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Lädt ... The Kosova Liberation Army : underground war to Balkan insurgency, 1948-2001von James Pettifer
Keine Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.  nwhyte | May 7, 2023 |  keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
In the struggle against Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia, the Kosova Liberation Army evolved from a tiny group of conspirators operating out of the 1980s Swiss political underground into an 18,000-strong military force allied with NATO in 1997. In this groundbreaking history, James Pettifer traces the development of the KLA using previously unknown documents from Russian, American, Serbian, Swiss, and other archival sources; numerous interviews with participants and observers; and other eyewitness accounts. He demonstrates how the KLA drew on deep historical traditions of resistance to Serbian rule in Kosova, and in other respects, forged an innovative, postmodern path that relied on its media image as much as its campaign achievements. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)949.71History and Geography Europe Other parts Former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina ∙ Croatia ∙ Kosovo ∙ Montenegro ∙ Macedonia ∙ Serbia ∙ Slovenia) [formerly also Bulgaria] Serbia; KosovoKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (4)
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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. (