After Yugoslavia (Lonely Planet Journeys) [Paperback]

The Lonely Planet Journeys are a series noted for their vivid creation of atmosphere and locale--but most notably for their often tough, unsettling evocations of the world's most troubled countries. Zoë Brân's After Yugoslavia may be concise, but the reader is taken on a remarkable epic journey in which one of the most turbulent periods in human history is powerfully conjured. The author visited Yugoslavia in the 70s as a tourist looking for a good time. And when she returns 21 years later, she finds a massively changed land. Sarajevo, Mostar and Dubrovnik (names carved into the consciousness of all of us who watched the deeply affecting news broadcasts of the early 90s) are the cities Brân finds herself in once again, struggling to make sense of the catastrophe that has befallen them. But as well as the destruction wrought by conflict, she finds a people filled with resilience and spirit--and her tale is as much one of the indomitable qualities in human nature as it is a study of war. From progressive Slovenia through war-torn Croatia (whose stunning beauty is in stark contrast to its image as an icon of human division) and into the country most deeply affected by the conflicts, Bosnia-Hercegovina, we are taken on an eye-opening journey that evokes both the nobility and horror involved in the war. And again and again, a word appears that is crucial to the genesis of the divisions: tradition--and the author becomes convinced that this is as crucial a factor in the hatred as religion is in Northern Ireland. But Brân is interested in far more than the dead hand of a tradition (often barely remembered) that has cost so many lives, and her book, while often unsettling, remains as much an affirmation of the human spirit as it is an astringent and compelling evocation of a divided land. --Barry Forshaw

Dubrovnik, Mostar, Sarajevo: these are names now etched into the world's psyche. In this book, the author retraces her steps through these cities, finding that although the war may be over, the recriminations and hatreds are not. Yet the people she meets on her travels are looking to the future.

In the early autumn of 1978, I made the short train journey from Munich to Ljubljana. I was twenty-one, a student living part-time in Bavaria, and there was almost a month before I had to return to university in Scotland. Yugoslavia was close, cheap and required no visa. It was the smiling face of Communism. Having spent the summer on an American military base, it offered the thrill of opposites.

In 1978 Josip Broz Tito, father and protector of the nation, still lived in a palace in Belgrade. His Yugoslavia was large, prosperous, and geographically and culturally diverse; yet it was easy to travel through Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia, as I did that September, believing you were in one country. Compared to provincial Britain it was paradise. Locals and tourists alike enjoyed good food and drink, and cheap public transport. For Westerners, there was the added frisson of lifting the hem of the Iron Curtain.

Yugoslavia had everything: high mountains and long coastlines; turquoise rivers and emerald forests; romantic castles and classical ruins; ancient churches and mysterious stones . . . and the place where the history of the twentieth century changed for ever. Where else in the world could state so categorically that here on this very spot, in the time that it takes to lift an arm and press a trigger, the direction of the world was knocked off course? The Gavrilo Princip Bridge in Sarajevo became my destination in 1978, not from ghoulish sentiment but because the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Serb nationalist Princip, the inciting incident of WWI, was almost the only thing I knew about Yugoslavia back then.

Tito died two years after my visit, in 1980, to live on in the popular imagination, a symbol of the past and of possibilities. His death marked the beginning of the end of federal Yugoslavia as his complex political constructs and economic deals began to crumble. By the late eighties what had seemed stable proved illusory. Centralists vied with federalists, Communists with nationalists, as the divides between Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia widened.

Like most Westerners, I was unaware of what was happening on Europe's edges. It was only when war started in 1991, and the names of the cities and villages I'd visited were repeated daily like a litany of horror on TV and radio, that I recalled details of my journey and of Yugoslavia as it had been, or rather as it had appeared.

It requires a leap of the imagination for the generations born in the West after 1950 to grasp the nature and scale of the conflict experienced in the Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Not because it was more horrific or more widespread than, for example, Vietnam, Afghanistan or Rwanda, but because it happened in Europe, in the West itself. Now, in a new millennium, the conflict seems likely to continue, in some form, for years to come. Kosovo, merely the most recent tragedy in a region fraught with them, has been described in the foreign media as 'tribal, savage', as though such emotions were unknown to Europeans. When the Bosnian war finally ended in 1995, mediators from 'stable' Western countries preached at the participants about the unacceptable hazards of nationalistic violence, forgetting the cost of their own stability - a twentieth century of blood and violence on a scale previously unknown in human history.

War distorted the Yugoslavia that I had known briefly in 1978; it also distorted my own memories of the country. Each evening, as I watched the TV news, I tried to recognise towns, landscapes, roads - and could not. While Sarajevo was still besieged, I planned to return one day to rediscover what was lost and, more importantly, to try to make sense, for myself at least, of what had happened in the twenty intervening years, and why.