"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [13]

Chapter 5 [continued]

Only a brief post this week; graduate school is a demanding mistress.

Glenny briefly recounts the story of an almost immediately aborted conference of parliamentary parties held in Vojvodina and organized by the Democratic Party of Serbia.

It does not go well, as calls for Albanian and Hungarian translators--it is explained that nobody in the party is able to speak those languages, it isn't a deliberate slight, while they are able to provide Slovenian and Macedonian translators--lead to calls for a Croatian, and then Bosnian, translators as well. Glenny explains that Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians all speak Serbo-Croat so that these "demands" are absurd jingoistic posturing. And he is correct. The conference, of course, is doomed.

In the next section of the chapter, Glenny discusses the ethno-national alignment of Bosnia's politics and political parties, and then the role that foreign recognition played in unleashing war. I will most likely consider the former in the next post, and save the post after that for the former, as this is conviction which I have serious reservations about but wish to consider in depth.