David Rieff's Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West
Denitch, Bogdan
SLAUGHTERHOUSE: BOSNIA AND THE FAILURE OF THE WEST, by David Rieff. Simon and Schuster, 1995. 225 pp. $21.50. This is a courageous and painfully honest book that must have been very hard to...
...It stops and turns back those who are trying to escape...
...Kenny seems to believe that although it was appropriate for him to resign from the State Department in protest against an immoral and incompetent U.S...
...Thou424 • DISSENT Books sands of mosques and other monuments of an Islamic culture that flourished for almost five centuries have been destroyed...
...Without these false hopes there might, just might, have been earlier negotiations for a more acceptable peace settlement...
...Many journalists have honorably done their best—some have died doing so—to see that the truth about Bosnia did get out...
...The Bosnian victims are now a "refugee problem" for Western Europe...
...But Western recognition without any provisions to protect the new secessionist states from military aggression by the Yugoslav army was criminally irSUMMER • 1995 • 423 Books responsible...
...The dreadful thing is that there is no evidence that the West, the United States, or the UN bureaucracy have learned anything from the tragedy of former Yugoslavia and the slaughter in Bosnia...
...If you report that victimization does not make people nobler and that hunger, deprivation, and constant fear of death make them appear "self-centered," you are taken to be unsympathetic to their pain...
...Thankfully, Rieff was not "measured" in his report on the Bosnian slaughterhouse...
...But it must never be forgotten that what actually did kill them was a murderous policy of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Bosnian Serbs...
...After what the West and UN have done, and not done, perhaps that was to have been expected...
...The brutal facts are these: (1) Military intervention, at least by air, must accompany the lifting of the arms embargo, since someone must deliver the arms, and this can be done only if the Serbian anti-aircraft fire is silenced and the Bosnians are protected from the Serbian offensive that would inevitably follow any prospect of massive aid...
...2) The United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR)—which, whatever else it does, does not protect the Bosnian victims—administers and enforces the siege of Sarajevo...
...Some UNPROFOR soldiers have accepted the Serbian nationalist troops' generous offer to use the camp brothels where Bosnian Muslim women are kept by force...
...Be that as it may, Rieff's somber summary says it well: "The future of Bosnia, and possibly the future of much of Eastern Europe as well, holds not peace but the sword...
...Had the UN existed in 1939 we would all be speaking German" is the bitter quip of one observer...
...The resentment of Bosnia's Muslims is growing...
...the dream that Europe is a civilized place...
...This is a question that these stalwart leftists have never answered...
...The UN has given more food and aid to the Serbian and Croat nationalist forces—who have together murdered a civic rather than ethnically divided Bosnia—as a price of letting any aid at all through to the victims Some UNPROFOR forces engage in the ever present black market, but it is unhelpful to write about this since that is the way even the reporters get fuel...
...And the electorate will not punish them...
...But who, you may ask, is to provide and above all to deliver the arms if not the imperial powers...
...It should come as no surprise that the old millenarian dream that truth will set us free should die there as well...
...That is, the UN, and increasingly the Western powers, now want a peace in former Yugoslavia, and above all Bosnia—any peace, no matter how unjust...
...OnceYugoslavia broke up, the war in Bosnia was a surprise only to the naive...
...Rieff makes clear that at least Cyrus Vance was not naive and urged that recognition be delayed...
...But to report these unpleasant facts in detail opens you to savage reviews such as the one by George Kenny in the Washington Monthly (March 1995...
...the dream that there is justice for the weak as well as for the strong...
...The Bosnian carnage was prolonged in good part because of false hopes, nurtured by the irresponsible statements of the United States, including shameful flip-flopping by President Clinton himself, implying the possibility of U.S...
...Some Muslims who were never religious are now turning to Islam because they believe that it was precisely their Muslim identity that permitted the West to stand by during this slow-motion genocide...
...At the very least it will take years to recover—as did, Rieff points out, the International Red Cross after its "inspection" and whitewash of the Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt...
...It may be that it was a mistake to grant early recognition to the republics that seceded fromYugoslavia— a Yugoslavia that was clearly a lesser evil than what has followed...
...policy on Bosnia, one must be measured in denouncing that policy...
...it blocks attempts by Sarajevans to obtain food from the countryside...
...Worse, since continued Bosnian resistance prolongs the war, many senior UN staffers are increasingly hostile to the Bosnian leadership...
...or NATO intervention...
...What is certain is that a lot of dreams have died in Bosnia during the last two and a half years: the dream that the world has a conscience...
...For us on the democratic left they remain a cause to support...
...This argument is unpopular both with the Bosnian government and the pro-Bosnian activists in the West...
...It has other priorities, and victims of genocide, even incomplete genocide, do not have effective lobbies...
...Although it is very well written, it will earn David Rieff few friends...
...A "peacekeeping" mission in Bosnia was therefore crass hypocrisy from the outset, since it had to pretend to an impossible impartiality—an impartiality between victim and perpetrator of a genocide...
...Being analytical opens you to the charge of depraved indifference...
...To be sure, just as in the case of the Spanish Civil War there are complications...
...That is the book's strength...
...However, after the recognition of Croatia it was probably too late to save Bosnia...
...It is extraordinarily difficult to write serious reportage about Bosnia-Herzegovina while the carnage continues...
...However, that particular Yugoslavia was no longer on offer in 1991, as Rieff points out...
...The Serbian nationalists are wiping out all traces of that culture in a campaign of cultural genocide in its purest form...
...Yet, the CIA report on war crimes in Bosnia issued this spring makes clear that 90 percent of the crimes were committed by the Serbian nationalists...
...While pointing out many of the complexities of the war, Rieff keeps the focus where it should be: on the moral and political responsibility of the West and the international institutions for having permitted this genocide to go on and on and on...
...And when you denounce the arrogant "angels" of the UN who have stood by and witnessed the slow-motion genocide of Bosnia's Muslims over the past three years, limiting themselves to feeding the survivors and the future victims, you are accused of being overwrought...
...These hopes helped kill thousands of Bosnians...
...Our" side in Bosnia is not composed of saints but of human beings who long for revenge for their burned villages, murdered relatives, raped women, and violated country...
...But without that logistical support, the call to lift the arms embargo is cruel demagoguery played for domestic political reasons: by the Republican right to embarrass Clinton, and by irresponsible parts of the left in order to preserve their impeccable anti-interventionist and anti-imperialist credentials...
...The editors gave the carnage in Bosnia ample space...
...This genocide was on CNN, ITN and our front pages...
...For that mandate we must thank the United States and its allies in the first place...
...This is a courageous and painfully honest book that must have been very hard to write...
...If you argue that the demand to "lift the unjust arms embargo against the victims" must necessarily be accompanied by a call for military intervention by NATO or the United States, you are accused of dragging your feet...
...The UN's moral stature has perhaps been fatally damaged in Bosnia...
...What was on offer was only the alternative of a more centralized Yugoslavia dominated by Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia or independence...
...The victims, by continuing to resist, have become a nuisance...
...There is almost no chance that it will ever be reversed...
...Yet the policy makers of the Western democracies did nothing to stop it...
...The main reason given for the inadequacies of the UN is the limited mandate of the Security Council...
...The UN senior staff constantly negotiates with the murderous Bosnian Serbian leaders, insisting that they are dealing with honorable men...
...q SUMMER • 1995 • 425...
...We can therefore expect this horror to be repeated, and the inconvenient victims to be forgotten as soon as possible...
Vol. 42 • July 1995 • No. 3
