The Case for Kosova: Passage to Independence
210
The Case for Kosova: Passage to Independence
210Paperback(First Edition, 1)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781843312451 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2006 |
| Series: | Anthem Series on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies , #2 |
| Edition description: | First Edition, 1 |
| Pages: | 210 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Ismaïl Kadaré is a world-renowned Albanian writer. In 1992, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca; in 2005, he won the inaugural Booker International Prize. He has divided his time between France and Albania since 1990.
Read an Excerpt
The Case for Kosova
Passage to Independence
By Anna Di Lellio
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2006 Anna Di LellioAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-712-0
CHAPTER 1
Is Kosova a late creation of the Yugoslav state and should it be considered the cradle of the Serb nation?
Isa Blumi
THE ALLEGATION
Mr. Draškovic, what is your attitude to Kosovo's past, present and future? For me, a Serb, Kosovo is and will go on being what it was in the past: the cradle of the Serb state, spirituality, culture, ethos. (Vuk Draškovic, Serbia and Montenegro Foreign Minister, SPO President and writer).
There are historical and religious reasons, as one argument goes, that justify Serbia's claim to sovereignty over Kosova: it was the cradle of Serbia. The world-wide media uncritically repeats this argument as fact, never failing to mention that Serbia sees Kosova as 'the cradle of Serbia's statehood', 'of Serbian culture and civilization', 'of the Serb nation' and 'of Serb culture and history'.
Serbia's historical rights would disprove that Kosova ever existed as such, outside the particular arrangements established by Communist Yugoslavia, as in the following statements:
After World War II Communist power transformed Kosova into the unique administrative entity it had never been. Why did they do that?
The answer is very simple: after World War II the Yugoslav Communist Party was subordinated to its pre-war Comintern-style politics intent in pushing back the claims of 'Greater Serbia's hegemonism' ... This explains also the fact that a regime of territorial and political autonomy for the Albanian minority was established only in Serbia and not in Montenegro and especially in Macedonia, both with a large Albanian minority. (Vojislav Koštunica, Prime Minister of Serbia and Montenegro).
Kosovo and Metohija is an ancient crime of the Yugoslav Communist Party, perpetrated by the IV Congress of the Party in Dresden in 1928, when they decided to split Yugoslavia into Soviet Republics and independent states and to 'reattach' Kosovo and Metohija to Albania.
(Dobrica Cosic, Serb writer and politician, President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992).
The Answer
Belgrade's claims to Kosova based on the state's link to a medieval empire that retained an ethnically 'pure' character have circulated since the mid-nineteenth century. Belgrade intellectuals and politicians have consistently argued that the remarkable collection of medieval buildings in Kosova somehow demonstrates a distinctive Serb national character to the region, excluding any place for non-Serb peoples in making an historical claim of their own. Key to this calculation is the assertion that religious affiliation immediately determines a community's ethno-national heritage. Since most of these historical sights are associated with the Patriarchate of the Southern Slav Orthodox Church (most commonly identified as Serbian today), their very physical presence in Kosova has therefore been used to prove that Kosova is an integral part of Serbia.
This complicated and ambiguous institutional history infuses much of the story of Kosova's past with patterns of association that assume cultural and political uniformity. What this reasoning fails to acknowledge is those social interactions that, if properly read, directly contradict any possible claim made in the context of a twenty-first century state on ethno-national grounds. If, on the other hand, we can accept that throughout the Lazar and Ottoman periods, well until the end of the nineteenth century, a form of cohabitation created recognizable spaces for Serbs, Albanians, Turks and others to live together and see their interests as common, the significance of Kosova itself no longer contains a specific ethno-national one, but rather a compilation of shared spaces that may in fact suggest Kosova is an entirely different historical entity, with people living in it that are unique.
