Tag Archives: world: kosovo

Madame Prosecutor, by Carla del Ponte

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

I was gratified to learn that so many African states, including some of the world’s poorest countries, in terms of material wealth but certainly not in terms of human pride and determination, had cooperated with the Rwanda tribunal, arresting and transferring to its custody leaders of the genocide. According to an American nongovernmental organization, the Coalition for International Justice, by the end of 2000, Benin had transferred two accused, Burkina Faso one, Cameroon nine, Ivory Coast two, Mali one, Namibia one, South Africa one, Togo two, Tanzania two, and Zambia three. Kenya had transferred thirteen of the accused; in one arrest operation engineered by Louise Arbour, the Kenyan authorities apprehended seven indicted Rwandan leaders on a single day and subsequently transferred them to the tribunal; the Kenyans knew, however, that they could have arrested and transferred several more; one of the fugitives in Nairobi was Félicien Kabuga, a wealthy businessman who allegedly helped nance Hutu militias and plan the genocide. In contrast, at the close of 2000, NATO, the most powerful military force the world has ever known, had been patrolling Bosnia for five years, and, within its borders, eighteen of the Yugoslavia tribunal’s accused war criminals, including Radovan Karadžić, were still roaming free. As I made my rounds of world capitals seeking assistance to secure the arrest of the Yugoslavia tribunal’s fugitives, I recalled the African states’ cooperation. I brought it up during private meetings with Western leaders. At the time it seemed that, thanks to these African countries, the Rwanda tribunal, much more than the Yugoslavia tribunal, stood to rival Nuremberg in its success at bringing surviving members of the top leadership to the dock.

A memoir by the Chief Prosecutor of the war crimes tribunals for both the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, taking the story up to the end of her Yugoslavia work in 2008. It’s quite a personal story, as she takes us through her childhood in Switzerland and her legal career, and admits her fondness for expensive handbags (though these are also a practical tool of the trade). But the nuts and bolts of it are the difficulty of operating the prosecution side of the first big international criminal court since Nuremberg, and the difficulties that del Ponte experienced from all sides.

By her own account, del Ponte must have been a difficult person to work with, though also by her own account and from what I know myself, she was given very difficult working conditions – the promised political and financial support from the Western democracies who had pushed for the war crimes tribunals in the first place turned out to be very inconstant, staffing of the tribunals varied in quality, and co-operation with the post-conflict authorities on the ground began badly and did not always improve. She was the subject of vicious personal abuse in the media of the countries concerned, and although she claims to have a thick skin, it’s difficult to be completely unmoved by that kind of thing.

It is a bit frustrating that the Rwanda narrative ends in 2003 and the ex-Yugoslavia narrative in 2008 when she went to Argentina as the ambassador of Switzerland; it means that while the individual trees of prosecutorial processes are examined at great length, she doesn’t write as much about the forest of international justice and accountability, which would have been interesting.

I myself was engaged with a lot of the policy debates regarding the former Yugoslavia during the noughties, and there are several conversations in the book that I recognise, not because I was present myself, but because I heard about them shortly afterward from people who were. I don’t believe I ever met del Ponte in person, though I became friendly with several of her close colleagues. My then employers, the International Crisis Group, get a couple of mentions, mostly positive; our line then was unqualified support for the war crimes tribunals.

I’m no longer quite as sure. While there were some very important successes, del Ponte herself is upfront about some of the failures: the Rwanda process became victors’ justice, as nobody from President Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front was prosecuted; Slobodan Milošević, conducting his own defence, distracted the court from establishing the facts with his theatrics, and cheated the verdict by refusing to take the medication which would have saved his life.

I would add that the Kosovo prosecutions by the court did not seem as well founded as the others, and more generally del Ponte’s statements about Kosovo sometimes seem to me the wrong side of speculation rather than factual reporting. In fact Kosovo complied much more swiftly with the demands of the tribunal than did any of the other governments involved, but got and gets little credit for that. Former prime minister Ramush Haradinaj has now been acquitted twice, which also surely counts for something. (And never mind the current Thaçi trial, which is under a different structure.)

I also found a couple of puzzling errors. George Robertson, the NATO Secretary-General, is consistently referred to as Lord John Robinson. And when I checked out a reference to one of the Crisis Group reports that I had edited, I found that our report simply referred back to one of the prosecution documents, in other words by citing us, del Ponte was effectively citing herself. Perhaps this just reflects some haste in getting the draft off her desk as she prepared for her next assignment, in Argentina.

In a sense, those were more innocent days, when it was credible to state that those responsible for atrocities during the course of an armed conflict should, could and would be held accountable by the international community. I’ve seen a couple of interesting recent pieces on this. In The Economist, Rosie Blau looks at the difference between today and Nuremberg. On his own blog, my friend and former colleague Andrew Stroehlein looks at the implications for future conflict resolution. He admits that “international justice can seem like a faith-based community. We believe in it, but proof of its existence is rare, and almost miraculous when it happens.” You have to look for that proof pretty carefully these days, especially with the rule of law itself being so visibly demolished in and by the USA.

You can get Madam Prosecutor here.

