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63 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Tim Judah Looks at Serbia, January 2, 2001
Tim Judah is a journalist who has lived in Yugoslavia and has had plenty of time to observe that country's disintegration and the subsequent wars in Croatia and Bosnia. This book is his attempt to explain why these wars took place and what the results were to both Serbia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia.I was a bit intimidated at first by this book. I've taken a class on Balkan history (which wasn't very good) but didn't think I was well prepared to dive into dense explanations of Serbian history. I'm much more familiar with Albanian history, which does overlap with Serb history somewhat, but not enough to make me an expert on Yugoslavia. I had no need to worry, as Mr. Judah made this book easy to follow. He keeps the information flowing and only focuses on major figures, which helps keep events in perspective. I would expect that even someone with zero knowledge of the region would be able to keep pace with this book. Judah's main argument is that the wars in fractured Yugoslavia aren't due exclusively to nationalism, but mostly to greedy, powerful politicians that are exploiting the Serbian people to make themselves wealthy. Judah does acknowledge that the Serbian people have a long history of nationalistic tendencies, and he explains this tendency in some detail in the first part of the book. This nationalism was carried down through time by the Serbian Orthodox Church,which acted as both a preserver of culture and a bulwark during the long occupation of Serbia by the Ottoman Turks. Judah also shows how Serbian epic poetry that retold the tales of Serb martyrs Milos Obilic and Prince Lazar reinforced the idea of the Serbian people as victims who would one day receive their just rewards. Politicians such as Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic used this victimhood to launch wars against Croatia and Bosnia. Behind the scenes, politicians, in league with mafia-type gangs, were looting the country. Judah even reveals that some Serb military officers were selling weapons to the enemy during these fierce wars. Judah is at his best when he is describing the Bosnian Serb government in Pale during the Bosnian war. He shows how ineffective they were in conducting a war, and also how corrupt they were. He also exposes the atrocities that were committed by Serbian militias that detained Muslims in camps and carried out mass executions. I had several problems with this book. First, Judah has a definite bias against the Serbs. Judah sees the Serbs as the major destructive force behind all of the conflicts in the region. But the Serbs weren't operating in a vacuum. Croatians and Muslims also committed atrocities and should be held in equal contempt if one wants to start throwing human rights charges about. Also, Mr. Judah doesn't seem to grasp the concept of war very well. War is an ugly thing, and atrocities are always committed by everyone involved. That's why it's called war. Also, war profiteering always occurs during a conflict. The Serbs by no means have a lock on this particular bit of unpleasant behavior. To try and paint them as such is irreponsible, in my opinion. Also, Judah heaps much scorn on Sonja Karadzic. Judah says that she hurt the Bosnian Serb cause by refusing journalists access to areas the journalists wanted to see. This is an error. Sonja didn't hurt the cause. The journalists did. This is a standard media trick. When the media doesn't get what they want, they throw a fit and the next thing you know, they start smearing people. In the final analysis, it's important to remember that the vast majority of Serbs only want to live and raise their families like everyone else. If anything, Judah proves the old truth that it is always politicians that start wars, and it is the people who suffer from them. Finally, I wish this book had better maps! The ones that are included aren't sufficient. Hopefully, future reprints will repair this deficiency. I really shouldn't bash the book too much, though. It inspired me enough to go out and by a biography on Tito. I'd also like to read Judah's book on Kosova. I recommend this book for its reader friendly, if somewhat misguided, introduction to Serbia and her wonderful people.
