Undermined from Within, Betrayed from Without

...Can we ever say "never again...

...The tribes," he warns, "are gathering...

...Like many who reject nationalism, he identifies himself as a secular Yugoslav...

...They include historical poems and letters portraying a centuries-old hybrid culture unique within Europe and within Yugoslavia...

...As the country collapsed, he helped found the union for a Democratic Yugoslav Initiative, a beleaguered effort to fight nationalism in the former republics...

...Some of the saddest moments in the book come when he describes former colleagues who have been swept away by nationalism...

...Although we might pretend Bosnia is merely a local agony, the credibility of the United Nations, nato and what has evolved into the European Union may never recover from the weakness they have exhibited with their infinite ceasefires, unenforced no-fly zones and safe havens, and a UN policy of gathering war crimes evidence against Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic while simultaneously cutting a deal with him over territory...

...Yet they have not only left Bosnia to its attacker...

...they have tied its arms through an embargo, bound it in red tape, nurtured false hopes for rescue, equated its flailing resistance to the attack itself, and finally pressured it to "make peace" with the perpetrator...

...The argument that the West can't get involved in the Balkan quagmire similarly dissolves in the face of the evidence presented here...

...The writings Ali and Lifschultz have collected show otherwise...

...The only place he has ever felt at home, he says in a chapter entitled "A Personal Summary," is the island of Brae where he has spent at least four months each year for the last two decades...

...After corning to the United States he worked as a trade unionist and civil rights activist, then turned to academia...

...The Bosnia that emerges from the descriptions in this book is a tapestry of cultures, explicitly multiethnic and devoted to tolerance...

...The voices that follow—journalists, academics, and other interested individuals in the United States, Western Europe and the former Yugoslavia—swell into a chorus of pain and indignation...

...A walking refutation of tribalism, the author is a Serb by lineage and a Croatian citizen by preference...

...Nations built around ethnicity, he argues, cannot even safeguard the civil rights of those in the majority...

...A story at once more personal and more general is told by Bogdan Denitch in Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia, an expanded version of his contribution to Why Bosnia...

...The Bosnia of these accounts is an international equivalent of Kitty Genovese, the mugging victim murdered on a New York street as neighbors watched...

...He also reflects on the more general tragedy of the murder of Eastern Europe's best chance for multiethnic democracy...

...But a blood feud—who can blame us if we compassionately stanch the wounds and hide from the crossfire...

...To images of Balkan tribalism these essays juxtapose a more complex reality...

...He even sounds warnings about the balkanizing tendencies of American debates over cultural pluralism...

...Denitch builds a case study in the recent degradation of Yugoslav politics, with particular emphasis on the role played by the West, the Yugoslav Army, party factions, and the semi-intelligentsia...

...He considers the indigenous democratic opposition throughout ex-Yugoslavia the best source of future stability...

...229 pp...

...Recent events heighten the value of this testimony, for as the West stumbles toward a defense of Bosnia, any moral and reasonable course of action depends on discarding those myths forever...

...If the world answers "aggression," then the invader (or invaders) must be stopped...

...We read a transcript of a conversation in a bar with a Serbian irregular who had carried out ethnic cleansing, reports on Sarajevo's daily suffering, and a demographic study that both proves the impossibility of the UN-sponsored Vance-Owen plan and—in a wonderfully quirky non sequitur—calls for a division of Bosnia by geographic watersheds instead of ethnicity...

...Since then we have aided aggression not only through the arms embargo and the cruel inefficacy of UN protection, but through a peace process that in effect mandated apartheid states and fueled ethnic cleansing...

...Its story is worse in kind, however, no less than in scale...

...In an incisive interview, Yale historian Ivo Banac spells out the long-range damage: "What Milosevic has done, and with greater effectiveness than many realize, is to demonstrate that there are no real restrictions on aggressive behavior...

...What has unleashed the Balkan apocalypse...

...Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia By Bogdan Denitch Minnesota...

...The sole antidote is a modern democratic state guaranteeing political, economic and personal integrity to all...

...This time the onlookers have not had minutes but years to react...

...Yet however novel his analogies, he ultimately relies on some surprisingly old answers to the new politics: rationalism in the face of postmodernism and antirationalism, civil solidarity, the rule of law, even a strengthened UN with the power to enforce peace through an international police and army—a "foreign legion in blue helmets.'' Denitch allows himself hope in grief...

...Finally, several authors make clear how Western officials abetted the nationalists by reducing the legitimate state of Bosnia to one combatant in a "war among gangsters...

