SOURCE: Ignatieff, Michael. “The Balkan Tragedy.” New York Review of Books 90, no. 9 (13 May 1993): 3-5.

In the following review, Ignatieff traces the history of the current conflict in the Balkans using several recent works, including Misha Glenny's The Fall of Yugoslavia, Branka Magas's The Destruction of Yugoslavia, and Drakulic's The Balkan Express.

Since the summer of 1991, at least 50,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the former Yugoslavia and at least a million more have been turned into refugees. After two-and-a-half years of fighting, a comprehensible explanation for the carnage still eludes most observers. The outside world's unspoken conviction, as it watches the unfolding savagery, is that all the parties must be, in differing degrees, insane. This belief comes in both simple and complicated forms, ranging from the sweeping finality of “they're all fucked,” which I heard from a Canadian UN soldier trying to keep Serbs and...