"The Corridor" – orienta menti 15

Now available the issue number 15 of Jugocoord's series orientamenti

• DISPONIBILE ANCHE L'EDIZIONE ITALIANA
• description
• the Author
• forewords to the English edition
• introduction to the second Italian edition
• editorial note to the first Italian edition
• Aleksandr A. Zinov’ev: introduction
• contents
• buy
• orientamenti series

Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti

THE CORRIDOR. Balkan Truths

First English eBook Edition
Accompanied by an extensive, up-to-date chronology and bibliography

orientamenti series n.15

© 2026 Coordinamento Nazionale per la Jugoslavia ETS, all rights reserved

Based on a translation by Tim Fenton

Editing: Andrea Martocchia, Rosanna Rizzi 

Publishing: StreetLib.com
eBook, 16 MB, 540 pages (bases on the number of pages which turns on a Kindle, using settings to closely represent a physical book), 12 euro
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-1224727873

(First Italian edition: La Città del Sole srl, Napoli 2006, ISBN 88-8292-277-4)

The Author

Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti initially worked in image and communication, particularly in publishing, working with Rusconi-France Editions, Rusconi and Hachette-Philipachi. She collaborated with various photographers, including Stefano Babic, Helmut Newton, Ugo Fallai, Graziella Vigo, Peter Knapp, Bob Krieger, Elliot Siegel and Marcus Tomlinson. She also had experience as an assistant director and casting director, working with renowned film directors such as Damiano Damiani, Eriprando Visconti and Pietro Germi. She was also a publicist and contributor to women’s magazines and cultural publications. She is the author of Le temps du réveil first part, (L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 1993) and a play An answering machine for lover.

She began to visit the Balkans on a regular basis only in 1992. She organised Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel’s trip to Yugoslavia and Bosnia. Then, she started travelling to war zones, from Croatia to Sarajevo, and from Krajina to Montenegro and Kosovo. In this way, she met key political figures and witnessed events firsthand. She published Journey into the Madness of a War (Europublic, Belgrade, 1994). She was also in the Serbian capital during the 1999 bombings.

Following The Corridor, she translated and edited important documents such as The Hidden Dossier of the Srebrenica Genocide (La Città del Sole, Naples, 2007).

She also edited Men and Not Men. The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the Testimony of a Yugoslav Officer by Goran Jelisić (Zambon, Frankfurt, 2013) and published The Gateway to Islam: Bosnia and Herzegovina, An Ungovernable Country (2016) with Zambon. She produced articles and interviews for newspapers such as Manifesto, Večernje Novosti and Politika, as well as magazines including liMes, Events and Maiz, and television channels such as ByoBlu.

She coordinated the jury for both editions of the international “Giuseppe Torre” Prize for critical essays on the ad hoc tribunal in The Hague, promoted by the Jugocoord Association. The second edition of the “Giuseppe Torre” Prize resulted in the volume The Strange Case of the Hague Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (2023 – also available in Italian), which she edited. She participated in numerous conferences, for example on memory of the concentration camp system run by the Croatian Ustashi (Jasenovac-Jadovno, 1941- 1945).

In 2022, she received the Radmila Bunuševac Dedinac Medal of Honour for Investigative Journalism from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia.

Aleksandr Zinov’ev, a writer and author of The Corridor's Introduction, wrote:

Jean has always stood out from the crowd of journalists because of her particular tact and charm, even when dealing with very sensitive subjects. […] is not a politically committed person, she does not belong to any party, she has observed the facts out of a duty of conscience, she has made frequent journeys in the course of ten years to the theatre of events in the territory of Yugoslavia (Bosnia, Krajina, Kosovo) and, as a citizen of free democratic Italy, she has analysed them through the ideas of Western European humanism. […] she bears witness to what really happened, without superimposing her own point of view. She simply describes what she has seen…

Forewords to the English Edition (Tim Fenton)

When Jean accepted my offer to proof read the English translation of her wonderful book, I was unaware of the Italian original, The Corridor, so had no preconceived notion of what to expect. I had read many, many other accounts of the wars that destroyed Yugoslavia in English by journalists, diplomats, military officers, politicians, etc. but none are quite like this book. As with the narrow Corridor of its title, the story opens out into broader landscapes: vivid descriptions of desperate and difficult journeys; heartbreaking and heart stopping encounters with the jumble of humanity that war throws up; lucid explanations of the almost impossibly complex politics and history of the land and its peoples; interviews with some of the personalities thrust into prominent positions, one feels, as much by force of terrible circumstance as by any desire for power or political ambition. The varied topics and styles flow wonderfully one to another. The interviews are particularly interesting and an opportunity to hear from those who were rarely given a voice in English before. For those too young to remember the events described, the book is an excellent introduction and to those who do remember, the descriptions and details provide a new perspective, covering topics which have been overlooked by most authors such as:
• the role of Fikret Abdić, the most popular Bosnian Muslim politician sidelined by the Islamists under Izetbegović and on good terms with Bosnian Serbs;
• the effects of sanctions imposed by Serbian President Slobodan Milošević on the Bosnian Serbs;
• the struggle between the factions of the Krajina Serbs.
In all these cases the facts do not sit easily with the simplified narratives of united ethnic groups pitted against each other.
When she went to Yugoslavia, Jean brought a fresh mind, unencumbered with prejudice. The reaction of a friend of mine who also read the translation describes that quality perfectly:
Jean has an omnivorous eye for detail, and its scope is wide ranging. Her curiosity is restless and relentless, examining her surroundings with infinite care and attention. Profoundly empathetic, she is at pains not to harm her subject - she seems to hover like an inquisitive insect gently probing but wherever she alights she illumines.

