cover image Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences

Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences

Christopher Bennett. New York University Press, $70 (296pp) ISBN 978-0-8147-1234-4

Drawing on sources written in English, Slovene and Serbo-Croat supplemented by interviews (Bennett, a British journalist, speaks both Slovene and Croat), this informative study describes how the Serbs, under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic, disarmed Slovenian and Croatian forces in May 1990, leaving the territories they had protected virtually defenseless. Bennett criticizes the Serbian media for its willingness to generate nationalist hysteria-which Milosevic shaped into a pathological hatred for the non-Serbian population, as well as for other Serbs who refused to accept his vision of a Greater Serbia. Bennett calls ``unpardonable'' the refusal of the international community to protect innocent victims of the Serbian rampage in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but fails to make clear what he thinks should have been done. The greatest tragedy of all, in his view, is the demise of the Titoist ideal of brotherhood and unity that, until Yugoslavia's collapse, had kept the various ethnic and religious factions loosely allied for nearly 40 years. Prospects for a peaceful settlement in the foreseeable future are bleak, he says, as long as Milosevic remains in power. (Jan.)