ident George Bush to become involved in the wars which followed the breakup of Yugoslavia after 1990, former American Ambassador to that country, Lawrence Eagleburger, expressed the conventional Western view that those wars were the inevitable result of ancient enmities among ethnic groups when he said in 1992 (in reference to the fighting then raging in Bosnia):
The tragedy is not something which can be settled from
outside . . . Until the Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats
decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the
Richard Holbrooke, who was the principal American architect of the Dayton Accords of November 1995 which ended the war in Bosnia and who delivered NATO's final ultimatum to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic before NATO began its spring 1999 air offensive, disagreed with Eagleburger's interpretation:
ethnic groups within Yugoslavia nursed deep-seated grievances against one another . . . but Yugoslavia's tragedy was not foreordained. It was the product of bad, even criminal, political leaders who encouraged ethnic
confrontation for personal, political, and financial gain.
Eagleburger and Holbrooke both stated portions of the truth. In Kosovo, Albanians and Serbs have lived together for centuries, by and large peacefully, but passionately rooted enmities have developed into a blood feud of unfathomable dimensions because of their separate historical experiences and their dealings with each other. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the growth of ultranationalist sentiment in both communities, themselves partly the result of international developments, produced a growing chasm between the two communities which has been exploited by Milosevic and others.
Albanians claim to be direct descendants of the Illyrians who inhabited Kosovo centuries before the Serbs. The Illyrians thinly populated the western Balkan peninsula, beginning sometime between the 9th and 7th centuries B.C. Illyrian arc...