This was the top unread book in my pile of books about Kosovo acquired in 2022. Next up there is Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, by Ivo Daalder.

Dragon’s Teeth: Tales from North Kosovo, by Ian Bancroft

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

War here [Kosovo], of course, did not arrive without warning. It rarely, if ever, does. There were the tell-tale signs. Spikes in nationalistic rhetoric, defiant and threatening in tone, vowing to avenge the humiliation wrought upon their people and prevent further degradation. There was palpable tension and uncertainty, with mounting casualties amongst civilians and police as a game of cat and mouse ensued between the insurgency and security forces; the latter contriving even tougher curtailments of liberty and ultimately life. Regular army exercises meant the call to arms arrived long before the postman delivered the formal conscription notice. Decaying weapons were distributed and fraying uniforms procured. There always seemed to be a deficit of ammunition, at least for those inexperienced in handling weapons. Checkpoints were erected through the usual rudimentary means and identification cards closely scrutinised. There were mass arrests and confessions of terrorist activity forced under duress.

This was sent to me by the author in 2022, but I have only just got around to reading it; and I really regret having left it so long. It’s a well constructed set of anthropological observations about history and society in Northern Kosovo, which remains mainly inhabited by Serbs and under the strong influence of Serbia. But rather than look at the big picture, Bancroft zooms in on particular localities, and particular situations, to colour in the blurry spaces on the map. Kosovo is a complex country, and its history is contested, but in the end its people – including the people of Northern Kosovo – just want to live in peace and prosperity. You can practically smell the macchiato in the cafes.

I was particularly startled to read of the involvement of Sir Alfred Chester Beatty in the exploitation of the Trepča mines from 1927. I associate him mainly with the spectacular manuscript collection which now resides in Dublin Castle; but of course this collection was assembled as the fruits of exploiting mineral resources in many other countries, and Kosovo was not one of his bigger areas of operation. So it was an unexpected connection between Ireland and Mitrovica.

I suspect I’ll be featuring this in my list of Books You Haven’t Heard Of at the end of the year. Meanwhile, you can get Dragon’s Teeth here.

Wag the Dog: The Mobilization and Demobilization of the Kosovo Liberation Army, by Andreas Heinemann-Grüder and Wolf-Christian Paes

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Second paragraph of third section:

Immediately after the war, a commission for transforming the KLA was set up, including representatives of KFOR, UNMIK, the KLA, and the FARK. The commission met approximately 40 times in order to determine the details of transforming the KLA. Three variants were discussed: the transformation of the KLA a) into a National Guard with 14,000 men; b) into a territorial defense with an active reserve, modeled on the old Yugoslavian pattern; and c) a combination of a) and b). KFOR and UNMIK rejected the Kosovar ideas since it was feared they could be a precedent for independence. As a result, the KPC model was actually dictated by the protectorate powers. The ambiguity with regard to the future role of the KPC was accepted by both sides. It is no coincidence that the Albanian name of the organization—Trupat Mbrojtese te Kosoves (TMK)—can also be translated as Kosovo Defense Corps. The question of why KFOR accepted the creation of a thinly veiled KLA successor organization remains open. Some possible answers include the emotional attachment NATO officers felt for the professionalism of their KLA counterparts (German General Reinhardt has, on occasion, noted that KLA commander Hashim Thaci was “like a son” to him). The hope that the KPC might play a useful ‘proxy’ role in combating violent acts by Yugoslav or Kosovo Serb forces may have played a role too. According to a statement repeatedly heard by the authors in Kosovo in early 2001, KFOR was simply interested in retaining some degree of control over the more radical firebrands within the KLA structures—“better in the KPC and under control, than in the hills and on the loose”.

As I work through my books acquired in 2022, there will be quite a few about Kosovo, because I stocked up on the subject in that year for a project that ultimately did not come to pass. This is a very brief start, an analytical paper from the Bonn Institute for Conflict Studies, dating from 2001, so only two years after the end of the conflict and before the debate about Kosovo’s future status shifted decisively in favour of independence.

It does what it says in the title, though the historical part has now been much more comprehensively covered by James Pettifer in The Kosova Liberation Army, and the present to near future part has been completely overtaken by events, starting with the 2001 conflict in North Macedonia which broke out only a few weeks after this paper was published. However it does bust a few myths about the origins and structure of the KLA, which was important to the overall narrative at the time.

In retrospect, the weird thing is that people in the international community were so neuralgic about the future security arrangements of the Kosovo government, independent or not. In my last year at the International Crisis Group (2006), we published a paper advocating a model which was pretty close to the eventual Kosovo Security Force which was founded in 2009. The skies have not fallen.

You can get Wag the Dog here.

This was the shortest book on my unread pile acquired in 2022. Next is The Spark the Survived, by Myra Lewis Williams.

The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, by Clea Koff

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Since the bodies had been buried by people in Kibuye after the genocide, the general location of the main grave was known: a large, somewhat sunken area of dirt and grass below the priests’ rooms and on the cusp of the northern slope down to the lake. With Stefan at the controls of the backhoe over the previous day or two, the surface layers had already been lifted away and four of us began working with picks, shovels, and trowels to expose the human remains closest to the top of the grave. Doug was setting up and running the electronic mapping station that would chart the contours of the site and provide a three-dimensional outline of each body and its location in the grave. The production of highly detailed and trial-friendly maps was Melissa’s specialty. Ralph was running between the grave and the analysis areas by the church, photographing both processes.

