Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War.(Review)

Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War, by Julie A. Mertus. Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 1999. xxii, 378 pp. $55.00 U. S. (cloth), $19.95 (paper) U. S.

For most of the public in the United States, Kosovo burst onto the scene in 1999, when the U.S. military became engaged in an air campaign under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). By that date, Julie Mertus had already been delving deeply into the dynamics of conflict in Kosovo between Serbs and ethnic Albanians. Her book, Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War, is a thought-provoking but necessarily limited effort to understand the origin and direction of this long-standing and brutal conflict.

Quoting Tzvetan Todorov on the need to examine "more or less truths" in order to appreciate the complex social and psychological processes by which popular beliefs were formed and …