Page 94 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

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THE KOSOVO CRISIS
underlying tensions that had sent other parts of the FRY into war.
Like Croatia and Bosnia, Kosovo had a non-Serb majority—the
Albanians—who constituted 90 percent of the population by
4
the 1990s. Differences between the Albanians and Serbs existed on a
number of fronts including language and religion. The Kosovo
Albanians were largely Albanian-speaking and Muslim, while the Serbs
predominantly spoke Serbian and were Orthodox Christian. The his-
tory of Serb-Albanian relations has been marked by much conflict and
bloodshed, with each side claiming to be the victim of the other’s
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atrocities. In the twentieth century, a major conflict, which became
particularly ethnic in nature, was recorded on a number of occasions,
beginning with the Serb conquest of Kosovo in October 1912 from
the Ottoman Empire. Unlike Croatia and Bosnia, Kosovo had signifi-
cance to Serb nationalists who saw it as their nation’s birthplace. This
ensured that it would not be given up easily. The Serbian claim dated
back to the legendary 1389 Battle of Kosovo, in which Serbian prince
Lazar was killed and his army defeated at the hands of the Ottoman
Turks, who then ruled Serbia for the next 500 years. According to
Noel Malcolm, the Battle of Kosovo was a “talisman of Serbian
identity . . . unlike that of anything else in the history of the Serbs.”
This legacy, combined with the fact that the patriarch of the Serbian 6
Orthodox Church was located in the town of Pec, made Kosovo a
holy land to many Serbs. These factors made Kosovo much more
dangerous than Bosnia. According to Richard Holbrooke,
The hatred between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo was far, far greater
than any of the so-called ethnic hatreds of Bosnia, which had been
grossly exaggerated by the crooks, and the Mafioso demagogues in the
ethnic communities of Bosnia. This was the real thing in Kosovo
between Albanians and the Serbs. Different cultures, different lan-
guages, and different histories, but a common obsession with the same
sacred soil. 7
In 1989, the newly elected Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic
sparked the latest round of tensions in Kosovo by revoking its
autonomous status to appease Kosovo Serbs and nationalists in Serbia
proper. From the Serbian position, the 1974 autonomy given to the
Kosovo Albanians led to discrimination and repression of the Serb
minority who were put under pressure by the Albanian majority to
leave Kosovo. Milosevic’s early popularity, in fact, originated from the
Kosovo issue, where he became known as a champion of the Serbs.
The loss of autonomy, in addition to a series of other measures to pro-
mote the interests of the minority Serbs, led to a backlash amongst the