In Europe

however, was that the background to these wars was often not as irrational as all that. For the Yugoslav leaders, Silber and Little wrote, war was quite often ‘a completely rational affair, and indeed the only way for them to achieve their objectives’.
    The Serbs almost completely flattened Vukovar. After the city surrendered on 18 November, a large number of wounded men were carried off and never seen again. They probably still lie in a mass grave in the surrounding countryside.
    In January 1992, Miložsević and Tudjman agreed to a ceasefire. Whatever role the European negotiators played, that was a rational decision: the battle of prestige for Vukovar had been won, a quarter of all Croatian territory was now occupied by the Serbs, an international peacekeeping force was on its way to guard the new borders, and Miložsević's Greater Serbia had come another step closer. As far as Tudjman was concerned, Croatia's recognition by the international community granted him enough time to revamp the Croatian Army thoroughly. What is more, both men were planning to breathe new life into the ‘gentlemen's agreement’ formerly reached at Karadjordjevo, and to move on together towards the next prize: Bosnia.
    Miložsević more or less left the Serbs in Krajina to their own fate. In August 1995, the tables were turned at last and a modernised Croatian Army rolled into Krajina and chased out almost the whole Serb population. Belgrade, Novi Sad and other cities filled with refugees.
    In 1993, just before I left Novi Sad, I found a long letter waiting at the front desk of my hotel. It was from an acquaintance, a Croatian woman. She urged me to be careful, and finally she wrote: ‘I had a dream in which there was no war. I breathed the fresh air of Slovenian snow, I ate the bread of Croatia, I drank Bosnian wine, I sang songs from Serbia and I lay in the beautiful fields of Vojvodina. It was my country, it was my home. For twenty-eight years I lived in a beautiful country and now, after only two years, they're trying to tell me it was all my imagination, nonsense, illusions. Except: twenty-eight years is not an illusion to me.My father was born in that imaginary land, and so was my grandfather. How can that be a fantasy?’
    She had translated the letter into English with great difficulty, having to look up almost every word in the dictionary. I went to where she lived to say goodbye. She and her husband lived in a lovely house on the Danube, no one in those parts had ever cared whether you were a Serb or a Croatian. Then the war came. The rumbling of the battle at Vukovar carried across the river and into their home, like the sound of distant thunder, every night.
    One morning, down by their neighbour's orchard, the body of a woman had floated up, her eyes wide open, staring at the sky. And when they tried to whitewash the gate of the fortress of Novi Sad – this all happened around the same time – snakes came crawling out of every nook and cranny, hundreds of snakes of a kind they had never seen before. ‘We want to leave here,’ she had written, ‘but we don't know how, with a four-year-old child, where can you find a new job and a house?’ She had no intention of going to Croatia. ‘If I must be a foreigner, then I'd rather be a foreigner in China.’
    It is a clear December morning in 1999. The film director žZelimir Zilnić and I are taking a long walk beside the river. The words of György Konrád in Budapest still echo in my mind: ‘The sooner Miložsević and his gang are gone, the better. But no Hungarian, no Czech, no Bulgarian, no Rumanian would ever come up with the idea of bombing the bridges of Novi Sad to accomplish that. To think up something like that you have to be far, very far removed from our reality.’
    And so there they lie. No attempt has been made to clear the rubble. The oldest bridge in particular is a dearly departed one. Atop the lanterns, partly under water now, a row of gulls is sitting in the sun. ‘The next morning, there were a lot of people standing on the banks, weeping,’ žZelimir told me. ‘On the far shore, the nationalists began singing their songs, that was horrible too.’ The traffic now hobbles across a makeshift pontoon bridge.
    A friend of his had seen the last of the bridges collapse before his eyes. ‘It was 3 p.m., lovely weather, you could see the cruise missile come sailing in across the river.'A few other acquaintances had fought in Kosovo,they had told him