Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War.

• Author: Lane, Charles

Peter Maass, Knopf, $25.95

If you can only read two books about the wars in the former Yugoslavia, you should choose this complementary pair. Laura Silber and Allan Little's journalism is cool, historical, analytical. They have written the best, most detailed account of the political machinations which led to the breakdown of the Yugoslav federation and the beginning of ethnic conflict among its successor states. Peter Maass's reporter's memoir is emotive, gripping, and often moving in evoking the war in Bosnia and the horrible atrocities that were committed by Serb nationalist forces against the mostly Muslim civilian population.

The most durable canard about the wars in the Balkans is that they are the consequence of ancient ethnic hatred, too complex and too deeply rooted to be fathomed, much less countered, by outside powers. This "analysis," which sounds sophisticated but is in fact intellectually lazy, became conventional wisdom--a kind of intellectual trump card--among all those who sought to forestall United States military intervention to stop the Serb drive in Bosnia.

Silber and Little show that the true causes of the war were contemporary. Yes, there were underlying intergroup suspicions among the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims of Yugoslavia. But the "nations," as Yugoslavs call them, had grown accustomed to papering over, if not solving, these tensions during the 40-odd years of Titoist Communism, which collapsed for good in 1990. Deliberate efforts by post-Communist politicians to arouse and exploit nationalistic feelings were what actually ignited the conflagration.

Silber and Little point no denunciatory fingers, but the cumulative impact of their reporting and analysis, based on extraordinary access to the key players in the former Communist governments of the Yugoslav republics, internal military intelligence videotapes, and other previously unearthed primary sources, is that Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia is the principal culprit in the Yugoslav crack-up.

This is essentially the story of three wars--in Slovenia, in Croatia, and in Bosnia, with the latter war being the most bloody and dramatic. Digging back into the much--neglected events of the late 1980s, Silber and Little show that the roots of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia lie in Milosevic's audacious decision to seize control of the Serbian Communist party by exploiting Serb nationalism. He began by making an issue of alleged mistreatment of Serbs in Kosovo--an...