A couple of rather gruesome books up for review today and tomorrow, I’m afraid. Clea Koff outlines the experiences of a forensic anthropologist in the mid to late 1990s in Rwanda and the Balkans. This was a side of conflict resolution that I never came very close to, though colleagues certainly did. The description of how an international team of variously motivated and variously qualified specialists comes together and works together in different and difficult sets of circumstances is very interesting reading; but the core is in the detail, if you can take it, of how she was able to bring closure (or often, sadly, not) to people whose relatives had disappeared as their countries collapsed.

It’s easy and lazy for conspiracy theorists (and genocide apologists) to claim that Srebrenica, or the Serbian attack on the people of Kosovo, or the Rwandan massacres, were hoaxes made up by the international conspirators of your choice. It’s vital that we do enable international organisations to follow these stories to their natural conclusion, and although Koff doesn’t dwell on the political underpinning for her work, it’s always there. You can get The Bone Woman here.

This was both my top unread book acquired in 2022, and my top unread non-fiction book. Next on those piles respectively are Silence, by Diarmaid McCulloch, and The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition.

A visit to Kosovo in 2024: Gračanica, Ulpiana and Prizren

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NB: This post is not in any way meant to be a guide to the situation in Kosovo, which I have written a great deal about in other places and at other times; it is a record of a road trip that I took last week, with a few reflections based on my previous experiences and stealing from Brian Aldiss’s 1965 books, Cities and Stones.

I was back in Kosovo last week for only the third time since independence, and the first time in five years, last week, and took Monday afternoon off to visit some parts of the country I had not been to before: the Gračanica monastery near Prishtina, the ruins of the Roman city of Ulpiana nearby, and Kosovo’s second city, Prizren. (I took a few photos back in 2006 as well.)

I was armed with two important tools. The Bradt Guide to Kosovo is co-written by my friend Verena Knaus, and was really helpful; and the Maps.Me app has brilliant downloadable maps for when you run out of data allowance, as long as you think ahead and download them before setting off (many thanks to the Hertz rental office at the Grand Hotel for suggesting that).

Gračanica monastery, just south of Prishtina, is in the Serbian-inhabited enclave of the same name. It’s really quite spectacular (and I was very lucky here and later with the sunlight). The inside is covered with vivid frescoes dating from the 15th century, truly breathtaking. Brian Aldiss again:

…it comes as a surprise to motor into the grubby little village of Gračanica and find in its centre one of the most harmonious of Byzantine monastic churches. Gračanica, by a miracle, is well-preserved, although work is going on to restore it inside and outside. Outside it is the loveliest of all monasteries except Dečani . It is square, and its central cupola is surrounded by four smaller cupolas, with much curved roofing to accentuate their upward sweep. The walls are of blocks of stone interleaved with brick, forming an harmonious and pleasing pattern.

When Brian Aldiss went in 1964, the scaffolding for the restoration works rather spoiled his view of the frescoes; sixty years later, we have unconstrained access to these remarkable colourful narrative stories, which fill every almost square centimetre of the interior. Taking photos of the frescoes is forbidden, and I can’t remember how I obtained this image. Wikipedia has a great selection of them.

Brian Aldiss described the surrounding settlement of Gračanica as a “grubby little village”. These days, it is the closest of the ethnic Serbian enclaves to Prishtina, less than 10km from the centre of the capital. The traffic was terrible and it took me over half an hour. Gračanica is bustling (no longer little, and not too grubby), filled with Serbian flags and political posters, and a more recent monument, a statue of semi-mythical Serbian warrior Miloš Obilić just outside the monastery. The 2004 riots in Kosovo were sparked here, so I was struck by the lack of any particular air of menace – indeed, teenagers were thumbing lifts on the road out of town, which suggests a lack of existential threat. Two weeks before, a senior Serbian diplomat had told me that Serbs in Kosovo are living under inhuman conditions; I did not go to the north of Kosovo on this trip, but the people of Gračanica seemed OK to me.

None of the youngsters would accept my offer of a lift, not because they didn’t trust me, but because I was only going as far as the ancient Roman ruins of Ulpiana, less than 2 km from Gračanica. I reflected that I’ve done quite well for Roman remains in the former Yugoslavia, with Ljubljana, Sremska Mitrovica, Stobi and an unblogged visit to Doclea north of Podgorica in 2022.These are nicely laid out with explanatory signs. There were only two other tourists there. (No Brian Aldiss quote – only minor excavations had happened by 1964.) It was rebuilt by Justinian after an earthquake in 527; so there are ancient Christian buildings built on top of the more ancient pagan ones destroyed in the quake.

