For those who may be too young to remember, or who have chosen to forget, a series of conflicts took place in the Balkans between 1991 and 1999 following the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. That communist state was an uneasy federation of six republics, comprising Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims (known as Bosniaks), Slovenes, Albanians, and other smaller ethnic groupings, all held together by the will of Yugoslavia’s ruler, Josip Broz Tito.

Following Tito’s death in 1980, the old tensions – some of them dating back to World War II, when the Catholic Croatian Ustasha had sided with the Nazis – began to manifest themselves once again, exacerbated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. Croatia and Slovenia declared independence in 1991, and immediately found themselves under attack by the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) – which was dominated by Serbs – and Serbian paramilitary groups, leading to the death and displacement of thousands before a cease-fire was brokered by the United Nations in 1992.

Meanwhile, Bosnia was also seeking independence, but the Serbian minority in the territory resisted. Once again, elements of the Yugoslav army – operating as the Army of Republika Srpska, or VRS, commonly referred to as the Bosnian Serb Army – intervened, commencing a program of ethnic cleansing against Muslims and Croats in an effort to create a Serbian stronghold. UN intervention failed, and the death toll rose, most infamously at Srebrenica, where more than eight thousand Muslim men and boys were tortured and executed after the town surrendered to Serbian forces led by General Ratko Mladić. Finally, NATO resorted to bombing the Bosnian Serbs, enabling Muslim and Croat forces to mount a counteroffensive. A peace agreement resulted in an independence referendum in 1992, and the subsequent international recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina as an independent state. (The Bosnian Serbs, meanwhile, also declared their own version of independence, calling their region the Republika Srpska.)

But conflicts in the former Yugoslavia continued. In 1995, Croatian forces took control of previously Serb-dominated areas of Croatia, and in 1999 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo won a bloody war against Serb forces to obtain their independence. By then Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro had also either severed ties with Belgrade or declared independence, and Serbian ambitions of creating a new Balkan empire from the ruins of the former Yugoslavia lay in tatters.

At least 130,000 people died in the wars, more than a million were displaced by ethnic cleansing, and up to fifty thousand women and children, mainly Bosniaks, were raped, with Serbian armed forces and militias bearing overwhelming responsibility for these atrocities. As one Serb put it during my research, ‘A lot of bad things happened, and most of them were our fault. Most,’ he emphasized, ‘but not all.’

I

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Requiem’

Chapter I