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Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo
In this brilliant book, Roger Cohen of The New York Times takes us to the core of one of the twentieth century's most complex stories, weaving together the history of Yugoslavia and the story of the Bosnian War of 1992 to 1995, as experienced by four families.
"I have tried to treat the story of Yugoslavia, which lived for seventy-three years, as a human one," Cohen writes in this masterly book, which, like Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem and David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb, makes us eyewitnesses at the center of historic events. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the Bosnian conflict shattered the West's confidence, reviving Europe's darkest ghosts and exposing an America reluctant to confront or acknowledge an act of genocide on European soil. Through Cohen's compelling reconstruction of the twentieth-century history that led up to the war, and his account of the war's effect on everyday lives, we at last find the key to understanding Europe's most explosive region and its peoples.
"This was a war of intimate betrayals," Cohen goes on to say, and in Hearts Grown Brutal, the betrayals begin in the family of a man named Sead. Through his search for his lost father, we relive the history of Yugoslavia, founded at the end of World War I with the encouragement of President Woodrow Wilson. Sead's desperate quest is punctuated by the lies, half truths, and pain that mark other sagas of Yugoslavia. Through three more families--one Muslim-Serb, one Muslim, and one Serb-Croat--we experience the war in Bosnia as it breaks up marriages and sets relative against relative. The reality of the Balkans is illuminated, even as the hypocrisy of the international response to the war is exposed.
Hearts Grown Brutal is a remarkable book, a testament to the loss of a multi-ethnic European state and a warning that the violence could return. It is a magnificent achievement that blends history and journalism into a profoundly moving human story.
"I have tried to treat the story of Yugoslavia, which lived for seventy-three years, as a human one," Cohen writes in this masterly book, which, like Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem and David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb, makes us eyewitnesses at the center of historic events. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the Bosnian conflict shattered the West's confidence, reviving Europe's darkest ghosts and exposing an America reluctant to confront or acknowledge an act of genocide on European soil. Through Cohen's compelling reconstruction of the twentieth-century history that led up to the war, and his account of the war's effect on everyday lives, we at last find the key to understanding Europe's most explosive region and its peoples.
"This was a war of intimate betrayals," Cohen goes on to say, and in Hearts Grown Brutal, the betrayals begin in the family of a man named Sead. Through his search for his lost father, we relive the history of Yugoslavia, founded at the end of World War I with the encouragement of President Woodrow Wilson. Sead's desperate quest is punctuated by the lies, half truths, and pain that mark other sagas of Yugoslavia. Through three more families--one Muslim-Serb, one Muslim, and one Serb-Croat--we experience the war in Bosnia as it breaks up marriages and sets relative against relative. The reality of the Balkans is illuminated, even as the hypocrisy of the international response to the war is exposed.
Hearts Grown Brutal is a remarkable book, a testament to the loss of a multi-ethnic European state and a warning that the violence could return. It is a magnificent achievement that blends history and journalism into a profoundly moving human story.
523 pages, Hardcover
First published August 25, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
August 1, 2017
We were on the northern coast of Croatia when we first stumbled upon ruined, graffiti-spattered buildings. We walked around and we wondered.
In Dubrovnik they spoke of bombings. The war seemed very far away.
In Montenegro, the Europe we knew fell away. I had long talks with our Serbian host, who had a hard time conceiving of Montenegro as a separate country.
But Bosnia stole my heart. The countryside, the friendly people, the winding streets, and oh, Sarajevo.
Roger Cohen concludes with little measure of hope that the violence would end, that Sarajevo would ever achieve its former multicultural vivacity. Yes, there was a devastating war in Kosovo that was brewing as this book hit the shelves. But I can assure you that Sarajevo is alive. I cannot compare it to the city that was, but I love the Sarajevo that is, and I wanted to understand it a little more.
There is an incredible amount of detail in this book that I could not assimilate. Names, places, political parties, and the inner workings of international peacekeeping bodies. But the message is clear. A show of horrors took place in the Balkans and the world looked on and mostly tried to avert its eyes. There are many, many victims (and we meet them) and many, many guilty parties (with layers of justification and accountability to wade through; we meet them too). It is sometimes boring, often gruesome, and always important.
And have we learned anything? Have we stopped dividing people along facile ethnic and religious lines? Do we open doors to our neighbours and work for peace before it's too late? Do we understand history, and can we trace hatred to its roots?
I think we all know the answers.
In Dubrovnik they spoke of bombings. The war seemed very far away.
In Montenegro, the Europe we knew fell away. I had long talks with our Serbian host, who had a hard time conceiving of Montenegro as a separate country.
But Bosnia stole my heart. The countryside, the friendly people, the winding streets, and oh, Sarajevo.
Roger Cohen concludes with little measure of hope that the violence would end, that Sarajevo would ever achieve its former multicultural vivacity. Yes, there was a devastating war in Kosovo that was brewing as this book hit the shelves. But I can assure you that Sarajevo is alive. I cannot compare it to the city that was, but I love the Sarajevo that is, and I wanted to understand it a little more.
There is an incredible amount of detail in this book that I could not assimilate. Names, places, political parties, and the inner workings of international peacekeeping bodies. But the message is clear. A show of horrors took place in the Balkans and the world looked on and mostly tried to avert its eyes. There are many, many victims (and we meet them) and many, many guilty parties (with layers of justification and accountability to wade through; we meet them too). It is sometimes boring, often gruesome, and always important.
And have we learned anything? Have we stopped dividing people along facile ethnic and religious lines? Do we open doors to our neighbours and work for peace before it's too late? Do we understand history, and can we trace hatred to its roots?
I think we all know the answers.
January 23, 2014
William Faulkner’s quote “The past is never dead. In fact, its not even past” applies even more so to what use to be Yugoslavia.
This is an eloquent, passionate and powerfully written book. The author points out how disconcerting it was to take a flight out of war-torn Yugoslavia and land in less than an hour in a highly civilized European airport.
My review will consist of passages from this very stirring book:
Page 431 (my book) speech of Milosevic in Kosovo on June 28, 1989 (the six hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo)
“For six hundred years now the heroism of Kosovo has inspired our creativity, fed our pride, and not allowed us to forget that once we were an army great, brave, and proud, one in the few that in defeat stayed undefeated. Six centuries later, today, we are again in battles and facing battles. They are not armed, although such battles cannot be excluded yet.”
Page 432
Milosevic postulated something that had never existed – a Serbian state stretching from Belgrade to Knin – and justified it through the message of a six-hundred-year-old battle. Seldom has necromancy so evidently raved. ..Milosevic opened the floodgates. All the ruined or extinguished lives were then but specks on the stream.
Page 138
Nationalism involves numbers. The nationalist declares not only that there are a lot of us, enough to impose our will, but also that there would have been a lot more of us if we had not, in the past, faced war, persecution, eviction, mistreatment, abuse, and other misfortunes at the hands of the enemy. A nationalist movement seeks to change the present in the name of the past in order to create a future vague in all respects except its glory. This luminous future, portrayed as a natural right, is, in the nationalist’s discourse, the one that would have occurred were it not for history’s aberrations. A paradise lost is never lost to the nationalist leader. It can be regained or at least exploited.
The Past
Page 15 (the creation of Yugoslavia in 1917)
It also ignored the fact that Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes were not alone in Yugoslavia. There were also Macedonians, Albanians – and Bosnian Muslims... It was a land of distinct topology; its mountains, narrow valleys, and countless rivers tended to encourage parochial loyalties.
Page 28
Under Nazi attack Yugoslavia imploded. The independent state of Croatia was established.
Page 32 (during Nazi occupation)
Viktor Gutic, the Ustasha prefect of western Bosnia, coined the term “cleansing” – ridding Bosnia of Serbs.
