The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War

Having visited Yougoslavia twice in 1989 as a 16 year old I was totally oblivious to the simmering tensions which were about to erupt with untold savagery and unimaginable suffering. The break up of Yugoslavia horrified me and the reasons for it were way too complex for a 16 year old to begin to understand.

Now in adulthood and with a relative period of calm and peeace over the are I decided I wold like to know what caused it, and who was to blame.

Glenny's book is written in an atmospheric style giving accounts of his up close and personal dealings with events as they unfolded. How Yugoslavia broke up is explained with each of the aggressors being blamed for their actions. The only disappointing thing with the book is that it ends too soon. How peace was restored I don't think is fully explained and the book end before the Kosovo conflict etc. Perhaps he will write another.

Good book (0/0 people found this helpful)

Quite impressed with it so far - based on the journalist's own extensive experience across the former Yugoslavia, with bits of history stitching his eyewitness accounts together. Authoritative and personal. Good read.

Frustrating and absorbing, revealing and simplistic in equal measures (0/0 people found this helpful)

Having recently finished Glenny's book on the last Balkan wars I am left with very mixed feelings about it. As I was reading the first half of the book I rapidly formed the impression that I was reading a sloppily-written, unobjective, unstructured and fundamentally uninsightful account of Glenny's personal experience in Yugoslavia, based predominantly on anecdotes and simplistic caricturisations of the people he encountered. However, I then found the final parts of the book surprisingly clear, intelligently written, absorbing and above all insightful, able to put the destruction and brutality described earlier on into some kind of historical and political context, and with Glenny drawing on his experience and 'insider' knowledge of the situation as a BBC journalist to formulate a coherent and intelligent view of the conflict, pulling no punches in criticising the sides involved, including Western nations whose interference he judges to have worsened the situation.

Anyone picking up this book will probably already know that the war in the Balkans was an exceptionally bloody conflict, but this doesn't make it any less important for a book about the war to deal with. The writer chooses to use the first part of the book to describe both the political events leading up to the war and the situation in and around the fighting as the war broke out. It is in this part of the book that Glenny often sacrifices accuracy for the sake of a more emotive writing style, and sometimes seems to let his personal opinions and cloud his judgement. For instance, he frequently uses words such as 'primitive' and 'peasant' to describe people or groups of people, which aside from coming across as rather smug tells us absolutely nothing as to why people behaved the way they did.

My main problem with the opening chapters is that, in short, Glenny frequently comes across as an unreliable guide to events, insomuch as you want the writer of a historical account to be above all objective, clear and refrain from judging or taking sides. And yet when he is 'setting the scene', the book does not follow a logical structure, flitting around from event to event, anecdote to anecdote inexplicably, leaving you feeling like you don't actually know what was really going on, and is seemingly littered with reporting which is rather personally involved. The end result is that I was left with the impression of listening to an account from someone who was involved in the conflict, and who had already judged everything and everyone that he had seen, but without bothering to explain his judgements, or seemingly uncapable of doing so without resorting to tirades against people being simply 'brutal' or 'primitive'.

Whilst many of his anecdotes and experiences are interesting, in my eyes Glenny loses credibility by his style of writing, which is personal rather than detatched and often provides descriptions which come across as superficial or simplistic, sometimes sacrificing accuracy for theatric or emotive effect, or to fit in with his personal views (e.g. "communal life revived faster in Mostar than almost anywhere else in BiH after the war" - as far as I am aware today, Mostar is still a city divided entirely into two communities, but this does not fit in with the image he was trying to paint of the population of Mostar being exceptionally tolerant). Whilst some may enjoy this writing style as it perhaps makes for a more engaging 'story', I was left with the impresison of not having actually learned much. Or agian, later on, Glenny describes how Greece strongly objected to Macedonian nationalism, apparently causing untold political and economic damage to the embryonic state. How? Why? What's the history behind this hostility? Why were the Greeks so unhelpful? We don't know and Glenny doesn't tell us, though that doesn't prevent himself from forming his judgement, we've just got to trust him that "Greeks ... prefer to prolong the misery of Macedonia." This is, in short, a simplistic reduction of a charged and complicated situation designed to elicit an emotional response rather than to inform which I found very frustrating, and which occurs throughout the first few chapters of the book.

And yet, despite these shortcomings, the last couple of chapters alone earn my recommendation of this book, as Glenny moves on to give an absorbing and very revealing description of the evolution and political and historical context. I found these chapters to be much better written, not only more engaging but also suffering from less of the shallow descriptions and lack of analysis as the first chapters. The section on Kosovo is genuinely insightful, and provides a context to the events that took place there in 1999, a few years after the book was written. Glenny uses his experience and insight to offer an analysis of the situation which would later prove to be sadly prophetic.

