Tim Marshall - Shadowplay: Behind the Lines and Under Fire: The Inside Story of Europe’s Last War

Dedicated to Jaka eki, a Yugoslav who had his country taken away

The regions of former Yugoslavia, before it started to break up in 1991.

Serbian population centres in Kosovo and Albanian population in Serbia. Some of these areas may form part of a land swap between Serbia and Kosovo (see ).

Ethinic make-up of the regions that formed Yugoslavia in 1990 (above) and 2015 (below).

T HERE HAVE BEEN OTHER WARS, OTHER STORIES, BUT for this writer none like the shattering of Yugoslavia. The end of something political was, for me, the beginning of something personal. It was the first time I really started to understand the nature of war and conflict. It was also the beginning of a physical journey, as my role as reporter at Sky News took me initially through the former Republic of Yugoslavia from Bosnia to Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia and then subsequently on to Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Syria and other places struggling to hold together.

The shattering of Yugoslavia shattered my naive belief that war in Europe was over. During my later journeys, the events and realities I confronted led me to develop a hard realist view of the world. That was tempered only by the finding that wherever there was pain there was also comfort: on all the roads from Bosnia, even in the most difficult of circumstances, I saw the kindness of strangers to those in need.

But still... Bosnia was the first conflict to show me that it does not take much for those of ill intent to pour poison into peoples ears and watch them divide from the other. In Serbia and Kosovo, I learned that ethnic and religious identity will often trump political ideas; that emotion can beat logic. Just as a Serb who would not have contemplated living in Kosovo would still fight to the death to keep the province as his or her own, so an Irish or Italian American, for example, might automatically side with a cause they know little about. In Macedonia, I saw that a quick, sharp and well thought-out foreign intervention can work to pull two sides back from the abyss.

Later, Iraq provided a different instruction: that a long, poorly planned intervention could open the way to that abyss. And yet through all of those subsequent conflicts, my mind would always return to Yugoslavia the place where I learnt that the phrase mindless violence was rarely correct. There was so often a cold, evil logic behind some of the worst behaviour.

Yugoslavia was also a place I learnt to love for its natural beauty, its music, the tough, often deadpan humour of its people, and their astonishing levels of education and knowledge of the outside world. As the man to whom this book is dedicated said: Ah, Yugoslavia it was a good idea.

I first wrote this account of the Kosovo War in its immediate aftermath, and it was originally published in translation in Serbo-Croat in 2002. Twenty years on from that conflict, I realized that the story was not yet finished. So here it is, in English, with new opening and closing chapters and new maps. The original text is almost untouched just tidied up in parts where it was apparent it had been written under the influence of exhaustion, alcohol and a rebalancing of reality after returning home from almost two months in Afghanistan.

The political story remains more important than the personal, though this book is a mix of the two. I hope that, through the less important one, the other is well told.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Sren Kierkegaard

T HAT WAS THEN. THIS IS NOW.

Then, we had bombs and bullets, followed by despair and demonstrations and, finally, revolution. From the burnt ashes of the parliament building in Belgrade, a modern state was supposed to rise and take its place among the community of European nations. The past would stay in the past, not become a barrier to a bright future. Now, two decades on, this remains a work in progress. The past is in danger of once again becoming the present.

Back in 1991, it became clear that Yugoslavia was breaking up as the country accelerated towards disaster. After losing Slovenia, Serbias President Slobodan Miloevi unleashed the might of the Serb-dominated military onto first Croatia and then Bosnia and Herzegovina to prevent them from following suit.

As the situation escalated, the Europeans told the Americans, Its OK weve got this. Luxembourgs Prime Minister Jacques Poos said, This is the hour of Europe; Italian Foreign Minister Gianni De Michelis claimed there was a European political rapid reaction force; the EU Commission president Jacques Delors said, We do not interfere in American affairs. We hope that they will have enough respect not to interfere in ours. The US seemed happy to sit this one out, as Secretary of State James Baker responded, We do not have a dog in this fight.

After four years of complete failure by the EU to halt the mass bloodshed, the Americans found their dog and stepped in. They bombed the Serbs in Bosnia, forced Miloevi to the table and constructed the 1995 Dayton Agreement which bandaged the open wounds the wars had caused. But the US and the EU then took their eyes off the Balkans ball again as the Serbian province of Kosovo slid towards conflict, which finally erupted in 1998.

Miloevi, clinging desperately to what remained of Yugoslavia, was never going to allow the Serbian province of Kosovo to leave. It may have been overwhelmingly dominated by ethnic Albanians, but it was also the cradle of Serb civilization. Clashes between the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the police intensified, with civilians on both sides being killed. Miloevi again sent in the military, and the following year NATO came in on the Kosovars side. For three months Serbian targets were bombed from the air across the length and breadth of the country. By the time Belgrades military was forced out of the province, more than a million Kosovar Albanians had been displaced and up to 14,000 killed. Hundreds of Serb civilians were killed in the NATO airstrikes and up to 200,000 were displaced.

Today, the Balkans continues to simmer. Serbia and Kosovo in particular remain hostile to one another and war between them is not unthinkable. In 2018 when Kosovo announced plans for an army, Belgrade responded with the threat of war. In the same year Serbia blocked Kosovos entry to Interpol. In response Kosovo imposed a 100 per cent tax on imports of Serbian goods and accused Belgrade of numerous acts of provocation. One example was when a train decorated with the Serbian flag and signs reading Kosovo is Serbia attempted to enter Kosovo; it was turned back at the border.