Blood on the Balkans : ...

Apart from one’s life--and more journalists have been killed during the war in former Yugoslavia than in any conflict since World War II--perhaps the hardest thing to preserve while covering and writing about what Misha Glenny rightly calls “the Third Balkan War” is one’s lucidity. After almost two years of war, the experience of being among the combatants--Serb, Croat and Bosnia Muslim alike (in this respect if in no other there is little to differentiate among the various factions)--is so intense, and the scenes of suffering and devastation so horrible, that the temptation to become a polemicist pure and simple becomes harder and harder to resist. But as books about the war by foreign observers begin to appear, what is surprising is how much objectivity most have managed to retain.

Two of the best works to appear so far are “The Fall of Yugoslavia” by Glenny, formerly one of the BBC’s principal correspondents in Eastern Europe, and “A Paper House” by Mark Thompson, a British writer who works for the Slovenian magazine “Mladina.” One of the worst is “Serbs and Croats” by the American academic and former diplomat Alex Dragnich.

The Glenny and Thompson books are exemplary in their intelligence, depth and dispassion. Far from being exercises in taking sides, both writers bend over backward to insist that although the Serbs are more at fault than anyone for the Yugoslav tragedy and, since the war began, have committed the bulk of the atrocities, no side is blameless. Such evenhandedness has earned Glenny almost as much hostility from the Croatian authorities as from the powers that be in Belgrade and Serb-occupied Bosnia.

In contrast, Dragnich’s book seems so resolute in its portrayal of the Serbs as the most injured party that it is hard to imagine anyone in power in Belgrade finding fault with it except on the most trivial point of detail. Dragnich has taken such an extreme stance that it is hard to see how his arguments will contribute much to anyone’s understanding of the crisis: He claims that Serbs held the key positions in Yugoslavia’s prewar governments because “to a large degree this was forced on them,” for instance, and that the Albanians of Kossovo have suffered at least in part because “they are victims of the highest birthrate in Europe, which to no small extent explains their poverty” (as if the apartheid state the Serbs have imposed in Kossovo did not exist).

To a large extent, the Glenny and Thompson books complement each other. “The Fall of Yugoslavia” was written quickly, and, if it has a fault, suffers from Glenny’s attempt both to understand the causes of the war and to portray the reporter’s experience of covering it. The difficulties inherent in trying to combine these two projects are obvious, and it is to Glenny’s credit that the joins between his two narratives are for the most part camouflaged very successfully. In any case, it would have been folly for him to have chosen between his historiographical and reportorial hats.

Few journalists were as well-placed as he during the early days of the Yugoslav break-up, the 1991 battles between Serbs and Croats and, the following year, the martyrdom of Bosnia. Writers like myself who came later to the conflict--and came without Glenny’s erudition in Balkan affairs, or his remarkable bravery--can attest both to the accuracy of what he had written and pay homage to the skill with which he has succeeded in moving from the anecdotal to the analytic, from an account of some encounter with a drunken, homicidal irregular at the front line to shrewd renderings of political jockeying in one of the belligerent capitals.

Glenny has the rare gift of being able not only to make his readers see but also to make them understand. Most reporters returning from former Yugoslavia have had the desperately frustrating experience of being told, even by their best-informed, most politically aware friends, that the war in the Balkans is simply too complicated to make sense of. Now, instead of drawing maps of former Yugoslavia on tablecloths or trying to give an overview of Serbian history at the dinner table, those of us just back from the Balkans can keep our pens in our pockets, and, rather than disrupting social occasions with our baroque, horrific tales, can simply press a copy of “The Fall of Yugoslavia” upon those of our acquaintances who really are curious about what is going on.

Glenny’s book is urgent, straightforward and immediately gripping. In contrast, Mark Thompson’s “A Paper House” is a leisurely, erudite tour, a sort of political travel narrative, of the lands that once made up the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia. Thompson is less interested in describing the war than in giving his readers a sense of what it has been like--both for himself as a foreigner and for the Slovenians, Croats, Serbs and Albanians he has come to know--to watch a national identity crumble (and whatever people now say, there was such a thing as “Yugoslavism,” and it was more than a flag of convenience for Serbian hegemony)and to discover that one lives not in a medium-sized European country on the road to prosperity but rather in a fractured, hellish place in which there seems to be less hope and less sanity with every passing day. “How do you see the future?” Thompson asks a Serbian acquaintance in Kossovo. “I don’t see it,” the man replies curtly, adding, “I’m very sorry to live in such a crazy country, but I can’t go to Zanzibar!”

