Prime Minister for Peace
My Struggle for Serbian Democracy
By (author) Milan Panic With Kevin C. Murphy
Not available to order
Publication date:
26 March 2015Length of book:
216 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781442243637
In this remarkable memoir, Milan Panic tells the formerly unknown story of his attempts to oust Slobodan Milosevic and his battles with the U.S. State Department in an effort to bring peace to the Balkans during the Yugoslav Wars. A young cycling champion who fought the Nazi occupation in Yugoslavia with Tito’s partisans, Panic defected after World War II from his now-communist country to start a new life in the United States. But his greatest challenge still lay ahead when he was invited to serve as prime minister of Yugoslavia. But in Belgrade, ancient enmities and suspicions festered, and the threat of tragedy and bloodshed loomed large as ethnic conflict raged. And even as Panic implored the West for support, he would have to outwit the machinations of a wily Serbian dictator, Slobodan Milosevic. Including behind-the-scenes details of his rivalry with Milosevic, this book is a compelling chronicle of the road to peace in the Balkans.
For Panić—an ambitious and practical man, primarily interested in democracy and the economic prosperity of the post-Communist Balkans—the greatest puzzle remains the West’s decision to ignore his efforts and proposals during the crucial years of the Yugoslav conflict. If the Brussels and Washington administrations had indeed immediately identified Milošević as the one to blame, why was he allowed to stay in charge throughout the 1990s and orchestrate some of the worst atrocities in post-Second World War Europe? Was the Yugoslav case viewed as a good geopolitical experiment in the new post-Cold War context or as an excellent business opportunity for, let’s speculate, arms manufacturers? With this in mind, Panić’s account is an invitation for additional analyses, either in the form of other balanced memoirs or well-sustained scholarly contributions.