In the 1990s Milosevic has been a consummate political survivor. He has weathered a major crisis nearly every year since assuming the presidency of Serbia and, later, Yugoslavia. He faced mass public protests in 1991, which he could quell only by sending tanks into Belgrade, his own capital. He considered his public support so feeble that he had to rig elections in 1992. Hyperinflation and a hunger strike by the opposition figure Vuk Draskovic led to additional popular outcries in 1993. Military stalemate in the Bosnian war and a crippled economy in 1994 further weakened his position. In 1995, the Dayton compromise in Bosnia and the purge of over 300,000 Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia belied his claim to being the protector of the Serbian nation. Large-scale demonstrations in 1996 and in 1999, after the defeat in Kosovo, reflected deep public discontent.
the survivor
Yet Milosevic is still around, an indicted war criminal who cannot risk setting foot outside Yugoslavia, the capo di tutti capi of a pariah state. There are important questions about how things ended up this way, and Doder and Branson mention most of them, even though they do not claim to have definite answers. To what extent was growing political unrest in Kosovo in 1987 encouraged by Milosevic's rabble-rousing speech before disgruntled Serbs, orchestrated before his arrival in the province? Did Milosevic and the Greek prime minister, Constantine Mitsotakis, seriously conspire to carve up Macedonia by force? Was the organized depopulation of Kosovo the ultimate goal of Yugoslav military operations in the spring of 1999 or merely a contingency plan for changing the demographic realities of the province? Such questions are crucial to understanding Milosevic's decisions and to appreciating the interactions between domestic Yugoslav politics and international reactions that have been central to the way the crises have developed.
For anyone who has followed Balkan politics in this decade, this book is at times painful reading -- not only for the cynical machinations and missed chances that it recounts, but also for the crass generalizations that it makes about the Serbs and their history. Doder and Branson often repeat the worst cliches about the Serbian past and the light that the nation's mythic history supposedly sheds on the disasters of the Serbian present. They also draw a link between the character of Milosevic and the rage for voluntary martyrdom often attributed to the Serbs. Milosevic, the authors say, is in "the grip of mythology and folklore," is "someone who is focused on a single idea," is "a despot in his soul."
Anyone who has traveled in Eastern Europe can find plenty of individuals for whom the Middle Ages were yesterday and the national injustices of the past a source of personal grievance in the present. But reading the minds of politicians from the cultures in which they thrive is not only crude. It is also -- an even greater sin for two accomplished writers -- simply banal.
Charles King holds the Ion Ratiu chair of Romanian studies at Georgetown University in Washington.
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