Davos man meets Homo Balcanicus.

• Author: Bardos, Gordon N.
• Position: Book Review

Sumantra Bose, Bosnia After Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 352 pp., $35.

Roger D. Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 312 pp., $25.

And when it is said to them, 'do not make mischief in the land', they say, 'we are but peacemakers.' Nay, of a surety they are the mischief makers, but they do not understand.

--Quran, 2:11-12

TO ANYONE following the Balkan tragedy of the past ten-plus years, the horror stories from Kosovo are well known. Hundreds of thousands of people driven from their homes. Countless murders and kidnappings. Scores of religious sites destroyed. Widespread, systematic ethnic discrimination in educational and judicial institutions. Patients in mental institutions routinely subjected to beatings and sexual assault. Paramilitary and organized crime groups rampaging across the countryside, persecuting ethnic minorities and destabilizing neighboring states....

Unfortunately, this is not the Kosovo of Slobodan Milosevic. It is the Kosovo of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations over the past four years. Moving south to Macedonia, the situation is little better. Relations between Macedonian Slavs and Albanians remain tense since civil war between the two ethnic communities erupted in 2001--a conflict that began in no small part due to NATO's unwillingness to prevent extremists in Kosovo from exporting their violence into Macedonia, and the first time in history that a UN member-state was the victim of aggression launched from a UN protectorate. The ceasefire agreement sponsored by the international community to end the conflict, known as the Ohrid Accords, has since been repudiated by three of the five signatories to the document, and two of them have openly called for a partition of the country.

West of Kosovo, Montenegro remains divided between pro-independence forces and those who prefer to remain a part of the union with Serbia, and the tiny mountain republic itself is on the edge of total economic breakdown. Apart from some tourism on the Adriatic coast, much of the Montenegrin economy relies on organized criminal activity for its few signs of life. Some 40 percent of the vehicles in Montenegro are estimated to have been stolen in Western Europe, and the Montenegrin premier, long a favorite of official Washington, is currently under indictment in Italy for his alleged involvement in smuggling.

North of Montenegro, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, almost eight years into the Dayton peace process, few observers are satisfied with the progress made towards establishing a viable, self-sustaining state. Although the international community has done a laudable job in getting refugees and displaced persons back into their homes, the effort to find enough common ground amongst Bosniacs (Bosnian Muslims), Croats and Serbs to run the country on their own, or to develop a sense of loyalty to their common state, has failed. The city of Mostar, for instance, remains as bitterly divided today as it was almost ten years ago when the conflict between Bosniacs and Croats ended. Classified sections of newspapers throughout Bosnia are full of advertisements by individuals of one ethnic group offering to trade property in areas in which they are in the ethnic minority for property in areas in which they would be in the majority. Much to the chagrin of international officials, nationalist parties again won in Bosnia's 2002 elections at both the statewide and entity levels. Not surprisingly, public opinion surveys show that a majority of the country's young people see no future for themselves at home and would like to emigrate.

Finally, in the heart of the Balkans, the post-Milosevic reform process in Serbia now runs the serious risk of being hijacked by a clique of erstwhile reformers who have joined forces with business tycoons and organized crime figures from the Milosevic era. The current government has refused to recognize decisions handed down by the Serbian...