'Balkan Ghosts.'

NOEL MALCOLM ends his diatribe about Balkan Ghosts by noting the different ways in which I spell the Romanian word for Gypsies. That Malcolm would criticize me for a proofreader's error is final proof that this was not a review, but an agenda-driven essay by an area specialist, one required to apologize for the sins of his adopted region. Malcolm believes "hatred is not a driving force" in Yugoslavia; that the Bosnian war is all the doing of modern politicians--as if they work in a vacuum without a history behind them. I hope he wasn't advising the British government on the likelihood of war in Bosnia.

Malcolm's London Spectator article about Greece, "The New Bully of the Balkans," (August 15, 1992) demonstrates how he is guilty of doing what he claims I do: demonize an entire nation. So he praises me for my critical section on Greece and Papandreou. He calls it a "tour de force." Only when I conform to Malcolm's prejudices am I praised.

Malcolm accuses me of "modern Serb hatred" for not writing about the recent crimes of the Serbs. I dislike headline books, and therefore did not expand the Yugoslav section. But in the preface to Balkan Ghosts, I state that "nothing I write should be taken as justification, however mild, for the war crimes committed by ethnic Serb troops in Bosnia, which I heartily condemn."

Malcolm disagrees that Romania was a bad place for Jews. He says the twentieth century was untypical of how Jews were treated in the Balkans. All the Jews I interviewed in Romania disagree. The most bloodcurdling pogrom in Jewish history occurred in Bucharest. The twentieth century was untypical for Jews in Romania in that the suspicion of peasants for the bourgeoisie kicked over into mass murder. The mass murder would not have been possible had the hatred not existed in the first place. Malcolm disagrees with my depiction of northern Romania--the place where Romanian political anti-Semitism was invented--as anti-Semitic. His argument is that Jews fared better under the Ottoman Empire than in the Slavic-Germanic world. He doesn't say that the anti-Semitic acts I wrote about took place after Turkish control had ceased. Malcolm says Nazi policy, not Balkan hated, was responsible for crimes against Jews. But many Nazi troops in the Balkans were raised from local communities. Concentration camps in Croatia and Transdneistria were run from top-to-bottom by Croatians and Romanians.

Like some extremist Croatian newspapers, Malcolm finds me too critical of Cardinal Stepinac, convicted by Tito as a war criminal. He says my conflicted attitude toward Stepinac, at "first benign, then denunciatory," reveals how "uneasy" I am about my own writing. My writing is conflicted and uneasy, since I was determined to be fair without becoming an apologist. Malcolm, while elsewhere accusing me of polemic, here convicts me of objectivity. Malcolm defends the behavior of World War II Croatia by saying the pro-Nazi puppet state was not typical in Croatian history. It wasn't typical, but it was a defining moment. The present reality in Croatia bears me out: the style and symbols of today's Croatian regime hark back to the Ustashe.

Malcolm implies I blame the Greeks for the slaughter of Jews in Salonica during World War II. My narrative makes clear that I don't blame the Greeks for killing Jews, but for erasing their memory from the city once they had been killed by the Germans.

Malcolm claims I don't like Turks. His reason is my comment that the dignified air of Turks "was the luxury of the conquerors." The Turks were conquerors. Because of that, as I explain in my book, Turks lack the anger of Greeks, Serbs, and others who share the chip-on-the-shoulder attitude common to conquered peoples. Malcolm says my comparison of the slums in Pristina to those in Turkey evinces an anti-Turkish sentiment. The comparison makes sense. Albanians, of all Balkan peoples, identify with Turks. Also, having just spent time interviewing people in the gecekondu districts of Istanbul, I can attest to how similar they look to parts of Pristina.

The Macedonian section of Balkan Ghosts ran first in The Atlantic Monthly, and was vigorously gone over by fact checkers--a category of editor that Malcolm may never have encountered. The chapter's premise, written four years ago, was that the world's attention would focus on Macedonia by the end of the century. But Malcolm has nothing good to say about it. He claims Macedonian has long been a separate language. Many other scholars claim that is false. They say Macedonian is a dialect of western Bulgarian or south Serbian. This dispute among experts like Malcolm, who ridicule every truth except their own, is what my chapter focuses on. Concerning Macedonia, Malcolm accuses me of a pro-Greek bias. This would be news to Greeks, who have accused me of being a "Bulgarian agent." Malcolm implies that I support the Greek academic-nationalist, Evangelos Kofos. In the book's index, there are three references to Kofos: in one, I quote Kofos in order to debunk him. The other two references concern statements by Kofos that are rather innocuous. The inflammatory statement ascribed to Kofos in Malcolm's diatribe is nowhere to be found in my book.