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 15th–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

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