Actually, many Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Albanians are voting with their feet. A quarter of a million Bosnian war refugees have arrived in Germany during the past year, while almost as many have spread out through the rest of Europe. Even the Serbs themselves, whatever the claims made by officials in Belgrade or their apologists overseas, are not immune to opting out. Some are so desperate that they line up for South African visas, assuming, as one would-be emigrant put it recently, that the situation in Serbia is definitely beyond repair, whereas the situation in South Africa is only possibly beyond repair.

Thus does the world appear from the vantage point of former Yugoslavia. It is a mental conditionin which the most extreme politics, beliefs and events have come to seem almost ordinary, and in which the ordinary seems like some figment of the imagination. Civil society, like peace itself, has become so psychologically remote over the course of the last three years that many people have a hard time even remembering what it was like, let alone believing that it will ever be enjoyed again.

Thompson’s great strength is that he has succeeded in portraying this Yugoslavia that has died, in explicating its contradictions and its strengths and of giving a nuanced sense of just how difficult it was to be a Yugoslav, even in better times, through portraits of figures ranging from Tito’s former comrade and later great adversary, Milovan Djilas, to experimental filmmaker Dusan Makavejev, to foot soldiers in all the wars, both ideological and actual, that eventually brought the federation down. The people whom Thompson admires are edgy, demoralized and often cynical, while the true believers, the blind nationalists within every ethnic group, seem to be the only people left with real energy and real confidence. Makavejev speaks nostalgically of the late ‘60s;Djilas momentarily retrieves the fire of his hard-line Communist youth;Thompson’s colleagues at “Mladina” indulge in elegant, impassioned anti-clerical and anti-nationalist arguments. In other words, he portrays them vainly decrying exactly those movements and habits of feeling that most of their fellow-citizens have come to cherish above all other beliefs.

For all his commitment to what appears to boil down to a humane social democracy, and his repeated insistence that better times will come sooner or later, there is a smell of dashed hopes and defeat about Thompson’s more optimistic arguments and his attempts to make the marginal people with whom he sympathizes stand for what the successor states of the former Yugoslavia still could become. For if ever there was a place that exemplified Yeats’ nightmare world in which the best lacked all conviction and the worst were full of passionate intensity, it is Thompson’s Balkan “paper house.” And somewhere he knows it. Appropriately enough, Thompson ends “A Paper House” with a scene in a cemetery. He has followed a village procession, unsure of its significance, only to discover that the field he has been led to “was a churchyard and the people were mourners, huddled over a grave.”

In his book, Glenny more straightforwardly records his apprehension about the future. “There were solutions to the Yugoslav crisis before the war began,” he writes, “but these have been lost amid a mountain of bones. We must continue to search for these lost hopes and perhaps one day we will find them. Until we do, the Balkan peninsula will bleed.”

Glenny’s judgment, encrusted as it is with qualifiers and sorrow, is about as optimistic as it is possible to be. Of course in optimistic America, where a new President can come into office insisting that he still “believes in a place called hope,” and who can talk in his inaugural address of “forcing the spring” (as if that season would not arrive whatever Americans did or didn’t do), even tragedies are expected to teach us something. Perhaps this is why so many Americans have had such difficulty making sense of the war between Serbs and Croats, or of the genocidal war the Serbs in both Serbia and Bosnia have been waging against the Bosnian Muslims.

Such news cannot be rendered as anything but irredeemably terrible. Neither Glenny’s book nor Thompson’s will change any of this, of course. But at least they afford those who want it the possibility of understanding. That is the most a writer can hope for. The fact that the Bosnians had the right to expect rather more from the people of Western Europe and North America is, of course, another matter.

Book Mark: For an excerpt from “The Fall of Yugoslavia,” see Opinion, Page 3.