Looking behind the Violent Break-Up of Yugoslavia

Abstract

Why is it so difficult to write about the war in the Balkans? Struggling, over the past two years, to make sense of the bitter fragmentation of Yugoslavia, I became more acutely aware that every fragment has its own story and that the stories tend to become more incompatible. In that recognition, it seems appropriate to indicate where I have come from; to start by looking back: Sarajevo in the 1960s. Meet some friends of mine. Here's Vera, she's about my age (we were in our twenties then). We drink Turkish coffee around the kitchen table in her flat. The flat has just been returned to her, well half of it, the other half allocated to another family, in that slow process of sorting out housing needs and rights after the war. (Vera's family had lost their house during that war, taking refuge in the hills ...) There is little furniture as yet but the rooms are large with views across the city. Vera works in the university library, and used to live in a small room there with her young son. She's independent, competent in the ways of getting round the system, critical, generous, witty. She seems to manage her lovers with a mixture of confidence and contempt. And here is Milena, our age too; she lives with her mother in a small (also divided) flat near to the centre of town; she works in the National Library, that fine building by the river where we sometimes visit her for coffee and conversation. She is not well this year, has had TB and needs more rest, and her love life is full of distress ... The third member of this group is Jelena. She works in a travel bureau in town and can always provide advice, if not tickets, if we want to travel by bus out of town. Perhaps Jelena is a bit more serious than the others, shows her anxieties more, but with an underlying determination and strength. They are good friends these three, often together, three young, independent women. Between them they try to teach Serbo-Croat to my companion and me.