Page 122 (after 1945)
World War II was officially know as the “People’s Liberation Struggle”. Such descriptions suggested a unity among Yugoslav people’s that did not exist. During World War II more Yugoslavs were killed by other Yugoslavs than by external enemies. The label “fascist aggressor” conveniently confounded Nazis, Serbian Chetnicks, and Croatian Ustashas.
Page 45
Serbs and Croats, especially in exile, continued to nurse their wounds. World War II was unfinished business...the various crimes committed by all sides in Yugoslavia between 1941 and 1945 [were] shunted into a largely forgotten historical siding, a place shadowy enough to incubate the ambiguity on which conflict in the Balkans has thrived.
Page 67
About half a million opponents of Tito chose to leave Yugoslavia at the end of the war...The Ustasha remained alive.
Page 143 Tito’s Yugoslavia
One-party rule, the deification of an untouchable ruler, the selective use of terror and intimidation, the exploitation of fear to still the inquiring mind.
The Prelude
Page 138
The Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts [1987] paranoid, self-pitying and aggressive, was certainly the single document most influential in establishing the drum beat of Serbian bombast and pathos that led inexorably to Yugoslavia’s dismemberment – it accused the Kosovo Albanians of “neofascist aggression”, establishing a “physical, moral and psychological reign of terror; practising arson, murder and rape; attacking “the cradle of the Serbs historical existence”, and waging “open and total war” against the Serbs.
Page 139
Throughout the 1980s, no more than five Serbs died in violent incidents in Kosovo. The Memorandum moved onto Croatia “the Serbs in Croatia have never before been as jeopardized as they are today”.
Page 147 Milosevic in 1987 in Kosovo
“You should stay here for the sake of your ancestors and descendants. Otherwise your ancestors would be defiled and descendents disappointed.”
Page 189
Milosevic and the authors of the Serbian Memorandum [dragged] the Serbs back in time, not merely to 1918, but to 1389 and the charged symbolism of the Kosovo battle. Six hundred years after their defeat, they used an imagined “genocide” against the Serbs of Kosovo to justify the dispatch of tanks to the Kosovo capital of Pristina, the slaying of Kosovo Albanians, and the crushing of the autonomous rights’ of the almost two million ethnic Albanians living there. Then having thus unmoored Yugoslavia, they elaborated their expansionary program in the name of the autonomous rights of the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia.
Page 148
Milosevic’s revolution provided a wonderful pretext, and precedent, for the expression of nationalism that sought to settle, finally, the painful Balkan legacy of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires in blood rather than diplomacy.
Page 144
It was the suppressed ghosts...that Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia raised in order to cement their power and ensure that Yugoslavia died in violence.
Page 187
The drum beat of tribal allegiance quickly drowned out the pale call of a Yugoslavia democracy.
Page 107
Bosnian Muslims (9 percent of Yugoslavia in 1991), were less protagonists than bystanders, caught between the gyre of Serb and Croatian violence that accompanied these two peoples’ attempts to come to terms.
Page 116 (1992)
The thrust of the Serb offensive was to deny, through force of arms, that the people living together in Bosnia and Herzegovina – 44 percent of them Muslim, 31 percent Serb, 17 percent Croat and the rest of sufficiently mixed descent; could continue to coexist as a society and a community. Because Sarajevo, with its intensely variegated gravestones and its Muslim, Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish places of worship, was the most eloquent symbol, it had to be destroyed.
War
Page 168
The Serb bombardment of Sarajevo looked like mindless barbarity in that over more than three years, it took thousands of innocent lives and was a colossal public relations disaster. In the early months of the conflict, however, it served one important purpose. It distracted international attention from the real business of the war. That business was brutal, venal, and rural. It involved the evictions or slaughter of Muslims living in the provincial towns and villages of Bosnia during the spring, summer and fall of 1992.
Page 169
In a sharp burst of Serbian violence more than three quarters of a million Muslims were ousted from a swath of territory covering 70 percent of the country. Once the fabric of a society has been cut so comprehensively, it is virtually impossible to piece it together again. Once a crime is unpunished its effects fester. Fear takes root; divisions harden. Herein lay the essence, and the accuracy of the Serbian calculation.
Page 185
Tudjman proved a master of committing his atrocities in the shadow of larger Serb ones. By November 1991 about 500,000 Croats and close to 250,000 Serbs had been displaced.
Page 199
Pero Popovic wanted to talk. He said it was his conscious. One memory in particular was bothering him. He once beat Muslim prisoners of the Susica concentration camp. Beat them with pieces of timber. The worst was this: he knew some of the people getting beaten.
Page 206
Popovic was one of Karadzic’s troops. Karadzic coordinated the preparations for war with Milosevic. Popovic, like all the Bosnian Serb army, was paid through the Ministry of Defense in Belgrade.
Page 473
Mishiba was fourteen when on May 24, 1992, the Serbs rounded up her family. She and her mother and five year old sister were bundled onto a bus; her father tried to join them, but the Serbs dragged him away. They were kicking him as the bus departed – Mihala’s last image of her father, who has disappeared.
Page 203
The refugee is a pathetic figure. As Yugoslavia unravelled human flotsam was tossed about on the floors of empty buildings, gathered in a chicken coup or idle factory, discarded by the roadside. The remains of the country were awash in such human debris.
Page 297
Any journey of any length in Bosnia inevitably involved the spectacle of villages not merely deserted but systematically destroyed. The possibility of “the other’s” return had to be eliminated, as far as possible, by the destruction of his dwelling.
Page 354 Sarajevo
A shell took the life of Nihada Catic, a violin student at the school. Aged fifteen, she was killed on June 20, 1992. That morning she had been practicing Vivaldi for a concert. It was a quiet day, not a sound of war and she went downstairs to watch some friends playing a game of chess. A 120-millimeter shell came crashing down, killing her and six other children. Her mother said there was no recovery from what had happened.
The International Community
Page 172
Many of the Serb camps were less than two hundred miles from the Austrian and Italian borders. Refugees were pouring westward with stories to tell.
Page 173
Managing Bosnia, for the Bush and then the Clinton administration, meant staying out of it.
Page 237 United Nations
The doublespeak inherent in trying to be two different things at once; defenders of a savaged Bosnia and disinterested agents of humanitarianism often assumed Orwellian proportions.
Page 238 Alain Finkielkraunt
“In the ‘world of humanitarianism’ there are no more enemies; there are only victims. The wars of the 1990’s then, are seen not as conflicts in which there may indeed be butchers and victims and a need for resolve, but as ‘humanitarian disasters’ with victims on all sides.”
Page 239
The placing of a “cordon sanitaire” around a war and the treatment of everyone in it as victims... it involved feeding the victims as a substitute for stopping the butchers.
Page 381
Everyone in Sarajevo, by now had some form of post-traumatic stress. They have told themselves countless times that there are limits, only to discover that there are none. The shells still come down. The hills still have eyes.
In Geneva, in Lisbon, in London, in New York, in Paris, in the Vatican the people of Sarajevo are discussed. But from these discussions nothing emerges, nothing tangible; nothing to change the fact that between five hundred and eight hundred Serb heavy weapons still ring a city.
This is an eloquent, passionate and powerfully written book. The author points out how disconcerting it was to take a flight out of war-torn Yugoslavia and land in less than an hour in a highly civilized European airport.
My review will consist of passages from this very stirring book:
Page 431 (my book) speech of Milosevic in Kosovo on June 28, 1989 (the six hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo)
“For six hundred years now the heroism of Kosovo has inspired our creativity, fed our pride, and not allowed us to forget that once we were an army great, brave, and proud, one in the few that in defeat stayed undefeated. Six centuries later, today, we are again in battles and facing battles. They are not armed, although such battles cannot be excluded yet.”
