Books: Whiskies and a carve-up

the death of yUgoslavia by Laura Silber and Allan Little Penguin pounds 6.99

THE boundaries of religion and territory are moving again within the confines of Tito's old Yugoslavia, to the confusion of many who thought of its disintegration as a moral fable. The first medium-sized war in Europe since 1945 gave birth to a corpus of journalism and minor literature, most of which presented the conflict either in heroic or Manichean terms. Now Laura Silber and Allan Little have come up with a first-rate piece of sustained political reporting to explain how and why Yugoslavia broke apart. There are villains and fools, but no heroes, in their story.

Silber, a Balkan specialist with the Financial Times, and Little, a BBC reporter who covered Sarajevo, make it clear their book is not "a call to arms of the 'Save Bosnia Now' type". Nor is it a "we were there and it was horrible" account. The revelatory Marcel Ophuls documentaries on Sarajevo should have raised questions about both types of journalism. Am I the only reporter to feel unease about the way the Yugoslav wars have been covered by some of the media: the angy partisanship, the presentation of tragedy as "infotainment", the correspondents who model combat chic for glossy magazines?

There is nothing glossy or superficial about this book, which accompanies a TV series. It is heavily detailed, from the smoke-filled and slivovitz- fuelled proceedings of the old Communist Party to the internecine disputes of Montenegrin nationalism. Even for those unfamiliar with the ethnic and political cocktail of the old Yugoslavia, Ms Silber's talents as a political reporter reap a just reward in anecdotes and first-hand accounts from many of the protagonists in the drift to war.

A good example is the meeting in 1991 between Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Croatia's Franjo Tudjman at Tito's hunting lodge in Karadjordjevo. The two nationalists downed whiskies and strolled in its grounds, debating the partition of Bosnia between their respective states. Tudjman returned to Zagreb boasting that he would increase Croatia's territory beyond the boundaries negotiated with Italian Fascist support in 1939. Milosevic, drunk on power, sought whatever outcome would maximise his grip on Serbian politics.

Milosevic, the prime warmonger, emerges as a strangely inefficient despot; unable to rein in his Bosnian proxies, careless of human life but rarely directly implicated in its taking. Tudjman, who once publicly gave thanks that his wife was "neither a Serb nor a Jew", is a much shrewder piece of work, who knew when to exercise caution, when to play Europe's diplomatic game and when, by pure calculation, to turn to violence.

Both men bamboozled a succession of mediators and grandees sent by a perplexed outside world in the naive belief that peace was, in itself, a desirable state. Perhaps the single most telling observation by the authors is that all sides, including the Bosnian Muslims, saw war not as an unavoidable ill but as a natural method of obtaining their goals. President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia more fool than villain in this account told parliament in 1991 that "I would sacrifice peace for a sovereign Bosnia-Herzegovina, but for that peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina I would not sacrifice sovereignty." Izetbegovic's political acumen was not equal to that tremendous responsibility and thousands of his countrymen paid the price.

Lord Carrington argued that Bosnia might have been saved if Europe had not rushed to give formal recognition to Croatia without settling its frontiers or the status of its substantial Serb minority. This careless decision the fruit of an officially denied British-German compromise over the Maastricht Treaty committed the successor states of Yugoslavia to war. Silber and Little give credit to the long-forgotten Carrington plan, which sought to create a loose federation, and they are also unfashionably kind to the doomed Vance-Owen plan, whose complex provisions would have kept a multi-ethnic Bosnia.

This book is stronger on the causes than on the course of the war, but it stands alongside Misha Glenny's eloquent account of the same period as a work of reference. One day some dedicated soul will marshal all the evidence to write the full history of a war where propaganda was often the most powerful weapon.