In March 1992, as a young journalist eager to make his mark with an exciting foreign assignment, I visited the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, on the eve of the brutal three-year war that tore this former Yugoslav republic apart. Unlike the other Western journalists in town, I had family there with whom I stayed, relatives of my late grandfather, the descendant of Spanish Jews who arrived in the Ottoman-ruled Balkans after being driven out by the 15 th – century Inquisition.
Over breakfast one morning, my grandfather’s cousin—a veteran of the Communist partisans during World War II and a professor who taught in the medical department of Sarajevo University—gave me the lowdown. The Bosnian Serb leadership, he said, was composed of pathological liars who could not be trusted. He told me that