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Sarajevo, 1984. The city welcoming the world to the XIV Olympic Winter Games that year was itself an international model of harmony, renowned as the city where Muslims, Orthodox, Catholics, and Jews lived peacefully for centuries. The hospitality was warm, the slalom course was perfectly chilled, and Yugoslav hopefuls contemplated what their Olympic spokesman said during preparation: "We are Communists. We have finished our part of the work. The rest is in the hands of God."

God allowed the Yugoslav people their first Winter Olympic medal that year, as native son Jure Franco took the silver; the skater's immense popularity inspired a saying in Sarajevo in the following months, "We like Jurek better than burek!" (a popular pastry)

But God didn't allow, or the Yugoslavs, or the international community didn't allow, the peace and goodwill of Sarajevo to last beyond the decade. In a rapid descent to hell, the names of the next years became synonymous with destruction: Serb, Croat, Bosnian. Milosevic. Sarajevo.

Was this out of nowhere, a freak episode in European history? From April 5,1992 to February 29, 1996, the city of shining Olympic humanism experienced the longest siege in modern warfare. Did the international community fail to feel the winds of change over the ski slopes?

In 1989, five years after the Sarajevo Olympics and mere months before the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, a journalist named Robert Kaplan reported to the Atlantic Monthly on his travels in Yugoslavia and the region:

"In the 1970s and 1980s the world witnessed the limits of superpower influence in places like Vietnam and Afghanistan. In the 1990s those limits may well become visible in a Third World region within Europe itself. The Balkans could shape the end of the century, just as they did at the beginning."

Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a euphoric world, with walls tumbling and economies growing. Yet this journalist kept a wary eye on the region southeast of Berlin, from where no new stories were reported; in the November 30, 1989 Wall Street Journal Europe he writes,

"Two historic concepts are emerging out of the ruins of communist Eastern Europe. One, Central Europe', the media is now beating to death. The other, the Balkans', the media has yet to discover..."

Robert Kaplan's book Balkan Ghosts, completed by 1990, was published in 1993. The book note says, "His magazine articles of the 1980s and early 1990s were the first by an American writer to warn of the coming cataclysm

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