Nicholas Burns, the U.S. undersecretary of state, declared, at a press briefing he gave after returning from a recent trip to the Balkan hot spots, that former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic “ordered the execution of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica.” Over the last few years, I have sought to get at the truth...
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Attack of the Greenies
I was born and grew up in Washington’s rural Ferry County, in the northeastern corner of the state. In 2000, Republican Sen. Slade Gorton was narrowly defeated by ex-Democratic Congressman Maria Cantwell, who spent huge sums of money and yet carried only five urban counties in and around Seattle. The remaining 34 counties went to...
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Homage to Montenegro
Not until I was well into this book did I realize how much it is needed. The son of illiterate Serbian immigrants from Montenegro, I knew almost no early Montenegrin history. Some of that history is noble, some confused, and some characterized by treachery and double-dealing. There were plots and counterplots. Agreements were always of...
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The Agony of Kosovo
The agony of Kosovo, Serbia’s ill-omened province, is recorded in the pages of history. Over the centuries, Kosovo was transformed from an ethnically homogeneous center of the Serbian medieval empire to an embattled region populated predominantly by ethnic Albanians demanding independence. To appreciate the position of the Serbs, imagine Hispanics controlling large areas of Texas...
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The Yugoslav God That Failed
The fate of one family rarely matters except to those directly involved. Yet family histories—often tragedies can sometimes tell us a great deal about a nation’s social fabric. One such story involves my aunt, Vida Knezevich Kontich—my mother’s older sister—and her family. Their fate was never far from mind during my diplomatic assignment with the...
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Cry, the Beloved Country
The Yugoslav civil war will turn out to be, from the long perspective of the American experience, a mere dot on the horizon. But for a small part of the American landscape—the Americans of Serbian descent—the twisted portrayal of this war, by politicians and the media, will be painful and difficult to bear for a...
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The Future of Kosovo
The fate of Kosovo, Serbia’s troubled province, has in recent years received a good deal of attention in the world press, usually in connection with the actions of Serbia’s president, Slobodan Miloševic. A somewhat obscure communist until he became head of the Serbian Communist Party in 1986, Miloševic went to Kosovo in April 1987 to...
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The Unknown Civil War
The use of NATO military strikes against the Bosnian Serbs, at the urgings of the Clinton administration, camouflages for the moment a rift that has occurred in the Western alliance. Sooner or later recriminations over “who lost Yugoslavia?” are certain to come. And though it may be a while before historians render a verdict, there...