The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect, with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George F. Kennan (review)

174 SAIS Review WINTER-SPRING 1994 The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect, with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict b} George F. Kennan. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment/Distributed by the Brookings Institution, 1993. 418 pp. $15.95/Softcover. Reviewed fry Peter McCormicic. Mr. McCormick holds a BA from Yale Unii*rsity and is an MA Candidate at SAIS. The Bosnian crisis reminds us daily ofall the pent-up edinic pathology which die Cold War temporarily paralyzed and camouflaged. But while most people know that an assassination in Sarajevo lit die fuse to the explosion ofWorld War I, few outside academia care to ponder die treaties of San Stefano and Berlin, and examine die ensuing tangle ofwars, disputes and massacres in the Balkans in the years before the murder ofArchduke Franz Ferdinand truly focused attention. Today, for all the horror conveyed by video from the former parts ofYugoslavia, die Balkans manage to retain a murky, distant quality, like a mist that occasionally lifts to reveal enduring ugliness. The latest Balkan crisis, by not going away, numbs us as it did past generations. "Anything in die papers?" asks uppet-class twit Bertie Woostet to his omniscient manservantJeeves, in a P.G. Wodehouse novel written seventyyears ago but set in an even earlier antebellum never-never land. "Some slight friction direatening in the Balkans, sir. Odierwise, nothing," Jeeves replies as he produces breakfast. As then, so now. The Carnegie Endowment inquiry, a reprint from 1913 widi a new introductory essay by George Kennan, tells us why we should pay attention more than ever. Eighty years ago, members from the leading powers tried to draw some lessons from the Balkans. In 1912 and 1913, newspaper reports ofthe fighting between the Turks, Serbs, Bulgarians, and Greeks described atrocities that horrified readers in Europe and the United States. The gradual contraction of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century had led to the creation of new states in the Balkans. In 1912, a coalition comprised of Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria fought a successful war against the moribund Turks. Immediately afterward, the victorious Serbs and Bulgarians fought a second war between themselves for possession of Montenegro. The fighting possessed the same qualities as the Balkan war today. Ethnic nationalism, combined with religion, ran rampant. Gangs ofarmed men murdered or displaced civilians whose beliefs and background failed to coincide with their own. The second war ended in the defeat of the Bulgarians in August 1913. When the commission completed its report, the Serbs had gone on to fight the Albanians, and by the following year, the Serbs struggle widi Austria had spread throughout Europe. From the Balkan atrocities came a novel enterprise: a commission of independent scholats, journalists, and administrators set out to examine in detail the causes and effects of the fighting. The undertaking was paid for by the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, created in 1910 by the man whose wealth, ironically, stemmed partly from contracts to provide steel for the rapidly expanding U.S. Navy. The commission, which spent two mondis collecting evidence in the region, was composed BOOK REVIEWS 175 of a Russian parliamentarian, law professors from Germany and Austria, two British journalists, an American professor from Columbia University, and a member of the French Chamber of Deputies. It was led by anodier French parliamentarian, Baron d'Estournelles de Constant a pacifist who had spent time in the Balkans. The fruit ofthe commission's inquiry appeared six mondis before the outbreak of World War I. Much of it foreshadowed the latet work of independent human rights groups in places such as Central America during the 1980s. Like the austere recitations of torture and murder that Amnesty International and Americas Watch publish, the Carnegie report provides carefully drawn-up evidence of rapes, beatings, burnings, disembowelment, and casual mass murder of civilians and unamned soldiers, frequendy exaggerated by the aggrieved and almost always indignandy and unconvincingly denied by the accused. "We are shown millions ofhuman beings systematically degraded by their own doing, corrupted by their own violence," Baron d'Estournelles observes in his introduction to the report. ".. [Violence carries its own punishment with it and something very different...