Rather than double back to Prishtina and take the highway, I decided to take the mountain road past Lipljan, Shtime and Suva Reka. The road west of Shtime was spectacular but a bit hair-raising – though not as hair-raising as our drive in 2006. As in 2006, I came across a roadside monument, this time to casualties of the 1999 war, and a lot bigger – dominating the road junction at 42.438627, 20.922865. They were killed on 10 May 1999, and again I have found nothing in English about the incident; it was just after NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and after the murder of Kosovar political leader Fehmi Agani, and many other awful things were happening in the neighbourhood.

And so I arrived in Prizren, which is nicely framed by the mountains. Brian Aldiss stayed for four days; I stayed for two and a half hours, until the light started fading.

Adiss described it as “a quiet little city of twenty-six thousand inhabitants, full of Turkish houses, red tled roofs, and mosques, and pleasant waters flowing everywhere.” The population is now more like 150,000, but the rest is still true. I tried to find Verena’s top recommended restaurant for lunch, the Besimi – Beska, but got confused and ended up at her second recommendation, the Fish House, where I had a nice whole grilled trout for 7 euro. (I found the Beska in time for a cup of coffee before I left.) The Fish House is right beside the baths, which are currently being restored but looked great in the sunlight.

The main tourist attraction is the Museum of the League of Prizren, telling the story of the Albanian nationalist movement of the 1870s which called for autonomy for Albanians in the Ottoman empire, but was eventually suppressed by the Turks. Verena and her co-author give it a very good write-up in the Bradt Guide, so I was disappointed to discover that it is closed on Mondays. To be honest, my time was short so it may be just as well – hopefully it is not the last time I will be in Prizren.

Note the large number of Albanian flags, which were not restricted to the museum complex but were flying all over Prizren, perhaps in the run-up to Albanian Flag Day which was three days later. There were a few Turkish flags as well – Prizren has a 5% Turkish minority and it is one of the official languages of the municipality.

After the museum, the big draw is the Sinan Pasha Mosque, which looked lovely outside and pretty good inside as well.

Prizren is a centre of activity for several Dervish orders; I looked into the courtyard of a tekke, and noted the fresh water flowing through it (there is a lot of fresh water in Prizren), and the neatly placed shoes of the dervishes by the building on the left, but I didn’t go in.

There is some interesting more modern public art as well; I didn’t get the title of this piece but the juxtaposition with the minaret of the Arasta Mosque tickled my fancy. (There are some much less interesting statues of fallen heroes on the other side of the square.)

More ephemerally, the Christmas decorations were going up in the Shadervan, the main square (in a city that is 96% Muslim these days). The bar on the corner on the left is called the Gatsby, and across the street is the Hemingway.

Brian Aldiss wrote after his visit sixty years ago,

It is not by the isolated monuments but the effect of the town as a whole that one remembers Prizren. Open gateways give glimpses into those jealously guarded Turkish walled gardens, most of which still look pleasant and inviting. This fact, and the sweet smell of the town, are owed to the abundant water supply. One of the most pleasant features of Jugoslavia generally is the number of wells and springs and waterfalls and rivers with which it abounds. In Prizren there is a lovely little spring in the Maraš Gardens, close by a massive and prehistoric-looking tree.

The tree and the spring are still there.

The light was almost gone by now, however, and I took the highway home, reaching the Hertz office just before it closed at 6pm. I know where to go next time.

A visit to Kosovo in 2006: mountains, Dečani, street art and Gazimestan

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NB: This post is not in any way meant to be a guide to the situation in Kosovo, which I have written a great deal about in other places and at other times; it is a record of a road trip that I took in 2006, with a few reflections based on my previous experiences and stealing from Brian Aldiss’s 1965 books, Cities and Stones.

I was in Kosovo last week, for the first time in ages – probably my dozenth visit overall, but only my third since independence in 2008. I had the idea that I could do some then-and-now photographs showing how much things had changed since my early visits – I first went in 2000, the year after the war – but didn’t manage (and haven’t yet managed) to dig those pre-digital era photos out of the attic.

However I did find something else in my archives, photos from a trip to Kosovo in early 2006, two years before independence while it was still under UN rule, with the captions that I had posted to a Livejournal gallery intending to write a blog post which I never got around to. So, better late than never, here’s the gallery of my visit to Kosovo almost 19 years ago, with my original captions and commentary from today. My photos from last week’s visit will follow.

It looks like I must have flown into Prishtina and then driven to Macedonia for some reason – the main road was closed so we crossed the border via a mountain track. It was not actually snowing, but it took forever. On the way back north we just went the long way round through Tetovo, which was much safer.

View down the twisty mountain track (the main road to Macedonia from Kosovo was closed by a landslide so we tried driving over the top of the mountains; stupid idea)
Another view down the twisty mountain track

I am trying to work out which track this could have been. The online maps show an alternate route across the border from Viti to Brodets, and the satellite pictures of the crossing point at 42.225384, 21.371863 look similar to the photos above. But who knows?

I haven’t recorded whether the memorial to Aqim Selmani below was on the mountain road or seen on the other route the next day, but the latter is more likely, as much more of the fighting in 2001 was in the Tetovo area and the terrain looks less challenging. I found a clearer picture of the memorial on Facebook which shows his dates of birth and death as 4 April 1964 and 5 August 2001. Another source gives the date of his death as 5 August rather than 6 August. I have not found specific reference to the incident in which he was killed anywhere. The peace agreement that would end the conflict was on the verge of being signed over that August weekend in 2001, and the fighting was over only a couple of days later.