                             Tim Fenton
                           Oxford, 26 November 2025

Introduction to the Second Italian Edition

Nineteen years after the first edition was printed, we still believe that The Corridor is the best text ever to appear on the Italian publishing scene about the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Indeed, it is still “the only great book [...] on the tragedy of Yugoslavia that unfolded from 1991 onwards”. ‘Great’ in both the physical and figurative senses, the book, even in paperback format, consists of around 400 pages crammed with data, information and photographs – as well as in terms of the vast range of topics covered, including aspects and dramas that the Italian press has chosen to ignore, as we wrote in our online presentation of the first edition (see https://www.cnj.it/INIZIATIVE/jeantoschi.htm, where you can find reviews, chronicles of presentations, and other texts by the author). In the November 2005 issue of his magazine, Louis Dalmas, the late editor of Balkans Infos, wrote: “Our Italian friend, writer and journalist Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti, has published a remarkable book with La Città del Sole Editions. The title evokes the 800-metre corridor that separated the Croatian-Muslim and Serbian fronts in 1992. It recounts more than twenty visits to the war-torn Balkans between 1992 and 2003. It is illustrated with numerous photos, most of which were taken by the author herself. It is an exciting work which, unfortunately for our readers, is still only available in Italian, but which deserves to find a French publisher quickly”.
Since then, the book has been published instead in a Serbian edition (Koridor, Zavod za udžbenike/Dva stoleća, Beograd 2006) and has also been translated for an eagerly awaited future English-language edition. For our part, we felt it was imperative to republish it in Italian, because despite the passing of years, this book remains unique and irreplaceable, so much so that we are constantly asked by people interested in investigating the dynamics of the Yugoslavian tragedy beyond the blanket of lies and omissions constructed ad hoc for that media war that enabled, assisted and fuelled the actual war waged, according to a now well-established pattern (Jean would say: protocol) which we have unfortunately seen at work in numerous subsequent contexts.
The aim of this second edition is to make the volume available again, in a modern electronic format, using a minimalist, non-commercial publishing solution to avoid the difficulties faced by small publishers and the vetoes of large-scale distributors. While it contains slight improvements, the layout of the work has not been changed, as it remains perfectly adequate for illustrating the Yugoslav crisis of the 1990s.
The occasion requires us to address a grateful acknowledgment to Sergio Manes, the unforgettable publisher of the first edition with La Città del Sole.
Although there are other sources on the aftermath of the Yugoslavian crisis, there is certainly a lot more to be written. Above all, what is needed is a compendium similar to that produced by Jean Toschi in The Corridor. However, the crisis is not over. Indeed, the Pandora’s box that the West wanted to open in the Balkans and elsewhere will continue to produce monsters. We do not know when this will happen or what consequences it will have for everyone. 

                                               Andrea Martocchia
                                              Jugocoord Association ETS, June 2024

Editorial Note to the First Edition

When we received the manuscript of The Corridor, we knew little more than the author’s name. Anyone who has scoured the press in recent years for in-depth and reliable information on the Yugoslav crisis will be familiar with Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti’s byline. This signature has also represented some of the most interesting and useful reports to appear in widely circulated newspapers such as Il Manifesto and liMes for us, too: interviews and chronicles that have always presented events and personalities in a different, direct, and therefore unusual and revealing light.
The manuscript The Corridor immediately evoked strong and, in some cases, painful impressions and emotions about this tragedy, both close and yet so little understood. A tragedy that has been called a delirium of history by some, but which, in reality, has roots and motivations that are anything but irrational and inexplicable. But this book does not seek to provide those logical explanations; its purpose is different and even more essential.
The author uses a descriptive tone, almost impersonal and yet profoundly direct, of someone who has seen something extremely serious at close quarters, and must recount it, knowing that it will not be easy to be lucid or convincing enough. Like someone who has experienced a trauma and must get rid of it and can only do so by narrating. And in tune with the author, the same emotions have been experienced and recognised by all of us, and certainly also by the readers most involved in the issue of the civil war in Yugoslavia, feel the same need.
Together with Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti, we read and re-read the enormous amount of testimony and documentation she made available to us. The result is a text in which we can recognise our own direct experience. In this document, individuals recount undeniable facts that the public is not yet aware of, alongside perspectives and evaluations that are not necessarily shared by everyone. Because the facts are what they are: the honesty of others will then be entrusted with the task of interpreting and explaining them, each according to their own interpretative keys.

