Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Julie Mertus has written the most informed, sophisticated, and convincing account of the struggle over the future of Kosovo. Anyone who wants to understand the ongoing Kosovo ordeal, or for that matter the whole class of ethnic conflicts, cannot do better than to read and study this fine book."-Richard Falk, Princeton University
"An important and original contribution to the literature about the break up of the former Yugoslavia. Julie Mertus reveals the competing narratives, the storytelling by which ethnic Serbs and Kosovo Albanians define themselves and their relationship to one another."-Eric Stover, Director, Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley
"Julie Mertus leads us on a fascinating journey through history, myths, identities, and ideologies deep into the thickets of ethnicity and politics that have led to the bloody conflict between Albanians and Serbs. Yet the author leaves us not with despair over the fatality of ethnic conflict, but rather with an understanding of possible ways to resolve what seems unresolvable. This is the clearest and most affecting account of the Kosovo war."-Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Chicago
Author Biography: Julie A. Mertus is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at American University. She is the coeditor of The Suitcase: Refugees' Voices from Bosnia and Croatia (California, 1997), coauthor of Open Wounds: Human Rights Abuses in Kosovo (1994), and the author of Local Action/Global Change (1999). Mertus's articles on the Kosovo crisis have appeared in major newspapers.
SYNOPSIS
Julie Mertus provides one of the first comprehensive looks at the explosive situation in Kosovo, where years of simmering tensions between Serbs and Albanians erupted in armed conflict in 1998. In a profound and detailed study of national identity and ethnic conflict, Mertus demonstrates how myths and truths can start a war. She shows how our identity as individuals and as members of groups is defined through the telling and remembering of stories. Real or imagined, these stories shape our understanding of ourselves as heroes, martyrs, conquerors, or victims. Once we see ourselves as victims, Mertus claims, we feel morally justified to become perpetrators.
Based on a series of interviews conducted in Kosovo, Serbia proper, and Macedonia, this book is one of the first extended treatments of the years leading to war in Kosovo. Mertus examines the formation of Serbian national identity, and closely scrutinizes the hostilities of the region. She shows how myth and experience inform the political ideologies of Kosovo, and explores how these competing beliefs are created and perpetuated. This sobering overview of the region provides a window into a complex struggle whose repercussions reach far into the international community.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
An essential document for understanding the crisis in Kosovo, this hard-hitting study blends political analysis, history and interviews that Ohio Northern University law professor Mertus conducted in Kosovo, Serbia proper and Macedonia between 1993 and 1998. Mertus, who completed this book just months before the NATO bombing campaign began, argues that the international community's years of inaction pushed the Kosovo Albanians away from a posture of passive resistance to Serb repression and toward militant demands for an independent state. She establishes a systematic pattern of human rights abuses perpetrated by Serb police and paramilitary forces against Kosovo Albanians since 1989, and she shows how Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, employing state-controlled media, used Serbian claims to Kosovo (whose population is 90% ethnic Albanian) to build his power base while whipping up nationalist sentiment into fervid hatred of Kosovo Albanians. Western perceptions that Islamic fundamentalism must lie at the heart of the Kosovo Albanian movement for autonomy are off the mark, argues Mertus, because the Kosovo Albanians are both Muslim and Christian. She structures her revealing narrative around a number of polarizing events, including the 1981 Kosovo Albanian student demonstrations, which erupted into a populist revolt, and the alleged poisoning in 1990 of thousands of Kosovo Albanian schoolchildren (variously blamed on Serbs or Albanian separatists). Her study concludes with broad recommendations to humanitarian, relief and conflict-resolution groups working to rebuild shattered Kosovo. Photos. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Mertus (law, Ohio Northern Univ.) believes that the current conflict in Kosovo has its origins in recent history and media reports that spread fear, not in the far past. She draws a sharp distinction between truth as fact (what actually happened) and the perception of truth in people's minds (what they believe happened). The latter is much stronger in coloring how groups view each other after any conflict. Like Mertus's previous book, The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia, this title is based largely on interviews in the region, conducted between 1993 and 1995 with individuals who were students (grade school through university) in 1981. In all cases, the readiness of one group to assume the worst about the other indicates how difficult conflict resolution in this part of the world will be. Mertus concludes with observations on the types of nongovernmental organizations working in the region and recommendations on how they should act in the shadow of such deep-seated perceptual differences. Specialized collections should consider this book.--Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
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