A small memorial of the 2001 conflict on the Macedonia/Kosovo border (on the way back into Kosovo we came by a more sensible route)
Close-up – the light was bad for details; putting photographs on tombstones is universal in the Balkans, whether Muslim, Orthodox or Catholic

The next day, we headed over to the west of Kosovo, and specifically to the Visoki Dečani Monastery. While I captioned the next picture as showing Montenegro, a check of the map suggests that the mountainsides visible here are on the Kosovo side of the border, though the frontier does run along the top of the range; but more crucially, it’s the border with Albania not Montenegro.

At the edge of the Kosovo plain, the mountains of Montenegro look down on us

The Visoki Dečani Monastery is one of the most important places for the Serbian Orthodox Shurch, and protection of its heritage was one of the sticking points in negotiation around the future status of Kosovo. I don’t remember if there were extra security checkpoints on the way in, and we probably would not have been allowed to take photos as they were. Perched in a steep-sided valley, it’s rather charming. Brian Aldiss wrote:

Of all the churches in Jugoslavia, Dečani seens the most lovely. Certainly it is the richest, and the air of serenity with which it stays among its surrounding dormitories, halls and orchards is impressive. Dečani looks eternal. It is a century older than Magdalen College, Oxford, two centuries older than Magdalene College, Cambridge, and was built when the medieval Serbian state was prospering… I wanted to stay near Dečani and visit it every day.

In 2006, the charm was offset by the tension over its future in a potentially independent Kosovo; which of course is why I was there.

View of Dečani monastery in its valley
Entrance to the monastery
The monastery church

A much younger me with Sava Janjić, who is the best known personality in the monastery. He became the abbot in 2011, five years after we met.

Fr Sava (the “cyber-monk”) and visitor, in front of the iconostasis
Plaque commemorating repairs to the church funded by the Ottoman Sultan in 1883 – Fr Sava snorted, “A big plaque for a rather small repair!”
Ancient frescos (perhaps dating from the 14th century) in Dečani

A couple of photos of iconography in Prishtina, first Ramush Haradinaj being the KLA leader and prime minister who had surrendered to the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague a year before (he was acquitted twice, and returned as PM in 2017-2020); and then Ibrahim Rugova, leader of Kosova before the conflict and president after, who had died just a few weeks before my 2006 visit – I also went to pay my respects at his grave, but we did not take photos there.

Ramush Haradinaj is still there…
…but Ibrahim Rugova isn’t

Finally we went to the battlefield where it all began, the Gazimestan where Slobodan Milošević gave his infamous 1989 speech which blew the starting whistle for the subsequent conflicts. I haven’t been in touch with my former colleague S for years, but I saw A in Kosovo last weekend where he entertained me for dinner with his wife and daughters (born some time after 2006), and M passes through Brussels frequently.

The memorial to the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, built in 1953, on a slightly misty day; with my colleagues S, A and M
S and A try to make sense of the official explanation of what happened in 1389
The Slovaks, with support from the Czechs, guard the Gazimestan memorial
Sometimes countries can split up amicably; and sometimes not

It’s OK to take pictures of the flags, just not of the military installations.

2024 pictures coming soon.

Return to Kosovo, by Gani Jakupi and Jorge González

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Second frame of third section:

I met Gani Jakupi at, of all things, a mutual friend’s standup comedy gig in Brussels a few months ago, and he kindly gave me two of his books; he is a comics writer based between Paris and Barcelona, and this was originally published in French as Retour au Kosovo. It’s a tremendous first person account of being in exile and seeing your home country on the news, not knowing if family are surviving; and then going back after the war is over to see what remains, and what can be reconstructed. It was published in 2014, but obviously has contemporary resonances at the human level with the Gaza war, even if there are significant differences in the geopolitics.

Jakupi’s take is humane and sane; he finds space for his traumatised relatives (several of his cousins were killed in a massacre) but also for the surviving Serbs; he has a wary approach to the internationals and to Kosovo’s new leaders. Jorge González has produced a tremendous artistic accompaniment to Jakupi’s script, with pastels conveying the shades of uncertainty in the situation, and some slippage into darker areas. Jakupi himself is a recognisable protagonist on every page, and I was pretty sure that I recognised a couple of other people who I know personally in the story.

This is one of the most remarkable graphic stories I have read this year. The French original is available here, but I don’t know how the average punter could get hold of the English translation; it was commissioned and published by the ProArte Institute in Kosovo, but that doesn’t even seem to have a website.

New State, Modern Statesman: Hashim Thaçi – A Biography, by Roger Boyer and Suzy Jagger

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

These horrors lurked for Kosovo, too. Arkan, rewarded for his slaughtering crusade in Bosnia, was put up as a candidate for Kosovo in the Serbian parliamentary elections. Surrounded by his thugs, he took up residence in Pristina’s Grand Hotel. Milošević, brushing off Arkan’s crimes to a Croatian envoy in November 1993, declared: ‘I too must have people to do certain kinds of dirty work for me.’ Then he laughed out loud. They weren’t laughing in Pristina. The candidacy of Arkan, says the Harvard-educated Minister of Dialogue Edita Tahiri, a formidable negotiator, ‘held up a mirror to the future of Serbian democracy.’

