Balkanalysis.com

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 Saakashvili [...]

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 exaggerated. On 20 August, [...]

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

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 [...]

“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 in the style of Tom Clancy, the [...]

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 music; one hears, in the rich, [...]

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 account [...]

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 National Movement [...]

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 rock concerts, the proliferation of colors and slogans, the shocking [...]

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 the suppression of leaders [...]