Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West - Softcover

David Rieff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684819031 ISBN 13: 9780684819037

Publisher: Touchstone, 1996

Synopsis

In a shocking and deeply disturbing tour de force, David Rieff, reporting from the Bosnia war zone and from Western capitals and United Nations headquarters, indicts the West and the United Nations for standing by and doing nothing to stop the genocide of the Bosnian Muslims. Slaughterhouse is the definitive explanation of a war that will be remembered as the greatest failure of Western diplomacy since the 1930s.
Bosnia was more than a human tragedy. It was the emblem of the international community's failure and confusion in the post-Cold War era. In Bosnia, genocide and ethnic fascism reappeared in Europe for the first time in fifty years. But there was no will to confront them, either on the part of the United States, Western Europe, or the United Nations, for which the Bosnian experience was as catastrophic and demoralizing as Vietnam was for the United States. It is the failure and its implications that Rieff anatomizes in this unforgiving account of a war that might have been prevented and could have been stopped.

About this title

About the Author

David Rieff is the author of eight previous books, including Swimming in a Sea of Death, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention; A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis; and Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. He lives in New York City.

From Library Journal

Rieff provides a fine journalistic account of the war in former Yugoslavia. Despite his particular distaste for Croatian nationalism, he manages a relatively balanced treatment of the war in Bosnia. The book's strength lies in describing the war's detail. For example, Rieff explains the mechanics of "ethnic cleansing" in Banja Luka, Bosnia's second largest city, as a process involving Serbian "crisis committees," outside terror against uncooperative local Serbs, and the systematic murder of "Muslim notables." He also distinguished the venality of some of the U. N. Protection Forces as "accomplices to genocide" from the stark heroism of aid workers for the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. The book lacks the perspective of Misha Glenny's The Fall of Yugoslavia (LJ 1/93) or the historical depth of Robert Donia and John Fine's excellent Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (LJ 10/1/94). Rieff also errs occasionally, e.g., Muslims in former Yugoslavia were declared a "constituent nation" in 1968-not 1974, as he asserts. But on the whole this book can be recommended for academic and public libraries.
--Zachary T. Irwin, Pennsylvania State Univ.-Erie
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0684819031
• ISBN 13: 9780684819037
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 274