Kosovo: A Short History

"An excellent scholarly contribution to the study of the province. . . . Seriously differs from the biased interpretations published by Serbian and Albanian historians, or trendy but shallow Western "Kosovology experts."
—Canadian Slavonic Papers

"A thrilling detective story."
--New York Times Book Review

"Excellent."
--New York Review of Books

"A book every policy expert, journalist and lay person must read."
--Wall Street Journal

"Malcolm's narrative is gripping, even brilliant at times ... He takes to his task with the vigor of a detective driven by true passion. At times his claims are, in terms of Balkan history, quite revolutionary."
--Economist

"Cover(s) the whole history of Kosovo, with an authority that is often breathtaking and never oppressive."
--Sunday Times

"Brilliantly researched and argued ... a magisterial work of history ... Kosovo will inevitably be received immediately as an immensely valuable contribution to our understanding and knowledge of a contemporary crisis. But to see the book as merely a contribution to the present-day debate is to do it a disservice. This is a profound and pioneering work which will endure for generations."
--Times Literary Supplement

In this awe-inspiring work, Malcolm has created a vital successor to his Bosnia: A Short History and an essential aid to anyone who wishes to understand this tragic region today...His book is exceptional not only for his unimpeachable rearch, but also for his equitable examination of the conflicting ethnic views of what really happened ... One can't help speculating on how a clear understanding of the information contained here might have affected the Dayton Accord and history.
--Publisher's Weekly, 4/20/98

By far the best available guide to the fatal steps to catastrophe.
--The New York Review of Books

". . .elaborately researched . . ."—Book World

A contested region of Serbia bordered by Albania and Macedonia, Kosovo was left out of the Bosnian peace agreement of 1995. For the 2.2 million Albanians living in Kosovo, this sparked the abandonment of a nonviolent independence movement in favor of armed struggle. The tinderbox Balkan province of Kosovo thus remains in limbo as Albanians urgently rally their forces against Serbian rule.

Exemplifying once again the best of narrative, analytical history, Noel Malcolm here provides the definitive story of Kosovo, from its origins to its current state of unrest. Kosovo clarifies the troubled past and present of this crucial region in a readable and neatly compressed style.

Kosovo, a 55-mile-long plateau in southern Serbia bordering Albania and Macedonia, should by all rights be a historical and political backwater. A Bulgarian geographer who visited Kosovo during World War I remarked that it was "almost as unknown and inaccessible as a stretch of land in Central Africa." The observation would prove ironically fitting by the '90s, as Central Africa and Kosovo both became sites of widespread genocide, fueled by ethnic hatreds, of the deepest international significance. Noel Malcolm, a British historian and journalist who has written extensively about the Balkans (including a companion volume of sorts on Bosnia), provides an overview of Kosovo's long-standing cultural divisions in his "short history" (although, at more than 500 pages, a not so short book).

Readers following the unfolding war in Kosovo through newspaper and television coverage may well ask why ethnic Albanians and Serbs are struggling so violently to command the small region. Kosovo, Malcolm explains, is the birthplace of Serbian nationalism; the defeat of Serbian forces there in 1389 by Turkish troops became emblematic of the fall of the Serbian empire, as it led to Turkish domination of the Balkans. Contemporary warriors of Serbia are, in Malcolm's eyes, evidently attempting to reverse the course of history by reclaiming the land from its Turkish conquerors--but in the absence of the Turks, they'll take it from the Albanians (the largest ethnic group among Kosovo's inhabitants) whose ancestors converted to Islam when the Turks ruled the region. Malcolm's lucid text shows again and again that the ethnic conflict in Kosovo is less a battle over bloodlines and religion than it is one over differing conceptions of national origins and history. "When ordinary Serbs learn to think more rationally and humanely about Kosovo, and more critically about some of their national myths," he concludes, "all the people of Kosovo and Serbia will benefit--not least the Serbs themselves." --Gregory McNamee