SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC AND THE DESTRUCTION OF YUGOSLAVIA

A welcome biography of the “Butcher of the Balkans,” now awaiting trial before the International War Crimes Tribunal.

Sell, a retired Foreign Service officer who worked in the former Yugoslavia for eight years, turns in a nuanced view of Milosevic, the man, often described as “a brilliant tactician but a disastrous strategist,” who led Serbia into an ultimately self-destructive war in Kosovo after a murderous campaign in Bosnia. Sell describes Milosevic’s rise to power from the role of an obscure, essentially conservative Communist functionary to that of empire-builder of an imagined Greater Serbia. Following the defeat of his chief opponent, Ante Markovic, and the effective withdrawal of Serbia from the de facto economic union established among the new republics of the former Yugoslavia, Milosevic set about dismantling the multiethnic society that, by Sell’s account, most Yugoslavians seemed content to maintain. This program of social disintegration relied on the loyalties and actions of mass murderers—and, perhaps, on the influence of Milosevic’s wife, Mirjana Markovic, whom many Serbians believed “was the true power behind the throne.” Sell observes that Milosevic was also well served by the bumbling of the international community, which did little to stop him despite clear evidence of his intentions. He chastises the Western powers, too, for their failure to address on equal terms the claims of all of the former Yugoslavia’s peoples for self-determination, insisting on maintaining the old internal borders instead of redrawing the map to accommodate the claims of Serbs and Albanians, “whose ethnic borders most deviated from the political ones.” He maintains additionally that NATO’s military intervention was less effective in bringing about the end of Milosevic’s reign than was domestic Serbian political opposition, which orchestrated widespread popular resistance and, in the end, delivered Milosevic for trial in The Hague.

An important contribution to the literature surrounding the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the ethnic wars that followed.