‘Madness Visible’ (286 pages. Knopf) is Janine di Giovanni’s unforgettable account of her journey through the Balkans during the dramatic last days of the Milosevic regime. Traveling through Kosovo and neighboring countries during the refugee exodus, she then slips into Serbia to observe the fallout from the Serbs’ defeat. In vivid, compassionate prose, she brings us terrified Albanians streaming across the frigid mountains, swaggering death squads, the lost generation haunting Belgrade cafes who have known nothing but war and economic sanctions. Along the way, di Giovanni–a Times of London correspondent who spent three years in Sarajevo during the siege of the city in the mid-1990s–flashes back in time to recall her horrific experiences during the Bosnian conflict. Di Giovanni’s work is a travelogue through hell, a pastiche of memory and on-scene reportage.
Few writers can match her evocations of individual suffering in wartime. Along the Kosovo border, we meet her Kosovar Albanian companion, Suzanna, who survived a terrorist bombing in a Pristina coffee bar that killed her best friend, then fled to Albania, where she was pulled off a bus and gang-raped by her ethnic kinsmen. In a Belgrade hospital, di Giovanni finds a Serb boy who was blinded by a NATO cluster bomb. Gazing incomprehensibly into the darkness, face swathed in bandages, he keeps repeating, ‘If only I knew what happened to my eyes.’ In the Bosnian town of Sanski Most she encounters a Muslim judge who had been dispatched to the Trnopolje death camp by a Serb policeman seeking revenge for a traffic fine. ‘So now you’ll never give me a parking ticket again,’ the cop sneered as he dragged the jurist off to prison, where he survived beatings and starvation. The carnage in the Balkans, di Giovanni suggests, was as much about settling petty scores as it was about tribal hatreds and extremist ideology.
The author doesn’t delve much into the historical background of the cataclysm: the centuries of wars and conquest, the ethnic rivalries that Tito kept in check, the implosion of the Yugoslav state and the unleashing of extremist forces. But in a series of up-close encounters, she brings us into the minds of some of the architects of the worst bloodshed in Europe since World War II. There’s Zeljko (Arkan) Raznatovic, whose paramilitary squads exterminated thousands of Muslims in eastern Bosnia in 1992, then resumed their work in Kosovo. Soon after di Giovanni met with him in Belgrade, Arkan was gunned down in the Hotel Intercontinental–a hit, the author suggests, ordered by Milosevic’s fanatical wife, Mira Markovic, who emerges in this account as the Lady Macbeth of the Balkans. Di Giovanni also sketches lesser-known–but no less monstrous–figures, such as Nikola Koljevic, a second-rate Shakespearean scholar who became one of Bosnia’s most virulent Serb nationalists. The primary architect of the destruction of Sarajevo, he blew his brains out in 1997 when his dream of conquest was dashed at Dayton.
After reading di Giovanni’s tale of devastation, one struggles to come away with a glimmer of hope for this shattered corner of Europe. True, some refugees have returned to the ruins of their homes, to live in uneasy proximity with the neighbors who drove them away. United Nations and NATO peacekeepers enforce peace in both Bosnia and Kosovo, while a phalanx of nation-builders constructs fragile democratic institutions out of the rubble. But then there are places like Banja Luka, capital of the Republic of Srpska, where killers and rapists continue to live with impunity. ‘A lot of terrible people who have never been indicted by the war-crimes tribunal, and never will be indicted, are out there walking the streets,’ a U.S. diplomat in Sarajevo tells the author. Di Giovanni’s book is a catalog of their crimes–and a powerful memorial to their victims.
