By pure coincidence, I was reading journalist Jeanine Di Giovanni’s Madness Visible: A Memoir of War when Kosovo made its recent bid for independence.
A first-hand account of the breakup of Yugoslavia, Madness Visible offers insight into the complex situation in the Balkans in the late 1990s, and also reflections from several years later. At one point, Di Giovanni considers the impact the atrocities in Bosnia will have on its future:
Milosevic is in The Hague, the first head of state to be tried by an international court, and Karadzic will eventually be hunted down. But is it too late? During those dark years, no one came to save Bosnia. Neither God, nor the Orthodox saints, nor the angels – despite all the candles the old ladies lit in the cemeteries and the prayers they said – certainly not the UN or the Western leaders, had tried to save it until it was too late.
In return, a whole generation will spend their lives trying to process the horror of what they saw. The stench of the place, the slow smell of death, will erode everything. Thousands of peacekeeping soldiers can’t cover it up, and all the World Bank money and Danish and Austrian economic aid can’t fix it.
[A friend] had said to me, in that field in Kozarac, when he showed me the Orthodox cross burnt into his scalp: “Evil things happened here.”
When contemplating the fate of Bosnia, Di Giovanni later asks:
What happened to this country? Who lit the fuse? How far had people gotten this time from past wars, past hatreds, past desires, past petty grievances? Would someone send someone to a concentration camp again in eight or ten years?…Would they inherit the same sense of humiliation and bitterness and the quest for retribution passed on from generation to generation?
People are clever. They know that unless they learn from the past they will continue to repeat the same mistakes, over and over. The same web of violence, terror and destruction. I just don’t know if they will, or can, get past it.
Given that the US Embassy in Belgrade is currently in flames, Madness Visible seems an eerie foreshadow. But I hope I’m wrong.
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