Madness Visible is a memoir of recent Balkan wars told through the eyes of actual observers and participants. The author, Janine Di Giovanni, writes the haunting story of common people who suffered bitterly at the hands of soldiers forcing the birth of “Greater Serbia,” a place for Serbians only, no Muslims or Croats allowed. The book contains brilliant, concise mini- biographies of Slobedan Milosevic and other powerful Balkan leaders who fanned the flames of ethnic intolerance. She covers a wide range of events across several geographic locations– from peaceful villages before the war, to Kosovo, and finally into the distress and privations she faced in close observation at the front lines of battle.
The question she confronts is this: what causes neighbors living at peace for a generation to flip suddenly to mutual enmity? Are politicians and government leaders chiefly to blame? Was the ethnic acceptance false, a thin skin of tolerance easily punctured? Why does a war like this happen? How do people endure atrocities in a battle zone for months or even years and survive to begin all over, afterwards?
During conflict, the sorrows were many, and cruel betrayals common. Di Giovanni believes that a type of insanity takes hold of rational man when they are forced to endure the horror and trauma of killing others. To experience war is to see insanity appear in the face of your former friend, as they are possessed by anguish and obsessive fear. War is visible madness.
She writes about how bombs fell in Sarajevo from 1992-96, but stalwart citizens refused to abandon their homes, despite a vicious siege and erratic violent explosions. Then in Kosovo from March to June 1999, soldiers were stirred to rage, confusion and ethnic violence so they roamed from village to village, seizing property randomly, attacking unarmed civilians. Fighters did not march in orderly lines wearing colorful uniforms to display loyalty to home and hearth– no! Small companies of warriors turned into unregulated bandits who seized guns, knives and assorted weapons. Paramilitary groups were fierce and bestial, neither retreating nor advancing as well-disciplined soldiers. Police assigned themselves a vicious role, claiming “antiterrorist” duties compelled and empowered them to ferret out pockets of so called resistance. They did not protect the innocent, but used their authority to rape, pillage and burn villagers in their homes. There was no sense in the violence nor was there pattern to the terror. Where could civilians turn for protection or to find justice?
The geographic focus of violence moved from region to region. Moments of peace, days of cease fire were grasped like islands anchored in a sea of fury. For a few transient hours, citizens would desperately seize hold of normal activities, such as taking the cow out to its pasture, riding the bus, or cook a family meal. A still center claimed in the midst of the cyclone of war.
In one of these peaceful periods, Di Giovanni looked at the religious side of one of the Balkan states. She visited a tiny Orthodox church set in a fragrant pomegranate grove in Montenegro. There she interviewed a priest determined to preserve a fragment of churchgoers, encouraging them to keep a separate identity from the Serbian Orthodox Christians. To him, if their ethnicity was acknowledged, if their cultural roots were maintained, this brought honor to the nation of Montenegro, providing a spiritual sense of home, continuity and history. “It’s always existed – the Orthodox church of Montenegro– we wanted and needed to have our own church in our own land.”
Despite his insistence, other observers said there was no perceptible subset of Montenegro Christians in previous decades. The Montenegro believers existed only inside the other because their church was swallowed by the larger Serbian one. All spiritual groups were assimilated just as smaller, tribal entities were absorbed by giant political ones.
Down the hill, across the river, monks in an ancient Monastery run by Serbian monks and nuns laughed. To them, the insistence of the Montenegro priest was a joke and they claimed he was discredited, defrocked a while ago. In all the rest of Europe, they argued, people united two or three smaller nations to form one larger entity with economic strength and prosperity. However, here in the Balkans, they said, we break into fragments of small “statelets.” How can we make progress, with such an attitude?
Thus the argument continued. Sadly, conflict was the only certainty, and the Orthodox church provided no haven from it– for there, as well as in villages and across the nations, the insatiable Balkan hunger for distinct ethnic parcels resulted in disorder and division. Political strife found an echo in spiritual confusion. To which church do we belong? Which church is our home? Who are we, Serbian or other?
Order and disorder, sanity and insanity vied for first place, then at last the wars stopped and the Balkans came to an uneasy alliance imposed outside. Countries accepted a treaty held in place by the presence of foreign soldiers — a veneer of quiet curtained the mountain villages.
Yet even a façade of peace allowed corn to grow – so the crops completed their cycle towards harvest. The school had its session and homes, here and there, were rebuilt. Bitterness and anguish left bruises which faded from the skin’s surface, but internal damage was left unhealed. Violence by and large disappeared from the daily landscape, and, at least for a time, the visible madness of war receded.
Reviewed by Becky Faber
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