DATELINE

As with much of the trouble in the Balkans, the world learned of ethnic cleansing from the international media--international because the state-run media in Yugoslavia made Serbia out to be the victim, not the perpetrator.What better cover, then, for U.N. spy Mai Fisher than a freelance journalist?But being back in the fractious Yugoslavia in the election year 2000 has raised plenty of ghosts and created a lot more.In this lead-in to the new series by P. A. Duncan, Self-Inflited Wounds, read these dispatches from inside a country on the verge of disintegration but yearning for that elusive form of government--democracy.