Volume 40, Number 9 · May 13, 1993
The Balkan Tragedy
By Michael Ignatieff
The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War
by Misha Glenny
Penguin, 193 pp., $10.00 (paper)
The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-up, 1980–92
by Branka Magaš
Verso, 366 pp., $19.95 (paper)
The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War
by Slavenka Drakulić
Norton, 146 pp., $19.95
Since the summer of 1991, at least 50,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the former Yugoslavia and at least a million more have been turned into refugees. After two-and-a-half years of fighting, a comprehensible explanation for the carnage still eludes most observers. The outside world's unspoken conviction, as it watches the unfolding savagery, is that all the parties must be, in differing degrees, insane. This belief comes in both simple and complicated forms, ranging from the sweeping finality of 'they're all fucked,' which I heard from a Canadian UN soldier trying to keep Serbs and Croats apart at a UNPROFOR checkpoint, to visiting journalists' speculation on the irrational strain throughout Balkan history.
Review, 3512 words
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