The wars of the former Yugoslavia, which stained Europe with blood in the last decade of the 20th century, began and ended in Kosovo. In 1989, when Yugoslavia was about to tear apart at all its seams, the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic took advantage of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds — in which, according to tradition, the Christian armies lost to the Turkish hordes, although basically the whole story is a legend — to exalt the worst instincts of nationalism. Kosovo concentrates all the myths of Serbian history, in the form of millennial grievances, and Milosevic knew how to stir them up to carry out his campaign of war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in Croatia, Bosnia, and finally in this province — now an independent state still not recognized by the entire international community — which has 90% Albanian inhabitants and 10% Serbs.
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In 1999, after they had already committed the genocide of Srebrenica in Bosnia, Serbian paramilitaries launched themselves on Kosovo, in a campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing that provoked a NATO intervention. Little Perfect War, the novel by Elvira Dones, a writer of Albanian origin in the Italian language, tells this story through three women locked in an apartment, terrified every time they go out on the street because the ultra-nationalist militias used rape as a weapon of war and could kill anyone on the street with impunity.
The book reflects the atmosphere of terror in which not only the inhabitants of Kosovo but all the Balkans were immersed in those years of ethnic violence, in which you could be killed just for having a certain surname. A trip out for food in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, reflects the terror that thousands of people suffered for years, victims of irrational hatred, although perfectly planned and manipulated. “A woman quickens her pace ahead of her, turns her head a couple of times to ask her something, but regrets it and speeds up again. Two trucks packed with Serbian soldiers speed past, Nita stops at the door of an abandoned store trying to control her panic,” writes Dones in a book that describes the violence unleashed by Serbian ultra-nationalists, sparing no details. She recounts, for example, an almost random murder: “He kills him because he looks among the fleeing Kosovars for the cars he likes the most. He has already confiscated five vehicles from those Albanian pigs. When he returns to Serbia, he will open a garage and make a lot of money.”
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Dones tells how the war affects specific people, but it is impossible to read this story without thinking about the ultra-right speeches that have multiplied in the West
The book does not intend to be a warning about present-day Europe and the danger of stirring up ghosts of hatred and exclusion, but it is. Dones tells how the war affects specific people, but it is impossible not to read the story of these three women run over by dark forces that opportunistic and cruel politicians set in motion without thinking about the present, about the ultra-right speeches that have multiplied in the West in recent decades, without thinking about hatred of the other turned into a political weapon. “History. That poor wretch, used by those who were brave to risk it all in a deranged orgy of words and lead. Nita, on the other hand, wished to eradicate History from the face of the earth,” writes Dones. In the Balkans, this History, manipulated, transformed, mixed with legend, was a source of pain and destruction for a decade. And it is not at all clear if we have learned those lessons.
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Little Perfect War
Prologue by Roberto Saviano
Translation by Regina López Muñoz
Errata Naturae, 2026
224 pages. 22 euros
