Anger, pity, and sorrow, more or less in equal doses, are my overwhelming feelings when I face the dim prospects for democracy or any tolerable and just order in the states emerging out of the wreckage of former Yugoslavia, and in most other postcommunist countries. The primitive nationalism and political bungling of the provincial mediocrities who gained political leadership of the two largest republics, Serbia and Croatia, blocked democratization in Yugoslavia, leading to constant confrontations between the ruling natio-cracies, a bloody war on Croatian soil in the summer of 1991, and far bloodier carnage in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Serbs and Croats are now both rivals and accomplices in a tacitly agreed upon partition of that hapless state at the expense of the Muslim Slavs, the largest Bosnian group. The nationalists and separatists who won the first free election in Slovenia have not been innocent either. They hastened to provoke an armed confrontation with the Federal Army by seizing frontier and customs posts on the international border separating a still existent Yugoslavia from Italy and Austria. For them, the end of an independent separate state justified any means. This, on the other hand, in no way justified the subsequent Army invasion of Slovenia, and there had been continuous violation of the constitution and laws of Yugoslavia for at least three previous years by the Serbian nationalist leadership under Slobodan Milosevic, prime minister of Serbia since 1986. Milosevic was a time-serving communist boss who managed to combine the old Party and state apparatus with populist-nationalist demagoguery. More fundamentally, he had the support of the Yugoslav Army, the Frankenstein monster of the whole story. Reliable sources indicate that the Army had actually become an independent force at least a year before the final breakup of the state in June 1991, when the Slovenian intervention occurred. The failure of the invasion and the