbs: genocide became the most frequently used word in Greater Serbian
agitprop.
The crowning event was a mass rally organized in June 1989 to
celebrate the 600th anniversary of Kosovo Field and held on the original
site of the battle. Milosevic, flanked by generals dressed in the
uniforms of the Yugoslav People’s Army – an army born in a national
liberation war meant to liberate Serbs and Yugoslavs from the Kosovo
curse – announced his readiness for war against other Yugoslavs.
In this latest attempt to ‘right the wrongs of Kosovo’ the Serbian
state started to prepare its army and its people for a war of
territorial aggrandisement. Some of its conquests took place even before
the actual war began, while Yugoslavia was still formally in place.
Between 1987 and 1990 Serbia imposed its rule on three of the other
seven members of the Yugoslav Federation: Vojvodina, Montenegro and
Kosovo. As for the rest, Slovenia was attacked frontally in June 1991,
Croatia in August of the same year, Bosnia-Herzegovina in April 1992.
Only Macedonia has so far escaped unscathed. Serbia’s wars in Croatia
and Bosnia quickly revealed its true aims: the destruction of these
states and the expulsion of all non-Serbs (‘ethnic cleansing’) from
conquered territory. The original charge that the Other was intent on
destroying Serbdom turned out to be a simple case of displacement – an
outward projection of the government’s own murderous designs.
This is a war driven by obsession not reason. Two years after its
inception it has lost all meaning beyond its self-perpetuation. What
will follow, even in the event of victory? This is a question to which
the Serbian regime has no answer. Winning has become as dangerous for it
as losing. Six centuries after Kosovo, Serbia is fighting another lost
war. The Kosovo myth has turned out to be not just an irresponsible
adventure, but the nemesis of modern Serbia. In the view of the
democratic opposition, the war amounts to Serbia’s historic defeat. As
Bogdan Bogdanovic, ex-mayor of Belgrade and an early opponent of
Milosevic, said in the summer of 1991: ‘Serbia has lost this war. When I
say “this war”, I am thinking not only of the current one, but of all
our modern wars and our entire modern history... A feeling of failure
lies at the very heart of Serb nationalism... This history gambled away –
a century and a half gambled away – is what can be described as a lost
war.’
Branka Magas is a Croatian-born expert in Balkan politics based in London. She is the author of The Destruction of Yugoslavia, Verso 1992.
1 For the power of this myth among Serb
peasants-turned-soldiers during the Balkan Wars see the account given by
Leon Trotsky in his Balkan Wars 1911-12, New York 1980.
2 Quoted in Miroslav Krieza, Desect krvavih godina (Ten bloody years), Zagreb 1957. During the War, Mestrovic was an active campaigner for the unification of Yugoslavia.