The Fall of Yugoslavia
Misha Glenny
314 pages, including index
published in 1996

The Fall of Yugoslavia was the first book I read in 2007, I got it as a Christmas present from Sandra. I had put this book on my Amazon UK wishlist quite a while back, after having read Glenny's The Balkans 1804-1999, which was an impressive overview of the modern history of the Balkans. I thought it would be a good book to start the new year with and was not disappointed.

If there's one thing I've learned the past few years blogging the War on Iraq it's that you can follow the news on tv, read the newspaper reports and magazine coverage on a subject and think you know what's going on, when in fact you've only gotten part of the facts, often arranged in a preconcieved narrative. Even if the news media are basically honest in their reporting, it is too immediate to see beyond the story being reported, to put them in context and digest them. At the same time, news thrives on new and unusual incidents, which greatly distorts the picture we get: in reality more people may die in single car crashes than multicar pileups, but the latter is the one featured on the evening news. Only the simplest of narratives can survive this process and governments and other propagandists make grateful use of it to push through their reality.

In recent years we've seen this process at work in the reporting about the War on Iraq; back in the nineties it was the wars in Yugoslavia. At the time I thought I knew what was happening there and why it was happening; today I realise that even if I wasn't actively lied to, the news media presented a very one sided image of the conflicts. Which is why we need books like The Fall of Yugoslavia. Written at the time the wars took place, by a journalist who's able to actually put the events he's witnessing into context and explain them. He doesn't show the whole historical backgrounds to the conflicts, that would come in his later book The Balkans 1804-1999, but he does show how the various wars got started and how they fed into each other, how they interacted with each other.

The picture that emerges from Glenny's stories is much more complicated than what would become the "official" truth. While it's been largely the Serbs who have gotten the blame for the breakup of Yugoslavia and subsequent wars, either eagerly led or forced into it by the evil genius of Slobodan Milosevic, The fall of Yugoslavia makes it clear that Croatia, led by Francis Tudman and the Bosnian Muslims also had their share in it. Moreoever, Glenny makes it clear that far from being innocent bystanders to all this, western Europe and Germany especially made things worse, with the quick recognition of Slovenia and Croatia as independent countries by a Germany eager to play a larger international role doing much to precitipate the conflicts.

Glenny also isn't afraid to harshly criticise the victims of the war in Bosnia, the Bosnian Muslims when that is warranted. Again, western media portrayed them as almost wholly innocent, helpless victims of Serb (and occasionally Croat) aggression, but Glenny shows that at least some of that aggression was self inflicted by their leadership, who did not prepared their followers for the war and in fact may have provoked massacres in order to get sympathy and support from the west. Of course, Glenny makes it also clear that the leaders did not have to pay the price for this strategy, nor does he deny that many innocent Bosnian Muslims (as well as others) were murdered, raped or ethnically cleansed. It's just that the truth is more complicated than innocent Bosniaks versus evil, murdering Serbs.

Originally this was written in 1993, when the wars in Yugoslavia were at their worst and before the west got fully involved, first in Bosnia, then in Croatia helping the Croats destroy the seperatist Serb republic there, finally in Kosovo with NATO attacking Serbia directly, actually chosing sides for the first time. This latter development isn't dealt with by Glenny, though he provides a lengthy epilogue to bring the story uptodate for when this edition, the third, was published.

If you're looking for a one volume explenation of how Yugoslavia broke apart and why and how the wars developed, this isn't it, as there is no such book. But it is a good book to start with. And for such a depressing, awful subject, Glenny writes very compelling, making this almost a page turner for me.

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Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, Yugoslav Wars, history, book review