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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mediterranean Odyssey,
By Carl Savich (Detroit, MI, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: THE INNER SEA: THE MEDITERRANEAN AND ITS PEOPLE (Hardcover)
Robert Fox, a defense analyst, historian, and a journalist for the BBC, the London Daily Telegraph, and the Evening Standard, traversed the Mediterranean from 1984 to 1991, visiting all the countries and the islands in "the inner sea". The Mediterranean was termed the "the inner sea" by ancient cartographers, while the ancient Greeks called it "the wine-dark sea" and the ancient Egyptians "the Great Green Sea". The Inner Sea: The Mediterranean and Its People, is his synthesis of the history, cultures, societies, ethnic, religious, and political conflicts in this mosaic of peoples.
Fox worked as a journalist and broadcaster since 1967. He was a reporter and correspondent for the BBC from 1968 to 1987. He reported on the Falklands conflict in 1982, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland. He was the chief foreign correspondent and defense analyst for the Daily Telegraph in 1987. He reported from Afghanistan, the Balkans, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East, covering the Palestinian intifada. He had been a commentator for the Italian journal Corriere della Sera in 1976. In 1982, he wrote Eyewitness Falklands, his analysis of the conflict between Britain and Argentina. His other works include Camera in Conflict (1995) on the impact and role of photojournalism in military conflicts, and War and Truth: Reporting and History. Fox examined the Mediterranean mosaic of peoples and cultures and societies in what is a history, travelogue, and journalist's notebook. He analyzed the crime syndicates in Italy, tribal conflicts, culture clashes along the Nile Delta in Egypt, the population explosion in the Moghreb, clan organizations and the development of radical religious groups and movements. He also addressed the issue of pollution and the threat that tourism poses to the fragile ecosystem of the region. He noted the impact of pollution: "The most conspicuous inanimate victim is the Parthenon, bandaged in scaffolding against the mordant smog." Fox begins his odyssey in Spain: Andalusia, Toledo, Barcelona, and Majorca. He assessed the cultural revival of the Catalonia region of Spain. He then travels to Narbonne and the Languedoc-Roussillon region of France, then to Marseille and Corsica. In Provence, he noted how the past endured in the present. From there he visits the northern Italian cities of Milan, Genoa, Venice, and finally, to Naples. He then moved to the Mezzogiorno, the south, to Calabria and finally to Sicily and Sardinia. In Italy, he analyzed the endemic political corruption and organized crime syndicates. Fox traveled to Yugoslavia and the Adriatic coast in the 1980s when the Yugoslav federation became politically and economically unstable. He reported from Yugoslavia at the time of the breakup which began in 1991 and provided eyewitness accounts of the beginning of the civil war in Croatia. He visited first Veneto and Trieste and described the population displacements there following World War II when a shooting war between Yugoslavia and the US was narrowly averted. He then reported from Albania. While in Greece, he went to Athens, Metsovo, Salonika, and Athos and reported from the islands of Cephalonia and Crete. In Turkey, which he regards as the "crossroads to Asia", and "a regional strong man", he traveled to Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir. Finally, he went to the divided island of Cyprus, with its Turkish north and Greek south. He traveled to the Moghreb, northern Africa, reporting from Libya, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. He concluded his Mediterranean odyssey in the Levant, with visits to Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, and Israel. After stops in Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus, his final destination was Jerusalem. Throughout his sojourn he analyzed the factionalism, whether ethnic, religious, or criminal, endemic to the Mediterranean. He was able to provide eyewitness accounts of the civil wars in the Balkans and the emergence of radical Islam in Algeria. Fox, a historian with a degree from Oxford, is skeptical and critical in his analysis. He was an eyewitness to the gradual disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1980s, following the death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980: "During my winter journey of February 1985, I was witnessing the dying gasps of Tito's Yugoslavia." As a historian, Fox examined the factors that resulted in the collapse of Yugoslavia with objectivity and balance, avoiding the accepted government-handout version of the pack journalist and media hack that was all too common during the conflicts in the Balkans. He saw the breakup of Yugoslavia as the inexorable and ineluctable result of failed policies promulgated during the Communist regime of Tito: "Tito's program...moving peoples, and altering internal borders was to have a