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57 of 74 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Rehashing typical Western illusions without any evidence...., November 16, 2001
By A Customer
Judah's little polemic would lead us to believe that Serbs are genocidal mythomaniac Orthodox zealots. This has required a lot of historical revisionism and tailoring bits and pieces to fit a pre-set biased agenda: the Serbs are to be blamed for the Balkan wars of the 1990s and much of the past history and their martyrdom complex stemming from historical delusions and myths allowed them to be manipulated to genocide by a tawdry dictator, the ubiquitous Milosevic. Unfortunately, this sort of reasoning does not suit a historian but a simpleton.The national consciousness is an average of the individual feelings of each member of the nation. What is obvious at once is that when most Serbs think of Serbian victimhood or martyrdom, practically no-one thinks of Prince Lazar and the battle of Kosovo, not even the Kosovo Serbs. This event is not even embraced as merely a symbol of greater Serbian victimhood. A Serbian sense of victimhood inherent in most but not all Serbs is not a function of epics and myths, as Judah and many in the West have been claiming: rather, it is a function of the personal experiences of that particular Serb. What do I mean by this? When my grandfather thinks of Serbian victimhood, he recalls how in WWI, when he was 5 years old, Bulgarian troops entered his village and tried to execute the entire village. He was barely saved by 2 Serbian generals in the Austrian army, but then the Bulgarians came back later, raped and killed his aunt, burned down the entire village, and massacred all those Serbian civilians who had not fled, dumping their bodies in the Morava. Or he might think of how, during WWII, he personally witnessed Hungarians tossing Serbs and Jews into the freezing Tisza and Danube to drown them. What does my grandmother recall when considering Serbian victimhood? She remembers hundreds of Serbian refugees flocking to her village, fleeing from the Ustasa genocide during WWII, or how in the 1960s, hundreds more were fleeing from the Kosovo Albanian repression, or how the Germans collected 7000 Serbian men, women, and children in the nearby town of Kragujevac in 1941 and executed them because of the death of a few German officers. And finally, what does my father think of? He thinks of how his mother's friend saw at the age of 6 Croatian and Moslem Ustase burn her entire family alive in the local Serbian Orthodox church; or he thinks of how his best friend was abducted in 1992 by Sarajevo Moslems, forced into a Moslem-run camp, and killed. I could say so much more, but Judah's thesis completely crumbles in light of these facts. These are not myths or fairytales. These are family members and friends murdered because they were Serbs, whether by burning or drowning or execution or being raped and killed; most of some 10,000,000 Serbs have similar stories to tell. No one, absolutely no one today, is thinking of the long list of other Serbian suffering in history: the Kosovo battle, the Western Crusades, the Turkish oppression, the Austrian oppression, the Serbs fleeing Kosovo under Patriarch Arsenije, forced conversion to Islam and the Uniate church, etc. And most don't even consider events that don't impact them personally (Kosovo Serbs are not very likely to think about Krajina when considering national victimhood). They think of what happened 10 or 50 or 80 years ago and that makes them consider themselves and their people victims. Are they wrong? Sadly, they're not, and no writer, least of all a biased creature like Judah, can distort history to such an extent as to reverse these personal losses. Serbian victimhood is real, it is not a myth, nor is it based on myths. It is based on personal experience, whether it be WWI, or Jasenovac and Stara Gradiska, or Krajina, or Kosovo or any one of a myriad of instances of Serbian suffering in history, and the national consciousness is merely the mean of these perceptions. And lastly, I do not think the Serbs are at all obsessed with their victimhood compared to other national victims of genocide. Armenians have a day of remembrance, April 24, a memorial in Yerevan, and are actively demanding Turkish recognition. Jews have an extensive museum, Yad Vashem, which all foreign dignitaries see; they also have the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C., and numerous books and movies about their tragedy. This is all as it should be. But the Serbs have no remembrance day, no monument to the victims of WWII in Belgrade, no Serbian genocide museum, and their tragedy is not even mentioned in a standard American textbook or history book. Instead, the Serbs intermarried with their former oppressors the Croats and Moslems and lived in harmony until 10 years ago. No, this is not at all a people suffering from an obsession.........rather, it is one that all too soon forgets its tragedies and suffers for this forgetfulness.
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30 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Those Serbs!, November 4, 2003
This book has taken a beating from some reviewers, and for good reason. Appearing at a time when the mere word "Serbs" was synonomous with "Nazi" in the media, the book poses itself as a fair look at this nationality.Once again we have a slanted book depicting Serbs in a less than favorable light. Once again, the Serbs are strictly the bad guys of the Balkan Wars through and through, and the actions of their neighbors are not afforded a similar taint. And, of course, we go through nationalism, treated like a poisonous word. An inevitable outcome of the fall of Communist Yugoslavia, nationalism was the most readily available tool politicians could use to move and shake the country. Of course it didn't move and shake in the right direction all the time, but nationalism is not the poison, per se. Go and find me a more nationalistic country than the USA for starters. The book did not appear in time to cover the Kosovo war, but Judah would approach this topic with another book entitled, oddly enough, Kosovo. It's a better bit of work than this book, which is packed full of information as Judah struggles to run through an entire people from beginning to end, stringing selective facts to hammer home a point Judah had long before he penned this, which is to confirm that the Serbs are misguided, and are, in fact, the bad guys. Naturally, ancient history and myths are given mighty weight as reasons behind the quest for a
Greater Serbia. Trying to hold on to provinces like Kosovo are not part of some Greater Serbia pipe dream. Imagine a Mexican-dominated southern state trying to secede in the future. And as one reviewer has pointed out, one of the most offensive bits is the real working over that Judah gives Orthodox Christianity. I'd like to see Judaism or Islam put through such a ringer, with major figures undermined and traditions marked as bizarre and strange. Real nice. All three major Balkan leaders of the 1990s should share some blame for the carnage of those wars, but it's only the pesty Milosevic who gets the brunt of it. Thankfully, enough time has passed for a wider array of accounts to appear on the Serbs and the Balkan Wars. Judah bites off quite a bit, but it's clear that he's already decided how to digest it.
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