For a few months in 1992, author Mladen Vuksanovic was trapped in the Bosnian Serb "capital" of Pale, a victim of his refusal to be a "good Serb" and go along with the implementation of ethnic cleansing and the establishment of a fascist mini-state within Bosnia. During those harrowing weeks, he kept a diary of what he saw, heard, thought, and felt as he watched his fellow Bosnian Serbs dedicate themselves to a project of hatred and madness, and as news of the war that project created trickled in. The diary was published in Zagreb in 1997, and an English translation was published in 2004.
From Enemy Territory: Pale Diary offers an eyewitness account of how society became warped in the process of carrying out a genocidal war, of how fascism is implemented at ground level, and how that subsequently warps social relations and personal psyches. I will begin my review in the next post.