One of those books where I know the subject, and the subject matter, reasonably well. Hashim Thaçi emerged from the shadowy world of Kosovo exile politics to become one of the political leaders of the new polity after the war of 1998-99 (the West likes to think of the NATO conflict of 1999, but it started a year earlier). the biography is by two journalists from The Times of London; I got my copy from Thaçi himself at a book launch in London in 2018; the Albanian translation came out earlier this year.

The book is unashamedly partisan, but I did not spot any factual inaccuracies, and it covers all of the main events fairly. It digs into Thaçi’s own perceptions and intentions in depth. There aren’t a lot of first-person narratives from actors in the Balkan wars (though I did also read an extended interview with Ramush Haradinaj, twenty years ago). The book therefore shows the biases you would expect – including consistent hostility to Ibrahim Rugova, Kosovo’s pre-war leader, who I must agree was way out of his depth. (On the shelf in my office, I keep a rock that Rugova gave me the first time I met him.)

One of the areas where the book needs to tread gently is its coverage of the horrifying organ-smuggling allegations against Thaçi made by a former war crimes prosecutor and by members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I have always been astonished that anyone took these allegations seriously. It is an improbable scheme in the first place, and any attempt to implement it would have left an undeniably clear logistics trail. The EU was unable to find any evidence for it, likewise the Kosovo Specialist Chambers tribunal. It seems to me to be another Martinović case writ large. (If you don’t know about the Martinović case, lucky you, and I advise you not to Google it.)

Unfortunately the book doesn’t quite deliver on the promise in the blurb to explore how come the Kosovo intervention was largely successful when Iraq and Afghanistan failed. But there is a repeated emphasis that Thaçi was planning for the day after victory – how to get to independence, and also how to avoid the trap of becoming a mono-ethnic society. It’s fair to say that the Kosovo Liberation Army went in much less for civilian reprisals than its counterparts on all sides in Bosnia, and its leadership should get some credit for this. It’s also fair to say that Thaçi became the most important political figure in post-conflict Kosovo for a time, though his dominance was never complete or unchallenged, and that his rhetoric on ethnic relations was always responsible.

Anyway, I think that there are more comprehensive books about Kosovo and the Balkans out there, but I don’t think there is a more comprehensive book about Hashim Thaçi. You can get it here.

This was published in 2019, at the point when Thaçi was President of Kosovo but was also under pressure from the Kosovo Specialist Chambers tribunal in the Hague, which duly indicted him in 2020 for war crimes. The book obviously doesn’t cover that but I just want to say up front that the prosecution evidence is remarkably poor, and the key points have been refuted by the ranking US diplomat in Kosovo at the time. Like his rival Haradinaj, Thaçi surrendered immediately on his indictment, and Kosovo has complied fully with its obligations under international law. Not every state in the region has as good a record.

This was the shortest book on my shelves acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is The Geraldines; An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald

Glimmer of Hope, Glimmer of Flame, by Ag Apolloni

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Third paragraph (there are no separate sections in this 169 page book):

The works are lost, but the author remains. The most wonderful and the most woeful, tragediographic and tragic.

(English translateion by Robert Wilton)

I got this last month when the author launched it at a Kosovo Embassy event in Brussels, a short novel that was declared Kosovo’s Novel of the Year in 2020. It’s a quick but tough read, written in something of a stream-of-consciousness style, linking the stories of two women who lost most of their families in the 1999 conflict with the ancient Greek myths, most notably the story of Niobe as told in the lost play by Aeschylus (and Lemonnier’s 1772 vision of that story graces the front cover). The descriptions of the violence done to civilians by Serbian police and paramilitaries are visceral and vivid, and unapologetically (and rightly) one-sided. It takes a bit of patience to follow the twists between the interlinked stories, but I felt that my patience was rewarded. You can get it here.

The Kosova Liberation Army, by James Pettifer

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

In the chaotic new climate in Tirana, the Communist state remained intact at a formal level but was disintegrating from within. The party leader Ramiz Alia was interested in the possibility of freedom in Kosova and had seen the Irish Republican Army as a possible model for a military force against the Yugoslav People’s Army.11 When his interest became known to Western governments via their spies in Tirana, they feared a ‘Greater Albania’ might soon emerge if the old barriers between Tirana and Prishtina collapsed.12 Alia saw the secular, class-based ‘Official’ IRA as a much better model for the KLA than the Provisional IRA with its Catholic nationalist ideology.13 It is questionable, though, whether Alia and other Albanians really understood that it was the Provisionals who had shown the capacity to bring back guerrilla warfare to the streets of Western Europe for the first time since the Second World War, and the Official IRA had not.14 The LPK avoided contacts with radical Eastern bloc countries in this period — insofar as they still existed — and had never had contacts with countries like Cuba or radical Arab and Islamic states. The Albanian link was all-important to them.
11 Interview with James Pettifer, Tirana, see above.
12 This was a main preoccupation of British foreign intelligence officials in 1991-92.
13 Interview, Tirana, July 2005.
14 See B. Hanley and S. Millar, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers Party, London, 2010.

