There has been an inverse relationship in this decade between events in the Balkans and journalistic writing about them. As the wars of the Yugoslav succession have proliferated and Western involvement has deepened, explanations for the origins of the tragedy have become ever simpler. At first, observers saw the conflicts as the result of the messy breakup of a shaky federation, when internal boundaries became international frontiers overnight, spawning a host of complicated demographic problems.
Next, journalists poured into the Balkans, carrying with them Rebecca West's pre-WWII book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and the Carnegie Commission's famous 1914 report on the Balkan wars. The key issue now came to be seen as one of ancient ethnic hatreds, national animosities that had bubbled ominously to the surface after being long submerged beneath Tito's slogan of "brotherhood and unity." The crux of the problem was no longer the many political and economic, local and international dimensions that had previously confounded foreign analysts but rather something more straightforward: a cyclical blood feud on the model of the Balkan wars of centuries past.
simplification
Today, following the Kosovo conflict, the matter of Yugoslavia's fall is presented as even simpler: the handiwork of one diabolical man, Slobodan Milosevic, and his drive to enlarge the borders of Serbia. As Dusko Doder and Louise Branson argue, Milosevic's "militant irredentism" spelled the end of the Yugoslav federation. It was his obsession with fashioning a Greater Serbia that has yielded today's lesser Yugoslavia.
Biographies of Milosevic are surely the next big thing, and with Milosevic: Portrait of a Tyrant, Doder and Branson have written the first full account of the Yugoslav president and the rise of his "television dictatorship." The authors are respected correspondents with over three decades' experience abroad between them, much of it in the south Balkans. This is not, however, the kind of book one would have expected them to write.
Doder and Branson are too good to settle for the story they offer here. With a few exceptions, their own experiences are sadly absent. The one chapter in which they rely mainly on their own interviews -- their detailed treatment of relations between Milosevic and the Yugoslav prime minister, Milan Panic -- is first-rate investigative journalism. But for much of the book, they lean on other writers' work. As the subtitle indicates, this is not a full biography but rather a "portrait." And it is one painted largely from other people's snapshots.
In making Milosevic the only real culprit in Yugoslavia's dismemberment, the authors offer a picture at odds with the complicated realities of the breakup. Milosevic may be an obsession of American policy makers and pundits, but he was not the only irredentist in town in 1990 and 1991 (if it even makes sense to speak of irredentism when the borders in question were internal, not international). Yugoslavia's explosion, as many other writers have demonstrated, was a drama with a huge cast, one that included not only the Serbs and other communities within the collapsing state, but also many international actors.
Milosevic's own story is, likewise, not a simple tale about the rise of "one warped and malevolent man." It is about the morphing of an opportunist into a demagogue, and about the relations between Milosevic's fight for power and the equally determined struggles of his rivals in other parts of Yugoslavia.
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