The final chapter is perhaps the most interesting of all, as Glenny looks at how the political leadership of the new Yugoslav states behaved and also how the West intervened, for better and for worse. He doesn't hold any punches in dishing out responsibility to Western countries for behaving irresponsily or naïvely towards the countries involved, in particular looking at the role Germany played, a point I find tends to be overlooked in most accounts of the subject. And to his credit, he also finally makes the point that all the sides involved had, in their eyes, valid reasons to defend their interests, though this cannot justify many of the actions which took place.

Perhaps one of the most clearest problems with books of this type is summed up by Glenny when he writes "our understanding of the war in the Balkans has ... been clouded by ... the tendences of many witnesses to confuse the moral questions raised by the conflict with the political issues that caused it." Whilst he is perhaps himself guilty of making the same mistake at times, the insight and balance offered later in the book makes this a valuable read for people interested in the Balkan conflict.

As A First Draft of History - Outstanding (4/4 people found this helpful)

I first found this book confusing and frustrating then absorbing and fascinating as it morphed from derring-do and reportage to geopolitical analysis. I chose it as Glenny was very much "Our Man in the Balkans" from a UK point of view during the chaos and destruction of the meltdown of Yugoslavia in the early nineties. The crisis in Croatia sees Glenny on the ground either soaking up the war stories along with the rakija in some dive of a bar in Knin or risking a bullet blagging his way though a roadblock manned by very jumpy and trigger-happy Serb or Croat irregulars half-way up a mountain. He certainly earned every journalistic award he won. Glenny takes you into the thick of the action and does not spare the detail in his account of the atrocities on all sides. You have to bear with the confusion about the geography and to some extent the dates and timeline in the excitement and the danger. Cautious checking with Wikipedia may help keep some factual grip.

As the war progresses and becomes the multifaceted and destructive battle for shares of Bosnia, Glenny steps back and takes us into the complex diplomatic processes of the European Union and Washington as they meshed (or often failed to) with the post-Tito aspirations of peoples still wounded by the Partizan/Chetnik/Ustashe conflicts of World War II. Glenny demonstrates these political manoeuvres were not mere sideshows but central actions in ratcheting up the tensions and military intervention. His analysis of Germany's premature recognition of Croatia and the EU's failure to agree a comprehensive solution to the Yugoslav problem as the cause of the conflict in Bosnia is utterly convincing. Equally so is his argument that Tudjman's treatment of the Serb minority in Croatia and promotion of the the Bosnian Croats in Western Hercegovina was just as culpable as Milosovic's attempt to salvage a "Greater Serbia" out of the rump of the former Yugoslavia. Glenny is a man of strong opinions, not least about the complicity of Tudjman and Milosovic at Karadjordjevo in 91 and later their proxies in Graz in carving up Bosnia without reference to the majority Bosnian Muslims. He clearly demonstrates Milosovic's final repudiation of his former henchman Radovan Karadzic in Bosnia and the Croatian Serbs in the Krajina as the EU and NATO belatedly upped the pressure of sanctions on Serbia proper. At the end the blood of ethnic cleansing is on everyone's hands but the Bosnian Serbs under Karadzic and Mlatko Radic bear the greatest shame, especially for the massacre at Srebrenica and the shelling of Vukovar.

The book ends at the end of 95/beginning of 96, as the ink was barely dry on the Dayton Accord, with Glenny struggling to keep up with events as the publisher's deadline loomed closer. With the value of hindsight Glenny's major doubts about the viability of the emergent Bosnia-Hercegovina were (fortunately) mostly misplaced and his growing obsession with a major southern Balkan conflagration based on the breakdown of Macedonia rather ludicrous. He was obviously right about Kosovo, although both the timing and the turn of events there were remarkable.

From the point of view of late 2009 the book misses much of the immediate aftermath of the war and obviously the ICTY trials in the Hague, which continue as I write. The history of the war in the Balkans will continue to be re-written as the evidence becomes clearer. Nevertheless Glenny's account will stand amongst the forefront as both testimony and analysis of the highest order.

A very good account of the disintegration of Yugoslavia (6/7 people found this helpful)

Glenny has the skill to keep a reader interested during the whole of the book. Although this book is a few years old now and perhaps abit dated (it doesn't cover the Kosovo conflict and was published a year after the war in Croatia and Bosnia ended) it is still excellent reading for those who know little abit the region.

The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War

Misha Glenny

Reader Reviews:

20th Centuary Savagery (0/0 people found this helpful)

Good book (0/0 people found this helpful)

Frustrating and absorbing, revealing and simplistic in equal measures (0/0 people found this helpful)

As A First Draft of History - Outstanding (4/4 people found this helpful)

A very good account of the disintegration of Yugoslavia (6/7 people found this helpful)

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