IN 1994, Marshal Tito returned from the dead to wander the streets of Belgrade for a couple of days: as a joke, the Serb film-maker Zelimir Zilnik had dressed up an actor as the man who led the Partisan war against the Nazis and reunited Yugoslavia in 1945 - and who had died in 1980. But to his amazement, the population of Belgrade reacted as if Zilnik's was real.
Women presented him with flowers. One told him she had cried when he died ("So did I," replied "Tito"). "I used to be one of your soldiers," a second World War veteran told his former leader, "but now there is no bread in the shops." Another told "Tito" that "you used to warm us like the sun", while a third berated the dead Marshal as a bandit. When the police turned up to restore order, they told Zilnik's film cameraman to move but demurred at the idea of ordering "Tito" off the street. "No, leave him out of it," the cops said.
The incident is one of the most memorable in Tim Judah's stunning new history of the Serbs, brief and terrifying proof that an entire people had lost touch with reality. Soaked in propaganda by Slobodan Milosevic's media - as one of Zilnik's colleagues pointed out - you have a situation where Tito is resurrected and people believe that". As they did, of course, so many other resurrected myths. I recall watching Serbian television one dark night in 1995 when NATO's aircraft and the last Muslim-Croat offensive were sending the Serb refugees of Bosnia teeming in their tens of thousands from their homes. The evening's main programme was about death and persecution and ethnic cleansing - during the second World War. Curled up in the armchair of my Belgrade hotel bedroom, I wondered in which country - and in what decade - I was living. Even as the Serbs were enduring their greatest military defeat since 1915, Serbian historians were arguing on their national television about how many Serbs had been slaughtered by the Croats in the Jasenovac concentration camp between 1941 and 1944. Was it 600,000 as the Communist authorities claimed after the war, or was it 120,000 in all Yugoslavia's concentration camps, as a Croat historian alleged? Or was it, as Croatian president Franjo Tudjman claimed, only 30,000 in Jasenovac?
The first two statistics can be found in Judah's book, the third in its parallel Croatian volume by my colleague Marcus Tanner who was the London Independent's man in the Balkans from 1988-94 Judah worked for the London Times in eastern Europe and is, by chance, a personal friend of Tanner. I read both books in tandem - a rare experience, but one which I recommend since each complements the other's work; together, the two volumes have an almost unstoppable power to convince.
Never before have lies, damned lies and statistics played such a powerful role in history; Tanner and Judah wrestle with them manfully. In the early Balkan wars, Serbia lost 30,000 men - and another 275,000 men, women and children in the 1914-18 War, along with 800,000 civilians who died of wartime diseases two thirds of the male population between the ages of 15 and 55. Croatian and Serb historians claim the total dead for all of Yugoslavia in the 1941-45 war was 947,000, of whom 487,000 were Serbs, 207,000 Croats, 86,000 Muslims and 60,000 Jews. But who do you believe when it comes to the October 1941 Nazi massacre at Kragujevac? Was it 3,000 or 7,000? And how many Croats were massacred by the Communists in 1945 (after being tricked by the British who pretended they would save them)? Was it 200,000, as Croat nationalists believe? Or was it only 30,000? In both world wars, it should be remembered, most of the Serbs were Good Guys - i.e. fighting on the Allied side - while in the Second World War, most of the Croats were Bad Guys, aligned in an Ustashe puppet state with Hitler's Germany.
When we reach our decade's latest Balkan war, the statistics move slowly towards damned lies. Judah briskly dismisses a Sarajevo newspaper's claim that there were 380,000 people trapped in the city in 1994 - a figure the UNHCR went along with because it wanted a big figure to present to donors. Privately, the UNHCR conceded that the real figure was about a quarter of a million. And how many Muslims were executed at Srebrenica? Was it 8,000, a figure that does not take into account those who later turned up in Bosnian lines after a nightmare journey through the forests west of the Drina? Or was it 6,546, the Red Cross statistics for tracing requests? Will we ever know?
When Judah examines Serbia's UN-sanctioned wartime economy, the statistics turn into farce. I believe his figures because it used to take me four days to reckon up every two days' worth of expenses for my trips to rump Yugoslavia for the Independent. At last Judah tells me why - he has carefully calculated the annual inflation rate for 1993 as - wait for it: 85 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 per cent; which is about 363 quadrillion per cent. The largest banknote issued during Serbian inflation had a face value of 50,000,000,000 dinars.
Such figures contain a cynicism all their own, though they are not as chilling as the economy of truth exercised by everyone - and I mean everyone - in ex-Yugoslavia. Here we find Karadjic denying he is besieging Sarajevo and Tudjman insisting he is trying to defend Vukovar (when he was quite pleased that his Croat militia rivals were dying in the besieged Croatian city). When the Croats attacked Serb-held Krajina and drove tens of thousands from their homes - slaughtering the old men and women who stayed on - US Secretary of State Warren Christopher saw fit to remark that "we did not think that kind of attack could do anything other than create a lot of refugees and cause a humanitarian problem. On the other hand it always had the prospect of simplifying matters.
Yes, the Balkan people can be very inconvenient. So why not let the Muslims advance on Banja Luka or the Serbs straighten out their lines around Srebrenica? Or the Croats drive out what US ambassador to Zagreb Peter Galbraith mendaciously called "so-called local Serbs"? They had been "local" for more than 400 years - yet today Mr Galbraith is raging about their ill-treatment.
It is impossible to put these two books down without a feeling of despair. The Slav peoples of ex-Yugoslavia are not involved in age-old hatreds, as the West's cowardly leaders liked to claim. But they are victims of their own history, a Grim Reaper which shadows them remorselessly. Judah - whose book imaginatively moves back and forth between the 16th century and the present - shows just how the retreat of the Serb peoples from the 14th century defeat at Kosovo Polje mirrored the 1995 trek from home and hearth of the Krajina Serbs. Tanner reminds us of how the Croat Ustashe crimes of 1941-45 came back to haunt them, bullet for bullet, knife for knife, in 1991.
"Then George went in and entered the cities,/he cut whatever Turk was for cutting," the Serb poet Visnjic wrote of the 1804 revolution. And here is the report of the Carnegie endowment into the 1913 Albanian revolt in Kosovo: "Houses and whole villages are reduced to ashes, un-armed and innocent populations massacred en masse . . . pillage and brutality of every kind - such were the means which were employed by the Serb-Montenegran soldiery
Does all this not sound familiar? Judah's book contains one startling, inexplicable omission - he has no serious study of that most cruel of all institutions for the women of Bosnia, the rape camps deliberately set up by Serb militiamen. Tanner concludes that Croatia may yet find itself. isolated by Europe for its human rights abuses. It's a worthy hope on which to end; but in a cynical world, I doubt it.