Getting to the heart of Bosnia

Two new books explore the inhumanity and failed politics behind the bloodbath in the Balkans

BOOK REVIEWS

SLAUGHTERHOUSE By David Rieff Touchstone; $12; 262 pages.

BY CAMERON McWHIRTER
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Many Americans have a problem understanding the Bosnian conflict.

We remember Bosnia's capital of Sarajevo as beautiful host of the 1984 Winter Olympics. Today, it has been transformed into a post-Cold War version of Dresden - devastated and forsaken.

The confusing war involves Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox Christians fighting in a mountainous European country that wasn't a country at all until 1992. The Bosnian people look the same and speak the same language, but they have grown to hate each other. Unrestrained armies have killed more than 200,000 people in less than four years.

What happened?

In the past year a slew of books has tried to answer that question. Political analysts, journalists and diplomats have rushed to publish their interpretations of Bosnia's destruction. Some books are so well-written and heart-felt that they bring the Bosnian nightmare alive for comfortable, insulated Americans. Other books - no matter how well-intentioned the authors - lose readers in a thick soup of Balkan politics and vitriolic bombast. They demand the reader's attention and therefore lose it.

Two recent offerings illustrate this division. One is a powerful success - Peter Maass' Love Thy Neighbor - and the other is a rancorous dud - David Rieff's Slaughterhouse.

Real for the reader

Mr. Maass, who covered the war for The Washington Post, writes mostly about what he saw and the people he met. Bosnia becomes a very real place for the reader, as Mr. Maass describes a Muslim Imam, a young man trapped in a Bosnian Serb concentration camp, or a one-on-one meeting with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

He describes the strange events of the war. At one point, he travels with a Bosnian Serb sniper up to the Sarajevo battle line, only to see the hotel where he was staying (the Holiday Inn) as one of the sniper's easy targets. At another point, he goes to sleep one night in a gas station held by the Bosnian government. He and other journalists are awakened by by Bosnian Croats attacking the gas station. They find themselves driving down a road for their lives in the middle of a battle zone.

Mr. Maass' reporting, which is excellent, goes beyond recounting what he saw. His guilt and anger about the war are present throughout the book. Mr. Maass never lets the reader or himself forget he was an interloper in this tragedy, that he observed these horrors as an outsider, and it shames him.

He is also angry that humans could treat other humans so horribly. Mr. Maass' rage stems, in part, from a feeling of impotence - unable to change the course of events and condemned to simply document the tragedies around him.

First-hand horror

"We left in a hurry, and I would be lying if I didn't admit I was relieved," he writes. "I returned to the Holiday Inn, wrote a thousand-word story and, later on, drank several glasses of wine with dinner. I could not put the nursing home out of my mind, and I could not erase the thought that Milena Topalovic could not possibly have done anything in her life that merited the kind of cruelty she endured in her final days at Sarajevo's Old People's Home."

Mr. Maass focuses on details of the Bosnian war. Real people whom he met who suffered. In doing so, he transcends the particulars of the Bosnian conflict to look at the nature of war and, more frightening, the nature of humans that create wars.

If you read one book on the Bosnian conflict, read this one.

Policy disasters

Mr. Rieff's book is concerned with lambasting the enfeebled United Nations peace-keeping operations in Bosnia, an easy target. He focuses on government factotums who carried out the unmitigated policy disasters set out by Western nations and the United Nations.

They didn't protect civilians. They let food be confiscated by Bosnian Serb soldiers. They never really protected anyone. Mr. Rieff is lecturing us. He doesn't take us to Bosnia with his writing; he takes us to the classroom.

More tell than show

In the end, both writers come to the same conclusions. First, the war was a horrible travesty that has forever altered the two men's view of humanity for the worse. Second, the Clinton administration is a guilty party in this war, because it should have become involved a lot sooner to stop the fighting. Instead, the United States foolishly tried to negotiate a settlement with the Bosnian Serbs without forcing them to stop ethnic cleansing, the shelling of Sarajevo and other atrocities.

Again, Mr. Maass says it best: "They appeased. They also overlooked an important lesson of history. Peace is not guaranteed by a thick treaty or enforcement troops; it is guaranteed by justice."

To date, Bosnia remains divided. Beyond the hundreds of thousands known dead, thousands more have simply disappeared, their whereabouts unknown. The Bosnian economy is destroyed. Millions of refugees are homeless. Only three of 52 war criminals indicted by the U.N. for alleged atrocities in the Bosnian war have been apprehended.

Justice, by the standards of both Mr. Maass and Mr. Rieff, is a long way off.

Cameron McWhirter recently reported from Bosnia for The Enquirer.

Published March 19, 1996.