With 'Blood & Belonging' and 'The Warrior's Honor', 'Virtual War' forms part of the acclaimed trilogy by Michael Ignatieff on the face of modern conflict.
In May 1999, in a vast tent city that had sprung up almost overnight in the fields of Macedonia, one desperate request was not for food or water, but for mobile phones: to find children, husbands, parents missing in the chaos of Kosovo. From satellite phones to laser-guided missiles, this was war at the end of the twentieth century.
Kosovo was a virtual war, fought by pilots at 15,000 feet, commanded by generals whose only view of the battlefield was through their pilots' bombing sights, and reported by opposing media trying to spin the news in their favour. A war in which NATO forces did the fighting, but only the Kosovars and Serbs did the dying.
Michael Ignatieff has travelled the battle zones of the Balkans for a decade, sending back moving reports and penetrating analysis. In 'Virtual War' he examines this strange, remote type of warfare through the eyes of the key players; the roving diplomat Richard Holbrooke, General Wesley Clark and Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor of the war crimes tribunal, and also of the people who suffered.
