Who are refugees? People who fled the wars in Bosnia and Croatia are scattered in Missouri and Ontario, Germany and Austria, Israel and Pakistan, and they are displaced to other towns within their own countries. They are not voluntary emigrants whose bags are packed with hopes in search of a dream. They may be wealthy, or at least they may once have been. The refugee cleaning floors for minimum wage may have been a surgeon in her own life. The eight-year old girl may be the only one in her family who has learned English, so it is only she who can speak with government officials and store clerks. Refugees are anyone and everyone. They are professionals and farmers and little boys and criminals and poets, but mostly they are women and children and the elderly.

The Suitcase gives voice to the people "without context". They speak of their dreams and their losses. Their poems are here and sad scenes of small things washed away forever by tides of war. "War taught us a lot. How the fear makes people irrationally greedy. It is difficult to resist becoming greedy. It is almost like an instinct. To possess, to hold on to something. In shelters, to hold on to somebody. To hold on to your prayer, even if you never prayed before". Some refugees long only for the day when they can return to their hometowns to begin to reglue the shards of their old lives. Some can speak only of Bosnia's beauty or the pleasures of a cup of coffee with friends.

Others close and lock the door on the past with determination. "We arrived here safely. Everyone is fine. Please do not write us or try to contact us. We do not want to be reminded of anything", reads the postcard sent by a Bosnian family after they arrived in Canada in 1994.

The book is well-edited and well-organized along five broad themes. These are followed by three powerful afterwords, of which Dubravka Ugresic's is the strongest as she muses on the fact that the people of the Balkans are one people. Divided by the same language, they look alike, and yet "not one generation in the Balkans manages to escape war, in every family there is at least one killer and one killed, new life only begins on somebody else's dead head." There is one minor error (p.11, Vukovar was attacked in 1991, not 1992).

The Suitcase rings powerfully and true. The simple message here is that refugees are people, and the lives they lead are but a shot away for us all.

The Suitcase is a wonderful and sorrowful journey into the hearts of an oppressed and victimized land. the personal stories are of those who, throughout history have had no voice. Any person with a sense of history will surely feel the magnitude of the plight of a refugee.

This story is not much different from similar diaries andaccounts I have read about other peoples pacifist accounts inconflicts such as in Korea, Indo-China and Lebanon. The same pacifistattitudes and vibes filter through. Reading Tim Judah's (a prolificwriter of anti-Serb texts) introduction was enough for me to knowwhere this book was heading.

This is the best of the Belgrade Internet diaries, by a Serbian feminist and peace activist who was at Belgrade ground zero during this very interesting and very unfortunate conflict.

Until I happened on this book, I didn't know that I was interested in what it was like to be a Serb while NATO was bombing Serbia (and Milosevic's troops were slaughtering Albanians in Kosovo). As much as Tesanovic despised what Milosovich and other Serbian nationalists were doing (in her name), she was also outraged by the casual acceptance of "collateral damage," that is, the destruction of civilian targets (including one that counted: the PRC embassy in Belgrade) and killing of civilians by carefully targeted NATO (US) bombs.

Tesanovic uses "idiot" in an ancient Greek sense, as meaning a common personwho cannot be trusted to make public decisions: "I am unable to make judgements. I see no options I can identiy with.... All the political options sound aggressive, stupid or far-fetched compared to my simple needs" as a mother. "I don't feel safe here, or happy, or free. I'm a refugee in my own city." Belgrade is/was a city with refugees from the "ethnic cleansing" of Croatia, even as Serbs engaged in "cleansing" of Serbia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. The Serbian nationalists considered Tesanovic a traitor; she considered them dangerously deluded and criminal. "In my country," she wrote, "uniforms always take away the power of speech from citizens, because uinforms carry guns, and citizens carry fear, so there is a permanent civil war going on between uniforms and civilians.

Although she defended foreign intervention again national barbarism, she was far from enthusiastic about the sanctimoniousness of the forces of civilization.Her despairing analyses of those in Serbian and in UN uniforms are acute, but what is most fascinating about the book is the detail about everyday life: a female cousin dying of AIDS, other women deciding to have abortion from concern with the toxins they have been exposed to from bombed buildings, the children with no school getting bored and ever more unmanageable in the dark, intermitent electricity, visits from friends whose water supply has been cut off.