Three Elegies for Kosovo

On 28 June, 1389, a Christian army made up of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians and Romanians was defeated by an Ottoman army. The battle was over in ten hours. But ever since, the birds of prey have been hovering above the battlefield to pick over the corpses. It was on 28 June, 1989, that the Serb Leader Slobodan Milosevic launched his campaign for a fresh massacre of the majority population of Kosovo, the Albanians. That was the day on which Yugoslavia began its process of implosion and post-War western Europe was first revisited by the barbarity of earlier epochs. The agony of one tiny population at the close of the 20th Century is the symptom of a sickness that European civilisation has carried in its bloodstream for a thousand years.