Kosovo: War and Revenge
by Tim Judah
Yale University Press, £25/£12.95; pp288
Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond
by Michael Ignatieff
Chatto & Windus, £12.99, pp249
A year on, it is curious how the revision of history over the war in Kosovo is already in full flood, driven largely by journalists and commentators who managed to avoid covering the build-up to Nato's first ever conflict. Wilfully ignoring the causes of the war, and the international community's part in those causes, their themes are these. That the West was conned by the Kosovo Liberation Army into joining a secessionist conflict on their side. That the Nato conflict was designed to punish Milosevic for the failures of the international community over Bosnia. And, most strange of all, the lingering suggestion that we did it because we could, hypnotised by the possibility of an allied casualty-free war, and by the ability to put on a demonstration of the supremacy of our technology.
It is all very nice and neat. But there is something deeply unsatisfactory about this account of why Nato went to war in Kosovo. Unsatisfactory because - as ever - it is about us, not them; because it is an account that is only interested in the neat transposition of European and American ideological arguments on to the Balkans. In the past seven years or so, the Balkan wars have thrown up two kinds of book. First, there are the glib volumes that place the writer's (often puzzled, sometimes horrified) experience at the centre of the examination of the Balkan mystery. But the Balkan wars have also produced tours de force of popular and serious history that for the first time, almost in a century, have placed the liminal territory of Balkan experience back at the centre of the European story.
This second kind has thrown up a trio of writers - Misha Glenny, Noel Malcolm and Tim Judah - who, while not necessarily in agreement in their analysis, have dared to treat the Balkans seriously. Tim Judah's first book, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, took the wars of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia from the most unfashionable of angles, examining the causes of the war from within the Serbian mind-set. Now he has turned his attention to an equally intractable problem - trying to extract a sense of meaning from how the contradictions and vagaries of Albanian nationalism within the ethnic Albanian Kosovar community, both in Kosovo and abroad, grew into a 'liberation army' and started a war.
The truth of the matter, as Judah makes clear in his new book, Kosovo: War and Revenge, is that the rapid acceleration towards the KLA spring uprising - that began after Serb forces wiped out the compounds of two secessionist clans in the Drenica mountains in March 1998 - was unexpected by almost everyone, including the vast majority who would within months be wearing the black doubled-headed eagle of the UCK (the KLA). The difficulty with revisionary accounts of what happened in Kosovo in the lead-up to the war and after is that they operate on the assumption that the nascent KLA (around 150 strong as the civil war began) was cohesive in its strategy, philosophy or aims; that tying Nato into the conflict was always intended, rather than a cry of help as the full weight of the Serb forces was unleashed against the mountain villages that summer.
One of those who repeats this claim is Michael Ignatieff. His Virtual War is a patchy and rather unsatisfactory book, including (at rather too great length) his correspondence with Robert Skidelsky on whether Nato was right to intervene. Ignatieff never seems to get below the surface detail or beyond what Ignatieff is feeling. Worryingly, the most interesting section (previously published in the US), which deals with the efforts of the US envoy Richard Holbrooke to negotiate a peaceful settlement, comes across as rather gauche - as if Ignatieff cannot quite credit that he is travelling with such important people.
Instead it is left to Tim Judah to interpret Ignatieff's material and to illuminate it. For where Judah is skilful is in his mastery of both primary and secondary sources, to lay bare how Kosovo, Serbia and the international community stumbled into a crisis where all felt bound by dangerous obligations. At the heart of Judah's argument is that despite the warnings of the diplomats and moderate ethnic Albanians, no one wanted to believe that the ground was being laid for confrontation. As one diplomat tells Judah: "There was no sense of critical mass. You could not say that it was going to erupt."
The point, as Judah demonstrates, is that there should have been. The failure of the international community to try and settle the Kosovo issue at the Dayton peace conference (and before), and the subsequent collapse of faith in the struggling policies of pacifist Kosovar leader Ibrahim Rugova, created the circumstances in which a disparate group of extremists could flourish and coalesce into the KLA. That failure, and the weaknesses of international resolve as the Serbs began the killing, made war inevitable.
