ABSTRACT
To the frustration of outside observers, virtually everything seems to represent a bone of contention between the Serbian and Kosovar Albanian communities. Caught between two ‘truths on Kosovo’—the Serbian one and the Albanian one —analysts often seek refuge, as Julie Mertus observes, in three lines of rhetoric: complexity, denial or Balkan primordialism. In combination, these offer a powerful ‘vision’ that nothing ever changes in the Balkans: people simply keep killing each other for unknown and unintelligible reasons buried deep in the past.1
