Collection of essays by Belgrade-based writers claiming to be representative of the anti-war opposition throughout the former Yugoslavia. The contributors' partisan airing of Serb-nationalist grievances makes them more representative, however, of (most of) the non-regime intelligentsia in Serbia alone

The idea behind writing this horribly amateuristic work was noble: to gather a large number of encyclopedic facts about the wars of Yugoslavian succession--something that would be useful to historians, journalists, politicians, and ordinary people.

Examples of gross errors and misrepresentations:

In one part of the book the main war protagonists are listed in the alphabetical order. Since one of the main characteristics of these wars has been their inhumanity, it is hard to believe that most of those currently or previously imprisoned at the Scheveningen prison (awaiting the trial at the Hague war crimes tribunal) are not listed. But those who are listed are sometimes listed on the wrong side, as is the case with Rasim Delic (Bosnian army), who is listed as "a veteran of the JNA Vukovar campaign." Vukovar was, of course, besieged by the Serbians, but the authors missed that one.

One of the most infamous Serbian warlords, Seselj, is listed as having been born in 1941 (false). The birth year is sometimes not even presented, as in the case of Blagoje Adzic, who was not even a teenager in 1941, so it's hard to believe that he was in the Partisans, as the authors claim.

The authors glorify Muhamed Filipovic, the former ambassador to London, to the point of making the reader think that Filipovic himself was the source of those entries. However, since there too are numerous errors present, it's probably the case that the authors themselves decided that "during 1992 MBO [Filipovic's Muslim Bosniak Organization] joined a small liberal party [headed by Kadic] and formed LBO, which to this day remains a true voice of non-secular Bosniaks." Considering that Kadic's liberals are still well and alive on the political spectrum of Bosnia, while LBO didn't even manage to gather sufficient votes to enter the Parliament the last time around, I wonder where and how the authors gathered their "encyclopedic" info.

The authors showcase their ignorance when they say that ex-Yugoslavian nations were shunned at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, where "Yugoslavian nations were suspended and barred from participating." So who was the audience at the opening ceremony so warmly greeting? Some impersonators posing for the Bosnian Olympic Committee and delegation? Also, the very real successes of the 1992 Croatian Olympic basketball team is also in the virtual realm. Hmmm...

The connection between Thessaloniki in Greece and the Serbian desire for access to the Adriatic is lost on all but the authors. If the Serbians wanted access to the sea through this Greek port, they would have surely not attacked Dubrovnik, and would have directed their mortars to Greece.

Even maps are sometimes inaccurate. On one of the maps Mostar is entirely within the Croatian territory and it doesn't even border the Bosnian territory, while it's totally emerged in the Bosnia entity on the next map.

It is a shame that this horrific book got a favorable review, if only because those reviewing it lack the background to verify the claims presented by the authors. If your interest is the break-up of Yugoslavia, there are much finer works out there.

First of all Lukavica isnt in the center of Sarajevo as this book says. Secondly, the procenteges used to describe population are reverted and incorrect.

Very purly and badly written book. It will just confuse you.

I was born in Sarajevo, and lived there until 1995 so i was 'living' situation this book tries to portrait and fails at evry aspect of it.

The previous review makes some very good points about the many flaws in this hastily compiled and poorly written "historical dictionary." However, I don't believe the intent of the authors was to engage in a propaganda exercise, nor that the publisher had some hidden agenda in printing it; on the contrary, it is part of a series of "European Historical Dictionaries," which, if this volume is any indication, are not of a very high quality. The problem with this book is that it seems to be more of a political lexicon for the Republic of Croatia rather than an actual historical dictionary. For if it was a historical dictionary, it would not contain uncritical entries on certain medieval Croatian kings (like Trpimir II and Kresimir I, II & III), whose very existence beyond the realm of legend is doubted by most serious historians of this region during the Middle Ages, whether in Croatia or abroad. Even more controversial is the uncritical acceptance of the theory that the pre-Ottoman era heretics of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia were Bogumils (a heresy otherwise centered in Bulgaria). This issue is still the subject of much controversy among historians and far from settled. These are just two examples which show that the authors are not critical historians, and that they depended too heavily on a few sources for such information. Also, if this were truly a historical dictionary, there would not be insubstantial one-line entries on such important Croatian historical figures such as 19th century writers August Senoa and Antun Gustav Matos or politicians like Ante Trumbic. There is no entry at all for the very important turn-of-the-century political leader Frano Supilo, while at the same time there are entries for often obscure and sometimes laughable contemporary political figures like Hrvoje Sosic, Slavko Degoricija, Joja Ricov, Marija Peakic-Mikuljan and even the (recently assassinated) Serbian war criminal and all-around thug Arkan. In this sense, this "dictionary" even fails as a "who's who" for the contemporary political scene in Croatia - particularly since it was published five years ago and is now truly dated.

"The Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Croatia" is a controversial book, beginning with its title. The Republic of Croatia became recognized as a sovereign country in 1992. The question that poses itself, before we even enter the contents of this dictionary, is whether it is at all possible to write the history of a state little more than two years after its international recognition, when the civil war from which it emerged had yet to reach its peak?

