ABSTRACT
In spite of the 1,500 miles between them, Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland share a number of features which help to explain why they should have been the scene of so much violence in an otherwise peaceful Europe. The first and most obvious is that both, for centuries, have been mixed communities in which the struggle of rival groups for dominance over their immediate neighbours has been masked by periods of uneasy truce. In Kosovo, the province where the greatest humanitarian catastrophe in post-war Europe took place in the early summer of 1999, the dispute goes back six centuries, to the crucial battle of June 28, 1389 at Kosovo Polje in which the forces of the Serbian ruler, Tsar Lazar, were defeated by the Ottoman armies commanded by Murad I.