Page 432
Milosevic postulated something that had never existed – a Serbian state stretching from Belgrade to Knin – and justified it through the message of a six-hundred-year-old battle. Seldom has necromancy so evidently raved. ..Milosevic opened the floodgates. All the ruined or extinguished lives were then but specks on the stream.
Page 138
Nationalism involves numbers. The nationalist declares not only that there are a lot of us, enough to impose our will, but also that there would have been a lot more of us if we had not, in the past, faced war, persecution, eviction, mistreatment, abuse, and other misfortunes at the hands of the enemy. A nationalist movement seeks to change the present in the name of the past in order to create a future vague in all respects except its glory. This luminous future, portrayed as a natural right, is, in the nationalist’s discourse, the one that would have occurred were it not for history’s aberrations. A paradise lost is never lost to the nationalist leader. It can be regained or at least exploited.
The Past
Page 15 (the creation of Yugoslavia in 1917)
It also ignored the fact that Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes were not alone in Yugoslavia. There were also Macedonians, Albanians – and Bosnian Muslims... It was a land of distinct topology; its mountains, narrow valleys, and countless rivers tended to encourage parochial loyalties.
Page 28
Under Nazi attack Yugoslavia imploded. The independent state of Croatia was established.
Page 32 (during Nazi occupation)
Viktor Gutic, the Ustasha prefect of western Bosnia, coined the term “cleansing” – ridding Bosnia of Serbs.
Page 122 (after 1945)
World War II was officially know as the “People’s Liberation Struggle”. Such descriptions suggested a unity among Yugoslav people’s that did not exist. During World War II more Yugoslavs were killed by other Yugoslavs than by external enemies. The label “fascist aggressor” conveniently confounded Nazis, Serbian Chetnicks, and Croatian Ustashas.
Page 45
Serbs and Croats, especially in exile, continued to nurse their wounds. World War II was unfinished business...the various crimes committed by all sides in Yugoslavia between 1941 and 1945 [were] shunted into a largely forgotten historical siding, a place shadowy enough to incubate the ambiguity on which conflict in the Balkans has thrived.
Page 67
About half a million opponents of Tito chose to leave Yugoslavia at the end of the war...The Ustasha remained alive.
Page 143 Tito’s Yugoslavia
One-party rule, the deification of an untouchable ruler, the selective use of terror and intimidation, the exploitation of fear to still the inquiring mind.
The Prelude
Page 138
The Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts [1987] paranoid, self-pitying and aggressive, was certainly the single document most influential in establishing the drum beat of Serbian bombast and pathos that led inexorably to Yugoslavia’s dismemberment – it accused the Kosovo Albanians of “neofascist aggression”, establishing a “physical, moral and psychological reign of terror; practising arson, murder and rape; attacking “the cradle of the Serbs historical existence”, and waging “open and total war” against the Serbs.
Page 139
Throughout the 1980s, no more than five Serbs died in violent incidents in Kosovo. The Memorandum moved onto Croatia “the Serbs in Croatia have never before been as jeopardized as they are today”.
Page 147 Milosevic in 1987 in Kosovo
“You should stay here for the sake of your ancestors and descendants. Otherwise your ancestors would be defiled and descendents disappointed.”
Page 189
Milosevic and the authors of the Serbian Memorandum [dragged] the Serbs back in time, not merely to 1918, but to 1389 and the charged symbolism of the Kosovo battle. Six hundred years after their defeat, they used an imagined “genocide” against the Serbs of Kosovo to justify the dispatch of tanks to the Kosovo capital of Pristina, the slaying of Kosovo Albanians, and the crushing of the autonomous rights’ of the almost two million ethnic Albanians living there. Then having thus unmoored Yugoslavia, they elaborated their expansionary program in the name of the autonomous rights of the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia.
Page 148
Milosevic’s revolution provided a wonderful pretext, and precedent, for the expression of nationalism that sought to settle, finally, the painful Balkan legacy of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires in blood rather than diplomacy.
Page 144
It was the suppressed ghosts...that Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia raised in order to cement their power and ensure that Yugoslavia died in violence.
Page 187
The drum beat of tribal allegiance quickly drowned out the pale call of a Yugoslavia democracy.
Page 107
Bosnian Muslims (9 percent of Yugoslavia in 1991), were less protagonists than bystanders, caught between the gyre of Serb and Croatian violence that accompanied these two peoples’ attempts to come to terms.
Page 116 (1992)
The thrust of the Serb offensive was to deny, through force of arms, that the people living together in Bosnia and Herzegovina – 44 percent of them Muslim, 31 percent Serb, 17 percent Croat and the rest of sufficiently mixed descent; could continue to coexist as a society and a community. Because Sarajevo, with its intensely variegated gravestones and its Muslim, Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish places of worship, was the most eloquent symbol, it had to be destroyed.
War
Page 168
The Serb bombardment of Sarajevo looked like mindless barbarity in that over more than three years, it took thousands of innocent lives and was a colossal public relations disaster. In the early months of the conflict, however, it served one important purpose. It distracted international attention from the real business of the war. That business was brutal, venal, and rural. It involved the evictions or slaughter of Muslims living in the provincial towns and villages of Bosnia during the spring, summer and fall of 1992.
Page 169
In a sharp burst of Serbian violence more than three quarters of a million Muslims were ousted from a swath of territory covering 70 percent of the country. Once the fabric of a society has been cut so comprehensively, it is virtually impossible to piece it together again. Once a crime is unpunished its effects fester. Fear takes root; divisions harden. Herein lay the essence, and the accuracy of the Serbian calculation.
Page 185
Tudjman proved a master of committing his atrocities in the shadow of larger Serb ones. By November 1991 about 500,000 Croats and close to 250,000 Serbs had been displaced.
Page 199
Pero Popovic wanted to talk. He said it was his conscious. One memory in particular was bothering him. He once beat Muslim prisoners of the Susica concentration camp. Beat them with pieces of timber. The worst was this: he knew some of the people getting beaten.
Page 206
Popovic was one of Karadzic’s troops. Karadzic coordinated the preparations for war with Milosevic. Popovic, like all the Bosnian Serb army, was paid through the Ministry of Defense in Belgrade.
Page 473
Mishiba was fourteen when on May 24, 1992, the Serbs rounded up her family. She and her mother and five year old sister were bundled onto a bus; her father tried to join them, but the Serbs dragged him away. They were kicking him as the bus departed – Mihala’s last image of her father, who has disappeared.
Page 203
The refugee is a pathetic figure. As Yugoslavia unravelled human flotsam was tossed about on the floors of empty buildings, gathered in a chicken coup or idle factory, discarded by the roadside. The remains of the country were awash in such human debris.
Page 297
Any journey of any length in Bosnia inevitably involved the spectacle of villages not merely deserted but systematically destroyed. The possibility of “the other’s” return had to be eliminated, as far as possible, by the destruction of his dwelling.
Page 354 Sarajevo
A shell took the life of Nihada Catic, a violin student at the school. Aged fifteen, she was killed on June 20, 1992. That morning she had been practicing Vivaldi for a concert. It was a quiet day, not a sound of war and she went downstairs to watch some friends playing a game of chess. A 120-millimeter shell came crashing down, killing her and six other children. Her mother said there was no recovery from what had happened.
The International Community
Page 172
Many of the Serb camps were less than two hundred miles from the Austrian and Italian borders. Refugees were pouring westward with stories to tell.
Page 173
Managing Bosnia, for the Bush and then the Clinton administration, meant staying out of it.
Page 237 United Nations
The doublespeak inherent in trying to be two different things at once; defenders of a savaged Bosnia and disinterested agents of humanitarianism often assumed Orwellian proportions.
