Kosovo-War and Revenge

Tim Judah cleverly begins his book Kosovo: War and Revenge with three attention-grabbing articles. They are also compelling, real-life stories from the Kosovo war in 1999. Judah is an experienced journalist, which is evident in his balanced approach to a highly contentious and sensitive topic. One story is about Kosovo Albanians’ ordeals with Serbian security forces during the conflict, another is about the sufferings of Kosovo Serbs, and another is about Albanians again but with a portrayal of brave acts of compassion by Serbian soldiers. These stories quickly earn the author the trust and interest of the impartial reader. You cannot wait to read what else this well-respected writer-reporter has to reveal. And Judah fulfills the early promise of the book, with a knowledgeable, captivating, and easy-to-read account of the war.
Judah’s journalistic reputation precedes him, even before he gains the reader’s confidence in the book’s opening pages. He covered the conflict he’s writing about for the New York Review of Books, the London Observer, the Sunday Telegraph and the Guardian weekend magazine. He had been living in Belgrade for five years before the conflict in 1999. Judah also covered the previous wars in Croatia and Bosnia. He therefore clearly knows the region and its people. His book can even teach Serbs and Kosovo Albanians about their own history and character. He also made a lot of important contacts who make this book a rich read. He has covered all the angles. And as much as it might be hard for a Serb to admit, given its occasionally unflattering portrayal of Serbs, his book seems to be trustworthy.
Judah not only scrutinizes the activities of Serbian security forces, the Milosevic government, and Kosovo-Albanian insurgents, but those of NATO as well. And he backs his writing with many sources and many quotes. He gets into the minds of key figures in this conflict, including Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, Serbian soldiers, the Kosovo Liberation Army, NATO Commander General Wesley Clark, senior American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, and high-level Russian officials.
As good as it is, Judah’s Kosovo isn’t perfect. He fails to address two important issues. He writes abundantly about what happened to Kosovo Albanians during the NATO intervention and what happened to Kosovo Serbs after the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1244 and Serbian forces and police left Kosovo. However, he does not even mention the gray area, such as mixed marriages and harmonious relations between the two sides. Serbs and Albanians have been living in Kosovo, side by side, for centuries, most of the time peacefully. How did the legions of Serb-Albanians or Albanian-Serbs experience the war? What happened to those people? Or can you attribute Judah’s lack of attention to this issue to a widely shared opinion that Serbs and Albanians are like “oil and water” and to the even more prevalent, and mistaken, Western bias that all of the Yugoslav Wars were the result of the reawakening of ancient tribal hatreds?
The other important event he fails to include in his book is the cluster bombing of Nis, the large industrial city in southeastern Serbia. Judah writes about the NATO targets, the gray area between the military and the civilian targets, such as electrical plants and television stations that were bombed, but he failed to even mention the cluster bombs
NATO dropped on Nis’s City Hospital, local park and a green market near the city’s landmark--the best preserved 17th-century Ottoman fortress in Europe. That attack killed more than 80 civilians and it breached the Geneva Convention, a international statute that Judah mentions in other contexts. Other valuable accounts of the war, such as the PBS Frontline documentary, focus on these bombings as perhaps the biggest outrage of the NATO campaign. The cluster bombings happened later in the intervention, when, as Judah writes, NATO felt it needed to intensify the bombings due to Milosevic’s defiance and the world’s pressure over the large number of refugees from Kosovo. Did Judah not know about the attack when he wrote the book in 2000? The attack was all over the local Serbian media at the time. Did Judah not trust his Serbian sources enough to verify that the attack occurred?
However, Judah’s Kosovo has many more strong points than weaknesses. He is original, creative and perceptive in using an analysis of a Serbian medieval, epic poem Serbs are very proud of to dramatize his story. This poem describes a simple Albanian man who defies the Serbian prince, saying he will not bow to the Serbian nobility by removing himself from the road peacefully, and that he would not let the nobles’ procession pass without a fight. Judah comments that this poem has more to teach us about the history of Serb-Albanian relations than all the historians in the world. And he has a point.
Judah ends Kosovo with an ominous, yet clear-minded, look to the future. His spin on the future of Serbian and Albanian relations, in and around Kosovo, is a grim one, but expressed in a poetic way. What happened in Kosovo before, but especially in 1999, will not be forgotten by either nation. And Serbs are known for holding a grudge for a long time and for having the memory of “an elephant.” They did not, after all, ever forget their defeat at the famous battle of Kosovo in 1389. They might never forgive Albanians for taking away what Serbs believe rightfully belongs to them—Kosovo. And so, as Judah warns at the end of his book, the cycle of revenge could go on and on.