Letter: Words that clash in the night

STEVE Crawshaw warmly reviews Noel Malcolm's book on the history of Kosovo with its debunking of the Battle of Kosovo legend ("Truths the Serbs weren't told", Review, 3 May). But without this legend would the Serbs have seen off the Ottoman, put paid to the dual monarchy, fended off Italian pretensions to the Dalmatian littoral, resisted Hitler and kept Stalin at arm's length?

The Krajina is a depopulated wasteland as a result of the murderous clearance of the Krajina Serb nation by the Croatian military, yet Zagreb's unwillingness to allow the return of the Krajina Serbs, even though they would not pose a threat to Croatia's sovereignty, has yielded only mild diplomatic rebukes. The EU bears a special responsibility for Croatia's new-found ethnic purity. But the ultimate irony is that the Krajina and Bosnian Serbs were not allowed to remain part of Yugoslavia because Tito's administrative lines were decreed to be inviolable. Now the EU is encouraging the establishment of a Greater Albania. So much for the frontier between Serbia and Albania dating back to 1912.

Mike Finch

Teddington, Middlesex