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Kosovo: War and Revenge. By Tim Judah. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-300-08354-8. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xx, 348. $17.95.
Publicist and historian Tim Judah reported on the Yugoslav wars for a number of publications including the London Times, the London Observer, and the Sunday Telegraph. Soon after the end of these wars, the biggest military conflict in Europe after the Second World War, he described the events and background of the war in Kosovo in the book under review here. He correctly identifies the war as a conflict between Serb and Yugoslav forces on the one hand, and the KLA, the Albanian population, and the NATO military machine on the other. The author had previously published a prize-winning book in 1997 entitled The Serbs: History, Myth, and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. These two books demonstrate his excellent knowledge of the history of the peoples and circumstances of the former Yugoslavia.
Kosovo: War and Revenge traces the conflict between the Serbs and Albanians from its origins, and emphasises the period of the 1980s and 1990s and the war that resulted in the intervention of the NATO alliance (p. xviii). In this context, the author seeks an answer to the question as to how Serbia's fate can be so strongly attached to Kosovo as to bring it to the brink of poverty and isolation (p. xvii).
The book's ten chapters can be divided into three major contextual parts: 1-Kosovo up to the death of Josip Broz Tito (pp. 1-40);...