Wrapping a political agenda in a "scientific", usually "historical," folder is just one of the methods employed in promoting a political goal into an internationally recognized status. The claim that a certain political aspiration has historical roots and that as such it has been an object of scientific research, makes the aspiration legitimate. Moreover, if it is not challenged it acquires the solidity of fact and paves the way to the desired changes. The conflict between current politics and history is an area of research that is probably not lacking material for exploration nowadays. This book expands the controversy, adding a new spin to it by insinuating itself, with all its disregard for the facts, its fabrications and prevarications in the reference section of a respected university library where academic research usually begins.

Inaccuracy of data, one of the major problems with this book, strikes the reader from the very first pages. The infamous Nazi satellite state, the Independent State of Croatia, according to the authors, was proclaimed on April 10, 1942,(Chronology xxiii) exactly one year later than it really occured on April 10, 1941. If the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia were presented accurately in this book, it would have been viewed in the line of two other salient historical events which all happened within 8 days in April 1941, and the nature of this Nazi satellite country would have been self-evident.

April 6, 1941Attack on Yugoslavia with the bombing Belgrade by German army. April 10, 1941 Proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia April 14, 1941Recognition of the Independent State of Croatia by Germany and Italy.

One of the longest entries, the "Borders of Croatia" (36) creates only further confusion since Croatia is also a geographical area having different borders from the Republic of Croatia. The following is perhaps a good illustration: The present interruption of the Croatian territory at Neum goes back to the same time, when Bosnia-Herzegovina was given access to the sea. It was a concession of Dubrovnik to the Ottoman Empire. It is exactly in this place that the Bosnian President Izetbegovic now wants a corridor to the sea for the Muslims.

According to the authors of this book, although Neum has been a part of Bosnia and Herzegovina for about 300 years, Neum is here defined by the authors as a "present interruption of the Croatian territory." The implication is that it is a Croatian territory, that the territory is interrupted, and that such an interruption is only for the "present," which further implies that it is not only temporary but also of a short duration. The next politically loeaded statement informs that the Bosnian President Izetbegovic " now wants a corridor to the sea for the Muslims."

Describing Neum as a corridor in political terminology implies no more than a geographical connection to something rather than the legitimate claim to that territory on other grounds. The claim that it is the Bosnian President Izetbegovic who "wants" it suggests two things: that it is (only) he who makes that claim and that such a claim is rather subjective because he "wants," which sounds rather personal, almost like a whim. And why does he want it? It is said that he wants it for Muslims, although he, as the president of the state, at least officially, represents all the nationalities who live in the state over which he presides.

The same thing could have been described as a territorial dispute between the states of the Republic of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Bosnia wants the borders to remain unchanged, claiming their control over Neum to be historically grounded, since 300 years of their legitimate possession of Neum was only interrupted during World War II, when it was controlled by the Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi satellite state. But, such an account, although closer to the facts, would not make the Croatian claim sound justified.

On the other hand entries that have nothing in common with the Croatian nation or the Republic of Croatia are included such as: "Miroslav Gospel" (156), "Sevdalinke" (193) "Bosanska Posavina" (39) etc. It is characteristic that all those apparently unrelated entries have one thing in common - a Bosnian element. The explanation for such a criterion can be found in the phrase that "Croatia officially inherited the borders fixed by the former Yugoslavia". This statement too is loaded with the implication that the present boarders of Croatia are not the ones with which the Republic of Croatia should be content, because they are officially inherited, and inherited from the former Yugoslavia, which was a Communist country. Merely by that fact it should be questioned. And the way they were established by the former Yugoslavia is that they were "fixed". If something is "fixed" it is rather imposed than mutually agreed to. And what was imposed by the former Communist regime was, of course, not just!

Questioning the borders of the Republic of Croatia to the extent and in the manner the authors did in this book, indicates a political agenda of Croatian territorial expansion into Bosnian territories. In view of such claims, this book could also be perceived as a piece of propaganda rather than an impartial historical overview. It is worth exploring how this book was placed in the reference section of a reputable university library (Robarts Library - University of Toronto), and what the motives of the publisher to promote this manuscript were.

Whether or not the author got the facts (mostly) right, the grammar is so bad as to make the book almost unreadable. This guy is a professor? Bad news for academia! The writing is so bad that it makes you wonder if his reporting of facts and opinions is as badly flawed. The maps and graphics are obviously poorly reproduced copies of military briefing slides. They are so poorly rendered that they are almost illegible. This is a really bad book!

This book is a really hard read. It is broken down into regions and countries. Beyond the first couple of chapters I had to put it down and keep it as a reference book. Most of the information was repetative and didn't really give a huge amount of insight. Way too slow a read and very little information using too many words. .

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.

"The Hague" was created as a means to justify the US/UK's bombing of the Serbian population - they bombed them in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia. The court is anti-Serbian and is seen as a Kangaroo Court, not an international court of justice! If it were after justice it would also deal with the issue of the illegal bombing of Serbia by the US/UK - no not interested in that. Therefore don't be interested in this book as the title and contents is hypocritical!

The author is a researcher at the University of Belgrade, and seems unable to extricate himself from the intellectual constraints of his position. The first half of the book deals with 'self-management' and the bureaucratization of the Communist Party: valid themes, no doubt, but hardly key elements of an explanation of the war. When he finally turns to the break-up of Yugoslavia, he begins with a grossly Serb-nationalist account of the Kosovo question; thereafter all blame is placed on Slovenes, Croats, etc.