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Learned Something New
May. 15th, 2009 12:58 pmSo, last night I started reading King Zog of Albania
. It's an interesting book, and I'm glad I bought it.
While reading it, I learned something that made me rethink a lot of what I thought I knew. Remember the Kosovo War - where NATO had to go in and separate the Serbs from the Albanians? At the time and thereafter, one of the lines used to defend the Serbians was that the Albanian majority were there recently, having immigrated or sneaked across the border over the years.
Well, King Zog of Albania tells me that, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, there were four majority Albanian provinces. Three of them became modern Albania. The forth, Kosovo, was lost to Serbia, despite several wars between Serbia and Albania. Then, Serbia undertook some ethnic cleansing, shipping out Albanian nobles (really chieftains) and the whole issue of "reclaiming" Kosovo was a major issue in Albanian politics through at least the 1920s. (I haven't gotten farther in the book then that.)
I could turn this post into a major rant about the way our American media ignores history, but I'll cut it short by saying that this little tidbit would have been very nice to know at the time.
. It's an interesting book, and I'm glad I bought it.While reading it, I learned something that made me rethink a lot of what I thought I knew. Remember the Kosovo War - where NATO had to go in and separate the Serbs from the Albanians? At the time and thereafter, one of the lines used to defend the Serbians was that the Albanian majority were there recently, having immigrated or sneaked across the border over the years.
Well, King Zog of Albania tells me that, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, there were four majority Albanian provinces. Three of them became modern Albania. The forth, Kosovo, was lost to Serbia, despite several wars between Serbia and Albania. Then, Serbia undertook some ethnic cleansing, shipping out Albanian nobles (really chieftains) and the whole issue of "reclaiming" Kosovo was a major issue in Albanian politics through at least the 1920s. (I haven't gotten farther in the book then that.)
I could turn this post into a major rant about the way our American media ignores history, but I'll cut it short by saying that this little tidbit would have been very nice to know at the time.
