MISHA GLENNY.  The Fall of Yugoslavia:  The Third Balkan War. 
New York:  Penguin, 1993.



     Misha Glenny's commentary on the current Balkan wars
provides something of an insider's take on the current
unpleasantness.  Glenny's past experience covering the Balkans
for the BBC shows up in the mood of this work.  The Fall of
Yugoslavia is written in the style and with the feel of a
newspaper human interest story.  Each chapter flows as if Glenny
were reading the piece over the air.  This conversational (or
broadcast, rather) sense of immediacy is welcome among the
onslaught of dense texts on the Balkans.  
     One of the attendant problems of the broadcast or
journalistic style is that it can be misleading.  The adoption of
an air of authority combined with biased reporting can deceive
those who place an undue amount of faith in perceived
'authority."   The unvigilant or unsophisticated reader may adopt
the subjective, editorial style of Glenny's account and not
realize that it has a definite agenda.  A more careful reading,
however, would quickly reveal Glenny's pro-Croat bias:  it is not
particularly well-hidden.  In fact, his bias is painfully obvious
to the careful reader.
     Glenny goes quite beyond the normal protestations one might
expect of enemy behavior ("The Serbs left a terrible trail of
blood and destruction in their wake as the closed the noose
around Sarajevo's neck (166)."  Hardly value-neutral language. 
Or "These were the parts of Yugoslavia which ran red with
innocent blood in 1991 (6)."  Glenny charges bravely forth with
base physical stereotypes that verge on hysteria.  The Serbs, as
reported by Glenny, are men of irredeemable "warrior
consciousness (7)": "demons with the trigger but no Einsteins
(8)."  Some of these "strange troll[s]" possess "inhumanly dense
brows (9)," and all believe that a man who uses a gun is no man." 
Compare this with the references to their antithesis:  "mellow
Croat academics (3)."  A thoroughly detestable charactature of
the Serb is drawn for the reader.  It is ironic that Glenny
finishes this last bit of description while lamenting that he
himself had been considered a "sub-human species (10)." 
Consistency would appear to be a brand of hobgoblin that Glenny
chooses not to embrace.  Such is the stuff of nationalism. 
Still, the application of certain amount of bias provides a
stability, an ideological sense of inertia for the reader.  The
goal of writing scientifically objective history is not
necessarily universal or even desirable.  
          There are other silver linings as well.  Local flavor
and emotion come through poignantly.  The kneejerk reaction of
the Bosnian Muslim to Glenny's British accent is hard to
misinterpret:  "You.  English.  Wrong.  [spits on ground] (127)." 
It is difficult for the relatively 'enlightened' Western to
understand the vehemence that Balkan peoples have for each other
and for outsiders.  This kind of recording does much to accustom
our minds to their mode of thinking.  This sympathy for the
Balkan condition seems to be Glenny's underlying interest.  If
Westerns, who, not incidentally, have a great deal of money to
distribute in the form of aid, can be recruited then the Balkans
might be jump-started economically.  This all depends on the
ability of the reader-politicians to suspend disbelief, to put
away the fact that "madness is a permanent mood in post-Communist
Yugoslavia (128)."
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