I will never forget interviewing Berina Kovac, who had lived in multiethnic Sarajevo in the early 1990s, when Bosnia and Herzegovina was moving toward independence from Yugoslavia. Though militias had begun to organize in the hills and former colleagues increasingly targeted her with ethnic slurs, Kovac continued to go to work, attend weddings and take weekend holidays, trusting that everything would work out. One evening in March 1992, she was at home with her infant son when the power went out. “And then, suddenly,” Kovac told me, “you started to hear machine guns.”
The civil war that followed, however, was not surprising to those who had been following the data. A year and a half earlier, the CIA had issued a report predicting that Yugoslavia would fall apart within two years and that civil war was a distinct possibility. One reason, the agency noted, was that citizens were organizing themselves into […]
Just finished the book. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the course of American democracy!
“This might come as a shock to many Americans. While we were going about our daily lives, our executive branch continued its decades-long accumulation of power to the point where a sitting president refused to accept an election result.” The trend of the accumulation of executive power has been on-going for decades. This combined with a Congress which has consistently refused it’s oversight and governing functions, along with non-competitive elections is a disaster for the county. We cannot laud presidential authority only when your candidate occupies the office. Only with a balanced functioning of the branches will the government work.
” I find our complacency quite troubling. Over the course of 30 years, I have interviewed numerous people who have lived through civil wars in places such as Baghdad and Ethiopia, and none of them saw war coming. All were surprised.” Note that in the examples cited the CIA has had involvement in both. Anyone troubled by that?