Page 238 Alain Finkielkraunt
“In the ‘world of humanitarianism’ there are no more enemies; there are only victims. The wars of the 1990’s then, are seen not as conflicts in which there may indeed be butchers and victims and a need for resolve, but as ‘humanitarian disasters’ with victims on all sides.”
Page 239
The placing of a “cordon sanitaire” around a war and the treatment of everyone in it as victims... it involved feeding the victims as a substitute for stopping the butchers.
Page 381
Everyone in Sarajevo, by now had some form of post-traumatic stress. They have told themselves countless times that there are limits, only to discover that there are none. The shells still come down. The hills still have eyes.
In Geneva, in Lisbon, in London, in New York, in Paris, in the Vatican the people of Sarajevo are discussed. But from these discussions nothing emerges, nothing tangible; nothing to change the fact that between five hundred and eight hundred Serb heavy weapons still ring a city.
March 21, 2019
[Update 3/20/19: Radovan Karadzic's war crimes sentence increased to life in prison. Couldn't happen to a nicer genocidal sociopath.]
This is a story of failure. The Bosnian wars of 1991 – 1995 (and of Kosovo a few years after) transfixed me at the time, suddenly there was warfare and barbarity on the European continent fifty years after the end of World War II. In a nation, Yugoslavia, that had straddled the east-west Cold War like no other, that was made up of multiple ethnicities, whose origin and history was a mix of pragmatism and willful misunderstanding imposed from without and willful papering over of centuries long resentments imposed from within, stabilized by a complex and bizarrely successful one-man rule for decades. People paying attention knew there was dark uncertainty ahead after Tito’s death in 1980, but what eventually came to pass was not some historic tribal inevitability, though it suited Europe and the U.S. to pretend this was so as an excuse for inaction, but deliberately manipulated by a handful of Serb and Croat leaders with delusions of some glorious ethnically pure destiny.
This book was published in 1998, and there’s a reason so many years passed before I read it. A number of books on the Balkan crisis were published around this time, including one I read called Blood and Vengeance by Chuck Sudetic, also from 1998. Sudetic’s book was shattering, blew me away and remains one of the best books I’ve read. (It’s on my Goodreads favorites shelf, and I’d love to post a review of it but would really have to reread it in order to do that justice after this many years; maybe one day I will.) So it was one of those things where I figured I’d just read a definitive book on the Bosnian wars, and while I never consciously abandoned plans to read Hearts Grown Brutal, mentally it slipped to the back burner and stayed there for years. But I’m glad I have finally read it. Both of these books are highly recommended by me, both are by journalists who covered the war and deftly mix reportage with historical overview and personal histories of some of the people the authors encountered. I deduct one star from Cohen’s book only for one partial misstep. The first section of the book is the story of a Bosnian Muslim who served in the Croatian (Nazi-allied) Ustasha in World War II and fled Yugoslavia to Turkey after the war, convinced Tito’s agents would never stop looking for him. (It appears this conviction was mostly hubris, as he wasn’t that important and it’s doubtful Tito had the resources to try to hunt down every former Ustasha.) Years later his grown son, having thought his father was long dead, learns he may still be alive and tries to find him. This section is moderately interesting, but Cohen strains a bit trying to make this family’s saga some metaphor for the Bosnian conflict to come. And, it simply goes on too long (though Cohen’s discussion of how WWII played out in Yugoslavia is invaluable). It’s not fatal, but I came to see it as an overlong prologue. However the rest of the book is sustained brilliance.
It’s difficult to talk about Tito’s rule and the events of WWII in a concise way, but some highlights. The Ustasha were a Croatian fascist movement dating from the 1930s; Hitler and the Nazis installed their leader, Ante Pavelic, as head of The Independent (ha) State of Croatia in 1941. The Ustasha saw the Nazi alliance as their ticket to liberation and ridding themselves of Serbs. Jasenovac was one of several Croatian death camps for Serbs. The term is no exaggeration; a Nazi functionary in Croatia reported that in his view the Ustasha had gone “stark raving mad”. Estimates of the dead vary, but likely at least 300,000 Serbs were killed under the Pavelic regime. Josip Broz Tito led the communist Partisan guerrillas against the Ustasha. Another opposing force was the Serbian Chetniks (originally the Chetniks were irregular army who fought against the Ottoman Empire), led by Draza Mihailovic, royalist-inclined, who initially also fought the Nazis but later shifted to collaborate with the Germans to oppose the Partisans. The Chetniks slaughtered thousands of Muslims and Croats during WWII. After the war Mihailovic was arrested by Tito, quickly tried and executed. (Pavelic escaped and died in Spain in 1959.) Got all that? Suffice to say, while Hitler helped, Yugoslavs had plenty of their own reasons to spend 1941 to 1945 murdering each other. This history created a simmering infection all through Tito’s rule, as the official story was a general noble struggle against fascism, with the specifics of who massacred whom swept under the rug. But memory will persist.
Tito doesn’t come off particularly well in either Cohen’s or Sudetic’s book, but I can never quite manage to be completely condemning. To be sure this was one-man rule, a dictatorship, there were political prisoners, no freedom of expression, and periodic disappearances. But it appears to have been a softer autocratic rule than some. Tito had the stones to defy Stalin and survive, he deftly played the east and west off each other during the Cold War to his nation’s benefit, and he managed to keep a lid on the simmering ethnic rivalries for far longer than should have been possible. But his fatal flaw was to have no coherent succession plan. In one sense, you can see why. Designating a successor, in a nation of six republics and two autonomous provinces, was bound to piss off all but one of them. So he set up an unworkable, ridiculous rotating presidency between Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, & Macedonia, plus Kosovo and Vojvodina. The Yugoslav constitution of 1974 was 310 pages containing 406 articles, also making clear that Tito himself could ignore any of them. What could go wrong? As Cohen writes, “It was so long precisely because bogus democracy takes a long time to explain.”
Slobodan Milosevic, president of Serbia, gave a speech at Kosovo field in 1989 that crystalized the deranged Serbian ambition of bringing about a ‘Greater Serbia’, this despite the fact that Serbs had always been dispersed throughout the former Yugoslaia, that mixed marriages were commonplace, and that culturally Bosnian Serbs had little in common with those in Belgrade. Three years later, the shelling of Sarajevo and then Tuzla began.
WHY SARAJEVO?
Sarajevo was the most cosmopolitan of Bosnian cities, the most diverse. Host of the 1984 Olympics, surrounded by mountains which became symbols of oppression during the four years of siege as Serbs lobbed shells down on the inhabitants at will. Its people were 44% Muslim, 31% Serb, 17% Croat, the rest mixed. Its very existence was a rebuke to the 'Greater Serbia' idea. "Because Sarajevo...was the most eloquent symbol of coexistence, it had to be destroyed." And yes, this meant that Serbs were also shelling Serbs. Some left before the siege started, many more left after it began, but there were others who elected to stay. The Bosnian Serb army called the latter traitors, for not fleeing their homes.
The Bosnian Serbs were led politically by Radovan Karadzic, a psychiatrist and poet who once worked in Sarajevo's hospital which he now bombed, and militarily by General Ratko Mladic. Their actions were financed and to varying degrees directed by Belgrade, though Milosevic spent the war denying this. But in the particulars of this triad of war criminals was a fatal conflict. Milosevic was a pure opportunist, who latched onto Serb nationalism as a means to power and status. He unfailingly checked which way the wind was blowing. But Karadzic and Mladic were true believers, who pursued their 'Greater Serbia' notion with psychopathic zeal.
