This book belongs to the broader corpus of works dealing with the disintegration of the Second Yugoslavia. Although a substantial body of literature has already addressed that collapse, this volume stands apart in several crucial respects. Its central subject is the “Serbian–global war” of 1999—a conflict in which Serbia, after a decade of Balkan warfare fought over the corpse of former Yugoslavia, ultimately provoked and compelled the United States and NATO to undertake military intervention. That intervention took the form of a laser-precise, quasi-surgical deployment of overwhelming military force against Serbia.
At the same time, even as the bombing of infrastructure in numerous Serbian cities was still underway, Milošević’s regime attempted to complete its own “final solution” against the Kosovo Albanians—that is, the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. This war has remained largely unthematized to this day, as many of those who could—and should—have offered a coherent account have chosen to avert their gaze. The sequence of events begins in Kosovo in 1981 and culminates, once again in Kosovo, with the 1999 war and NATO’s execution of military force over Serbia.
Rather than adopting a conventional political-science or sociological framework, the author offers something far more demanding: a journalistically investigative and dramaturgically structured narrative that lays bare personal, collective, and societal dramas of destruction and self-destruction—of humanity undone by a politics that engineers criminal campaigns of war. Such politics ultimately ends in a conflict through which a criminal regime is militarily pacified. Yet the fact that a dictatorial regime has been stopped by armed force does not amount to the defeat of its underlying ideology—an ideology that continues to dream of conquest and new wars.
Rade Radovanović is a journalist and playwright. He is the author of numerous radio and television programs and has worked for Radio Belgrade, Radio Free Europe, TV 5, TV Avala, among others. He has served as a correspondent and columnist for WDR Cologne, Deutsche Welle, NRTV Studio 99, Al Jazeera, and other international media. He is one of the founders and editors of the daily newspaper DANAS. His dramatic works include Original of a Forgery, The Butterfly’s Dream, Kosovo Tribals, and The Myth of Victory, as well as the screenplay for the film Original of a Forgery. In opposition to totalitarianism, he has founded trade unions, associations, NGOs, and political parties, and has organized strikes and demonstrations.