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.
