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Kurspahic, Kemal. Prime Time Crime: Balkan Media in War and Peace. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2003. 261pp. $19.95
Solving the puzzle of the destruction of Yugoslavia is one of the dominant historical and political questions of our time. Prominent scholars, high-ranking military officers, and noted politicians all seem to be asking how an advanced confederation could fail so quickly and with such disastrous consequences. Kernel Kurspahic, the award-winning editor of the Sarajevo wartime daily newspaper Oslobodjenje, provides some important answers to this question with his firsthand account of media in the former Yugoslavia.
This book provides chilling, first-person insight into the decline of the Yugoslavian media into nationalism and into its contribution to the destruction of the Yugoslav federation. Kurspahic, a Bosnian Muslim, paints a picture of the disintegration of the former republic that, like many horror stories, is at once riveting, revolting, and compelling. This is a work that is riveting in its honesty, revolting in its facts, and ultimately compelling in its insight. The author's journalistic style easily dissolves the complexity of politics and personality, offering the reader a valuable glimpse into a political arena rarely seen, much less understood, by Westerners unfamiliar with the Balkans.
The first chapter's treatise on the author's thoughts and beliefs concerning journalism during Josip Broz Tito's socialist revolution evokes an optimism shared by many Yugoslavs during the days of the "Balkan miracle." This optimism offers a starting point for the reader's compassion for the people of the...