Customer Rating: 
Summary: OK as far as it goes - but not far enough
Comment: The concept of Ms. Mertus' book is that recent events and, especially, the subjective interpretation of them, fueled the Yugoslav wars much more than "ancient ethnic hatreds." Unarguably this is the case, though said "traditions" provided a convenient stage for new actors to read lines from an old story.
However, while describing the myths that led to war in Yugoslavia, Professor Mertus is not averse to injecting a few of her own, that led the West to war with Yugoslavia. Specifically, the charges on page 143 that Slobodan Milosevic had been transformed overnight from "a good Communist" into "a good nationalist"; and that he was elected by an "uneasy coalition of nationalists and Communists" who would "follow him into war."
As anyone familiar with Yugoslavia knows, "good Communists" in the ideological sense had largely vanished by the 1970s, with nationalism already at the center of public dialogue and policy. Thus no "transformation" was required to be both a good organization/party man and nationalist; otherwise, the whole devolution of Yugoslavia throughout he 1980s would not have been possible. Hence also the coalition of "Communists" and nationalists was not only far from uneasy but quite intimate, and as much so in the other republics. Retaining official party membership (even while renaming the party) was useful to Milosevic as a power platform, but no more so than the Federal Yugoslav Army. One can just as easily state that his "coalition" was based on a military-party-nationalist alliance.
But if Communism as ideology had only symbolic value at this time, ignored in practice by everyone in the Fedration, why was it necessary to drag it into the analysis at all? Precisely, of course, because of its mythical symbolism. Use of the word as adjective and noun helped mobilize Western opinion against Milosevic as a "backward renegade" who "opposed reform," requiring removal to "complete" the Yugoslav "transition process." While Professor Mertus does not explicitly state this, she was a strong pro-interventionist, as her short essays at the back of the book clearly show. Stressing a by-then irrelevant "Communism" and "Communists" in Serbia was part of the mobilization process.
Thus the book is a useful example at a micro level, how artful gossip-cum-propaganda can stimulate grass-roots hysteria and paranoia, leading to war; and at the macro level, on how academic scholarship can rationalize the choices of policy-making elites determined on war.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Balanced and Thought Provoking
Comment: While living in Kosovo, I read several books to try to understand the current situation. Most are relatively dry historical accounts which don't seem to adequately explain the tensions. Mertus has a unique approach which uses first hand reactions of both Serbs and Albanians to certain events in the 80s and 90s. From these accounts, you see how each group can view the same events with different eyes and use events to fan flames of hatred against the other side. It is clear how the tension developed to boiling point in the 90s. It also helped me to understand the riots of March 2004. The book is easy to read and does not require previous knowledge of the region. I would recommend it as the key book for anyone with dealings in Kosovo. Mertus ends the book with recommendations for NGOs working for reconciliation in Kosovo.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Where's the Serbian point-of-view?
Comment: This is pro-Albanian propaganda. Nobody knows about the Albanians' "ethnic cleansing" of the Serbs that went on for the past 30 years. Serbs were driven out of their homes by the Albanian mafia and nobody could do anything about it because the communist government allowed it to go on unpunished. Nobody even talks about the Albanians that were killed by other Albanians because they believed that an independent state of Kosovo was not in the best interest of the Albanians. UN investigators that were sent into Kosovo after the recent bombing found only 2,200 bodies in mass graves. They didn't even know how many of those bodies were Serbs and how many were anti-secession Albanians. When this report was released, the US state department lowered its figure of 100,000 Albanians dead to 10,000 Albanians dead. If you want a better perspective from a more reliable source. Watch "Children of Kosovo: 2000" it shows the perspective of the children of Kosovska Mitrovica, which has both Albanians and Serbs living in it. It's made by a famous Hungarian film-maker so you cannot think that it is directed to any one side.
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Summary: Balanced and informative
Comment: This book analyzes the gradual rise in ethnic tensions in Kosovo, a region of the former Yugoslavia ruled by Serbia but populated primarily by Albanians, in the years between the death of Tito and the collapse of Yugoslavia.
The focus is rather narrow. The author makes no attempts to tell the full story of the Serbian-Albanian conflict over Kosovo, which has roots in the Middle Ages, or to discuss the recent developments since the 1999 war.
