Slaughterhouse : Bosnia and the failure of the West /

Rieff's moving, excellent, passionate, and, above all, disturbing defense of Bosnia ought to be on the "must" reading list of everyone concerned with Bosnia's fate. More to the point, it ought to be on the reading list of everyone who ought to be concerned with the defense of Bosnia. Rieff is unsparing in his criticisms of the UN protection forces (UNPROFOR), and his critique leads to somber second and third thoughts about the UN. But the UN is only a stand-in for the indifference and evasions of Europe and the West in general. He is particularly sharp in detailing the illusions of Bosnians that more and more CNN pictures of bodies would move Clinton or whomever to "do something." These are not casual observations. Rieff lived for extended periods in Sarajevo between 1992 and 1994. A special strength of the book is that he analyzes so well the picture of a people under siege--or, worse yet, facing genocide. This is as intelligent and sharp--and depressing--a volume as one is likely to read on Sarajevo--and, as it seems, on the quality of Western civilization. All levels. H. Steck; SUNY College at Cortland

"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

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.'' (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Instead of looking back at the root causes of the current upheaval in the Balkans, Rieff (The Exile, LJ 7/93) looks ahead to the worldwide consequences of the West's failure to act decisively in the crisis. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Rieff's powerful mix of reporting and polemic chronicles the fall of Bosnia and lambastes Western equivocation. ``Bosnia was and always will be a just cause....To have intervened on the side of Bosnia would have been self-defense, not charity,'' declares Rieff (The Exile, 1993, etc.). Fueled by anger and anguish, his book is a sort of meta-narrative, offering witness while regularly lamenting that information about mass death and destruction has not prompted action. Rieff went to Bosnia in 1992, haunted by the stories of Bosnian refugees. He recognizes that Bosnians aren't pure--that many patriots are black marketeers and not all Muslims are multiculturalists--but he tracks larger villainies. In Croatia he meets nationalists insistently purging Serbian and Muslim words from their vocabulary. In a town in northern Bosnia, Rieff describes the process of ethnic cleansing, beginning not with murder but with the loss of jobs, privileges, and psychic security. His center, however, is Sarajevo, where slaughter proceeds alongside negotiations and relief efforts. There the ``social pyramid'' has been inverted, the middle class turned to begging from visitors while the rough Rambo pretenders are ascendant. UN peacekeepers ``fetishized'' their Security Council mandate, claiming that all parties are tainted while enforcing the status quo. Coming across as far more honorable are those who worked for non-governmental agencies and for the UN's refugee relief effort, which Rieff credits with valuing ideals of justice and fairness over bureaucratic strictures. But even those heroes were compromised--mandated to relieve suffering, they in essence abetted ethnic cleansing even while publicizing it. Rieff says he resolved ``to write as frankly incendiary a narrative as I could.'' It is, however, a bit claustrophobic, lacking reportage, for example, on Serb concentration camps and some glimpses from the West that might have further buttressed his point. A troubling document on two levels: the damage done both to the people of Bosnia and to Western illusions of conscience and justice.