The Milosevic and Islamization Factors: Writing Contemporary History in the Balkans

Robert J. Pranger reflects on the role of the Milosevic and Islamization factors in building a Greater Serbia. In other words, the prevailing historical paradigm favoring the Milosevic factor has, at the very least, been overtaken by events and was constituted as a bad historiography to begin with. Milosevic, Karadzic, and Mladic became the poster boys of contemporary genocide for observers in Europe and the US, adorning the walls in the highest levels of official foreign policy and academic study as well as in popular consciousness. Arriving under the wing of the Ottoman Empire, Islam has historically claimed a central position in the Balkans from the fourteenth century to the present. Long before the wars of the 1990s, Serbs strongly resisted Islamic inroads in a history marked by bitter wars and national heroism.