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Kosovo

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Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

When Secrets Bloom by Patricia Furstenberg

Paul & Kiki's Guide to Vacationing in Italy by Paul Stuart

Adventure Travel & Exploration In Europe

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Books About Kosovo

13 books — 10 voters

The Troika of Osip Teitelbaum by Grant Patterson

A History of Eastern Europe by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

Come to This Court and Cry by Linda Kinstler

A History of Eastern Europe Suggested Readings

57 books — 13 voters

The New Ukrainian Cookbook by Annette Ogrodnik Corona

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The Immigrant and the Golden Coin by Dorothy May Mercer

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

novels for when you wish you knew more about what you see on tv

83 books — 51 voters

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West

The Balkans

296 books — 229 voters

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“ Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a fo Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews? I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action. ...more ”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

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“ ...the problem of Kosovo has simmered until Slobodan Milošević, Serbia's nationalistic prime minister, brought it back to the boil by his efforts to incorporate Kosovo into his fiefdom by depriving the great bulk of the population, the Albanians of Kosovo, of their political, civil and, in some instances, human rights. Serbia's communist party is the only one in Eastern Europe to have retained popular support; a trick pulled off by Milošević by his astute identification of the party with the mos ...more ”
― Walter Perrie, Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe

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