...Ominously, the last essay describes the situation of the Albanians in Kosovo, a likely flashpoint...

...The eyewitness accounts, journalistic dispatches and academic analyses tell the same basic story: The only democratically founded, secular, multiethnic nation to emerge from Yugoslavia has fallen to what Mark Thompson calls "post-Communist Balkan atavism hand in glove with the laissez-faire geopolitics of the democratic West...

...They found a ready audience among the alienated youth—kin of skinheads, soccer fan club rioters, and other lumpen elements across Europe—who stock the irregular forces of both Serbia and Croatia...

...In the midst of a political and moral catastrophe, he demands of the late 20th century and its institutions the basic, redeeming trait of decency...

...In Sarajevo over a third of marriages are ethnically mixed, and thousands of citizens still refuse to identify themselves with one or another nationalist party...

...So his punchy analysis—delivered in polemical bites of three or four pages—is suffused with personal loss and a deep sense of betrayal...

...Many of the essays overlap in registering such points, but there are surprises along the way—from a bitter parody of a Sufi chronicle by an Islamic theologian at the University of Sarajevo to Danilo Kis' classic characterization of nationalism, presciently written over a decade ago ("Nationalism is an ideology of banality...

...A position promoted by Serbian and Croatian nationalists, and echoedby apologists for Western inaction, is that Bosnia never really existed anyway...

...This will simply give carte blanche to Milosevices everywhere, of whom there are and will be quite a few...

...In his depiction of their psychology we recognize Kis' thwarted individualist...

...Denitch has long played a role in Yugoslav democratic politics...

...Croats and Serbs occupy high places in the Bosnian (or, as Western officialdom insists, the "Muslim") government, military and media...

...In the other republics as well, far from being the inevitable political factor, nationalism was whipped up to maintain centralized power, first by Slobodan Milosevic and his Belgrade elite in the name of Greater Serbia and next by Franjo Tudjman in Zagreb...

...These last are the mediocrities, the second-rate writers, poets and priests who use nationalism to inflate their own importance...

...The structuring of democracy in multiethnic states in an era of awakened nationalisms, he says, is "the major political problem for the early 21 st century...

...Picasso's Guernica on the cover reminds us that they are always with us...

...By stressing recent history over ancient hatreds, the contributors return the Bosnian War to the realm of politics and responsibility...

...Denitch insists on the global implications of Yugoslavia's demise...

...Bosnians—Serbs and Croats, Muslims and Jews—have in fact lived together for centuries...

...One of the victims of Bosnia is the system of international law...

...Writings on the Balkan War add up to a coherent stance: Bosnia is trapped in the fire of opportunistic nationalism and ice of global realpolitik...

...In the Introduction, editors Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz provide a remarkably cogent narrative of how Bosnia has been undermined from within and betrayed from without...

...fax machines—and tactical help to the democratic Left...

...A nationalist is a thwarted individualist...

...At his most abstract, the author argues that ethnic cleansing and atrocity are only extreme manifestations of the exclusivism that sets in when political identity is conflated with ethnic heritage—when, as he says, ethnos becomes demos...

...Reviewed by Jerry Kisslinger Author, "Serbian Americans " IN EXPLANATIONS begin responsibilities...

...One impassioned essay after another debunks the myths that allow leaders and citizens of Europe, the United States and other UN member nations to live with themselves while Bosnia dies...

...On every page Denitch blends the global and die particular, underlining the parallels to the former Yugoslavia in Italy, Mexico, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and beyond...

...Infusing sociology with a passionate plea for sanity, Denitch, a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, details the political dismemberment of his homeland...

...With a perspective that reflects his dual citizenship—he has lived in the United States since he was 17—he examines not only the Milosevic/ Zhirinovsky-ite threat to all of Eastern Europe, but the postmodern retreat from democracy in Western societies as well...

...Costumed like road warriors, these Balkan Rambos live a savage apocalyptic theater more alluring to a powerless adolescent than the "boring" values of tolerance, patience and democracy...

...That its systematic destruction has been a distinct war aim is made evident in an essay entitled "Culture Under Fire...

...44.95...

...Why is Bosnia dying in slow motion on CNN...

...The Bush Administration's determination to preserve the unity of Yugoslavia in 1989 and '90 inadvertently gave Milosevic a green light in Kosovo, Slovenia and Croatia...

...For all their variety, the pieces gathered in Why Bosnia...

...In 1991, with a grant from the Swedish Institute of the Workers' Movement, he began to provide material aid—e.g...