Sarajevo Daily: A City and its Newspaper Under Siege. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, March, 1995 by George Kenney

Tom Gjelten, HarperCollins, $24

We struggle to learn from the Holocaust, the measure of modern state terror, because we desperately wish to avoid repeating its evil. There's a risk, however, of overlearning. As the saying goes, a man with a hammer sees everything as a nail, even if it's a screw. Full-throated advocates of intervention in Bosnia often dwell on the question of genocide in the hope that the high moral imperative of "never again" may influence policy. As one of the original interventionists, I must confess here, I'm guilty myself of having used the term genocide (rarely, with qualifications) in reference to Bosnia, yet I've never been comfortable with insisting it was taking place--mostly because it distracts from the more urgent policy debate.

David Rieff, the author of Slaughterhouse, unconditionally believes the Serbs perpetrated genocide, and that most of the outside world watched indifferently, the same way it ignored the Holocaust. His book sums up what he saw in more than two years of frequent travel into the Bosnian war. In his first pages, he makes a comparison to Auschwitz, setting the tone for the rest of the book--an extended political tract against Serb efforts to exterminate the Bosnians.

The hollowness of the vague, unsubstantiated accounts of mass murder that appear every few pages dilutes Rieff's outrage to the point where it merely raises faint curiosity in the reader: The narrative does not communicate; Rieff paints no great and terrible picture of genocide. To the contrary, he awkwardly daydreams through a jumbled series of anecdotes, throwing in occasional half-baked theories about policy formation. Unless one subscribes to "the Bosnian cause," Rieff offers thin gruel with few new insights. Slaughterhouse can't live up to its title, because it isn't based on facts.

Where, one might ask, are the bodies? Genocide, of course, can't be merely a question of numbers, but one may use numbers as a rough--a very rough--way to figure out a threshold for declaring that genocide happened. Looking back after three years of war in Bosnia, a review of what we know about the numbers is sobering. How many people died? Rieff says more than 250,000. He never supports that claim, or explains its origins, but 250,000 is a number the press has used for some time. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees has no numbers for dead Bosnians, nor does the UN's peacekeeping office in New York. Sources at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Washington and Geneva tell me their estimates range from 20,000 to 30,000 dead. (They say that the war against the Turkish Kurds has been much deadlier, and in Chechnya the death toll may soon surpass Bosnia's.) Friends in the U.S. intelligence community tell me their best guess for confirmed dead runs to tens of thousands. (It's worth noting that Secretary of State Warren Christopher's office has sometimes demanded the numbers, only to discover they don't exist.) Intelligence sources add that official Bosnian statistics simply "come out of the air." The Bosnian Ministry of Health, for example, reports 200,000 dead or missing. Although we'll never know for certain, the number 250,000 probably evolved out of sloppy reporting of Bosnian government claims, a demonstration of the herd instinct at work among journalists. The question is not whether 250,000 dead is a wildly inflated number, but by how much it is wildly inflated.

There are good reasons not to call this genocide, at least until the bodies turn up. To misuse the word cheapens the memory of the Holocaust and diminishes the power to arouse horror against the real event. Rieff contends that we have a moral obligation to bear witness, but his preoccupation with his feelings, at the expense of factual reporting, obscures what it is we ought to be bearing witness to in Bosnia. As news accounts amply demonstrated, Serb policy was to ethnically cleanse, or violently chase out, all non-Serbs from the areas Serbs coveted.

Reluctance to use the term genocide does not lessen the barbarity of "ethnic cleansing," which resulted in over 2,000,000 refugees. Nor does it diminish the need for a thorough UN war crimes tribunal effort to sort out the guilty from the innocent on all sides. With much smaller numbers of dead, however, differences among the warring sides begin to blur palpably. Yet Rieff builds on his exaggeration of mass murder to heap contempt on the UN for drawing a "false moral equivalence" and falling, he says, into a Munich-like trap of peace at any price.

Late in the book, tucked in as almost an afterthought, Rieff quotes a UN Protection Force commander who explains that politics drove a UN mission concerned more with appearance than with results. Rieff expresses repeated disillusionment and bewilderment; like many analysts outside government, particularly in academia, he takes UN statements at face value to derive a pristine theoretical explanation of policy, when the political dynamics behind UN actions are as, if not more, important. I agree with much of Rieff's colorful critique of UN operations in Bosnia. But a worm's-eye view of UN results that ignores UN officials in New York and elsewhere misses much of the relevant story, as well as an opportunity to understand why international security institutions are failing.