Where the Bullies Have Won

...When such purported aberrations are attributed solely to class differences or "outside forces," the argument begins to sound circular: Bosnia is tolerant, and if it sometimes hasn't been, it wasn't acting like Bosnia...

...the Nazi Holocaust was ultimately vanquished...

...If a Bosnia is possible, both books suggest, then anything is...

...take on one key element of Western self-delusion: the historical distortions underlying recent policy...

...At that point, the horrors perpetrated in Greater Serbia are echoed in Greater Croatia—new campaigns of ethnic cleansing, camps, the siege of Mostar...

...Donia and Fine's view of Bosnian culture is on the whole compelling, but its presentation is troubling...

...We step over body parts and dodge bullets with a line of helpless Muslim refugees...

...Milosevic and Tudjman are "the second-hand Castor and Pollux of the Balkans...

...According to the authors, that culture includes a singular style of tombstones, shared customs of dress and music, and, throughout every era, a pattern of ethnic cohabitation and religious tolerance rare not only in the Balkans but in all of Europe...

...The book's clearest contribution lies in its first half, where Bosnia is sketched from earliest times to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand...

...During World War II Bosnia, incorporated into the Fascist Independent State of Croatia, was indeed the site of interethnic atrocity and retribution, including the mass executions of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, and violent reprisals by Serbian Chetniks...

...Columbia...

...24.95...

...Toleration survived the religious conversions and Islamic privilege of the Ottoman period, the subsequent evolution of distinct ethnic and religious communities, and the rise of political nationalism in the 19th century, when manipulations of identity by Ottoman and Hapsburg rulers played a role...

...Vulliamy brings us close to the situation on the ground...

...In all, Donia and Fine counterpoise a religious atmosphere marked by tolerance and a noticeable lack of fundamentalism to the "ancient hatreds" thesis often cited by Western leaders—the notion of tribes of religious fanatics eternally at one another's throats...

...Dante's hell worked divine justice...

...An award-winning correspondent for the British Guardian, Vulliamy knows the war in its grisliest minutiae and its broadest sweep...

...Instead we have been given "false dichotomies, flawed analogies, gross historical exaggerations, and well-wom shibboleths....' Fine, a professor of Balkan and Byzantine History at the University of Michigan, and Donia, an expert on Islam under Hapsburg rule, attempt to address and redress the misuses of Bosnia's past by summarizing social and religious relationships from the arrival of the Slavs in the seventh century to the present...

...The resulting fluidity of religious identity fostered the development of a local autocephalous Bosnian Church?which the authors take pains to distinguish from the Manichaean sect of the Bogomils—plus later conversions to Islam under the Ottomans...

...In Chetnik leader Vojislav Seselj, an ideologue of ultranationalist warrior manliness, we are shown a "podgy, failed academic who, ironically, has trouble growing the traditional beard...

...Often his sentences strike in several directions at once, their phrases exploding like multiple warheads...

...All the rest is detail...

...And despite their nominal enmity in this "War of the Maps," the Serb and Croat leaders share a further commonality: Neither group recognizes politics outside of ethnicity, so neither recognizes the Bosnians as a distinct people nor Bosnia as a legitimate nation...

...By focusing on urban culture as the true picture of Bosnia, the authors neglect the more refractory countryside, where in fact much of the current conflict is rooted...

...Vulliamy guides us through the war, descending circle by circle into the spiraling madness: the siege of Sarajevo, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, systematized rape ("the most pernicious chapter" in this most pernicious tragedy), and then—when the victims' suffering seems already unbearable—Croatia's "knife in the back" breaking of its fair-weather alliance with Bosnia...

...As a work that documents a legacy, Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed is an answer—however disproportionate—to the burning of the national archives in Sarajevo, the razing of hundreds of mosques and churches, the destruction of the Mostar Bridge...

...The language of the war is one of Vulliamy's subjects...

...Donia and Fine track the Bosnians from medieval through Ottoman, Hapsburg and Yugoslav times, to show that in fact the area has had "a distinct history and culture, one shared by people of all its religious denominations...

...Like the actual fighting (but unlike the media's coverage of it), most of the book is set outside of Sarajevo...

...they can never bottle the genie of historical memory...

...The author humanizes both the victims and the perpetrators by giving them names, faces and voices...

...A teacher tells of her mentally deficient charges in a Sarajevo group home who are unable to comprehend what is happening and wander around the front lines looking for their flattened homes...

...Both are driven by the same revanchist dreams of departed medieval glory...

...Having defined Bosnian tradition as free from interethnic strife, they must engage in contortions to explain the region's long record of bloodshed, including peasant revolts under the Ottomans and local nationalist (especially Serbian) resistance to Hapsburg, Royal Yugoslav and Titoist rule...

...from prisoners, including Fikret Alic, whose emaciated, skeletal image shocked the world into grim recognition...

...Religious rivalry and violence, we are told flatly, have not been a part of Bosnia's long heritage...

...The ragged Bosnian conflict, now grinding on into its third winter, has often been cast as a maze of alliances and political forces, but for Vulliamy its causes are "cruelly simple": Bosnia is the boundary zone where two centuries-old myths, Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia, collide like tectonic plates...

...Finally, the atrocities of World War II constitute an exception so drastic it virtually disproves the rule...

...The bullies have won in Bosnia, and the world has helped them...

