Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff

majority, a Serbian minority, and several other groups—Germans, Italians, and Hungarians— besides. The 1991 war tore these villages apart, and now they are divided between Croatian and Serbian sectors, with UN checkpoints in between.
    On all the roads that lead north from the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity, there is a continuous swath of devastation wherever you look: roofless houses, with a cascade of roof tiles and roof beams strewn about the deserted, weed-filled rooms; fire-edged window and door frames, brick walls pierced with tire-sized artillery blasts. Some houses have been raked by so much automatic-weapons fire that the plaster has been completely torn away, leaving only the pitted brick, the tree trunks outside the houses wearing aglittering jacket of metal slugs. In the ditches lie small Yugoslav Zastava cars, riddled with bullet fire or twisted into rusted sculpture by a tank’s treads.
    At first the destruction appears to have no rhyme or reason. In some villages, not a wall has been left unsprayed with bullets, while in others, scarcely a house has been touched. After a while, you begin to work like an archaeologist, sifting through the clues to discern a pattern to what must have happened. There appear to be three typical forms of destruction. The most surgical form is dynamiting: the houses are collapsed in neat piles, with minimal damage to the houses next door. Families were driven out by their neighbors or by paramilitary militias and their homes were blown up. Many of these dynamited piles appear to have once been large, recently constructed houses, and it makes you wonder how many years of a man’s or woman’s life as a Gastarbeiter in a German automobile factory went into this, only to see it fall like a pack of cards.
    The second type of destruction appears to have been accomplished by artillery fire, from the Yugoslav National Army guns that punched round, tire-sized holes in Croatian village walls. The third type of destruction is firebombing, which leaves fire marks on all the windows, and which would have been the work of marauding paramilitaries on both sides.
    Some houses were daubed by the Serbs with the slogan “U’ for “Ustashe,” which then marked them for ethnic cleansing. Others are marked with crudely and rapidly painted names of those who lived in them, as if, as they were abandoned, their inhabitants were hoping to remind the defenders that they belonged to the same side. I spent hours in these ruins, the dust in my throat, the sound of broken glass under my feet,deciphering the clues to the shape of catastrophe.
    Never say ethnic cleansing is just racial hatred run wild, just Balkan madness. For there is a deep logic to it. By 1990, this part of Yugoslavia was a Hobbesian world: No one in these villages could be sure who would protect them. If they were Serbs and someone attacked them and they went to the Croatian police, would the Croats protect them? If they were Croats, in a Serbian village, could they be protected against a nighttime attack from a Serbian paramilitary team, usually led by a former policeman? This is how ethnic cleansing began to acquire its logic. If you can’t trust your neighbors, drive them out. If you can’t live among them, live only among your own. This alone appeared to offer people security. This alone gave respite from the fear that leaped like a brushfire from house to house.
    The West has to make up its mind about the emerging order of ethnically cleansed microstates that have taken the place of Yugoslavia. Nobody in the West wants to appear to be condoning ethnic cleansing, but every day, every hour, civilians are fleeing war zones, or being driven thence by men with guns, into the relative safety of their own ethnic enclaves. Ethnic apartheid may be an abomination, but for the more than two million refugees who have fled or been driven from their homes, apartheid is the only guarantee of safety they are