The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-Up 1980-1992 - Softcover

Magas, Branka

Softcover

ISBN 10: 086091593X ISBN 13: 9780860915935

Publisher: Verso Books, 1993

Synopsis

The year 1992, scheduled to be a milestone on the road to European unity, saw Sarajevo and other European cities bombarded slowly to pieces and their inhabitants starved before the TV eyes of the world. It saw two million Bosnian Muslims threatened with Europe’s first genocide since the Second World War; most of them already driven from their homes by massacre, rape and terror. It saw Bosnia’s legal, multi-ethnic government treated as a mere “warring party” and pressed to surrender by Western governments eager for peace at any price. And it also saw a liberal and left opinion in the West unable to offer any explanation for the continuing war beyond variations on the racist notion of an innate propensity for violence among the peoples of Yugoslavia, or indiscriminate lamentations about the evils of nationalism.

Combining political analysis, reportage, polemic and personal reflection, this book provides the first inside account and analysis of the tragic path leading to Yugoslavia’s break-up. Against the background of events as they occurred since Tito’s death in 1980, it tracks the process whereby an equitable settlement between the country’s constituent nations was destroyed by an increasingly virulent Great-Serb nationalism, bent on recentralizing the country under its own hegemony.

The book is written not by a passive spectator but by a participant with a firm grasp of Yugoslavia’s history, which accounts for the breadth of its content. As the decade it covers draws to a close, Branka Magaš’s initial cautious optimism changes to a growing intimation of impending tragedy, and finally to outrage at the slaughter visited upon Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Serbian army, with the tolerance or complicity of Western chancelleries. The Destruction of Yugoslavia represents a unique documentary testimony to Yugoslavia’s regression towards disintegration, war, and the horrors of “ethnic cleansing;” a testimony which is frighteningly accurate.

About this title

About the Author:

Branka Magas is a historian and journalist now living in London.

From Publishers Weekly:

Magas, a Croatian journalist and historian, offers some pointed, alternative perspectives on the former Yugoslavia in this compilation of her often-prescient articles, written for New Left Review and other journals. Though this is not a comprehensive or narrative history, and some articles are redundant, Magas adds to the literature of Yugoslavia by emphasizing the politics of intellectuals; she identifies the 1981 institution of martial law in the province of Kosovo as a watershed, since Serbian leftist intellectuals did not protest but rallied to nationalism. Magas criticizes intellectuals inside and outside the country for not understanding the link between uenven economic development and nationalist intolerance. Serbian nationalism, she observes, is backed by "the only structures of the Yugoslav Communist state that managed to escape the process of democratization: the Serbian Communist Party and the Army High Command." The book also includes manifestos and letters from Yugoslavian organizations and from Yugoslavians outside the country. Magas's writings show that at least some observers were warning of chaos long before it erupted.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 086091593X
• ISBN 13: 9780860915935
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 390