Book Reviews and Recommendations on the Ex-Yugoslavia Part 1
By very, very popular demand, with the main focus being on the 20th century
My life on the internet has been a long one, having first logged on in 1994 to join email lists that provided news, commentary and insight on the wars in both Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia. Up until that time, news was consumed through physical copies of newspapers and magazines, or by watching TV, or in the case of diaspora Croatians during 1991, by way of shortwave radio dispatches updating us on the status of battles across the country.
Books were the best way (and still continue to be) to learn about history, culture, geography, etc. Having fallen in love with reading from when I learned the first words that I had ever read (“Pat! Curt! Mommy! Daddy! Look! A jet! A jet! Here comes a jet!” - from the elementary school series “Mr. Mugs”), I devoured books like a child cookies…..and my thing to devour was history. I have some 3,000 books alone sitting in my parents’ basement as I cannot physically carry them around with me. Suffice it to say that many of these books are about the lands of the former Yugoslavia.
When the war broke out in the ex-YU, a bumper crop of books began to appear on bookshelfs in the West, each with their own angles, their own biases, and their own agendas. Some were sensationalist, some were academic in nature, others still were simple reporting from the war on the ground. Others dove into the history of the region, trying to explain the reason why this corner of Europe erupted into bloodshed just as the Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall fell, and the European Union became real.
I bought, borrowed, or stole them all. I read them all. I read so many of these books that I had to stop in the early 2000s out of both fatigue and because I learned to accurately predict what a new book would say just by learning about the author due to the material covered repeatedly by others. I will still grab a new book here and there if the subject matter is more specific and interesting, but general histories of the region or of one of the wars in specific leaves little new to be said. The amount of first person interviews with people from the region alongside testimony from war crimes trials pretty much covers the wars in total.
There is no subject that I get asked more about than the ex-YU. People constantly ask me questions about it and beg me for book recommendations to learn more. The fatigue that set in after years of absorbing so much information combined with the incessant flamewars with Serbs and Muslims (and others) have made me reticent to dive into the subject online for almost two decades now. If the conflict was ongoing or threatening to break out again, I’m sure that I’d be all over it once more. The fact that I don’t write about it much here should suggest to you that the region is relatively peaceful for now (“relatively” being the key word). If you see me writing and posting more about it, then you know the temperature has risen markedly. Allow me to be your bellwether.
So without further ado, I have prepared a list of English language books covering the 20th century history of the lands and countries that once composed “Yugoslavia”. There is a focus on the wars of the 1990s, as most books came out then. Other books cover earlier periods in that bloody century. I don’t endorse every book in this list, but that really shouldn’t matter to you. If you find one interesting, grab it. Some of these books are very, very well known, others are obscure but valuable. I’ve tried to make the selection as wide as possible to appeal to everyone that has been BUSTING MY BALLS FOR YEARS to do this.
Important Note: I am biased due to my ethnicity, but I tried to do my best to be as objective as possible when giving brief reviews for each of the books presented here. Please understand that. Some of these books can be found for free to read if you know where to look (and no, I won’t post links no matter how much you ask).
Misha Glenny, BBC writer and producer, is best known for his book “McMafia”, which covers the various international criminal groups, stretching from the Sicilian Mafia through to the Russian vor v zakonye (thieves-in-law) and Nigerian gangs across Africa. He also wrote a rather gripping book about the wars in in the ex-YU as they were still going on.
In “The Fall of Yugoslavia”, Glenny places blame on the war spreading throughout the ex-YU on migration of poor mountain folk from the Dinaric Alps (the mountains forming the Croatian-Bosnian border to the west of Bosnia, and running down through Hercegovina into Montenegro) to the industrial cities in places like Croatia’s Eastern Slavonia, where Croatians from Western Hercegovina lived right next to Serbs from the Dalmatian Highlands around Knin. He paints a frightening picture of Branimir Glavas, then head of Croatia’s defense in its 3rd largest city, Osijek (in Eastern Slavonia), saying that he has the “most cold, steel blue eyes”. He then notes that Glavas is a Croat from Western Hercegovina. He eventually arrives in that region (where I was born), and hears that only three things grow there: “snakes, rocks, and Ustashe” (WW2 Croatian Fascists).
Glenny suggests that if it were not for the communist-era migration of these Croats and Serbs to Eastern Slavonia, the war would most likely not have engulfed that part of Croatia, as the older citizens are of a more docile type. For the sake of balance, Glenny visits the capital of the Serb para-capital of occupied Croatia, the town of Knin high up in the Dalmatian interior, and finds Glavas’ mirror image in the form of a local Serb official.
Glenny looks at us like psychos who are best avoided, and I don’t really mind that. Unlike many Brits covering the subject then, he did not have an overwhelming pro-Serb bias, which tells us that he was ahead of the curve with respect to where international treatment of the region was headed.
