Albania

Kosovo: War and Revenge

Tim Judah lived in Belgrade from 1990 to 1995, reporting for the London Times and the New York Review of Books; and when the "ethnic cleansing" started in Kosovo, he was there. So his Kosovo: War and Revenge is well placed to offer some insights, variously scathing and compassionate, on the whole, sorry mess. It doesn't matter how many Serbian tanks you (allegedly) knock out with your high-tech bombing raids, "since the most potent weapon in ethnic cleansing is the cigarette lighter needed to set houses on fire." And Judah can evoke the madness of Kosovo in a single, startling set piece: vengeful Albanians rampaging through a Serbian Orthodox priest's house, smashing icons, stealing candles; French soldiers from KFOR "looking on amiably"; a nearby Gypsy house also on fire; and a passing French commander explaining to an open-mouthed Judah that the official NATO policy at this moment is "to let them pillage." Paraphrasing a Belgrade journalist, he notes sadly that Serbia has still not found its Adenauer, nor Kosovo its Mandela, which is what both so desperately need. The introductory chapter, summarizing Kosovo's tortured and tortuous history, is better rendered in Noel Malcolm's Kosovo: A Short History, and for a wider overview of the Balkans themselves, one would certainly prefer Misha Glenny's The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers 1809-1999. For an acerbic and perceptive personal account, however, Judah's book is hard to beat. --Christopher Hart, Amazon.co.uk

This is a revealing account of how Kosovo became the crucible of one of the twentieth century's most poisonous ethnic conflicts. Written by a seasoned journalist who witnessed the Balkan conflagration and its aftermath, the book presents a gripping analysis of the origins of the Serb-Albanian conflict, the course of the battle, the issues and personalities, and options for the future. In this second edition Tim Judah updates the story to, and beyond, the fall of Milosevic.

The Albanians: A Modern History

Albanian Escape: The True Story of U.S. Army Nurses Behind Enemy Lines

On November 8, 1943, U.S. Army nurse Agnes Jensen stepped out of a cold rain into a C-53 transport plane. But she and twelve other nurses never arrived in Bari, Italy, where they were to transport wounded soldiers to hospitals farther from the front lines. A violent storm and pursuit by German Messerschmitts led to a crash landing in a remote part of Albania, leaving the nurses, their team of medics, and flight crew stranded in German-occupied territory.

What followed was a dangerous nine-week game of hide-and-seek with the enemy, a situation President Roosevelt monitored daily. Albanian partisans aided the stranded Americans in the search for a British Intelligence Mission, and the group began a long and hazardous journey to the Adriatic coast. During the following weeks, they crossed Albania's second highest mountain in a blizzard, were strafed by German planes, managed to flee a town moments before it was bombed, and watched helplessly as an attempt to airlift them out was foiled by German forces.

Albanian Escape is the suspense-filled story of the only group of Army flight nurses to have crash-landed and spent any length of time in occupied territory during World War II. The nurses and soldiers endured fridgid weather, survived on little food, and literally wore out their shoes trekking across the rugged countryside. Thrust into a perilous situation and determined to survive, these women found courage and strength in each other and in the kindnesses of Albanians and guerrillas who hid them from the Germans.

Albanian Identities: Myth and History

The Case for Kosova: Passage to Independence

This book makes the case for the independence of Kosova - the former province of `old-Yugoslavia', temporarily a United Nations-led International protectorate - at a time in which international diplomacy is deeply involved in solving the contested issue of its final status. Negotiations began in January 2006 under the auspices of a United Nations Special Envoy, and have been given renewed impulse by the international community's determination to arrive at a solution. "The Case for Kosova" aims to contribute to these negotiations, by providing informed arguments for a different approach to the issue of Kosova's status beyond the limitations of current debates. It's aim is to counteract the anti-Albanian propaganda waged by some parties, but never to propose a counter-propaganda hostile to others or to the goals of democratic Kosova.

King Zog of Albania: Europe's Self-Made Muslim Monarch

"An outstanding biography of the most unusual and controversial king of the 20th century. Highly recommended."—CHOICE

"Vivid and atmospheric, but based on solid and scrupulous research, this is an outstanding account of one of the most intriguing figures in twentieth-century Balkan history. Non-specialists will read it with pleasure and fascination, and even specialists in Albanian history will find much to learn here from Jason Tomes's marvelously lucid analysis of the politics and diplomacy of the period."
—Noel Malcolm, author of Bosnia: A Short History and Kosovo: A Short History

"Very well researched, critical yet balanced, this is the best book about Zog to have appeared in any language."
—Bejtullah Destani, Director of the Centre for Albanian Studies

Shortly before 5 p.m. on Saturday, September 1, 1928, Europe gained a new kingdom and its only Muslim king: 32-year-old Zog I of the Albanians. Few foreign journalists were present in the Parliament House in Tirana to hear him swear his oath on the Koran and the Bible, yet the birth of the Kingdom of Albania—a native monarchy, not an alien imposition—did not go unnoticed abroad.

