For my own part, it’s an excellent report, and a good insight into the mentality currently moving throughout Serbia. And it will evolve, this damaged sense of self, as the consequences continue to compound.

The UN has just recommended that Kosovo permanently secede from Serbia. The government continues to refuse to hand over either Radoavn Karadzic or Ratko Mladic. And further applications to join the European Union are stalled until at least one of these men goes to The Hague.

The Serbs will have to deal with their new national identity in much the same way the Germans did, as the Hutus are still doing vis-a-vis the Tutsis, and many other once-peaceable ethnically distrete neighbours besides. It means generations of self-recrimination, lost self-confidence, a stunted country.

The reason I didn’t immediately reply to this post was that it’s exactly correct, I don’t understand. It is difficult to react to these events, and differently but equally difficult to learn to accommodate the psychology of the criminal nations. I don’t understand, so I hardly know what to say. When I used to write about these events at university, I would be hard pressed to maintain a detached line of analysis, because the fault was so obviously the Serbs’. And it was so obviously also the fault of the blithe and disengaged West, who took shelter in Kaplan’s “ancient hatreds” theory.

(There is an evil irony here: the Serbs and Bosnians were not riven by any genuine ancient hatred, and their conflict should never have been allowed to go so far. But today, in Iraq, where Sunnis and Shias are tearing each other apart because of a sincere, and severely perverse, ancient loathing for each other, no commentators or analysts are trying to understand that conflict. The civil war in Iraq is seen purely in terms of the mistakes of the occupiers, and not at all in terms of the inevitable violence of the fanatics.)

In many ways it was avoidable. In all ways it is incomprehensible. Despite the media frenzy that sometimes attends a genocide, we only ever have factual accountings. No one can ever explain.