What she does do, and do quite well, is describe in detail the conflicts of the period she does discuss, and the way in which Serbs and Albanians saw the same events in narratives so entirely opposed that even discussing their differences, much less resolving them, was extraordinarily diificult. In addition to her own analysis, Mertus includes extensive sections where both Serbs and Albanians discuss these events in their own words.
The period in question doesn't lack for events that each side can narrate to its own purposes. It begins with mass demonstrations of Albanians for equal rights (or for secession from Yugoslavia) and also includes the mass poisoning of Albanian children (or a mass hysteria, or deliberate hoax), the murder of several Serb soldiers of the Yugoslav Army by a mentally ill Albanian recruit (or a large Albanian conspiracy), a Serbian farmer who suffered vicious sexual humiliation from a gang of Albanian thugs (or concocted a hoax to hide his own sexual proclivities), etc.
The greatest strength of this book is its fairness. Much of the literature relating to the Yugoslav wars of the past decade is thinly disguised propaganda for one side or the other; this book genuinely seeks the truth, but notes that where each side is so wrapped in its own narratives of key events, finding out definitively what really happened can be almost impossible.
One target audience for this book is people doing nation building or related NGO work in undeveloped countries generally, not merely Kosovo or the Balkans. Mertus provides an added chapter discussing lessons from the work that her own and other NGOs carried out in Kosovo, and how such lessons can apply to other areas.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A bedtime story
Comment: So, Slobodan Milosevic has been toppled.. Guess that means all will now be peaceful in Kosovo!Well, no, actually..and this book will tell you why.
Written just before NATO's 1999 air campaign over Kosovo, Julie Mertus illuminates the process by which trust between Serbs and Kosovars became impossible. It hints at Phillip Gourevitch's reflection that "power comes when you convince your enemy to inhabit YOUR version of HIS story".
That struggle, each wanting the "correct" version of history to stand, lies at the heart of all Balkan conflicts of the last ten years.
Through innumerable interviews with the ordinary people of Kosovo, Serbian and Albanian, Julie Mertus reveals how competing myths came to be, and how they then contributed to an environment where terrorism and atrocity became - ultimately - a logical choice.
She does not go back to the mythology surrounding the 1389 defeat of the Serbian Prince Lazar at Kosovo Polje - the rallying point for Milosevic. (Covered already in Noel Malcolm's "Kosovo: A Short History). Mertus shows how events within our generation created defining national stories.
Two quick examples.
In 1990, thousands of schoolchildren fell ill. The ethnic Albanian understanding: they were deliberately poisoned, probably with Sarin gas, by Serbian authorities. It was proof of the evil Serbs would be willing to do to Albanians. The UCK (Kosovo Liberation Army) recruited youths with the argument that without resistance, they would all be poisoned again.
The Serb response to the same event was that it was mass hysteria at best, or at worst a deliberate plot by ethnic Albanians to generate international sympathy against them, the Serbs. It proved the extent of the Kosovars' untrustworthiness, their deviousness.
There could be no common ground between those views. Which story you believed, defined you.
Similarly, there is the case of Djordje Martinovic, a Serbian peasant who turned up at hospital with a bottle in his rectum and a story about being assaulted in his field by "masked men". Although later apparently recanting his story, and confessing his "assault" had been a botched act of self-gratification, for Serbs it became a rallying point. Dismissing the recantation as an Albanian plot, Serbs were only too happy to believe that this, the violation of an honest peasant in an act with echoes of the old Turkish practice of impaling, was the extent to which ethnic Albanians would not hesitate to stoop. Martinovic quickly returned to his original story. He remains on the list of Serb martyrs to this day.
Today, Kosovo remains in an effective state of partition, nearly all its former Serb population living above the divided city of Mitrovica. Without the presence of KFOR troops, armed conflict would be inevitable. It is not their religion, or even their language, that divides Serb from Kosovar. It is the incompatability of the stories they tell. Since this book was written, both sides have volumes of fresh grievances, accentuating their enemy's inhumanity and highlighting their own victimhood. These stories, nearly all with some grain of truth, are now being woven themselves into the complex fabric of national myth.
Brilliantly, painstakingly and without taking sides, Prof. Mertus has given us a vivid account of how events become remembered. She gives us the template to understand better all the intractable conflicts of our times.
