Travels Through Hell; A reporter's account of the last days of the Milosevic regime.(Madness Visible by Janine di Giovanni)(Book Review)

Byline: Joshua Hammer

On the evening of March 24, 1999, after the collapse of last-ditch diplomacy, NATO planes commenced bombing targets in Belgrade and in the ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo. The outbreak of war set off an orgy of mass killing by Serb police and paramilitaries, and the flight of 500,000 ethnic Albanians. It was the final gasp in an eight-year campaign of ethnic cleansing devised by Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, the onetime communist apparatchik carried to power in 1987 by vowing to protect the rights of ethnic Serbs across the disintegrating Yugoslavia. The NATO air war ended 78 days later with the abject retreat of Serb civilians and soldiers from Kosovo, setting in motion Milosevic's ouster from power and his surrender to the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague.

'Madness Visible' (286 pages. Knopf) is Janine di Giovanni's unforgettable account of her journey through the Balkans during the dramatic last days of the Milosevic regime. Traveling through Kosovo and neighboring countries during the refugee exodus, she then slips into Serbia to observe the fallout from the Serbs' defeat. In vivid, compassionate prose, she brings us terrified Albanians streaming across the frigid mountains, swaggering death squads, the lost generation haunting Belgrade cafes who have known nothing but war and economic sanctions. Along the way, di Giovanni--a Times of London correspondent who spent three years in Sarajevo during the siege of the city in the mid-1990s--flashes back in time to recall her horrific experiences during the Bosnian conflict. Di Giovanni's work is a travelogue through hell, a pastiche of memory and on-scene reportage.

Few writers can match her evocations of individual suffering in wartime. Along the Kosovo border, we meet her Kosovar Albanian companion, Suzanna, who survived a terrorist bombing in a Pristina coffee bar that killed her best friend, then fled to Albania, where she was pulled off a bus and gang-raped by her ethnic kinsmen. In a Belgrade hospital, di Giovanni finds a Serb boy who was blinded by a NATO cluster bomb. Gazing incomprehensibly into the darkness, face swathed in bandages, he keeps repeating, 'If only I knew what happened to my eyes.' In the Bosnian town of Sanski Most she encounters a Muslim judge who had been dispatched to the Trnopolje death camp by a Serb policeman ...