high cost...for it was to seed the war to come." Fox correctly ascribed the reason for the collapse, not to "Serbian nationalism" and "Greater Serbia", misleading propaganda constructs of the US government and media, but as due to the "militant nationalism " which was "already burgeoning, among Slovenes in the north, Macedonians in the south, Croats, and even the Bosnian Muslims." In other words, there was a spontaneous resurgence of nationalism that began in all the republics and regions of Yugoslavia. He termed the Yugoslav conflict as "the Yugoslav vendetta". He correctly saw Albanian separatism as the cause of the Kosovo conflict. The Communist regime of Tito had been unable to solve the "nationalities" problem. Kosovo was a problem that was only bottled up, waiting to explode. Fox saw this. The reason was due to Albanian separatism fueled by demographics and the goal of the Albanian population to take over and to control the Kosovo-Metohija region of Serbia. The Communist federation created by Tito was gradually unraveling. With the collapse of the Cold War, Yugoslavia too collapsed with it. This is how he described the conflicts that led to the break-up of Yugoslavia: "The type of war is very old, almost primeval, for it involves the vendetta of tribes and peoples as much as the battle of nations and states....Yugoslavia has been torn apart by ethnic conflict, in which different peoples have taken arms to separate themselves and establish identity and security." He described the conflicts as a "war of peoples, rather than of nations and states" and he concluded that international organizations designed "to keep the peace" in these types of conflicts as "peculiarly impotent". The Balkan conflicts represent the breakdown of the "modern secular nation-state" and highlight the instability of the entire Mediterranean region. Fox proffers a novel analysis of the Yugoslav breakup---dispassionate, objective, clinical, and unbiased. Fox witnessed the beginning of the civil war in Croatia in Tenja and Borovo Selo: "The trouble had started during a Croatian police raid to round up `trouble makers'". He pointed out how the news reports were distorted and even falsified by all sides to justify their actions and policies. He concluded that reports of atrocities were manipulated and distorted. There were victims on all sides: "Reports of atrocities in the war of Yugoslavia's dissolution have been depressingly frequent. Their victims have come from all sides." Fox penned "Albanians and Afghans fight for the heirs to Bosnia's SS past" published in Daily Telegraph. Fox gets to the heart of the matter immediately. For good or ill, the Nazi-fascist genocidal Ustasha regime of Ante Pavelic during World War II was the backdrop to the civil war that erupted in Croatia in 1990-1991. He described the revival of Nazi/fascist Ustasha symbols in secessionist Croatia, then backed by a resurgent and reunited Germany: "Increasingly Croat national forces, regular and irregular, have displayed the capital `U' badge." This revival of militant Nazism and fascism was carefully and meticulously covered-up in the mainstream US and Western media. It was very carefully controlled in the US. Fox cuts through the US propaganda constructs and infowar paradigms. Fox noted that Franjo Tudjman was a rabid ultra-nationalist "whose nationalist writings landed him in prison." He gave a good account of Jasenovac and the Ustasha movement, describing how two Roman Catholic primates, Ivan Saric of Sarajevo and Alojzije Stepinac of Zagreb, endorsed the Nazi Ustasha regime and their genocidal policies against Orthodox Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies during World War II. The civil war in Croatia could not be understood without this World War II history. It was censored and suppressed, however, in the US and the West. He dispassionately analyzed what motivated the Serbs, their "psychology of betrayal" under the Communist regime, how their enemies had mischaracterized the conflict. His analysis is unique in that he attempts to see the conflict from the Serbian perspective and to empathize with them. How would you respond if your government revived Nazi/fascist symbols and sought to finish the job that Adolf Hitler and Ante Pavelic started? He is alone in even attempting to see the conflict from a Serbian point of view. It is rather daring and a rejection of the mindless pack journalism then the vogue in "the free world". One thing is certain. Fox is no advocacy journalist, no media prostitute and hack for the US State Department and the corporate sponsors who control all the media outlets in the US and the West. For this reason alone, this book is a must read. Fox was a reporter during the breakup and subsequent civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, covering the civil war in Bosnia. One of his most famous and important reports is the story from Fojnica, in central Bosnia from 1993, when he reported that the Bosnian Muslim "government" and army had reformed the World War II Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division... Read more ›
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