A senior UN official's account of the war in Bosnia as he experienced it on duty in Sarajevo.

"A portrayal of the nightmare world and personalities of Balkan politics and war by a diplomat with unparalleled access to Milošević, the man at the heart of the darkness. It analyses where the West went wrong in terms of waging a war for regime change and in recognizing Kosovo despite UN resolutions to the contrary"--Provided by publisher.

In his new book, Lessons from a Diplomatic Life: Watching Flowers from Horseback, retired State Department official and career diplomat Marshall P. Adair recounts and reflects on his time in the US Foreign Service. The story of his assignments throughout the world reveals important details about significant foreign policy issues and historic events, including Bosnia, American policy toward Tibet, the 1988 Burmese uprising, and the foundations of the current US-China relationship. It provides the reader with an inside look at the history of the US State Department, US diplomacy, and US foreign policy of recent decades, during what was often an unstable and uncertain time. This first-hand, detailed account of the author’s work with foreign governments and populations provides a unique outlook on US relations around the world that has critical policy implications for the situations we face today. Through this retelling, Adair illuminates how the depth and accuracy needed of diplomats and Foreign Service agents requires a close and intimate understanding of the cultures and governments they work with.

"An "inside the room" memoir from one of our most distinguished ambassadors who--in a career of service to the country--was sent to some of the most dangerous outposts of American diplomacy. From the wars in the Balkans to the brutality of North Korea to the endless war in Iraq, this is the real life of an American diplomat. Hill was on the front lines in the Balkans at the breakup of Yugoslavia. He takes us from one-on-one meetings with the dictator Milosevic, to Bosnia and Kosovo, to the Dayton conference, where a truce was brokered. Hill draws upon lessons learned as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon early on in his career and details his prodigious experience as a US ambassador. He was the first American Ambassador to Macedonia; Ambassador to Poland, where he also served in the depth of the cold war; Ambassador to South Korea and chief disarmament negotiator in North Korea; and Hillary Clinton's hand-picked Ambassador to Iraq. Hill's account is an adventure story of danger, loss of comrades, high stakes negotiations, and imperfect options. There are fascinating portraits of war criminals (Mladic, Karadzic), of presidents and vice presidents (Clinton, Bush and Cheney, and Obama), of Secretaries of State (Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton), of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and of Ambassadors Richard Holbrooke and Lawrence Eagleburger. Hill writes bluntly about the bureaucratic warfare in DC and expresses strong criticism of America's aggressive interventions and wars of choice."--

This compellingly written autobiography covers the past century and more in the life of Bato Tomasevic's Montenegrin family in the harsh and ever-turbulent mountains of southern Yugoslavia. The narrative begins some fifty years before the Balkan wars (1912-1913) and recounts the harrowing experiences of the Tomasevic clan in the twentieth century's two World Wars. The author conveys vividly the hardships of life in under Italian and German occupation: the daily executions, the heroism of underground workers and the effects of occupation on ordinary people. Bato Tomasevic was a boy soldier with the Partisans and experienced the horrors of warfare against the Chetniks, cheating death in an ambush in Eastern Bosnia.Just as vivid are his accounts of, inter alia, post-war Yugoslavia, his narrow escape in the Munich air disaster, life in Belgrade in the hopeful sixties and seventies, the break-up of the Federation after Tito's death, and the efforts of extreme nationalists to create a Greater Serbia and a Greater Croatia through armed might and ethnic cleansing. The family saga ends with Tomasevic's experience of the NATO bombing of Serbia in March 1999 and the downfall and imprisonment of President Milosevic. Tomasevic's story is at once fascinating, heroic, tragic, sometimes even funny, but unquestionably moving, such as his description of he and his mother finding his dead brother's skull or of witnessing a suicide by a young German prisoner of war of roughly the same age as him. It is a story as remembered by a young boy, whose family, like his country, was drawn into a violent and brutal conflict that it could not escape.

The wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s were the deadliest European conflicts since World War II. The violence escalated to the point of genocide when, over the course of ten days in July 1995, Serbian troops under the command of General Ratko Mladic murdered 8,000 unarmed men and boys who had sought refuge at a UN safe-haven in Srebrenica. Shocked, the United States quickly launched a diplomatic intervention supported by military force that ultimately brought peace to the new nations created when Yugoslavia disintegrated. Peacemakers is the first inclusive history of the successful multilateral intervention in the Balkans from 1995--2008 by an official directly involved in the diplomatic and military responses to the crises. A deadly accident near Sarajevo in 1995 thrust James Pardew into the center of efforts to stop the fighting in Bosnia. In a detailed narrative, he shows how Richard Holbrooke and the US envoys who followed him helped to stop or prevent vicious wars in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, and Macedonia. Pardew describes the human drama of diplomacy and war, illuminating the motives, character, talents, and weaknesses of the national leaders involved. Pardew demonstrates that the use of US power to relieve human suffering is a natural fit with American values. Peacemakers serves as a potent reminder that American leadership and multilateral cooperation are often critical to resolving international crises.

A young survivor of the Bosnian War returns to his homeland to confront the people who betrayed his family. The story behind the YA novel World in Between: Based on a True Refugee Story. At age eleven, Kenan Trebincevic was a happy, karate-loving kid living with his family in the quiet Eastern European town of Brcko. Then, in the spring of 1992, war broke out and his friends, neighbors and teammates all turned on him. Pero - Kenan's beloved karate coach - showed up at his door with an AK-47 - screaming: "You have one hour to leave or be killed!" Kenan’s only crime: he was Muslim. This poignant, searing memoir chronicles Kenan’s miraculous escape from the brutal ethnic cleansing campaign that swept the former Yugoslavia. After two decades in the United States, Kenan honors his father’s wish to visit their homeland, making a list of what he wants to do there. Kenan decides to confront the former next door neighbor who stole from his mother, see the concentration camp where his Dad and brother were imprisoned and stand on the grave of his first betrayer to make sure he’s really dead. Back in the land of his birth, Kenan finds something more powerful—and shocking—than revenge.

Eastward to Tartary, Robert Kaplan's first book to focus on a single region since his bestselling Balkan Ghosts, introduces readers to an explosive and little-known part of the world destined to become a tinderbox of the future. Kaplan takes us on a spellbinding journey into the heart of a volatile region, stretching from Hungary and Romania to the far shores of the oil-rich Caspian Sea. Through dramatic stories of unforgettable characters, Kaplan illuminates the tragic history of this unstable area that he describes as the new fault line between East and West. He ventures from Turkey, Syria, and Israel to the turbulent countries of the Caucasus, from the newly rich city of Baku to the deserts of Turkmenistan and the killing fields of Armenia. The result is must reading for anyone concerned about the state of our world in the decades to come.

Examines the origins of political violence in the Balkans since the 19th century, while treating the region as an integral part of modern European history, reminding us that political violence and ethnic cleansing are hardly unique to this region.