The demons of Kosovo.

• Author: Zimmermann, Warren
• Position: Conflict between Serbia and Albania over the control of Kosovo

A gray falcon spread its wings and flew away from Jerusalem to the field of Kosovo. It carried a book from the Mother of God to Tsar Lazar, who was preparing his army to defend Serbia against attack by the Turks. The falcon dropped the book on the Tsar's knees, and it began to speak by itself:

'Honorable Tsar Lazar, what Kingdom will you embrace now? Is it to be the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of this world? If you choose the earthly one, saddle your horses, tighten their reins, gird on your swords. Let all your knights rush together among the Turks. All the Turkish invaders will perish by your hands. But if you choose the Kingdom of Heaven, then build a church on the field of Kosovo, not with marble but with pure silk and brocades, and let your knights take holy communion in it. For they shall all die, and you, Prince, will die with them.'

When the Tsar read these words, he beseeched God for advice: '0 Almighty Lord, what kingdom shall I choose? Shall I choose a heavenly kingdom, or shall I choose an earthly kingdom? If I choose an earthly kingdom, it will last only for a short time, but a heavenly kingdom will last through all eternity.' So the Tsar chose a heavenly kingdom. He built the church in Kosovo of silk and brocades, and summoned the Serbian Patriarch and his twelve bishops to come. Then he gave his soldiers the Eucharist and their battle orders. In the same hour the Turks attacked Kosovo.

Tsar Lazar rushed among the Turks with his seventy-seven thousand men, and chased them across the vast field of Kosovo. They were so fiery and brave that it seemed as if they would carry the day. And so they would have, but for Vuk Brankovic, the Tsar's son-in-law, who betrayed him and joined the Turkish side. So the Tsar perished, and with him all his soldiers, the seventy-seven thousand Serbs. All was holy, all was honorable, and the goodness of God was fulfilled.

Thus the Serbian national epic of Kosovo, handed down by oral tradition for six centuries and known to every Serb from childhood. It embodies almost all the elements that Serbs see in their history and in their present circumstances-heroism, mission, holiness, faith, glory, devotion, opulence, disunity, betrayal, demonization, martyrdom, victimization, predestination. Kosovo is the founding myth for all Serbs, the historic heart of Serbia's glorious medieval kingdom, the religious seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and the geographic site of Serbia's oldest and most beautiful monasteries and churches. When Serbs think and talk of Kosovo, in their mind's eye they are seeing their past - their transgressions as well as their triumphs - through the purifying light of their own origins as a nation.

The real battle of Kosovo took place on June 28, 1389. Most historians agree that it was not the epic struggle of the myth. Nor was it even the decisive battle against the Turks, which had been fought and lost eighteen years before in Bulgaria. The opposing forces were small and feudal. Tsar Lazar evidently had problems raising a national army; his curse against malingerers - "Let [their] fields go barren of the good golden wheat / Let [their] vineyards remain without vines or grapes" - has been carved into the marble monument that stands today on the field of Kosovo. Muslim Albanians, Christian Bosnians, and Catholic Croats probably fought on the Serbian side, and (as the epic implies) some Serbs fought with the Turks. The post-Kosovo Serbian contention that the Serb knights were defending Europe against the infidel is thus questionable. In any case they failed, since after Kosovo the Turks swept through the Balkan peninsula and eventually through Hungary to threaten the ramparts of Vienna.

Kosovo remained under Turkish suzerainty until Serbia got it back, with the diplomatic support of France and Russia, following the First Balkan War in 1912. After World War I, it became a part of newly created Yugoslavia, remaining effectively under Serbian rule. During World War II Kosovo was occupied by Mussolini's Italy. While some Albanians fought the Axis as members of Josip Broz Tito's partisans, many others collaborated with the Italians with the aim of forming a greater Albania.

After the victory of Tito's communist army in 1945, Kosovo became an autonomous region under Serbian control. Tito's last constitution in 1974 and his death in 1980 brought considerable political and cultural autonomy to Kosovo and its Albanian majority. For example, the province was awarded one of the eight seats on the collective Yugoslav presidency, the same allocation as for Serbia and the other republics of Yugoslavia. These concessions spurred Kosovo's Albanians to lobby for even greater autonomy. During riots in 1981 in the capital, Pristina, Albanian student demonstrators demanded republic status for Kosovo, a condition that would make it completely independent of Serbia and imply its right to secede from Yugoslavia.

During most of Kosovo's history, its Serbian and Albanian populations lived in hostile coexistence. They fought each other in both world wars, the Serbs on the Allied side, most of the Albanians on the German. Neither ethnic group showed much tolerance whenever it got the upper hand. The increase in Albanian power in the 1980s, the subliminal and sometimes explicit demand for republic status, and the widening demographic difference (Albanians make up about 90 percent of the two million population today) stoked growing revanchism among nationalist Serbs.

Serbian grievances were not all trivial, though they were cynically exploited and distorted by Serb nationalists. Kosovo, they argued, is the Serbian Jerusalem - a Holy Land in which Serbia's nation, religion, state, and culture were born. They even made an explicit link between Serbia and Israel and between the Albanians and the Palestinians. Kosovo, Serb nationalists claimed in the 1980s, was ruled by Muslim "separatists" who had fought against the West twice in this century, who remained loyal to a foreign power - Albania - and who wanted to take Kosovo and its Serbian identity fight out of Yugoslavia.

Nationalists alleged further that Albanians were stripping Serbs of their rights, raping their women, and torturing their men. (These ridiculous charges distort the fact, conceded to me by Kosovo Albanian leaders, that some Albanians did abuse their powers before 1989.) But by nationalist scripture, Tito was the primary betrayer of Serbia, even though it was his military successes that ensured that Kosovo would go to Serbia, rather than Albania, in 1945. Among his sins, the nationalists charged, was his denial of the...