...In doing so, they portray an ethnic harmony in Bosnia that may be more a platonic ideal than the historic reality...

...At the millennium, when the Byzantine and Roman Churches were vying for control of the Balkans, Bosnia's mountainous terrain and remoteness prevented either institution from becoming too entrenched...

...Their efforts are valuable because the war in Bosnia has been fought to expunge its past while determining its fate...

...A mother tells the story of her five-year-old's gang rape...

...He quotes at length from Serbian generals and Bosnian roadblock guards...

...Still, like Vulliamy, Donia and Fine deepen our understanding of what has been lost in Bosnia, and underscore the distance between knowledge and political wisdom...

...The powerful satire, the elegant structure and precise diction, the epigraphs from Shakespeare, the worldliness and sense of violated fair play—all are redolent of European civilization at its most decent and urbane...

...In Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed, Robert J. Donia and John V. A. Fine Jr...

...Especially voices...

...240pp...

...The story of Bosnia's disintegration has been told before, yet never with the scope and power of Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia's War by Ed Vulliamy...

...but the hell of Bosnia, with its extremes of nationalist butchery and international complicity, is open-ended and nihilistic...

...Inevitably, that memory leads us back to the horrifying present and its implications for the future...

...In the 1990s,"Donia and Fine write forthrightly, "as representatives of the international community issued idle threats and distorted the nature of the conflict to justify inaction, armed bullies and perpetrators of ethnic cleansing destroyed much of a society that shared many of the values and beliefs that are central to Western democratic life...

...It was not so much a meeting ground of East and West as a "no-man's-land between the two worlds...

...Reviewed by Jerry Kisslinger Author...

...At a long-denied meeting in May 1991 in Graz, Austria, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic agreed on terms for the partition of Bosnia...

...All of these had ethnic and religious aspects...

...Memories of those horrors fuel the flames nationalist agitators have blown high...

...While the rest of the region fell into either the Eastern or Western tradition, compromise and multiplicity obtained in Bosnia...

...In the sad last chapters, we see the hoax of "safe havens," the degeneration of the Bosnian side into chaos and despair, and the reluctant turn to an Islamic fundamentalism that its enemies had attributed to it from the outset...

...And the better the author is, the worse we feel...

...Because of Yugoslavia's relative openness since the early 1960s, it was for decades the country of choice for American scholars of Eastern Europe...

...The Serbian Americans " IT SEEMS ALMOST INDECENT to say so, but a graceful—even beautiful—book has come out of the hideous violence in the Balkans...

...Not that Vulliamy is shy with his own opinions...

...from a teenage girl in besieged Bihac, and dozens of other wretched civilians...

...three years and two wars later, the United Nations ceasefire plan matches almost identically the borders they worked out...

...A few years ago, for example, A. M. Rosenthal wrote in the New York Times: "There are no Bosnians—just Slavs who call themselves Serbs, Croatians, or Muslims...

...It is not history itself," the authors insist, "but the use of it by leaders with ulterior motives, that is at present poisoning relations among people who had actually learned to live in peace....' The authors admit only a single exception, and it is a glaring one with direct bearing on today's conflict...

...For as the war marches toward its deplorable conclusion, Seasons in Hell leaves us helplessly pondering the ominous gap between the refinement of our sensibilities and the grossness of our actions, between what we know and what we do...

...Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed By Robert J. Donia and John V. A. Fine Jr...

...Taking particular relish in highlighting the banalities of evil at work, he identifies Bosnian Serb Commander Ratko Mladic?nowadays dignified as a full-fledged UN negotiating partner—as "a curious, fat man who wears an incongruous, simpering smile on his pasty face which contrasts with his monkey-wrench handshake...

...Like "his puppet-master Milosevic," Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic "is a tin-pot dictator for all seasons, whom the West has taken seriously, and he cannot quite believe that he has got away with it...

...That fluidity, affirm the authors, also underlies the persisting multiculturalism of Sarajevo, where Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, and Jewish communities lived together peaceably for centuries...

...from Bosnian Croat leader Mate Boban...

...Their central task is to prove that Bosnia has existed for ages, despite the claims of both sides in the "War of the Maps" and the contentions of some Western pundits...

...Short chapters consisting of "Travnik voices"—soliloquies by Muslims in the central Bosnian town that became "the crossroads of the war"—tell their own tale of defiance sinking into despair...

...His elegant narrative balances personal testimony and historical perspective, compassion and rage, to spell out exactly what the world has let happen, although he cannot explain why...

...But the rich body of knowledge they produced has never made it into the public debate...

...The unique Bosnian mix is, of course, well-known as a modem urban phenomenon (in the postwar era the intermarriage rate in the cities has been 30 to 40 per cent), but it is this book's particular accomplishment to trace it to the very advent of Bosnian Christianity and extend it to outlying towns and villages...

...Conquerors can blast stone from stone...

...Recalling the Royalist era, World War II, the rise, evolution and collapse of Titoism, and Yugoslavia's demise, the authors do shed light on the sources of today's conflict, but they also allow the Bosnian focus to blur...

...I'm a Muslim," one woman says, "because they won't let me be a Bosnian...

...Thereafter, from Versailles to Vance-Owen, its history is subsumed into Yugoslavia's and the the work becomes extremely broad...

...Together with a set of chapters under the bitter heading "Meanwhile the Diplomats," where the author pans back to the inept and irresolute responses of the international community, they help create a fugue of perspectives...