I sit here sifting through my memories of Yugoslavia - a country which no longer exists, and which I never visited anyway.
I remember the death of Tito, from which day the artificially-packed constituents of Yugoslavia began to separate out once again. Six minds which had been encouraged - no, forced - to think along the same collective, communitised lines sought their independence, at no matter what cost.
I remember Zvonimir Boban kicking a Serbian policeman in the face at Maksimir Stadium, the event which they say tipped the country into civil war and led to its eventual dissolution. 'Yugoslavia' now represents not just a defunct place in south-eastern Europe, but a duration, spanning the dates from its aggregation to its disintegration.
The same fissures are appearing in present-day Belgium, but without the genocide. One day in the not too distant future, the Walloons and the Flemish will separate, and the unity we are so familiar with will be no more than a historical footnote. Of course, both groups will claim the spirit and history of the former nation as their birthright.
In another hundred years, people will express surprise that Yugoslavia ever existed at all, in the same way that Austria-Hungary sounds like an ancient experiment to my ears.
What of my false memories of Yugoslavia? The power station at Golubovci, Podgorica, in what's now Montenegro; the zoo just off Humska Street in Belgrade; the small plaque in Bosansko Grahovo marking the life and death of Gavrilo Princep, and warning that it must never happen again; the day out I spent at the army barracks in Skopje?
These are no more the derivation of my own experience than the story of my most recent trip to the moon - but I wonder to what extent a list of real placenames filled with fictitious attractions is any less valid than a defunct kingdom which is receding unstoppably into anecdote as the people who recall it grow older, and fewer?
This is the danger of history - we are condemned to repeat its mistakes as soon as even unspeakable and horrific actions are far enough in the past to be condemned as irrelevant to our modern society which, in possession of superior knowledge and ethics compared to our barbarian ancestors, now knows better.
One day, if we are not careful, someone in the future will write about Humska Street Zoo as being the flashpoint which lit up the Balkans - when Croatian dissidents kidnapped Veljko the lion and starved him to death by way of antagonising the Serbs into conflict. There are no records of it because the Tudjman government later expunged it from all official documentation; but the Serbs have long memories and are aware that no apology, even a brief, informal one, has ever been made by Zagreb. Until they get it, for some Serbs, the war is never over.
