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behavior—especially Serbia’s absorption of the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina— convinced Croatian and Slovenian nationalists that they had no future inside a federal Yugoslavia. Independence strongly appealed to the local intelligentsia and the Communist elite: it would make them big fish in a small pond.
    Croatians claimed the right of national self-determination, and they soon had influential backing from the newly reunited Germany. But no one in Germany or the European Community scrutinized with sufficient care the implications of Croatian independence for the rights of the 600,000-strong Serbian minority.
    Croatia, in its independence constitution, described itself as the state of the Croatian nation, with non-Croatians defined as protected minorities. While most Croats sincerely believed that their state offered full rights to the Serbian minority, Serbs regarded themselves not as a minority but as a constitutionally protected nation, equal to the Croats. When the Croats revived theÅ ahovnica, the red-and-white checkered shield, as their new flag, Serbs took one look and believed the Ustashe had returned. The Å ahovnica was both an innocently traditional Croat emblem and also the flag of the wartime regime that had exterminated a large, if still undetermined, number of Serbs. When Serbs weredismissed from the Croatian police and from the judiciary in the summer and autumn of 1990, the Serbian minority concluded they were witnessing the return of an ethnic state, with a genocidal past.
    Defenders of the Croatian position insist that these fears were manipulated by MiloÅ¡ević. They certainly were, yet, in the broader context of the collapse of the inter-ethnic Yugoslav state, Serbs had reason to be afraid. War was the result of an interacting spiral of Serbian expansionism, Croatian independence, and Serbian ethnic paranoia in Croatia.
    The final explosion was detonated in the summer of 1991 by battles in Serbian areas of Croatia for control of the key seat of local power, the police station. In Serb villages like Borovo Selo in western Slavonia, when the Croatian state dismissed local Serbian policemen, they proceeded to arm and set themselves up as vigilantes. When the Croats tried to restore their authority in Serbian areas, they were fired upon and roadblocks were set up at the entrances to villages. With the Croatians unable to control Serbian areas of their state, the Yugoslav National Army stepped in, at first to restore order and then to smash Croatian independence. Croatia then had no option but to fight for its survival. After six months of tenacious resistance, it found itself, at the cease-fire of February 1992, with a third of its national territory occupied by the rump state of Serbian Krajina and its supply routes to the Dalmatian coast blockaded by the Serbian paramilitaries in Knin. Twenty-five thousand UN troops now keep the two sides apart at checkpoints scattered across all of Croatia’s main road networks. The war in Croatia has subsided into an armed truce, but the basic conflict between Serbs and Croats rages on south of theSava River, as the two fight to divide Bosnia-Hercegovina at the expense of the Muslims.
    THE HIGHWAY OF BROTHERHOOD AND UNITY
    I began my journey where it used to begin every summer of my Yugoslav childhood, on the highway between Belgrade and Zagreb. This was the highway we traveled, in a magnificent black Buick with lots of fins and chrome, to Lake Bled in Slovenia. It was called the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity and it was built, with a typically Titoist mixture of genuine national enthusiasm and socialist forced labor, to link together the economics of the two central republics, Croatia and Serbia. For three hundred kilometers, it runs parallel to the Sava River, through the Slavonian plain, some of the flattest and richest farmland in Europe.
    I began by visiting Tito’s birthplace in Kumrovec, which is off the Highway of