King Zog (1895-1961) was a curiosity, and so he has remained: the most atypical European monarch of the twentieth century, a man entirely without royal connections who created his own kingdom. By contemporaries, he was variously labeled "the last ruler of romance," "an appalling gangster," "the modern Napoleon," "the finest patriot," and "frankly a cad." Even today his reputation is disputed, but Zog is undeniably one of the foremost figures in Albanian history. Though notorious for cut-throat political intrigue, he promised to bring order and progress to a land that had long known little of either. "It was I who made Albania," he claimed.

Zog's reign ended in 1939; Italian Fascists forced him into exile and post-war Stalinists kept him there despite his best efforts to return. In this first full biography, Jason Tomes explores the reality behind the man described in The Times as "the bizarre King Zog" and shows him to have been the product of a unique time and place. Tomes invites readers to set aside their assumptions about modern European monarchy and meet a king who fired back at assassins and paid his bills with gold bullion.

The Albanian Question: Reshaping the Balkans

Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo

The ethnic conflicts in the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo are often bewildering to readers without a grounding in the tangled history of the Balkans. Miranda Vickers, the leading English-language student of Albanian history, does much to clarify the situation with this thorough account of the tiny region, a fertile, mountain-ringed plateau whose Serbian name means something like "place of the blackbirds." That bucolic place name, however, does not speak to the violence that has been visited on the land for centuries.

Kosovo, as Vickers writes, has long been a place where different cultures--Slavic, Albanian, Jewish, Turkish, and Central Asian--have met and, at times, either peacefully coexisted or battled bitterly. The lines of division, Vickers proves again and again, have never been clearly drawn. The debate in the 1990s, as it was in the Middle Ages, is over which group has the clearest ancestral claim to Kosovo: the Muslim Albanians, who make up about 90 percent of Kosovo's population and trace their roots to the ancient Illyrians, hold that it is theirs, while Orthodox Serbs, defeated by the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, similarly claim that their long presence in the region gives them dominion over it--a claim that, Vickers writes, "derives purely from history and emotion." History and emotion are powerful motivators, of course, as demonstrated by the Serbian nationalists who now seek to thwart ethnic Albanian attempts to unite Kosovo with Albania itself. (The issue is complicated, Vickers contends, by the presence of many Serb fighters in the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army who are not native to the region, but mercenary veterans of the now-dormant civil war in neighboring Bosnia.) After centuries of inhabiting parallel worlds, in Vickers's useful metaphor, these two groups are now drawing on the memories of centuries of conflict to shape the present. The result is a continuing legacy of bloodshed and hatred that has captured the attention of the world. --Gregory McNamee

Little notice has been paid to the growing ethnic and religious tensions within the Serbian province of Kosovo-tensions that now pose a serious threat to the security of the Balkans. Miranda Vickers explores the roots of this conflict, and tracks the recent trajectory of Serbian and Albanian relations in Kosovo. The first third of the book outlines the history of Kosovo during the medieval and Ottoman periods, when relations between the two communities were generally good. The second part of the book examines Kosovo since 1945, when the area fell under Serbian administration in the socialist Yugoslav system. Vickers concludes by surveying the steady deterioration in Serb-Albanian relations since the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1981. With careful detail, she reveals how a largely peaceful, politically driven campaign for the independence of Kosovo has recently turned to violence with terrorist attacks on Serb political and military institutions, on Albanians thought to be collaborating with the Serbs, and on Serbs themselves. In the process, the author provides a balanced account of the Serb and Albanian positions, while placing much of the blame for the current situation on the repressive policies of Serb dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

Tomorrow You Die: "You are a traitor. . .and traitors are shot." (International Adventures) (International Adventure)

Reona Peterson Joly and Evey Muggleton Heckman never dreamed of the adventure and danger that lay before them as they attended a short-term missions school in Switzerland. Then, as the two young women sought God, they began to sense a burden for the mysterious, isolated nation of Albania - a nation unlike any other.

In the 1970s Albania's leaders boasted that theirs was the first completely atheistic nation in the world. Closed to almost all outsiders, Communist Albania particularly wanted no contact with Christians. In this nation that had sealed Christian citizens in barrels and rolled them into the sea, preaching the gospel was punishable by death.

Willing participants in God's plan, yet unsure of how He would lift their burden, Reona and Evey took the first small steps of faith. Through a miraculous set of events, the two young believers were drawn into the danger and intrigue of being God's undercover agents in a nation that officially despised Him.

On every continent, in every nation, God is at work in and through the lives of believers. From the streets of Manila to mysterious Albania to the jungles of Ecuador and beyond. This and every title in the International Adventures series emerges as a dramatic episode that could be directed only by the hand of God. There are 12 books in this series.

The Albanians: An Ethnic History from Prehistoric Times to the Present