Second paragraph of third chapter:

Meanwhile, advancing internal decay, as well as external pressure, had severely weakened the Porte. Capitalising on this weakness, the Serbian and Montenegrin principalities took advantage of the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877-8 to invade Kosovo, thus bringing the Serbs and Montenegrins into their first serious conflict with Albanians. Thousands of Kosovo Serbs crossed over into Serbian territory to enlist in the Serbian army; those Serbs and Montenegrins who remained in Kosovo largely managed to avoid conscription into the Ottoman army by bribing military officials. Facing little opposition, the Serbian army advanced steadily, occupying the towns of Nis, Lescovac, Vranje and Prokuplje, before entering Kosovo. During this period thousands of Albanians were forcibly expelled from the region of Toplice in the Sandjak of Nis, and many of the region’s mosques were destroyed, while as many Serbs fled southern Kosovo ahead of unleashed bashibazouks, who began to take vengeance upon the remaining Serbian inhabitants. The operations of the Serbian army in Kosovo provoked a wave of refugees in the opposite direction as an estimated 30,000 Albanians deserted those parts of the region which the Serbian army occupied. Alongside the retreating Ottoman troops were thousands of displaced Albanians who arrived in Kosovo as refugees. Unaware that Russia and the Porte had agreed to a truce, the voluntary Serb regiment of Major Radomir Putnik took Gnjilane, while the advance guard of the Serbian army reached the Gracanica monastery near Pristina towards the end of January 1878. There a solemn liturgy was performed to honour the victory of the Serbian army and Prince Milan, and a commemoration was held for the heroes of 1389. However, the concluded truce was inclusive of the Serbian army whose units were thus compelled to withdraw from Kosovo.²
² Batakovic, The Kosovo Chronicles, p. 108.

I had read this ages ago, soon after it came out in 1998, and like any book about Kosova published before 1999 (well, 2008), it misses the climax of the story through no fault of the author’s. It’s also somewhat in the shadow of Noel Malcolm’s better known Kosovo: A Short History. But it complements Malcolm in concentrating on the twentieth century and the internal dynamics of Kosova’s emerging autonomy and confidence within pre-1988 Yugoslavia, followed by the collapse of communications between the majority population and the structures of the state.

It’s actually rather difficult to see what other paths were possible from the main actors at the end of this period, given the personalities and starting points; Milošević’s destruction of the Yugoslav state was rooted in his destruction of Kosova’s autonomy, while on the other hand Kosovar militants were not in a position to resort to military pressure earlier than they actually did, never mind the fact that the Americans had told them not to.

I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that the political violence spilled from Kosova as far as Brussels. Vickers recounts that in 1981, a Yugoslav diplomat was killed and another injured in a shooting near the Bourse, in what was then the White Horse pub and is now a hotel / shisha bar called La Pièce. The gunman himself was found shot dead in 2004 in the Loi underground car park, quite close to my office. There were other Brussels incidents too, but those were the most notable. (And of course there were plenty of incidents in other parts of Western Europe.)

So yeah, a book of its time, and for specialists, but very good on the areas of detail. You can get Between Serb and Albanian here (at a price).

This was my top unread book about Kosova. Next on that pile is British Generals in Blair’s Wars, edited by Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron, and Hew Strachan (where I suspect the Kosova content may not be huge).