[I]t is impossible to have peace and normality not because the Balkan peoples could not in principle have much better relations with one another, but because the interests at stake in the Balkans are too great to permit such a development. The way I see it, the roots of the problem go way back in time and all the various conflicts were encouraged, at one time or another. There is a joke I often tell which I heard on my first trip. Before the war a foreign journalist went to Bosnia and was walking about in a town which had a mixed population – i.e. Muslims, Serbs and Croats – and at some point he went where we all go. There was a large public urinal in the centre of the square and he headed towards it, but just as he reached it someone passed him and made the sign of the cross. He stood surprised for a moment, then someone else went by, crossing himself in the Catholic manner but with the same degree of respect before the urinal – and then a Muslim passed, making the analogous Muslim gesture. The journalist asked someone and was told that in the twelfth century there used to be an Orthodox church on this spot. In the fourteenth century it became a mosque and when the Austro-Hungarians arrived it became a Catholic church. Tito, to erase all that, demolished it and built a public urinal.