The Serbian province of Kosovo, or the Republic of Kosova as the majority Albanian Kosovar population calls it, declared independence last Sunday, February 17th. The UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) is moving out, and a European Union force is preparing to move in to help with the political transition. On Thursday, February 21st, the US Embassy, as well as the embassies of other countries supporting the declaration of independence, suffered attacks in the Serbian capital city of Belgrade. On the UN Security Council, Russia and China are supporting Serbia's claim that Kosovo's declaration violates international law. Meanwhile, the UN force in Kosova closed its border with Serbia to try to contain the unrest. On the day after independence, the NATO Kosovo Force (KFOR) announced that it intends to stay "to continue helping in the development of a stable, democratic, multi-ethnic and peaceful Kosovo. "
Historically, Kosova has seen ethnic violence not only against Kosovar Albanians by Serbs, but also the other way around. The Serb minority within Kosova has lived for many years in bunker-like conditions.
Why will Serbia never fully give up on Kosova? The definitive historic battle of the Serbian nation was fought there in the 14th Century (with the Ottomans winning).
More links to give you the 411 on this historic declaration of independence:
BBC Country Profile: UN Mission in Kosovo
Human Rights Watch "Focus on Kosovo"
Commentary on Status of Kosovo by the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia (The Kosovo Helsinki Committee web page is down.)
In 2003, I traveled through Kosova with a Bosnian activist on our way to a conference in Macedonia. We went a very long way around through the mountains to avoid Mitrovica, a place on the Serbian border which is perennially and now again in turmoil. I won't go into the adventures of our mountain passage-- by the time we hit the agrarian flatlands that comprise most of Kosova, I was sound asleep in the sunny backseat. When I woke up, we were going very slowly along a shabby road behind a hay thresher and a tractor. This famous land - "Kosovo Polje" - Field of Black Birds - rolled out in furrows and mounds as far as the eye could see. In the cities we passed through, it could have been almost any Eastern Bloc post-Soviet or post-Tito city, with the concrete block houses, except for the Albanian flag hung from every telephone pole and shop window: it was the Albanian national flag day.
The story I've heard from people working in the region since then is that Serbia could never afford to reabsorb Kosova, and that Albania has shown little interest in supporting its ethnic kin next door. But Serbia can never let Kosova go completely, because of that battle long ago that their champion Lazar lost so brutally. In her 1941 book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Dame Rebecca West publishes the song that is known to all Serbs which tells the legend of the Battle of Kosovo "There flies a grey bird, a falcon..." In the song the military commander is given the choice to "build a church at Kosovo" where his army will be destroyed, and be granted a heavenly kingdom, or use his army to drive back the Turks. Whether or not in reality Lazar had a choice in the matter is unclear.
It is timely to remember Dame West's aggravation with the way nationalists (then as now) use Lazar's martyrdom.
- "Lazar was wrong, he saved his soul and there followed five hundred years when no man on these plains, nor anywhere else in Europe for hundreds of miles in any direction, was allowed to keep his soul. He should have chosen damnation for their sake."
