Customer Reviews

Making Peace Prevail: Preventing Violent Conflict in Macedonia (Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution)

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Alice Ackermann assembled an excellent list of well known people in Macedonia, interviewed them on videotape and wrote this book. The videotape would be a better buy. The book, wasting one rather long chapter on other countries unrelated in order to garner academic collegial points, and maintaining throughout the jargon of conflict resolution, is valuable mostly for its quotations from her interviews. Even these are marred by the absence of questioned asked to elicit the excerpts included from the replies as the context. One star goes to the interviews

The book is marred throughout with the very irritating feature of calling Macedonians as other than they like to be called in order to divisively hold them as a foil to the people she terms "Ethnic Albanians." Recent genome studies of Albanians and other Europeans show both Albanians and Greeks to be extremely mixed peoples with remnants of the unique characteristics of many peoples as identified by the introduction of various markers from the Euro Altaic steppes to Turkey and the Middle East as well as the Balkan peninsula and most of Eastern Europe and North Africa. There are close similarities between the complex ethnic makeup of Albanians, Turks [of Turkey] and Greeks. Relatively "pure" "ethnicities", to use terms that should be irrelevant today, such as the Basques and Sardinians, have relatively simple blood profiles, with perhaps three strains. Albanians, Greeks and Turks have over seven. Macedonians have four. These "Ethnic" Albanians discussed in her book are contrasted with "Slavic" Macedonians, a term actually openly despised by Macedonians. Not only does she feel compelled to identify the two largest groups of peoples in Macedonia by such divisive terminological standards and by blood lineage, and that inaccurately, never conceiving any of Macedonia's peoples as simply Macedonians, she feels so compelled to make such distinctions that she adds the words "Slavic" and "Ethnic" in brackets to interview text, as if explaining that people as they are normally called must be corrected by errata and corrigenda.

To even divide people in such a way, between an ethnicity and a member of an overriding ethnic group from a couple thousand years ago, i.e. as a part of a late antique horde, goes beyond irritating to artificially divisive. It is also an unfair divisor, as she does not seem compelled to similarly label Slav Serbs, Slav Croats, Slav Poles, Slav Ukrainians, Slav Russians, Slav Slovenians, Slav Slovaks, Slav Bulgarians, Slav Czechs, Slav Russians, and numerous other peoples who are partly or wholly derivative of the numerous Slav hordes that invaded the Balkans between the 2d and the 6th centuries.

As to the contents of the book apart from nomenclature, she provides a survey of various IO and NGO actors on the scene in Macedonia through 1998, giving a rather more prominent role to the effects of foreign rather than domestic actors, few unavoidably stellar personalities like Violetta Petroska-Beska and President Gligorov excepted.

One gets the distinct impression that she spent the majority of her research time in Skopje and on the Kosovo and Serbian border with an occasional foray to Ohrid, venturing not terribly far into the interior of the country.