                                   La Città del Sole, Naples 2005

Introduction. The Corridor Between Life and Death

Without doubt, one of the most shameful pages in the history of Western civilisation is what the US and NATO did in Yugoslavia during the terrible 1990s.
These events were presented by the mass media of the civilised and cultured West in such a way that the tragedy that was actually unfolding before the eyes and with active participation of the International Community took centre stage. It took the titanic efforts of honest and courageous journalists, politicians, writers, ordinary people – witnesses of an immediate, indelible historical infamy of that America and the West that in its time blessed similar crimes of the century in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq – for the crumbs of a terrible truth to begin to be known, as far as possible, by vast strata of international public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic.
Journalists, who have tried to write another story, the true story of the Serbs, have experienced first hand what the democratic right to information, the right to freedom of broadcasting, the right to freedom of thought is. Here are some names of honest people working professionally in the media whom I would like to mention: Jacques Merlino, Bernard Volker, Milena Gabanelli, Martin Lettmayer.
The destiny of Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti was quite different. She is an Italian journalist, a writer, a charming and intelligent woman whose work I got to know more than 15 years ago.
Jean has always stood out from the crowd of journalists because of her particular tact and charm, even when dealing with very sensitive subjects. 
But the passion and grief with which she has suffered the common pains and emotions involved in the tragedy of the offence to the honour of an entire people, of an entire country in the Balkans, the profound and implacable honesty with which she was torn away the veils of the myth of the democratisation of Yugoslavia, a myth that has relentlessly been fed to the dumbed down media consumer, the way in which she restored the truth of the facts to its authentic face, the courage and civilised spirit of her stance, were for me, who has been through so much, starting with the Lubianka prison, for me who fought throughout the Second World War and was then exiled from my homeland for 21 years, it was a profound emotion. 
The author of the book The Corridor – an Italian citizen – is not a politically committed person, she does not belong to any party, she has observed the facts out of a duty of conscience, she has made frequent journeys in the course of ten years to the theatre of events in the territory of Yugoslavia (Bosnia, Krajina, Kosovo) and, as a citizen of free democratic Italy, she has analysed them through the ideas of Western European humanism. In her numerous interviews with Dobrica Ćosić, Milan Panić, Slobodan Milošević, Tomislav Karađorđević, Zoran Ðinđić, Vojislav Koštunica, Vojislav Šešelj, she bears witness to what really happened, without superimposing her own point of view.
She simply describes what she has seen. She speaks of destroyed villages, of crossroads between life and death, of families torn apart, of the unexpected discovery of a luxurious bar amidst the ghost of a half destroyed Modriča. She tells of the destroyed National Library, of unanswered letters, the fate of five hundred thousand inhabitants of Krajina who voted in a referendum for secession from Croatia, because the new Croatian constitution of 1991 turned the Serbs into foreigners in their own country...
I can only recommend reading this book. It is a book of true human testimony and experience.

                                 Aleksandr A. Zinov’ev, writer, professor,
                              President of the Russian Social Committee for the Defence of Slobodan Milošević.
                              Moscow, January 2004

Contents

Acknowledgements
Forewords
Introduction to the Second Edition
Editorial Note to the First Edition
Introduction by Aleksandr A. Zinoviev
1. The Corridor
2. Manjača, the detention centre
3. Journey to Knin
4. Bihać
5. Pale
6. After Dayton
7. Kosovo and Metohija
8. Belgrade
9. The Fabricated History
Balkan Timeline
List of broken Treaties and Laws
Bibliography
The Author

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orientamenti series

In Italy, the knowledge of the Yugoslav and Balkans’ reality is less than scarce. Albeit geographical proximity, common histories and unavoidable cultural exchanges along the centuries, the image which stays hegemonic in the public opinion can be summarized with the famous motto: hic sunt leones. While exotism and intellectualism on one side, prejudice and hostility on the other side do generally prevail when dealing with the Slavic world, after the dramatic crisis of the end of the XX century the inclination has been further encouraged, in the specific Yugoslav issue, to cancel every hint of the both unitary and multifaceted features typical of that cultural and historic-political space.
That is why the Italian no-profit organization Coordination for Yugoslavia (Coordinamento Nazionale per la Jugoslavia ETS) has set itself as a constituent objective to enable a greater integration of knowledges on this matter, and to this aim “publish books, brochures, multimedia documents" as well as disseminate and make information always available through the newest telematic tools, and promote specific cultural and informative initiatives.
In line with this understanding, the series { orientamenti } has been kicked off, which, by operating in territories of the Culture which are currently populated only little and poorly, necessarily aims to provide first of all the basic tools – republishing classics or translating important texts which never appeared before in Italy, providing synthetic and informative tools on different themes, responding to the requests of those who are really interested in knowing and understanding.

CONTENTS OF THE SERIES:

Slavic and Balkans’ art and culture / Contemporary History / Liberation movement / International politics / Slavic world / Biographies / Workers’ and anti-fascist movement / Partisans’ internationalism / Political theory / Linguistics / Nationalities and identities / Friendship among the peoples / Macroeconomics / Materials for the organization