BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS OF THE DAMNED: The War Inside Kosovo

"The only defense is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves." This quote, occurring toward the end of this horrifying and deeply moving account of Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, comes not from Slobodon Milosevic but from Stanley Baldwin, later a British prime minister, in a 1932 speech and serves as a historical frame for the action covered here. While most Americans saw the air strikes on television, McAllester claims that "the unseen war, the war inside Kosovo, has remained largely untold." Defying the Yugoslavian government's ban on unescorted foreign reporters, McAllester, who shared a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the TWA flight 800, went in 1999 to Pec, Kosovo's most ravaged city during the 78 days of NATO bombing. McAllester carefully charts the larger historical and political framework: the history of Pec, the longstanding animosity between the ethnic Albanians and the Serbs, the complicated position of regular Serb soldiers caught between the KLA attacks and NATO bombing. But the main focus is on Isa Bala, an ethnic Albanian sausage maker and his family, and in particular their persecution by their Serb gangster neighbor, Nebojsa Minic, and on a persistent family feud. McAllester is a careful observer and as the story moves from the ordinary (everyday life; Isa selling Minic sausages; Isa wishing he had married earlier so that he could have more children) to the horrifying rape of his wife and brutal murder of most of his children, the story becomes nearly unbearable in its inevitability. McAllester's spare, understated prose ("The skull seemed to be the size of a child's," he notes, coming upon a local killing ground) is potent, as is his exploration of the human side of geopolitics and war.(Feb.)

Forecast:As the "small" wars of the '90s involving Muslims come to seem more and more related (see review of A Dirty War, p. 58), journalistic books such as this will be sought out by readers trying to make sense of recent history. McAllester's excellent, heartbreaking work here is more relevant than ever.