In Europe

Kosovo, the West never engaged in a ground war.
    In the final account, the Yugoslav wars were also typical publicity wars. There was a constant manipulation of death counts. NATO smugly televised direct hits on Belgrade, as though the city was a pinball machine. For Miložsević, the national television stations comprised his most important asset, more important even than the army, politics or party. The wars ran on fear, particularly among the Serbs: the fear of decimation, the fear of a repetition of the cruelties of the Second World War. And nothing whipped up those fears more effectively than television.
    The history of the Yugoslav wars is complicated. From the fifteenth until far into the nineteenth century, Yugoslavia – like the rest of the Balkans – had acted as a highly prized buffer zone between the three great religious traditions: Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam. Many mountain people lived almost exclusively within their clans and isolated village communities, and it was to them that their loyalty was given. Boys and men were regularly press-ganged into the armies of the warring powers; most of their contact with differing convictions took place on the battlefield. The key virtues were bravery, a sense of honour and loyalty to the clan.
    At first there were no major ethnic tensions. The Ottoman Empire was relatively tolerant, its population divided only along religious lines and not by ethnic origin. Western Europeans travelling through Thrace around 1900 noted to their amazement that the people in a mixed Greek/Bulgarian village had absolutely no idea whether their ancestors were Greek orBulgarian. That played no role whatsoever. All they knew was that they were Christians.
    The First Yugoslavia, also known as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, was created at the Versailles peace conferences, as part of the dismantling of the Habsburg Empire. The new nation was dominated by the Serbs; partly because they formed the largest local minority, and partly because they had fought on the side of the victorious Allies. Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina had sided with the Habsburgs and were seen rather as the spoils of war and treated accordingly. Meanwhile, the central government remained weak and the villages fought out their own disagreements: Serbs against Croatians, Croatians and Serbs against Muslims, Croatians and Muslims against Serbs,‘my brother and I against my nephew, my nephew and I against the foreigner’.
    During the Second World War this traditional local violence began escalating like never before. The National Socialist Croatians set up an independent state, and their Ustažse movement, along with certain Muslim groups, set out to cleanse all of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina of Serbs. On 9 April, 1942, thousands of Serb families from the region surrounding Srebrenica were driven into the River Drina and massacred by the Ustažse, a bloodbath that horrified even the German occupiers and left a deep mark in the Serb collective memory. The Serbs’ Chetniks, by the way, struck back just as mercilessly, storming Ustažse strongholds and descending with their supporters on dozens of Muslim villages. During this ethnic fighting many hundreds of thousands of people were killed, particularly on the Serbian side, including several tens of thousands of Jews and Gypsies.
    The Second Yugoslavia was formed after the war, under Tito, who succeeded in combining an effective central authority with a large degree of autonomy for the six Yugoslav federal republics. The national constitution drafted in 1974 further decentralised the country's administration: each of the federal republics was to have its own central bank, its own police force, its own system of courts and schools. The country rapidly began modernising, and new schools, roads, factories and housing estates were built everywhere. Until the 1980s, in fact, Yugoslavia was seen as far and away the most advanced communist country. Tito declared thatthe old complex conflicts had been forgotten and forgiven, and the Yugoslavs were able to live with that for more than thirty-five years.
    It was only after the old leader's death in 1980 that things went wrong. Tito, it turned out, had left behind enormous foreign debt, and inflation quickly escalated. Savings and pensions melted away, huge shortages of food and fuel arose, the old certainties were proving worthless. As had happened earlier in other Eastern Bloc countries, this resulted