CONCENTRATION CAMPS, ETHNIC CLEANSING, "NEUTRALITY", AND THE NADIR OF PEACEKEEPING
If you're inclined to hate the United Nations (I'm not), read this book. It's a four-year nonstop parade of international impotence, incompetence, spinelessness, and ass-covering. Where to start? Maybe with the international arms embargo, imposed on all states of the former Yugoslavia in 1991. Sounds reasonable, yes? Well no. The fact is, the former JNA (Yugoslavia's army), once Yugoslavia ceased to exist, became Serbia's de facto army overnight. So the real world effect of the arms embargo was to cripple Bosnia's Muslims and the Croatians right at the start of the war, and lock in Serbia's military advantage. A child could see this, but not, apparently, the UN, and the embargo remained. The predictable result, first in Croatia, was Serbia bombing Vukovar into rubble in 1991 and mass slaughter in the Krajina region. Then in 1992 the Serbs rolled into Bosnia and made the term 'ethnic cleansing' familiar to news readers worldwide. It didn't help that the Bosnian Muslim political leader, Alija Izetbegovic, while he had stridently insisted on Bosnia declaring its independence, incomprehensibly refused to raise an army at the same time. His people suffered for it. By the end of 1992 the Serbs controlled 70% of Bosnia.
Cohen details one incident that exemplifies UN incoherence in Bosnia. UNPROFOR (the UN Protection Force) had been created at the time of a ceasefire in the Croatian war. Part of the ceasefire agreement gave the UN control of Sarajevo’s airport. If you’re thinking, wait, Sarajevo isn’t located in Croatia, full points; but bizarrely, the UN saw it as neutral ground! Crossing the airport, which was surrounded by Serb snipers, was the only way for people in Sarajevo to escape the siege. In August 1993, a woman called Bisera Zecevic decided to risk the crossing. One son had died on the mountains surrounding Sarajevo in a military engagement; her other son had successfully crossed the airport and eventually made his way to Detroit in the U.S. So Bisera and a family friend ran the gauntlet. But the UN had somehow decided that ‘neutrality’ required them to discourage this, so they beamed a spotlight on the two Bosnians as they crossed the airport; this gave the Serb snipers a clear shot, and Bisera was killed. Yay neutrality.
The Serb psyche was a funhouse mirror which allowed them to perceive themselves always as victims acting in self-defense. The Serbs lobbing shells onto Sarajevo markets, killing and maiming civilians and children were thus just defending themselves. And “the Serb obsession with the sexuality, fertility, and promiscuity of the Muslims” led to the systematic mass rape of thousands of Muslim women in 1992. And memories of the Jasenovac camp in WWII led to several concentration camps being set up for the displaced Muslim civilians of the ’92 rampage.
That business was the eviction or slaughter of Muslims in mostly rural towns and villages. Taken from their homes, herded into camps, selectively killed; over three quarters of a million people displaced. The UN defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” And we knew. Refugees, survivors, informers had stories that reached the State Dept. Reports from the International Red Cross. And satellite photographs. We knew, and we blinked. We decided we didn’t like to use the word ‘genocide’. Earlier defiant talk wilted. And the Serbs took the meaning, correctly, that the international community lacked the stones to back up talk with action. The dispiriting course of the next three years was thus set.
There was also preconceived notions of Serb sophistication and Muslim uncouthness. Mladic and Karadzic were good at bonhomie, backslapping, offers of plum brandy. Many UN personnel felt they could relate to them, while the Muslims seemed comparatively like Appalachian hicks, where two matching boots qualified one as part of a special forces unit. Two diplomats in particular, Yasushi Akashi of Japan and Bernard Janvier of France, never met a Serb lie or false promise they wouldn’t believe, or passed up an opportunity to scorn the Muslims as “professional victims”. Then there was Michael Rose of Britain, a true piece of work. He once blamed the death of a British officer in a Serb attack on the ‘safe area’ (ha) of Gorazde on the Muslims for folding their front line. Unhappy with the author’s reporting, he calls Cohen into his office for a meandering rant. On the fact of Serbs defying an ultimatum to remove all weapons from a Gorazde exclusion zone: “I’m not about to start a third world war for three rusty pieces of metal.” On Gorazde’s hospital being bombed, Rose denies it was destroyed, rather only had a “shell through the roof” and “two or three tank rounds into the stairwell.” Well ok then. Rose developed a mantra for UN dithering and inaction: “This is the Balkans, you know.”
How bad did it get? The UN utter devotion to ‘neutrality’ and obfuscation even extended to the death of one of their own. A French soldier, Eric Hardoin, had been building an anti-sniping barrier in Sarajevo when he was shot twice and killed. The next day a UN spokesman said that while the first bullet fired definitely came from a Serb sniper, the second shot—three seconds later—might possibly have come from the Bosnian government side. Seriously.
THE SEEDS OF THE SERBS’ UNDOING
Time, however, was not on the Serbs’ side. By the end of 1992 they controlled 70% of Bosnia and 27% of Croatia, due largely to the overwhelming military advantage they started with. But over the next three years, the lines barely moved. With desperation as a motivator, Bosnian Muslims scraped together an army which over time became more organized and effective. And by 1994, the U.S. had become a de facto military ally of Croatia. Not officially of course. But at this point there was a tenuous Muslim-Croat Federation. Clinton administration thinking was that it needed to be strong enough to hold off the Serbs. Fair enough, though it ignored the fact that these 'allies' barely tolerated each other, and that Croatian President Franjo Tudjman viewed Muslims with contempt and wanted to expel all Serbs from Croatia. So Iran wanted to help Bosnian Muslims and had been pressing the U.S. on this issue for some time. Eventually pragmatism won out, and odd as it sounds, there was an 'Iranian pipeline' sending arms to Croatia which made their way to the Bosnian and Croatian governments, while the U.S. quietly told Tudjman they had no opinion on these shipments. The longer the war dragged on, the less advantageous the Serbs' position became.
Tudjman himself was another factor. To be clear, he was an equally despicable figure as Milosevic, just as virulent in the nationalism he pursued. But you didn't read about him nearly as much. Partly this is because no one could outdo the Serbs for disastrous P.R. And partly it's because Tudjman was a master counterpuncher. While the Serbs turned Vukovar into a modern day Dresden--the first atrocity of the Balkan wars to garner worldwide attention--Tudjman was savvy enough to order his forces, when they 'liberated' a village of its Serb inhabitants, to leave Orthodox churches untouched. They were no less vicious, but this detail, in comparison to the Catholic churches and Muslim mosques the Serbs would reduce to rubble, was a handy symbol. As Cohen puts it, "Tudjman proved a master of committing his atrocities in the shadow of larger Serb ones."
And in time Milosevic found he couldn't control Karadzic. Peace agreements were proposed at various points, eventually Milosevic wanted to sign and be done with the war, but Karadzic balked. Milosevic was furious and essentially cut ties. So when the tide turned in the Krajina region of Croatia, the Serbs there found they were on their own, and routed. It was over in four days, and 150,000 Serbs (those who weren't outright killed) fled east into Serbia.
Finally there was the myth of Serbian military prowess, taken on faith by the west from the war's beginning.
SREBRENICA
As the war dragged on, the Serbs were desperate to lock down as much territory as they could, with an eye toward eventual negotiations on how territory would be divided in any peace agreement. This put three eastern Muslim enclaves--Gorazde, Zepa, and Srebrenica—in extreme danger. I’ve read about Srebrenica so many times, it never gets less depressing. The trapped Muslims, increasingly desperate but believing earlier promises they would be protected; the Dutch peacekeepers hung out to dry by their own superiors; NATO planes in the air, waiting for the order to launch airstrikes which could have averted the massacre; Janvier hesitating, wanting to believe Mladic’s lies that the Serbs wouldn’t attack and reneging on his promises to the Dutch that if an attack came, they would have air support. Srebrenica fell on July 11 1995. Mladic publicly assured the Muslims they could leave on July 12, but his forces weeded out Muslim men and diverted them to fields where they were executed and put in mass graves. Over seven thousand Muslims were killed, the worst massacre on European soil since WWII. Mladic personally supervised this; and Belgrade was still paying his salary. I should add that Sudetic, in Blood and Vengeance, gives a much more intimate, moment to moment account of these events, harrowing and shattering to read.
