Customer Rating: 
Summary: Tragedy Without End
Comment: Perhaps nothing explains more about the reason for the war in Kosovo then a chart on page 313 showing the population change in Serbia from 1948 to 1991. The Albanian population ballooned from 498,242 to 1,606,690 while the Serb population barely budged from 171,911 to 195,301. Two groups, one Muslim the other Christian, old rivals, each claiming the tradition and ownership of Serbia. During World War II the Serbs sided with the allies inspiring many as the "Serbian David standing up to the Austro-Hungarian-German Goliath." Meanwhile the Albanians took up with the Axis gaining, "an unenviable reputation, apparently preferring rape, pillage and murder to fighting, particularly in Serbian areas". The Albanians managed to appall even the Nazi's (if that seems possible) who eventually disarmed them. Is it surprising that a people who were savaged in the past would fear and loathe a group that was so decidedly winning the population war?
It takes a bit of the book to get your bearings what with Albania and Kosovo and Serbia and Bosnia and Montenegro and on and on. It all becomes very confusing but basically it boils down to the Albanians and Serbians reveling in abusing each other whenever the opportunity arises. It's an age old battle with each side claiming ownership of the same piece of land. In this particular conflict the Albanians started by taking a Gandhi like tact of passive resistance towards the Serbian abuses unfortunately this was a failure and in Srebrenica, Bosnia 8000 Muslim men were massacred creating a popular guerilla movement.
I can remember how, after the NATO bombing ended, Slobodan Milosevic was described as a modern day Hitler but the author paints a very different picture. The author writes, "When trying to comprehend Milosevic it is vital to understand that the man has no long-term vision. His main interest is power and keeping it." Apparently Milosevic was more of a tin-pot dolt than a master strategist with his biggest blunder being the deporting of hundreds of thousands of Kosovars. Thinking that NATO was bluffing about bombing would run a close second. There were no grand designs or extra-regional desires. Milosevic was more a product of desperation.
In the end the NATO bombing forced Milosevic from power and now he's dead but the questions remain. Was it right to use NATO against a sovereign country which had not attacked any of them without a Security Council mandate? The Serbians had suffered at the hands of the Albanians and thus took revenge until NATO stepped in but afterwards almost a quarter of a million Serbs and others were forced to flee or find themselves ethnically cleansed. It was the Serbs who were now having their homes burned and their churches looted. The author writes, "While Albanians take their revenge today, the time may come for the Serbs to take theirs" So what was achieved in the end? As the author wrote the biggest lesson of Kosovo may be that no lessons were learned. It's just one more bloody example of ethnic hatred and revenge added to a very long list.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Comment: Definitely the best book about Kosovo conflict 1998-1999, although it goes briefly through the entire Kosovo's history with increasing coverage as the time is progressing. The book treats fairly Albanian and Serb side.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Well researched, documented, and thought provoking.
Comment: This is a worthy exposé on the conflict in Kosovo. This work includes some provocative ideas as to Kosovo, and the numerous other conflagrations across the world, e.g.
 ...much of the Kosovo conflict can be related to the fact that too many Serbs have never been willing or able to rid themselves of the idea that the Albanians, with whom they shared a state for the best part of a century, were not to be treated as equals. P 16
 Serbian and Albanian propagandists now went to war armed with statistics, lies and half-truths, which far from helping either side in the long-run, were to embitter communal relations, pave the way for the rise of Milosevic, the destruction of Yugoslavia and the deaths of tens of thousands. Pp 43-44
 ...many Kosovars successfully convinced many Westerners that the question of Kosovo was really one of human rights. In fact it was not. P 84
 ...the police were not trained as specialists anti-insurgency fighters and so they had no idea how to take on a vastly popular guerrilla movement without driving out the village populations who gave them shelter and burning their houses. P 167
Hopefully, this book along with others will spark an interest and further study into solutions to current and future state of affairs involving low intensity conflict and law enforcement.
 Despite this grim picture, it is also undeniable that huge progress has also been made. Serbs and Albanians are both being trained together for a new Kosovo Police Service.
 Diplomacy is often viewed as a rather impersonal affair, in which men and women represent their countries and, in that sense, are all interchangeable. In fact, diplomacy is like anything else and personalities, contacts and friendships all count for something. P 275
 ...optimistic UNMIK officials say that the future of Kosovo is `a process' which has only just begun. Citing the examples of Northern Ireland, South Africa and Israel and the Palestinians, one said that, before any talks began, it would be `difficult and unnecessary to focus on the endgame'. P 301
Customer Rating:
Summary: Judah beats authors to the punch year after war
Comment: Overall, this is a much better book than Judah's previous work, Serbs. It appeared hardly a year after the conflict in Kosovo, and with the wealth of material that has appeared about Serbia, Kosovo, and Milosevic, it is slightly dated in its tone, though the many quotes and accounts of the happenings on the ground are valuable. The dirty secrets of this conflict are touched upon: the recruitment of hardcore criminals to become members of MUP (interior ministry police who were tapped to murder civilians and suspected terrorists), the elaborate chain of command that Milosevic worked while avoiding any paperwork that could tie him directly to any war crimes, the flat out aggression by NATO against the civilian population of Serbia, the heightened humanitarian crisis that the bombing actually produced, etc.