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. You can get it here.

The Ahtisaari Legacy: Resolve and Negotiate, ed. Nina Suomalainen and Jyrki Karvinen

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Second paragraph of third chapter (“The Right to be Buried”, by Helena Ranta):

When we boarded the plane again, there were only four Finns left. The plane flew low and the devastation of the war could be seen clearly as we approached Sarajevo Airport.

This is a lovely collection of eleven short papers by Finns involved with peace-making in the Balkans, pulled together to commemorate the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari in 2008. I myself worked with Ahtisaari quite a lot in the 2002-2008 period, and the collection was given to me by co-editor Nina Suomalainen. He is ill now, but I am sure that he appreciated this collection at the time.

These are all very good papers. Contributors include Ahtisaari himself, three others who I know personally (Olli Rehn, Alpo Rusi and Kai Sauer), and also Elisabeth Rehn – who was defeated by Ahtisaari in the 1994 presidential election – and the late Harri Holkeri, who I knew by sight from both the Northern Ireland peace talks, where he was one of George Mitchell’s co-chairs, and his stint as head of the UN in Kosovo.

The Finns have a reputation for being somewhat silent (the joke is that you can tell an extrovert Finn, because they look at your shoes), but these are all eloquent accounts of personal experience in a region where the Finns felt needed and useful. Most of the details are about Kosovo at its different stages, with both Ahtisaari and Sauer giving their accounts of the diplomatic process that led to independence, and Holkeri trying to give his own side of the story to explain his disastrous tenure. (Ahtisaari pushed for his appointment, which was surely a mistake.)

But I learned most from two people I had not heard of; Arto Räty gives an account of what it is like to be a peacekeeper in a NATO mission at a time when Finland’s relationship with NATO was less comfortable than it is now, and Terhi Nieminen-Mäkynen tells us about being the unelected, UN-appointed mayor of the southern Kosovo town of Prizren.

The other thing I learned – though of course the authors are a self-selected and not necessarily representative sample – is that Finns feel quite strongly about the Balkans. Their own nation emerged from conflict and spent most of the twentieth century uneasily balance between two blocs; older Finns can recall when they and Tito’s Yugoslavia were the lynchpins of the Non-Aligned Movement, and Helsinki hosted the signing of the Final Act which laid the groundwork for the peaceful ending of the Cold War fifteen years later.

I should note that Finns feel equally strongly, if not more so, about Ukraine, having themselves emerged from a century of Russian dominance. The current war has pushed them directly to join NATO. It did not always look inevitable. I remember a lunch in Kyiv in 2005 where I was sitting between Martti Ahtisaari and Thorvald Stoltenberg, the former Norwegian foreign minister. Stoltenberg leaned across me to say, “Martti! Congratulations! I hear that you have tripled the support for NATO membership in Finland!” Ahtisaari replied, “Yes! From 5% to 15%!” That was then, this is now, and Stoltenberg’s son is now the NATO Secretary-General.

Unfortunately this book is out of print and there seem to be no second-hand copies available, so I can’t supply my usual “get it here” link, and I am all the more grateful to Nina for giving it to me in 2016. I’m ashamed to say however that this was the non-fiction book which had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Diary of a Witchcraft Shop 2 by Trevor Jones and Liz Williams.

The Road To Kosovo: A Balkan Diary, by Greg Campbell

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

He was right to warn me: beyond Zagreb the autobahn fed right into the type of road I was doomed to travel for the remainder of the journey: a narrow ribbon of crumbling asphalt that was barely wide enough for two cars abreast, much less the dense traffic of cargo trucks that are constructed more of lumber than of steel, buses that look like something that was just pried off the Titanic, and horse-drawn wagons carrying four-story haystacks. Of course, there are other obstacles, such as steep mountains, shoulders seeded with PMA-2 antipersonnel land mines, random police checkpoints that always seem to be located at the end of a patch of road-top gravel on a blind curve, sudden narrow business districts springing from the hillsides as if from a children’s pop-up book, and a motley collection of pedestrians in various stages of fatigue-induced dementia staggering in the roadway … usually leading a herd of goats and hens and carrying a stack of 2-by~4s. All this is navigated at breakneck speeds and a thorough disregard for safety and curves.

Returning to the Balkans, I had a good read of this book by a Colorado journalist, sent to the Balkans by the Boulder Weekly and immediately immersed in a conflict that he struggled to understand. Of course, he is writing for the well-meaning Colorado reader who wants to be thrilled and informed, and not for me; I found the breathlessness a bit exasperating at times. (Though I did cheer on the couple of occasions when people who I know personally appeared on the page.)

I’ve read a lot of Balkan war stories over the years, and this one stands out for two paradoxical reasons. First, Campbell totally absorbs and regurgitates the collective narrative of the Balkan press corps at any given time – so he accurately reflects the media consensus without especially critiquing it. But second, he has a good eye for human detail, even if he doesn’t always put two and two together. His chapters on Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 are particularly good on incidental observation. So I was duly entertained by it, if not always in the way the author had intended.

