Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started A War

The concept of Professor Julie A. 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.