While the Serbs are generally the Nazis of the 90s during the Balkan wars, with the Kosovo conflict it is Milosevic who begins to bear the brunt of the blame, while the Serb people are hapless bystanders punished for their support of a de facto dictator whose cynicism sealed his own fate.
The Kosovo war is beginning to take on a strange tint. The 'humanitarian' reasons for the war are suspect at best. The massive NATO bombing helped escalate the waves of violence on boths sides. It also helped them slap together a hasty indictment against Milosevic and his top brass, all charged with war crimes that occurred after NATO started dropping bombs on their heads. Go figure. Meanwhile, it was known from the outset that no ground troops would ever enter Kosovo or Serbia, so there was an expected rise in the ethnic cleansing.
What's interesting is also the cover. It shows the side of a building with a massive hole, the kind usually produced by bombing. Peering out is an Albanian man, suggesting that the 'humanitarian intervention' is, of course, anything but.
Perhaps not stressed enough is the wealth of disinformation about the conflict itself. The number of suspected dead was grossly exaggerated, the damage done to the Yugoslav army grossly exaggerated, and the overall success of the war completely questionable. Is it humanitarian intervention to blow apart a country from above while exacerbating the crisis you claim to be reversing? In many ways, Kosovo was a manufactured war against a trumped-up bogeyman. In a post 9/11 world, does this sound familiar?
The war did not solve the Kosovo issue, far from it. Its product was revenge killings of Serbs who had lived in the province for generations, while giving legitimacy to glorified terrorist organizations like the KLA, which officially disbanded, only to appear in modified form later, attacking people in Serbia proper while the UN stood around and watched. It also strained relations between the US and Russia and with China. It was a heavily protested war in Europe, and it didn't help when the Chinese Embassy was blown up 'accidentally' when it was clearly marked on common street maps of Belgrade. Oops! With characteristic contempt for international law, Clinton had his own war of aggression.
Of interest in this book are the accounts of some of the murderers, who speak in frank terms about their job. Overall, this is a better piece of work than the distorted book, Serbs.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent coverage of Kosovo's recent history
Comment: When fighting in Kosovo began breaking out and hitting news tabloids in mid-1998, the problem was that few people knew about this region's history, let alone its location on the globe. No one could quite understand the motives of Serbs and Albanians, who were at odds with each other. When NATO began bombing rump Yugoslavia for its conduct against Kosovo Albanian civilians, uncritical (and heavily biased) media reports and press coverage were the only source of information that one could turn to for background. While this may have been better than nothing, this information was far from providing a critical and satisfactory explanation and understanding. This was the case, until Tim Judah wrote his second book, the current one now under review. Judah is a Balkan expert, who speaks numerous languages (including Serbo-Croatian and Albanian) and has written several articles for many newspapers and magazines throughout the world. His previous book ("The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia" [New Haven, 1997 and 2000]) put the Bosnian war into its proper context, while the current puts Kosovo into its respective context. The first chapter is a short, condensed history of Kosovo leading up to the end of the Second World War, while the next sizable portion of the book details key events and personalities throughout the 1980s and 1990s that shaped modern-day Kosovo and unwittingly turned it toward a war-path. Judah discusses the outbreaks of violence in late 1997, the failed efforts of Western diplomats in stopping the bloodshed, a critical and thrilling chapter chronicling the failed Rambouillet peace accords in February 1999, a chapter chronicling NATO's 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, and the aftermath of Kosovo's tragic conflict: vengeful Albanians returning home and killing Serbs and Roma.
Integral to Judah's work is his assessment of NATO's conduct in the conflict. His thesis is that the entire war was one of "human error," where Western diplomats foolishly believed that they could make Serbia's Milosevic back down within one week. Milosevic, on the other hand, believed NATO to be bluffing and took the alleged bluff. Tensions mounted within the NATO alliance, other world superpowers (in the military sense, aka. Russia and China) began bracing themselves for toil with the US, while Albanian and Serb civilians were either massacred or blown up by NATO's firepower. Totally unprepared of what to expect, NATO carried out blunder after blunder, failed to stop massacres in Kosovo and perhaps made the Balkans even more tense and unstable than before.
It is imperative that readers consult Judah's work for every meticulous detail surrounding Kosovo's recent history. Readers should consult other recent works in understanding Kosovo's ancient past to determine if Serbs really have rightful historical claims to the province, for Judah's first chapter is merely a primer. Of course, there are those critics out there that will cite, as I mentioned in another review, that Judah is not a "professional historian." It is likely that his knowledge, experience and excellent writing style makes his book more valuable and a much better, thrilling and informative read than the work of any academic.
