The bloody collapse of Yugoslavia shamed Europe. But those of us who live in the Balkans know particularly well that dismantling that artificial state involved a series of murderous ethnic and religious wars and cost at least 100,000 lives, while hundreds of thousands had to flee their homes. This is not to mention the physical devastation. Such appalling and widespread massacres and ethnic cleansing Europe had not seen since the defeat of Nazism.

There is, however, one positive story from those dreadful years. It involves my own small but fiercely proud multi-ethnic country, Montenegro, which was wiped off the map by the Allies after the first world war and forced to become part of the kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which was renamed Yugoslavia. Before that, Montenegro had taken pride in its 1,000-year history and its freedom-loving spirit, the only nation in the region not to have succumbed to Turkish rule during the Ottoman empire.