[review cont'd in comments; damn, I knew this was too long]
This is a story of failure. The Bosnian wars of 1991 – 1995 (and of Kosovo a few years after) transfixed me at the time, suddenly there was warfare and barbarity on the European continent fifty years after the end of World War II. In a nation, Yugoslavia, that had straddled the east-west Cold War like no other, that was made up of multiple ethnicities, whose origin and history was a mix of pragmatism and willful misunderstanding imposed from without and willful papering over of centuries long resentments imposed from within, stabilized by a complex and bizarrely successful one-man rule for decades. People paying attention knew there was dark uncertainty ahead after Tito’s death in 1980, but what eventually came to pass was not some historic tribal inevitability, though it suited Europe and the U.S. to pretend this was so as an excuse for inaction, but deliberately manipulated by a handful of Serb and Croat leaders with delusions of some glorious ethnically pure destiny.
This book was published in 1998, and there’s a reason so many years passed before I read it. A number of books on the Balkan crisis were published around this time, including one I read called Blood and Vengeance by Chuck Sudetic, also from 1998. Sudetic’s book was shattering, blew me away and remains one of the best books I’ve read. (It’s on my Goodreads favorites shelf, and I’d love to post a review of it but would really have to reread it in order to do that justice after this many years; maybe one day I will.) So it was one of those things where I figured I’d just read a definitive book on the Bosnian wars, and while I never consciously abandoned plans to read Hearts Grown Brutal, mentally it slipped to the back burner and stayed there for years. But I’m glad I have finally read it. Both of these books are highly recommended by me, both are by journalists who covered the war and deftly mix reportage with historical overview and personal histories of some of the people the authors encountered. I deduct one star from Cohen’s book only for one partial misstep. The first section of the book is the story of a Bosnian Muslim who served in the Croatian (Nazi-allied) Ustasha in World War II and fled Yugoslavia to Turkey after the war, convinced Tito’s agents would never stop looking for him. (It appears this conviction was mostly hubris, as he wasn’t that important and it’s doubtful Tito had the resources to try to hunt down every former Ustasha.) Years later his grown son, having thought his father was long dead, learns he may still be alive and tries to find him. This section is moderately interesting, but Cohen strains a bit trying to make this family’s saga some metaphor for the Bosnian conflict to come. And, it simply goes on too long (though Cohen’s discussion of how WWII played out in Yugoslavia is invaluable). It’s not fatal, but I came to see it as an overlong prologue. However the rest of the book is sustained brilliance.
It’s difficult to talk about Tito’s rule and the events of WWII in a concise way, but some highlights. The Ustasha were a Croatian fascist movement dating from the 1930s; Hitler and the Nazis installed their leader, Ante Pavelic, as head of The Independent (ha) State of Croatia in 1941. The Ustasha saw the Nazi alliance as their ticket to liberation and ridding themselves of Serbs. Jasenovac was one of several Croatian death camps for Serbs. The term is no exaggeration; a Nazi functionary in Croatia reported that in his view the Ustasha had gone “stark raving mad”. Estimates of the dead vary, but likely at least 300,000 Serbs were killed under the Pavelic regime. Josip Broz Tito led the communist Partisan guerrillas against the Ustasha. Another opposing force was the Serbian Chetniks (originally the Chetniks were irregular army who fought against the Ottoman Empire), led by Draza Mihailovic, royalist-inclined, who initially also fought the Nazis but later shifted to collaborate with the Germans to oppose the Partisans. The Chetniks slaughtered thousands of Muslims and Croats during WWII. After the war Mihailovic was arrested by Tito, quickly tried and executed. (Pavelic escaped and died in Spain in 1959.) Got all that? Suffice to say, while Hitler helped, Yugoslavs had plenty of their own reasons to spend 1941 to 1945 murdering each other. This history created a simmering infection all through Tito’s rule, as the official story was a general noble struggle against fascism, with the specifics of who massacred whom swept under the rug. But memory will persist.
Tito doesn’t come off particularly well in either Cohen’s or Sudetic’s book, but I can never quite manage to be completely condemning. To be sure this was one-man rule, a dictatorship, there were political prisoners, no freedom of expression, and periodic disappearances. But it appears to have been a softer autocratic rule than some. Tito had the stones to defy Stalin and survive, he deftly played the east and west off each other during the Cold War to his nation’s benefit, and he managed to keep a lid on the simmering ethnic rivalries for far longer than should have been possible. But his fatal flaw was to have no coherent succession plan. In one sense, you can see why. Designating a successor, in a nation of six republics and two autonomous provinces, was bound to piss off all but one of them. So he set up an unworkable, ridiculous rotating presidency between Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, & Macedonia, plus Kosovo and Vojvodina. The Yugoslav constitution of 1974 was 310 pages containing 406 articles, also making clear that Tito himself could ignore any of them. What could go wrong? As Cohen writes, “It was so long precisely because bogus democracy takes a long time to explain.”
Slobodan Milosevic, president of Serbia, gave a speech at Kosovo field in 1989 that crystalized the deranged Serbian ambition of bringing about a ‘Greater Serbia’, this despite the fact that Serbs had always been dispersed throughout the former Yugoslaia, that mixed marriages were commonplace, and that culturally Bosnian Serbs had little in common with those in Belgrade. Three years later, the shelling of Sarajevo and then Tuzla began.
WHY SARAJEVO?
Sarajevo was the most cosmopolitan of Bosnian cities, the most diverse. Host of the 1984 Olympics, surrounded by mountains which became symbols of oppression during the four years of siege as Serbs lobbed shells down on the inhabitants at will. Its people were 44% Muslim, 31% Serb, 17% Croat, the rest mixed. Its very existence was a rebuke to the 'Greater Serbia' idea. "Because Sarajevo...was the most eloquent symbol of coexistence, it had to be destroyed." And yes, this meant that Serbs were also shelling Serbs. Some left before the siege started, many more left after it began, but there were others who elected to stay. The Bosnian Serb army called the latter traitors, for not fleeing their homes.
The Bosnian Serbs were led politically by Radovan Karadzic, a psychiatrist and poet who once worked in Sarajevo's hospital which he now bombed, and militarily by General Ratko Mladic. Their actions were financed and to varying degrees directed by Belgrade, though Milosevic spent the war denying this. But in the particulars of this triad of war criminals was a fatal conflict. Milosevic was a pure opportunist, who latched onto Serb nationalism as a means to power and status. He unfailingly checked which way the wind was blowing. But Karadzic and Mladic were true believers, who pursued their 'Greater Serbia' notion with psychopathic zeal.
CONCENTRATION CAMPS, ETHNIC CLEANSING, "NEUTRALITY", AND THE NADIR OF PEACEKEEPING
If you're inclined to hate the United Nations (I'm not), read this book. It's a four-year nonstop parade of international impotence, incompetence, spinelessness, and ass-covering. Where to start? Maybe with the international arms embargo, imposed on all states of the former Yugoslavia in 1991. Sounds reasonable, yes? Well no. The fact is, the former JNA (Yugoslavia's army), once Yugoslavia ceased to exist, became Serbia's de facto army overnight. So the real world effect of the arms embargo was to cripple Bosnia's Muslims and the Croatians right at the start of the war, and lock in Serbia's military advantage. A child could see this, but not, apparently, the UN, and the embargo remained. The predictable result, first in Croatia, was Serbia bombing Vukovar into rubble in 1991 and mass slaughter in the Krajina region. Then in 1992 the Serbs rolled into Bosnia and made the term 'ethnic cleansing' familiar to news readers worldwide. It didn't help that the Bosnian Muslim political leader, Alija Izetbegovic, while he had stridently insisted on Bosnia declaring its independence, incomprehensibly refused to raise an army at the same time. His people suffered for it. By the end of 1992 the Serbs controlled 70% of Bosnia.
