Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West

Offering a disturbing story of moral collapse, a portrait of the post-Cold War war in Bosnia reveals the U.N. contingents "standing by" as the genocide continues and aid workers risking their lives to help victims. 30,000 first printing. Tour.

Rieff (Going to Miami) "resolved to write as frankly incendiary a narrative as I could of my journeys to the slaughterhouse that the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina became in the spring of 1992." He found a society with multicultural ideals worth preserving and concluded that the great powers had a moral obligation to defend Bosnian independence: "It should have been the West's cause." Rieff describes the terror tactics employed by the Bosnian Serbs against Bosnian Muslims and makes the chilling observation that Serb soldiers are better outfitted for killing civilians than for engaging enemy forces on a battlefield. He acknowledges that humanitarian relief efforts have been as heroic as any in modern history but argues that, more than food, medicine and clothing, military intervention is needed. He reviews Washington's prevaricating Bosnia policy and the toothless resolutions of the U.N. Security Council, referring to the U.N. "peacekeepers" as handmaidens of genocide for standing idly by as a nation is murdered. The resonating attitude of this brief report is despair. Gone, says Rieff, is "the dream that the world has a conscience; the dream that Europe is a civilized place; the dream that there is justice for the weak as well as for the strong."
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.

"Dreams have died in Bosnia," declares Rieff, author of The Exile (1993) and studies of immigration's impact on Los Angeles and Miami, "the dream that the world has a conscience; the dream that Europe is a civilized place; the dream that there is justice for the weak as well as for the strong; . . . the old millenarium dream that the truth will set us free." In a scathing indictment of worldwide fecklessness in the face of the destruction of Bosnia-Hercegovina, the death of 200,000 Bosnian Muslims, and the displacement of two million more, the author, who has researched this story in Europe and the nations of the former Yugoslavia since 1992, identifies many culprits: Western European countries, which resisted intervention from the start; the U.S., which pretended a concern it was not prepared to demonstrate; the United Nations, which, in spite of its valiant humanitarian relief work, saw its "mandate" as requiring "impartiality" between the victims and the perpetrators of genocide. Slaughterhouse is perhaps the most powerful, passionate, and penetrating dissection by a Westerner of the ongoing Bosnian tragedy. Mary Carroll