For one, claims made in Belgrade today about Kosova's distinctive Serbian character are predicated on a number of misrepresentations of medieval political power. It has already been successfully argued that the empire referred to as founded in Kosova was originally based in Rascia, to Kosova's north. Indeed, most of the historical structures related to that period of 'Serbian glory' remain well outside the widely accepted boundaries of Kosova. That Kosova as a region eventually becomes incorporated into Lazar's Empire in itself cannot be a worthy argument because similar territorial claims are not made on areas to the south in present-day Greece, which the empire at its height actually comprised as well. Moreover, these nationalist claims and assumptions about the nature of the population in Kosova obscure an important fact: that a variety of peoples lived in the region, suggesting Kosova itself has retained for much of its history a distinctive cultural, political and economic identity/place in Balkan history that is multi-ethnic at its base.
Kosova needs to be studied outside the confines of nationalist territorial claims, in order that we address current claims. An important first step is to adopt a non-ideological assessment of the long history of institutions such as the Southern Slav Orthodox Church. Such a history would recognize that contributing factors to the Church's history are construed along political lines, contradicting any assertion that such organizations functioned as an incubator for particular ethno-national interests. The Slav Orthodox Patriarchate, for example, has often been brought under the direct control of outside powers/states, including the Ottoman Empire, which for a period beginning in 1557 used the reconstituted Southern Slav Church to counterbalance the power of the Ecumenical Patriarchate based in Constantinople.
Equally, the assumption that the Serbian Orthodox Church was alone in serving the spiritual needs of ethnic Slavs actually misrepresents the importance of faith to other peoples living in the region. Throughout an extended period of Kosova's administrative existence — both during the reign of the Lazar kingdom and later under the Ottomans — the confluence of the Balkans' social, cultural and economic dynamism enlivened key towns such as Peja/Pec, Prizren and Mitrovica with a multi-sectarian significance which included both Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. Most importantly, the patterns of sectarian self-identification largely reflected the range of political and cultural possibilities of the time, not the specific ethnic divisions that existed between one group and another. Prior to the advancement of Islam in the region, for instance, everyone living in Kosova was either Catholic or Orthodox Christian. Adherence to the Orthodox or Catholic Church, therefore, does nothing to properly explain the cultural, linguistic and subsequently 'ethnic' composition of the region's population. Rather, they are a reflection of the political realities of the time, one in which assured sectarian identities coincided with the institutional ascendancy of a particular kind of state.
The problem with an anachronistic line of thinking that emphasizes ethnicity lies in the fact that throughout Kosova's history, identity, be it ethnic or religious, was by its very nature fluid and therefore multiple, as people faced new kinds of structural and economic realities. This can be further explored by concentrating on how, during the expansion of the early Ottoman state, the existing religious communities in Kosova (both the Eastern and Western churches) interacted with the Islamic state. The very fact that Orthodox institutions pre-dating Ottoman rule are still functioning highlights a dynamic of cohabitation rather than cultural (and ethnic) hegemony over the entire 1400–1912 period. Religious affiliation in the Ottoman context was a basic reflection of the community within which one lived, not one that, in the eyes of Muslim administrators, required conversion of other 'people of the book' (in other words, Jews and Christians). In fact, widespread conversion to Islam was probably never desired by the new Muslim administrators in Kosova, and many of the peoples that were under the religious tutelage of the Orthodox patriarch or Pope were left to continue to live in the region as Christians. What did emerge culturally as a result may be best interpreted as a reflection of indigenous social practices that in most cases would be construed as reflective of a distinctive, Kosovar identity.
As has already been amply demonstrated, in the early Muslim Arab conquest of the Middle East, fiscal stability required that the region's Christian populations continue to conduct their economic activities in order to produce taxable surpluses. As in earlier times, the Ottomans also practiced a system of taxation that specifically did not seek to convert large numbers of Christians into Islam. The dividing of administrative districts and more importantly, the appropriation of the proceeds of the region's annual wealth within the established Sancaks of Iskodra (consisting of Peja/Pec/Ipek and Dukagjin that are relative to our interests here), Vushtrii (including Prishtina and Novobrdo) and Prizren, created new economic communities but not necessarily religious ones. In other words, Ottoman administration led to a redirection of regional economies, ones which connected the Adriatic with the centers of global trade at the time, including the oasis cities of Central Asia, the Arab world and beyond, but did so with the intention of assuring that non-Muslims (who were not protected from taxation) produced the vast majority of taxable wealth.