You can get it here.

The Kosovo Indictment, by Michael O’Reilly

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Several children and a pregnant woman were among the 24 people killed in these two actions, most of them from just two families – Ahmeti and Sejdiu. Both families were associated with the KLA and the evidence suggests that both attempted to resist the Serb attack but were quickly overwhelmed.

I know the author of this book, and I know the subject, and I know many people mentioned in the book (including Søren Jessen-Petersen, who wrote the foreword). It’s an account of the war crimes trial of Ramush Haradinaj, briefly Prime Minister of Kosovo, written by a leading member of his defence team. There is a lot of well-crystallised historical information about the roots of the Kosovo conflict and Haradinaj’s role in it, and also a lot of excoriating analysis of the weakness of the prosecution case (Haradinaj was in the end acquitted, twice). I did not spot any errors in the former, and so am more inclined to trust the author on the latter.

The core argument of the book is a strong case that the prosecution of Haradinaj and others was launched as a political sop to the government of Serbia in order to encourage Belgrade to cooperate with the international tribunal. The facts are that the final batch of indictments by ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) included seven high-ranking non-Serbs, every one of whom was ultimately acquitted; but Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić, the two highest-ranking Bosnian Serb fugitives, were handed over by Serbia shortly after the indictments were issued. One may draw one’s own conclusions. You can get the book here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves (sorry Michael). Next on that pile is Political Animals, by Bev Laing.

Three books about Kosovo

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I am working on a small project about Kosovo at the moment, and improving my reading around the subject. No detailed write-ups as those are for my project notes.

Kosovo: A Short History, by Noel Malcolm. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Unfortunately there is very little direct evidence about conditions in Kosovo during those earlier centuries of Bulgarian and Byzantine rule. We can assume that the Slav population that had settled in Kosovo was brought within the cultural realm of the Bulgarian empire, which means that it would have been included in the Bulgarian dioceses of the Orthodox church. Thanks to the work of Saints Cyril and Methodius (and their followers) in the ninth century, the Slavs had a liturgy and other texts in their own language, written in either of two newly invented alphabets: Cyrillic and Glagolitic. The western macedonian town of Ohrid developed strongly as a cultural and religious centre in the ninth and tenth centuries, and by the end of Tsar Samuel’s reign the archbishopric of Ohrid included bishoprics in Skopje, Lipljan (Alb.: Lipjan; a town just south of Pristina) and Prizren.1 Although the formal division of the Christian Church into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox did not occur until 1054, it would not be anachronistic to describe this Bulgarian Christianity as Eastern in the ninth and tenth centuries; the roots of the conflict between East and West went back a long way. (The Slav liturgy was at first violently rejected by the Roman Church, on the grounds that God spoke only three languages: Hebrew, Greek and Latin).
1 Gelzer, Patriarchat, p. 4; Gjini, Ipeshkivia, pp. 79-80.

Magisterial stuff, which unfortunately takes us only to 1997 and the emergence of the KLA. Unlikely to be bettered as a summary of historical knowledge, especially in the medieval period. You can get it here.

Stability Operations in Kosovo 1999-2000: A Case Study, by Jason Fritz. Second paragraph of third chapter:

The President and NATO members supported an air campaign because it excluded the obligation of ground forces, pressured Milosevic toward compliance, and limited allied exposure to losses. The rejection of a ground option satisfied domestic political interests across the Alliance, but limited the seriousness of the threat posed to Milosevic. NATO publicly ruled out ground forces to assuage citizens concerned about starting a new war, but the announcement also signaled to Serbia the limits of U.S. and NATO commitment.94 The guidance from the NCA, discussed in the following section as the plan developed, provided a limited set of strikes to draw Serbia back to negotiations, going so far as to give a break in hostilities to signal NATO’s preference for a bargain, while allowing for an accelerated series of strikes if that failed. Theoretically it was an ideal strategic approach: a limited use of force to compel the adversary to a negotiated settlement. It limited friendly, enemy, and civilian casualties, did not tie down U.S. forces into an occupation, and while Serbian allies such as Russia would disapprove, it was limited enough to keep Russia on the sidelines. Of importance after the operation began, not only did NATO reject a ground component, it refused to plan for any contingency that included ground forces in Kosovo.
94 Nardulli et al., Disjointed War: Military Operations in Kosovo, 1999, 22–23.

Looks at the NATO intervention, especially the air campaign in 1999, from the perspective of lessons to be learned by the US military, of which the most general conclusion is that it is sensible to think ahead of what the political leaders say they want this week, and plan for what they might want next week. You can get it here.

The Smell of War, by Roland Bartetzko. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Be a little coward! Take it easy in the beginning and don’t volunteer for any dangerous assignments. Wear your body protection, even when the whole squad is laughing at you.

Personal account of a German who fought for the Croats in Bosnia and for the KLA in Kosovo. Author subsequently convicted of murder, attempted murder and terrorism for a post-war bomb attack on a Serbian government office. You can get it here, but I think you can give it a miss.