the future of Europe is anything but safe

So I was heading off to Croatia and I realized that I knew next to nothing about the war there. I knew it had something to do with Serbia and Bosnia or Bosno-Serbi-Cromagnon or something, but really didn't have the foggiest idea what it was all about, how it started, how it ended, who was doing what to whom, and that I should really get my head `round it while I was there (so forgive me if you already have encyclopaedic knowledge of the event. You're in a minority.)

The Fall of Yugoslavia was my attempt to do just that (although, reading a book with that title on a Croatian beach was probably in the same order of stupid as going into an Irish Pub and reading a book called The Troubles: Who's Right and Who's Retarded?). It's the story of Misha Glenny, a 'confessed coward' who nonetheless ended up, in his role as a journalist for the Guardian, in all the hotspots of the various wars that sprung up all over Yugoslavia throughout the former half of the 1990's. Yep, it really wasn't that long ago- the war was still raging less than ten years ago.

I say 'various wars', because the Croatian war was just one of many different wars which sprung up during Yugoslavia's dissolution. The Croatian war was the first of these, and seemed to begin when Serbians in Croatian became alarmed by measures taken by the Croatian government to reduce the role of Serbians in Croatia's cultural and political life. Several of these alarmists formed small militias and overtook the town of Knin (not far from where I was staying in Split), which happened to be the gateway between the economically powerful Dalmatian Coast and the rest of Croatia. They got a stranglehold on Croatia's economy and war swiftly broke out from there, spreading into Bosnia-Hercegovina and then transforming into a three-way conflict, as Serbians and Croatians in Bosnia went on a collosal land-grab, leaving none for the resident Bosnia Moslems, who formed a third faction in the conflict. Other factions included the UN, who largely had their hands tied while the conflict got more and more bloody, and the JNA, Yugoslavia's Federal Army, which began by trying to keep the peace, but as more and more nations seceded from Yugoslavia, became more and more a tool for the Serbian factions.

Confused? I was. It's a confusing conflict. One of the more bizarre sequences in the book is when a Serbian General calls a Croatian General and says: "Mladic! We've left an open grave with all your boys in it near the front, you might want to go and pick up the bodies, they're stinking up the place. How's your family?" There was a lot going on, and annoyingly, the book kind of cuts off in 1993, when the conflict was still going strong.

All the time I was reading the book, I kept looking around myself, at Croatia, asking: "Where the heck are all the Serbs? Surely the conflict didn't just STOP and everyone became friends again after all the horrible atrocities they committed on one another?" The epilogue, which was written in 1996, covers the massive exile of Serbs from Croatia- the largest exile of a people from one country since World War II- and answered my question.

This is disturbing, fascinating, very well balanced, and exhaustively well researched material. I say exhaustive as both a compliment and a warning- it's not a 'light read'. I had to go over some pages over more than once just to figure out exactly what was happening.

It's also a very sad book, just because the entire conflict seemed so bizarre, so needless. The author repeatedly refers to war as some kind of virus (he probably would have said 'meme' if he was a blogger), something that infects people and makes them do horrible things they would never normally do. It's tough to argue with his theory when presented with such awful testimony.

As I sat on golden sands in Croatia, surrounded by tranquility, knowing that most everyone around me had lived through, could remember, had participated in, those insane times, not too long ago, it was a frightening reminder to me of how close any society is to suddenly being infected with the virus.