Seasons in hell : understanding Bosnia's war /

Anyone who has followed the outrages perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs and Croats upon their Muslim neighbors must find it hard to be objective; perhaps to his credit, Vulliamy makes it clear that objectivity is not his goal here. Rather, he attempts to show the horrors inflicted on a people whose only crime is to be caught between the virulent revanchist nationalisms of Serb and Croat. While Vulliamy avoids the trap of equating the Serbs with Nazis and the Muslims with Jews, the parallels are certainly there. Vulliamy's rage is directed primarily against Serbian nationalists, but he also displays contempt for the inactivity of the Western powers. This is a work that tears at the emotions and shocks the sensibilities of decent people. Nevertheless, it is essentially a one-sided scream; while it eloquently serves to highlight the ongoing horror of Bosnia, it does not point the way to an ultimate, lasting solution that can send the demons of ethnic hatred back to the hell whence they came. ~--Jay Freeman

Vulliamy, a British journalist with keen powers of observation and nerves of steel, describes what he saw during his 1992-1993 coverage of the war in Bosnia. Much of his compelling narrative consists of scenes in which drunken thugs and uniformed lynch mobs perpetrate outrages and atrocities against civilians, including the systematic rape of women. The testimony he collected for his chapter on rape in the war zone encompasses, as he puts it, ``every conceivable dark cranny of sexual sadism and male violence.'' Vulliamy denounces the UN and the European Community for failing to come to the aid of Bosnia's stillborn democracy, especially its Muslim population, and for denying them the means to defend themselves. His coverage of the fighting in the former Yugoslavia earned him Grenada Television's Foreign Correspondent of the Year award in 1992. Photos. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

As this review is being written, the morning Internet brings news of fresh Serbian "ethnic cleansing." The shock is not diminished, and Vulliamy's excellent work of firsthand reportage of the Serb and Croat war against the Muslims provides both context and understanding of the carnage, not least in the words of victims and participants. Most chilling are the words of a Serbian "intellectual" that Sarajevo was theater to divert world attention from what was happening elsewhere. More complete than Roy Gutman's excellent A Witness to Genocide (LJ 10/1/93), Vulliamy's account of the Bosnian war and the betrayal by the diplomats of "Western civilization" is so vivid that reading it produces moral and physical pain. This account of human and cultural genocide is essential reading for all but the morally indifferent.-H. Steck, SUNY at Cortland (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An angry, impassioned book from a journalist who has seen the Bosnian conflict at its worst. Vulliamy has been covering the war in the former Yugoslavia for the Guardian, winning several awards for his reportage, much of which has gone into this volume. After a pungent historical summary of the troubled nationalities that make up the population of former Yugoslavia, Vulliamy plunges readers headlong into a nightmarish war in which 85% of the dead are civilians, a war stained by concentration camps and genocidal violence. He describes a conflict in which a multiethnic Bosnian state has been caught in a territorial vise between two vicious and unprincipled neofascist states, one Croatian and one Serb; both, he says, are rabidly nationalistic and want to ``re-establish their ancient frontiers with modern weaponry in the chaos of post-communist eastern Europe.'' He describes formerly Muslim villages now ``gutted, charred and lifeless''; concentration camps full of men with skeletal bodies, ``alive, but decomposed, debased, degraded.'' Vulliamy harshly criticizes diplomatic cynicism, referring to the behavior of the European Community, the Russians, and the US as nothing less than a Munich-scale appeasement that has allowed the Serbs and Croats to blackmail, lie, and wheedle their way toward the dismemberment of Bosnia. He makes no effort to hide his distaste for the politicians who engendered the butchery or the diplomats who made it possible. The reporting and the writing are comprehensive and moving, and it is hard to imagine anyone coming away from this volume not feeling enraged and dismayed by events in Bosnia. If readers are seeking an objective and detached history of this conflict, this is the wrong book. However, it is one of the best books to date on the Bosnian tragedy. A powerful and important volume.