Balkanalysis.com

Archive for August, 2005

Classic Balkanalysis: Georgia, the Unlikely War State

This analysis, originally published one year ago, recounts the heated events leading up to Georgia’s stymied attempt at starting a war with its neighbors. Although he had been empowered by the Americans in the so-called ‘Rose Revolution,’ President Mikheil Saakashvili learned that there is a limit to everything.
The aggressive tone Georgian President Mikheil [...]

Cretan ëDrug Lordsí Defend Fields with Land Mines, Albanian Armed Guards

It used to be that Albanians on the Greek island of Crete were just there to pick olives, build buildings and work in menial restaurant jobs. However, now they seem to have become the armed guards of Cretan village ‘drug lords’ – though this description of the latter might be somewhat [...]

Guns for the Sultan

Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire
By Gábor Ágoston
Cambridge University Press (2005), 277 pp., 20 illustrations, 4 maps, 32 tables
Reviewed by Christopher Deliso
Hungarian scholar Gábor Ágoston, an Associate Professor of History at Georgetown, has in Guns for the Sultan done marvelous [...]

Generalissimo el Busho: Essays & Cartoons on the Bush Years

Generalissimo el Busho: Essays & Cartoons on the Bush Years
By Ted Rall
NBM Publishing (2004), 283 pages, numerous cartoons
Reviewed by Christopher Deliso
Avowed liberal and Bush-hater Ted Rall sets his sites on the “resident” president in this anthology of essays and cartoons compiled from 2000-2004. Precisely because his political views are spelled out with [...]

Classic Balkanalysis: An Improbable War and Turkey’s New Opportunities

“We want dialogue with the U.S., not war,” says Turkish author Burak Turna. “We have written this book to prevent a war.”
The book of which Turna speaks, Metal Firtina (”Metal Storm” in Turkish) has become a runaway bestseller in Turkey over the past couple months. A thriller [...]

Music of the Ottoman Empire: Turkish Classic Music

Music of the Ottoman Empire: Turkish Classic Music
ARC Music (2001), 1 CD: 10 tracks (57:10)
Released by world music specialist ARC Music of Great Britain, Music of the Ottoman Empire is an invigorating compilation of Turkish classical music by 19th century Ottoman composers. This is big music, regal [...]

Crimes of the Fascist Occupants: the Holocaust in Yugoslavia

The Crimes of the Fascist Occupants and their Collaborators against the Jews in Yugoslavia
Jasenovac Research Institute, 2005 (in Serbian, with summary in English)
Reviewed by Christopher Deliso
Originally compiled by a former Yugoslav army captain and concentration camp survivor and published by the Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia in 1952, this detailed [...]

Bargaining in Bulgaria: the Aftermath of the June 2005 Parliamentary Elections

By Vassia Gueorguieva*
For more than a month after the parliamentary elections on June 25th, the political forces in Bulgaria have been unable to strike a deal to form a new coalition government.
As predicted by polls, the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) won the majority of the votes (34%) followed by the incumbent [...]

Revolution Industry, Phase 2: Ukraine’s Summer of Discontent

By Christopher Deliso
I deliberately did not write anything about Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” when it was going down 10 months ago. Really, what to say? Everything about it was so depressingly predictable that there was nothing left to the imagination: the student protests, the staged [...]

Turkey Purges Army of Islamists, Terrorism and Military Buildup Continue

It was always meant to be the bulwark of the modern-day Turkish Republic’s secular state and, since the time of founding father Ataturk, the military has lived up to this creed, exercising inordinate power in Turkish politics and society. It has helped to propagate the ubiquitous cult of Ataturk, and demanded [...]

Faced with Losing Kosovo, Serbian Church Moves to Assert Itself Elsewhere

The three-year saga of Jovan the Schismatic – the defrocked Macedonian puppet-monk who has been installed from afar as Archbishop of Ohrid by the Serbian Orthodox Church – seems to be winding down, which is somewhat unfortunate since it has been so entertainingly ridiculous.
-’You can’t use ‘entertaining’ as an adverb!’ –’Yeah, [...]

Requiem for the Unreal Real World

by Christopher Deliso
The last few weeks of carnage and hubbub in London left me with both a shudder and a sigh of relief: “At least here in Macedonia, we don’t live in the ‘real world,’” I thought to myself. “Hey, who cares about [...]

Croatian PM: We Are Proud of Operation Storm

Balkan memorials and anniversaries tend to be bathed in blood, and Friday’s planned gala event in Zagreb – a commemoration of the 10th anniversary of ‘Operation Storm’ is no exception. Far from being an occasion for shame, at least in Croatia, the single biggest act of ethnic cleansing in Europe since [...]

Military History of Macedonia

Military History of Macedonia
 By Dr. Vance Stojcev
Skopje Military Academy (2004), 2 volume box set; 775 pages, 115 full-color maps and 13 appendices, ISBN: 9989-134-05-7
In this interview/review, emeritus member of the Macedonian Military Academy Dr. Vance Stojcev discusses his career as a military historian in the former Yugoslavia and in modern-day Macedonia, [...]

Balkanalysis.com- Back in Action

Balkanalysis.com is back! We apologize to readers who suffered through technical problems over the past few weeks- we changed servers and had various bugs to work out, but now hopefully everything has been resolved.
Stay tuned for lots of interesting new reports, starting with tomorrow’s interview with Macedonia’s foremost military historian, author of a controversial [...]