Cohen details one incident that exemplifies UN incoherence in Bosnia. UNPROFOR (the UN Protection Force) had been created at the time of a ceasefire in the Croatian war. Part of the ceasefire agreement gave the UN control of Sarajevo’s airport. If you’re thinking, wait, Sarajevo isn’t located in Croatia, full points; but bizarrely, the UN saw it as neutral ground! Crossing the airport, which was surrounded by Serb snipers, was the only way for people in Sarajevo to escape the siege. In August 1993, a woman called Bisera Zecevic decided to risk the crossing. One son had died on the mountains surrounding Sarajevo in a military engagement; her other son had successfully crossed the airport and eventually made his way to Detroit in the U.S. So Bisera and a family friend ran the gauntlet. But the UN had somehow decided that ‘neutrality’ required them to discourage this, so they beamed a spotlight on the two Bosnians as they crossed the airport; this gave the Serb snipers a clear shot, and Bisera was killed. Yay neutrality.
The Serb psyche was a funhouse mirror which allowed them to perceive themselves always as victims acting in self-defense. The Serbs lobbing shells onto Sarajevo markets, killing and maiming civilians and children were thus just defending themselves. And “the Serb obsession with the sexuality, fertility, and promiscuity of the Muslims” led to the systematic mass rape of thousands of Muslim women in 1992. And memories of the Jasenovac camp in WWII led to several concentration camps being set up for the displaced Muslim civilians of the ’92 rampage.
The Serb bombardment of Sarajevo looked like mindless brutality in that, over more than three years, it took thousands of innocent lives and was a colossal public relations disaster. In the early months of the conflict, however, it served one important purpose. It distracted international attention from the real business of the war.
That business was the eviction or slaughter of Muslims in mostly rural towns and villages. Taken from their homes, herded into camps, selectively killed; over three quarters of a million people displaced. The UN defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” And we knew. Refugees, survivors, informers had stories that reached the State Dept. Reports from the International Red Cross. And satellite photographs. We knew, and we blinked. We decided we didn’t like to use the word ‘genocide’. Earlier defiant talk wilted. And the Serbs took the meaning, correctly, that the international community lacked the stones to back up talk with action. The dispiriting course of the next three years was thus set.
There was also preconceived notions of Serb sophistication and Muslim uncouthness. Mladic and Karadzic were good at bonhomie, backslapping, offers of plum brandy. Many UN personnel felt they could relate to them, while the Muslims seemed comparatively like Appalachian hicks, where two matching boots qualified one as part of a special forces unit. Two diplomats in particular, Yasushi Akashi of Japan and Bernard Janvier of France, never met a Serb lie or false promise they wouldn’t believe, or passed up an opportunity to scorn the Muslims as “professional victims”. Then there was Michael Rose of Britain, a true piece of work. He once blamed the death of a British officer in a Serb attack on the ‘safe area’ (ha) of Gorazde on the Muslims for folding their front line. Unhappy with the author’s reporting, he calls Cohen into his office for a meandering rant. On the fact of Serbs defying an ultimatum to remove all weapons from a Gorazde exclusion zone: “I’m not about to start a third world war for three rusty pieces of metal.” On Gorazde’s hospital being bombed, Rose denies it was destroyed, rather only had a “shell through the roof” and “two or three tank rounds into the stairwell.” Well ok then. Rose developed a mantra for UN dithering and inaction: “This is the Balkans, you know.”
How bad did it get? The UN utter devotion to ‘neutrality’ and obfuscation even extended to the death of one of their own. A French soldier, Eric Hardoin, had been building an anti-sniping barrier in Sarajevo when he was shot twice and killed. The next day a UN spokesman said that while the first bullet fired definitely came from a Serb sniper, the second shot—three seconds later—might possibly have come from the Bosnian government side. Seriously.
THE SEEDS OF THE SERBS’ UNDOING
Time, however, was not on the Serbs’ side. By the end of 1992 they controlled 70% of Bosnia and 27% of Croatia, due largely to the overwhelming military advantage they started with. But over the next three years, the lines barely moved. With desperation as a motivator, Bosnian Muslims scraped together an army which over time became more organized and effective. And by 1994, the U.S. had become a de facto military ally of Croatia. Not officially of course. But at this point there was a tenuous Muslim-Croat Federation. Clinton administration thinking was that it needed to be strong enough to hold off the Serbs. Fair enough, though it ignored the fact that these 'allies' barely tolerated each other, and that Croatian President Franjo Tudjman viewed Muslims with contempt and wanted to expel all Serbs from Croatia. So Iran wanted to help Bosnian Muslims and had been pressing the U.S. on this issue for some time. Eventually pragmatism won out, and odd as it sounds, there was an 'Iranian pipeline' sending arms to Croatia which made their way to the Bosnian and Croatian governments, while the U.S. quietly told Tudjman they had no opinion on these shipments. The longer the war dragged on, the less advantageous the Serbs' position became.
Tudjman himself was another factor. To be clear, he was an equally despicable figure as Milosevic, just as virulent in the nationalism he pursued. But you didn't read about him nearly as much. Partly this is because no one could outdo the Serbs for disastrous P.R. And partly it's because Tudjman was a master counterpuncher. While the Serbs turned Vukovar into a modern day Dresden--the first atrocity of the Balkan wars to garner worldwide attention--Tudjman was savvy enough to order his forces, when they 'liberated' a village of its Serb inhabitants, to leave Orthodox churches untouched. They were no less vicious, but this detail, in comparison to the Catholic churches and Muslim mosques the Serbs would reduce to rubble, was a handy symbol. As Cohen puts it, "Tudjman proved a master of committing his atrocities in the shadow of larger Serb ones."
And in time Milosevic found he couldn't control Karadzic. Peace agreements were proposed at various points, eventually Milosevic wanted to sign and be done with the war, but Karadzic balked. Milosevic was furious and essentially cut ties. So when the tide turned in the Krajina region of Croatia, the Serbs there found they were on their own, and routed. It was over in four days, and 150,000 Serbs (those who weren't outright killed) fled east into Serbia.
Finally there was the myth of Serbian military prowess, taken on faith by the west from the war's beginning.
In truth, the vastly superior arsenal of the Serbs...had always masked a limited willingness to fight...The craven long-range bombardment of Vukovar and other towns reflected the reluctance of the Serbs to take casualties and engage in fighting at close quarters...The only occasion on which the inheritors of Europe's fourth-largest army proved really effective was against defenseless civilians.
SREBRENICA
As the war dragged on, the Serbs were desperate to lock down as much territory as they could, with an eye toward eventual negotiations on how territory would be divided in any peace agreement. This put three eastern Muslim enclaves--Gorazde, Zepa, and Srebrenica—in extreme danger. I’ve read about Srebrenica so many times, it never gets less depressing. The trapped Muslims, increasingly desperate but believing earlier promises they would be protected; the Dutch peacekeepers hung out to dry by their own superiors; NATO planes in the air, waiting for the order to launch airstrikes which could have averted the massacre; Janvier hesitating, wanting to believe Mladic’s lies that the Serbs wouldn’t attack and reneging on his promises to the Dutch that if an attack came, they would have air support. Srebrenica fell on July 11 1995. Mladic publicly assured the Muslims they could leave on July 12, but his forces weeded out Muslim men and diverted them to fields where they were executed and put in mass graves. Over seven thousand Muslims were killed, the worst massacre on European soil since WWII. Mladic personally supervised this; and Belgrade was still paying his salary. I should add that Sudetic, in Blood and Vengeance, gives a much more intimate, moment to moment account of these events, harrowing and shattering to read.
