Dusan T. Batakovic

A low level of political culture was and remains the main characteristic of the political tradition existing among the two main ethnic communities in Kosovo and Metohija, the Serbs and Albanians. Together with Albania and Macedonia, this region was under Ottoman rule the longest, up till 1912, isolating it from the dominant European traditions of modern times, including the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and liberalism, for almost five centuries. The political traditions that it inherited from the late Ottoman Empire, which relied on religious and ethnic antagonism, continued to develop in a vicious circle of mutual violence that were only occasionally interrupted by periods of calm. Many of these respites were the result of outside pressure from an authoritarian regime and did not originate from a voluntary and mutually accepted decision to live together in
political, religious, and ethnic tolerance.

The ethnic conflict in Kosovo, as in other parts of the Balkans, was largely about fighting for territory, albeit in a much stronger former and contrary to the modern concepts of coexistence and mixing, such as the model of multicultural society. Simultaneously, two parallel views of the past and reality were nurtured creating parallel worlds where stereotypes and myths were combined into a volatile mixture featuring pronounced linguistic, religious, and social barriers, laying the foundation of today's ethnic clash, which is both difficult to understand and to resolve, and in the periods of crisis escalation was unavoidable.

Even the word "Kosovo" has opposite meanings to the ethnic communities. To the Serbs, Kosovo denotes an area considered to be the Serb Jerusalem whose dazzling cultural and economic rise in Medieval times was brought to a halt by the Ottoman conquerors. The plight of Kosovo heralded by the battle that took place there between the Serb and Turkish armies in 1389 became a reality in the mid 15th century. After centuries of Turkish rule, the suffering of Kosovo had grown to legendary proportions thanks to Serb epic poetry. Then, in the wake the First Balkan War of 1912, Kosovo was again a part of the Kingdom of Serbia, but with a vastly different ethnic makeup since the Serb population had been dropping and the Albanian population expanding from the end of the 17th century. The Metohija region was a part of the Kingdom of Montenegro, the second Serb state of the time. Finally, in 1918 Kosovo become a part of Yugoslavia.

To the average Serb, Kosovo, in the national ideology, represents a holy land from which Serbs have been pushed out for centuries and continue to be pushed out even today. This was the result of a collaborative and systematic effort primarily by the Muslim Albanians, legal and illegal immigrants who arrived in various times during the rule of the Ottomans, the Italian fascists, and Tito's communists.

Serbia's southern province, now under U.N. administration, contains 1300 churches, monasteries, and former church sites. The area is officially known as Kosovo, since the word Metohija was removed by a Kosovo Albanian administrative decision in 1968 and slipped out of official and then everyday political use. Many researchers consider Kosovo to be the word in the Serbian language that has the strongest symbolic importance. Kosovo, after God and St. Sava, denotes the national and cultural identity of the entire Serb people in its modern history.

Ethnic Albanians consider Kosovo to be a symbolic of an "ancient Albanian land" that directly links the ancient Illyrian and modern Albanian community in the province, although today it symbolizes the expatriate type of nationalism that feeds on constant demographic expansion aimed at legitimizing pretensions to a certain region. The fact remains that there is no tangible scientific evidence of any continuity between the Illyrians and the Albanians of today, a vast and merciless void existing in historical sources existing from the 6th to the 11th century. This, however, has not had a significant effect on the formation of the Illyrian myth as a basis for the continuity of the Albanian national identity.

In an romantic historical project created by Albanian historians during the times of Enver Hoxha, Kosovo has become a symbol of occupied ethnic territory to the modern day Kosovo Albanians. The Serb monasteries, which were built in unusually large numbers from the 13th to the 15th century, are, to them, only churches by the "occupying" Serb rulers of the Nemanjic Dynasty, often on the foundations of older, Illyrian churches, that were in fact Byzantine.

That is why, in the peace created in KFOR-administrated Kosovo after NATO's 1999 bombing, there has been such an effort to as quickly and in as short a time as possible permanently destroy the Serb monasteries and churches, inconvenient witnesses and the most striking examples of the former and current Serb presence, in a visible systematic campaign. This represents a kind of collective tribal vengeance which, instead of individuals who are guilty of crimes, targets members of an entire ethnic community. The pattern of extreme nationalism envisages the ultimate destruction of both Serb monuments and the expulsion of the Serb community to justify a new political reality that Serbia considers unacceptable: Kosovo as an exclusively Albanian land. Today, Kosovo belongs both to the Serbs and the Albanians, and only through mutual agreement can a stable future be secured for the province.

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