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Slate - The Serbs’ Self-Inflicted Wounds
WITH KOSOVO INDEPENDENT, YUGOSLAVIA IS FINALLY DEAD. by Christopher Hitchens

But how did it begin? In fact, Kosovo has never been recognized internationally as part of Serbia. It was only ever recognized as part of Yugoslavia, and with the liquidation of that state Serbian claims upon its territory became null and void. A little history here is necessary.

During the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, the then-distinct kingdom of Serbia, with some regional allies, did manage to invade and annex a formerly Ottoman territory that had been the scene of a Serbian military defeat in—wait for it—1389. …

You will by now have read dark remarks made by partisans of the Russian and Serb Orthodox viewpoint, to the effect that if one “secession” is allowed, then what is to prevent every Gypsy or Chechen or Ossetian from proclaiming their own statelet? You should, first, ask if the Bosnian Serbs ought not to have thought of this first and been better advised by the “realist” or Kissinger school that now weeps such hypocritical tears. You should, second, ask if you know of any case comparable to the Kosovo one, where a national minority was so long imprisoned within an artificial state.

Of course, one ought to acknowledge that this is a calamity for the Serbs and indeed an injustice in the sense of an insult to their pride and history. But the injustice was self-inflicted. I remember seeing, in Kosovo, the “settlements” for Serbs that the Milosevic regime was building in a vain effort to alter the demography. And who were the bedraggled “settlers”? The luckless Serbian civilians who had been living in the Krajina area of Croatia until their fearless leader’s war of conquest for “Greater Serbia” had brought general disaster and seen them finally evicted from farms and homesteads they had garrisoned for centuries. Promised new land on colonized Albanian territory, they had been uprooted and evicted once again. Where are they now, I wonder? Perhaps stupidly stoning the McDonald’s in Belgrade, and vowing fervently never to forget the lost glories of 1389, and maybe occasionally wondering where they made their original mistake.

So, it’s always irritated me (I doubt this is the first time I’ve brought this up) how people write about the whole Balkans thing. As if we all know what’s going on. They never say who these people are. There are Serbians and Albanians, and apparently they’re ethnically distinct from each other, but their countries don’t necessarily reflect those divisions, and if there are religious distinctions, which I’m fairly certain there are, no one ever mentions those, either. It’s a bit like William the Conquerer invades England and, rather than the French from France and English from England, everyone refers to them as the Williamites and the Haroldians. And even if they did do that, we’d at least know that the Williamites came from France and the Haroldians were the original English. Nobody says how these two completely distinct groups came to be in the same place and yet stay distinct from each other.