At the same time, however, it is clear that there was a considerable amount of conversion to Islam. Practical economic considerations as well as complicated cultural interactions rather than proselytizing may account for much of this conversion. One contributing factor may perhaps be that former subjects of the earlier Christian states recognized the range of new opportunities presented to those who could tap into a world that the Ottomans brought to the Balkans. In the context of an extended Ottoman Empire, being Muslim presented new opportunities as a soldier or merchant. The recruitment of young men to serve the Ottoman state, largely misrepresented in the twentieth century as 'enslavement of Christian boys', actually offered rural communities and local community leaders the opportunity to secure a direct link to the halls of Ottoman power by way of the military. The system worked very much the same way as the US Marine Corps or the elite forces of France and other volunteer armies today. The honor of sending a son to be trained to become the best and brightest of Ottoman society had its long-term economic rewards. These Janissaries (children trained in Istanbul to serve as administrators in the outer regions of the empire) formed tight-knit communities that retained their native languages and helped extend trade networks: for Albanians, this eventually linked the neighborhoods of Tunis, Algiers, Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus with Kosovar towns.
Of course, aside from economic and political opportunities presented by something akin to a Pax Osmanica, there is ample evidence to suggest that people also converted to Islam for strictly spiritual reasons. Sufi missionaries from dozens of tekkes established a foothold in the region, proselytizing to larger numbers of people whose sensitivity to both the power of the state and the message of a new faith contributed to the massive conversion of the region's Christians. While there were periods of hostility, older Christian traditions and the growing influx of Iberian Jews, most of whom were eventually encouraged to settle in the Balkans, created a fascinating spiritual space that conjoined Sufi tekkes from the Helveti, Nakshibandi, or Bektashi orders with local Christian sects. Such a spiritual mix would eventually create an environment of considerable importance as idiosyncratic movements among the region's Christians, Jews (dhimmi or 'people of the book') and Muslims interacted in ways that could be read as distinctive from other regions. There are numerous examples of local religious movements emerging to face open threats of persecution as heretics by the guardians of the official institutions that represented Christians, especially the Rum Patriarch in Istanbul and the Slav Orthodox Church in Peja/Pec/Ipek. Among the more interesting examples are the Donme, Jewish converts to Islam who followed the teachings of a charismatic Rabbi cum Sufi saint, as well as a long line of Sufi charismatic preachers popular among local audiences, both Christian and Muslim.
As hinted at above, we seem to understand this history in terms of 'ethnic' communities who implicitly retain a distinct cultural identity. Embedded in this logic is the idea that religious affiliation determined the ethnic community, while any possibility that local practices represented a vibrant exchange was treated as impossible. This unfortunate way of reading social historical processes allows many to assume that Muslims, for example, were foreign to the region, therefore most likely to be 'Turks' who were introduced into the region following the military conquest of the Ottoman Empire. Inferred from this line of thinking, at least in some still-influential corners of the academic communities in Serbia, Greece and Turkey is that the non-Slav Muslims of Kosova today are either Turkish by origin or were imported from elsewhere.
Kosovar Osmosis
While migrations are not the reason for a rise in the Muslim population in Kosova, itinerant proselytizers, many from Sufi orders founded in central Anatolia, did make their way to the Balkans and had a profound impact on this process of cultural integration. I would suggest that patterns of integration taking place to absorb Ottoman culture precisely through the preaching of the region's great purveyors of Islamic spirituality are distinctive to the post-conquest period. This process is important since, as we have already noted, there is little demographic evidence of significant numbers of settlers from Anatolia. Rather, what accounts for the growing number of Muslims is the conversion of those already living in Kosova for both economic and spiritual reasons. From the late fourteenth century onwards a process of cultural fusion of already fluid communities occured. This fusion was created, in part, by mystic orders which permitted ordinary people to adopt otherwise dramatically different spiritual traditions, in order to fit in with the contemporary realities in their lives. Much like the impact of Ottoman state policies in the area that sought to maximize state revenues, this early period of spiritual conversion did not represent a dramatic disruption (most inhabitants of the region would retain distinctive and unorthodox methods of worship), but an adaptation.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Case for Kosova by Anna Di Lellio. Copyright © 2006 Anna Di Lellio. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.