If you cut yourself off from the other side you fail to understand their arguments, how they think, how they feel, and why they act the way that they do. Alex Dragnich’s “Serbs and Croats” came out in 1993, and I bought it the following year as the war was nowhere near its conclusion. Curiosity got the better of me, as I wanted to see what it said. Naturally, the book made my blood boil at the time, but the exercise was still well worth it.
Dragnich is a Political Scientist who received his PhD from Berkeley, and worked in the US Embassy in Belgrade. Suffice it to say that he was quite the asset for Serbs. In this book you will quickly learn the Serbian nationalist and conservative arguments with respect to the former Yugoslavia, why it broke apart, and who was responsible for its collapse (the Serbs are blameless).
In this version of history, the Kingdom of Serbia “liberated” the Croats, the Slovenes, and the Bosnian Muslims from the “horrors” and “terror” of the Habsburg Empire, but were ungrateful for this Serbian sacrifice (one must concede that the Serbs shed A LOT of blood during WW1, losing over one million people along the way due to war and disease). The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which lasted from 1918-1941 and was ruled by the Serbian Karadjordjevich Dynasty, “bent over backwards” to accomodate non-Serbs, and was paid in return by the most ungrateful Croats by way of the many massacres of Serb civilians during WW2 by the Ustashe. Per Dragnich, no good deed goes unpunished.
Outing himself as a Royalist Serb, Dragnich goes on to suggest that Communist Dictator Tito (Croat by father, Slovene by mother) “hated Serbs”. His ‘worst crime’ wasn’t the persecution of Serbs through UDBA, the Yugoslav State Security Agency, but rather the drawing of boundaries separating Communist Yugoslavia into six republics, and two autonomous regions within the Serbian Socialist Republic, because it left around two million Serbs outside of Serb borders. He identifies the western insistence on the sacrosanctity of these republican borders as war broke out the biggest reason why the conflict continued. In Dragnich’s mind, all Serbs should have been allowed to remain in the same state, and not become citizens of new countries that separated from Yugoslavia. This ethnic principle is not extended to others, as per this notion the Magyars would be entitled to parts of the Vojvodina region of Serbia, the Albanians to almost all of Kosovo, the Bosnian Muslims to a slice of southwestern Serbia, and so on.
Not to be outdone, Dragnich lays the final blame for the collapse of Yugoslavia on the Germans and Austrians, for supposedly “rushing their recognition of Slovenia and Croatia’s independence”, despite it coming six months into the war, where the Yugoslav Army and Serb paramilitaries had already occupied one third of Croatia, leaving devastation in cities like Vukovar in their wake.
If you want to understand the anti-Communist Serbian nationalist and conservative take, this is the book for you.
Ed Vulliamy was a reporter for the Guardian UK back in 1994 when this book was published. He is still a a reporter for the Guardian UK today. It is his argument that has won out and has formed the prevailing western narrative regarding the War in Bosnia:
Bosnian Muslims are the good guys
Bosnian Croats are the bad guys
Bosnian Serbs are the very, very bad guys
There is a tendency among many to view Tito’s Yugoslavia as an almost-paradise of multiethnicity, downplaying the horrible massacres committed by Tito’s forces immediately after winning the war, and also downplaying the very oppressive regime that he put into place, powered by UDBA. It was this apparatus that put a lid on the various unresolved ethnic grievances for four decades, until the pressure blew the lid off of the pot. By breaking with Stalin in 1948, Tito won a lot of goodwill in the West. By opening the borders in 1961, he further buttressed the image of Communist Yugoslavia being “Communist-lite”.
Vulliamy’s main focus was on the war crimes and atrocities committed by forces on the ground in order to justify western intervention in the conflict on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims who were denied the arms to defend themselves (an arms embargo instituted by the UN in 1991 as the conflict broke out in Slovenia and Croatia meant that the pro-Serb JNA, Yugoslav Peoples’ Army, had an overwhelming advantage in arms). He details the actions of various paramilitary units and how they terrorized people of differing ethnicities, lamenting the “impotence” of the international community.
Vulliamy also inserts himself in the rising conflict between erstwhile allies, the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, in Central Bosnia, laying the blame on the latter and their sponsors in Zagreb, suggesting that Croatia was no different than Serbia, Croatia’s President Franjo Tudjman no different than Slobodan Milosevic (more on this conflict in other books that are reviewed).
The War in Croatia was unsexy for British journos at the time, because both sides were ethnic nationalists, and because Croatia was seen as little more than a Vatican Clerical Fascist project. Bosnia was sexy, because it depicted rampaging Christo-Nationalist forces (both Serbs and Croats), destroying a multiethnic paradise with Muslims as victims.