James Pettifer

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-kosova-liberation-army-by-james-pettifer/

A substantial and important book by one of the UK’s major experts on Albania and Albanians. Pettifer has unparalleled access to all the key players in Kosovo and Albania, and in the western part of North Macedonia, and I don’t think it will ever be possible to improve on the factual detail of his blow-by-blow account of how, where and by whom the Kosovo Liberation Army was set up and its progress to the point where its leadership became a key political force in pre- and post-independence Kosovo. I was paying pretty close attention at the time, I thought, but there is a lot here that I had only suspected or had not suspected at all – not only in the 1995-99 period, but also in the 2001 Macedonian conflict. A number of myths are very helpfully and convincingly exploded here. I am sure that there are points of historical incident where there is still room for argument, but the narrative shape of the KLA’s origins and progress is clear. With all that material, it’s surprisingly short, only 256 pages for the main text.

There are some irritating weaknesses along with the mastery of the facts. One of them is Pettifer’s treatment of ideology – the KLA founders are described as “Enverist” without that term ever being defined, and it is never demonstrated that political ideology was a strong motivator for the behaviour of leaders or followers, rather than the existential question of survival in a hostile state. Another is that several key actors are described as being puppets of the Serbs, or the British, or the French, or the Americans, or the Italians, or the Vatican; it’s as if nobody had free will to make their own decisions, except for the people the author is really interested in. And there are some annoying mistakes with names – mostly simple misspellings of Serbs and Macedonians, but also my old friend Ian Oliver is confused with my old friend Iain King; I don’t think that they even know each other in real life.

Apart from those issues of coloration, I think it’s an essential book for understanding the Kosovo conflict.… (meer)

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1033959.html

It is an autobiographical account of what it is like to be a reporter of conflict; the physical difficulties of transport and communication in the field, the problems of getting copy into the paper, convincing sceptical editors, and overcoming opposition and interference from the British foreign policy apparatus. It is also the political story of the movement of Kosovo from miserable subjection to the verge of independence, and I don't think I have read a better account of the 1991-99 period; I really regretted that apart from a couple of vignettes from 2001, he does not take the story further.

Pettifer is a romantic. His story is full of geography, both human and physical; his Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia are steeped in history. This is both good and bad. I found myself in roughly equal measure deeply impressed by his insights into the interconnections between key figures and events across the region, and frustrated by his paranoia about continental western Europe (the "Euroids") and the British intelligence services (though if even a quarter of what he alleges is true, there are some very serious questions to answer, for instance about the Macedonian arms plot of 1993). His sympathies, like Rebecca West's, are absolutely clear, but that certainly does not make this a bad book. (I do wish someone had proof-read the Slavic names for him, though.)

Anyway, if you want an insight into Kosovo that gives a very different perspective than the usual diplomatic histories, you could do a lot worse than start here.… (meer)

http://nhw.livejournal.com/668185.html

A collection of essays on Macedonia, first published in 1999 though this is a 2001 reprint, whose relevance was therefore immediately superseded by the conflict that took place in the latter year. Many of the essays had been published elsewhere before, including one as early as 1950. As well as a number of dull articles by Macedonian writers explaining how wonderful their policies are, I found some really good pieces. In the first section, I found the analyses of the competing claims to Macedonian identity by Kyril Drezov, and Stefan Troebst's essay on Macedonian nationalism, particularly lucid, and there's a lovely piece on the Vlach minority by Tom Winnifrith. Particularly revealing also is a piece by Evangelos Kofos on Greece's approach to the name issue, in which he exposes the domestic political machinations behind this particularly counter-productive policy, yet remarkably without really challenging the foolish assumptions on which the policy was based. Pettifer includes two pieces by himself, which combine his almost unmatched ability to penetrate and explain what is going on with the Albanians with his unfortunate tendency to perceive geopolitical conspiracy behind the motivations of most other actors. Sophia Clement finishes with a decent but too brief description of the international community's approach. Not really a classic collection - apart from anything else, the separate essays simply don't cohere particularly well - but useful to have on the shelf.… (meer)