[review cont'd in comments; damn, I knew this was too long]
May 6, 2012
Roger Cohen is/was a writer for the New York Times and went to Bosnia in 1992 to cover the war which resulted in the breakup of Yugoslavia and the impact as experienced by four families. The four families included Orthodox Christens, Catholics, Jews, and Muslins that had intermarried that the bottom line is, they all were Yugoslavians and so inter-mixed there was no clear separation. There was past history of fighting and intergrating going back to 350 AD that the bottom line a few people started this whole mess for their own personal gain.
Families broke up, marriages between a Serb and a Muslin were destroyed with the children having to decide which parent they were going to side with and then the agony all suffered. I found it very interesting reading about the positions various nations took trying to help the individuals caught in the middle. And, if there is any truth in the book then it provided a real good justification for the abolition of the UN Peace Keeping Forces and NATO Troops in Europe what with their role to be observers, but not to do anything to prevent harm to the old, the young, and the women. The sad part of reading this book is reading of the brutality all committed against each other just to prove a stupid point that will explode again.
A sad read, but very educational.
Families broke up, marriages between a Serb and a Muslin were destroyed with the children having to decide which parent they were going to side with and then the agony all suffered. I found it very interesting reading about the positions various nations took trying to help the individuals caught in the middle. And, if there is any truth in the book then it provided a real good justification for the abolition of the UN Peace Keeping Forces and NATO Troops in Europe what with their role to be observers, but not to do anything to prevent harm to the old, the young, and the women. The sad part of reading this book is reading of the brutality all committed against each other just to prove a stupid point that will explode again.
A sad read, but very educational.
April 16, 2013
This is one of the best overall histories of the Yugoslav wars I've read and it's also a heartfelt polemic against the ineffectual, dishonest and cowardly foreign policies adopted toward the conflict by the Western powers in Europe and the U.S. that could have provided real help much earlier. Cohen's arguments make it clear that earlier intervention very likely would have saved thousands of innocent lives and would have preserved Bosnia, to some extent, as a multi-confessional society and nation. He makes cases and points fingers, implicating of course Milosovic, Karadzic and Tudjman, but also many in the west that should have known better, like James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger of the U.S.
The bonus of the book is the high level writing of Cohen. His ability to pull out a creative metaphor or simile to paint a picture or a mood is something to behold and admire. I've personally experienced the phenomenon of "falling in love" with Bosnia. This book shows that this is not an uncommon reaction to experiencing Bosnia.
The bonus of the book is the high level writing of Cohen. His ability to pull out a creative metaphor or simile to paint a picture or a mood is something to behold and admire. I've personally experienced the phenomenon of "falling in love" with Bosnia. This book shows that this is not an uncommon reaction to experiencing Bosnia.
May 11, 2025
"I communicate only with those who guard me from others, and who guard others from me."
If you've ever felt intimidated about the complex history of conflict in the Balkans, this is the book to read. Heartrending and raw, it lays bare the violence, heartbreak, and cultural strength of a region long ignored and minimized by the West.
If you've ever felt intimidated about the complex history of conflict in the Balkans, this is the book to read. Heartrending and raw, it lays bare the violence, heartbreak, and cultural strength of a region long ignored and minimized by the West.
January 3, 2021
Haunting recounting of the history leading up to the bloody and tragic break-up of Yugoslavia. Cohen is a wordsmith, with many years of reporting from eastern Europe.
December 1, 2019
If there were a chance to rate a single sentence, a scene, a paragraph, each interview, each character, each story, I would probably do it for this book, this one only.
A book of stories within stories, part of a bigger story from yesterday's story to the stories of the present.
There is no linear narrative in here. Very few filters remain. Everything is turned and tossed at you by the author from a myriad of places and times, from left to right, above and below. You can't protect yourself all the time from suddenly comprehending their meaning. It's a lost cause until your heart goes brutal too.
A book of stories within stories, part of a bigger story from yesterday's story to the stories of the present.
There is no linear narrative in here. Very few filters remain. Everything is turned and tossed at you by the author from a myriad of places and times, from left to right, above and below. You can't protect yourself all the time from suddenly comprehending their meaning. It's a lost cause until your heart goes brutal too.
February 3, 2014
Like any book about war, this book was exhausting. But it was worth the effort. Roger Cohen wrote about his experiences in Bosnia/Serbia/Croatia as well as the experiences of several families. But, he also covered much of the countries' history--the history that we in the USA were led to believe was the cause of this awful war. It was an eye-opening experience to see the workings of the international community and the efforts made not to "intervene" and to "remain neutral" in this war which, as clearly elucidated by Mr. Cohen, was not a civil war but a war of aggression in which someone should have intervened. He was extremely critical of the US, of Britain, France as well as the UN and NATO. He stated that the war changed him--and his book changed me. I now look at humanitarian aid from the UN in "peacekeeping" efforts with a much more jaded eye. This book calls us all to account and reading it has changed my view of the current efforts to bring peace to Syria. I have much less confidence in that effort because I see how feckless (as Mr. Cohen called it) the US and the UN can be in these efforts. Just how much responsibility do we all bear for people in other parts of the world? It is hard to know. But, this book certainly illustrates how bad it can be when we fail to take any responsibility at all.
September 3, 2012
You would think that a book about the Bosnian war would yield tons of books full of emotion, intensity and real life drama. Unfortunately, this is the second book I've attempted to read on the subject but I have not been able to get passed the first half without falling asleep every two pages. Although there are some stories of real people and their experiences, they are really just used as tools through which the author gives one LONG ASS history lesson on the Baltics. I love history but not the dry kind that you were forced to learn in school and that is what this book offered. The author didn't get to the heart of the people and their experiences but instead mentioned an event in their life followed by a rattling-off of chronological happenings. YAWN
October 14, 2009
For 3 years the city of Sarajevo was a shooting gallery for plum-drunk Serbian weekend warriors, Muslims were being rounded up by the thousands for execution and the world stood by wringing its hands, exclaiming "its just the Balkans".
The author follows several families who endured this war and presents as concisely as possible the tangled history of the Balkans. I was left gasping and more than a little annoyed with myself for not realizing what was happening at the time. This book is a masterpiece.
The author follows several families who endured this war and presents as concisely as possible the tangled history of the Balkans. I was left gasping and more than a little annoyed with myself for not realizing what was happening at the time. This book is a masterpiece.
September 27, 2015
Cohen highlights the complexitiess and struggle around a region that has symbolized implosion in the modern era. Drawing on testimonies from civilian and military alike from bands as varied as Serbo-Croats, Muslim Bosniaks, and Orthodox-Muslim Turkic 'Yugoslavs' of Tito's patriotism, 20 years on the crossroads of The West and The Orient are still an alluring mystery to outsiders, and a bitter beauty to those within.
May 26, 2020
Before the tragedies of Homs, Aleppo - and Syria , there were Sarajevo, Srebrenica - and the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
And just like in Syria, the United Nations - held hostage by the balance of power between the five permanent members of the Security Council, each of which has a veto power - was also useless in the former Yugoslavia.
And just like in Syria, the United Nations - held hostage by the balance of power between the five permanent members of the Security Council, each of which has a veto power - was also useless in the former Yugoslavia.
June 2, 2009
Comprehensive and insightful presentation of the Serbian/Bosnian conflict that approaches the situation historical from the perspectives of the Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians. Articulate and highly readable for a complex and difficult subject.
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