Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime

Rating:
Summary: Chronicle of a Massacre
Review: Honig and Both are Dutch foreign policy specialists who take an academic approach to the massacre of Srebrenica in Bosnia in July 1995. Their detailed accounts of UN policy debates and genocidal Serb attacks on the civilian population leading to the expulsion of over 20,000 women and children and the murder of 6,000 Bosnian Muslim men clearly demonstrate the failure of the international community's tepid approach to peace-keeping and the responsibility of the military and political leaders involved. There were no heroes at Srebrenica, only variable levels of guilt. The book is dispassionate and slightly distanced from the moral implications of the massacre. It is indeed a `record of a war crime'.

The Bosnian Serbs, commanded by General Ratko Mladic and led politically by Radovan Karadzic (both indicted for war crimes by the Hague tribunal), carefully planned for weeks and months the reduction of the Srebrenica enclave. They had calculated the number of buses needed to transport the Muslim men to their killing fields, and they ordered the victims to remove their shoes before being shot in order to thwart identification.

The book is divided into three sections, describing the actual fall of Srebrenica; the slow slide of the international community into the "safe area" concept as a sort of least common denominator; and the months of military and political deterioration leading up to the massacre. There is criticism for everyone: the UN which viewed the safe areas as an interim solution and came to endorse them because Security Council members were unwilling and unable to agree on anything more substantive. For their defense, the Bosnians in Srebrenica relied on the goodwill and the hesitation of their enemy Serbs and on an undersupplied battalion of Dutch soldiers. The US which abandoned the Vance-Owen peace plan without a viable alternative and then endorsed the creation of "safe areas" without the will to defend them. The authors also point out that policy disputes in Washington prevented the pursuit of a "Frasure Deal", a negotiating track between US Ambassador Robert Frasure and Serb President Slobodan Milosevic. The Bosnian Muslim leadership which refused to evacuate its civilians from Srebrenica long after it recognized the enclave as indefensible. The Dutch government which ostentatiously placed its troops in harm's way in order to satisfy domestic humanitarian demands, but then allowed them to become little more than underfed hostages unable to defend themselves, much less a large civilian population.

But most of all, final and criminal culpability falls to Mladic and Karadzic and the Bosnian Serbs with murder in their hearts who achieved military conquest through genocide. For while the authors demonstrate that any number of international players may have been able to stop the massacre of Srebrenica, only one side actually started it, the Serbs.

The book is excellently researched and clearly organized. By allowing the facts to speak for themselves and eschewing vociferous moral censures, Honig and Both have indicted us all for our roles in the worst European massacre since World War Two.

Rating:
Summary: Chronicle of a Massacre
Review: Honig and Both are Dutch foreign policy specialists who take an academic approach to the massacre of Srebrenica in Bosnia in July 1995. Their detailed accounts of UN policy debates and genocidal Serb attacks on the civilian population leading to the expulsion of over 20,000 women and children and the murder of 6,000 Bosnian Muslim men clearly demonstrate the failure of the international community's tepid approach to peace-keeping and the responsibility of the military and political leaders involved. There were no heroes at Srebrenica, only variable levels of guilt. The book is dispassionate and slightly distanced from the moral implications of the massacre. It is indeed a 'record of a war crime'.

The Bosnian Serbs, commanded by General Ratko Mladic and led politically by Radovan Karadzic (both indicted for war crimes by the Hague tribunal), carefully planned for weeks and months the reduction of the Srebrenica enclave. They had calculated the number of buses needed to transport the Muslim men to their killing fields, and they ordered the victims to remove their shoes before being shot in order to thwart identification.

The book is divided into three sections, describing the actual fall of Srebrenica; the slow slide of the international community into the "safe area" concept as a sort of least common denominator; and the months of military and political deterioration leading up to the massacre. There is criticism for everyone: the UN which viewed the safe areas as an interim solution and came to endorse them because Security Council members were unwilling and unable to agree on anything more substantive. For their defense, the Bosnians in Srebrenica relied on the goodwill and the hesitation of their enemy Serbs and on an undersupplied battalion of Dutch soldiers. The US which abandoned the Vance-Owen peace plan without a viable alternative and then endorsed the creation of "safe areas" without the will to defend them. The authors also point out that policy disputes in Washington prevented the pursuit of a "Frasure Deal", a negotiating track between US Ambassador Robert Frasure and Serb President Slobodan Milosevic. The Bosnian Muslim leadership which refused to evacuate its civilians from Srebrenica long after it recognized the enclave as indefensible. The Dutch government which ostentatiously placed its troops in harm's way in order to satisfy domestic humanitarian demands, but then allowed them to become little more than underfed hostages unable to defend themselves, much less a large civilian population.

But most of all, final and criminal culpability falls to Mladic and Karadzic and the Bosnian Serbs with murder in their hearts who achieved military conquest through genocide. For while the authors demonstrate that any number of international players may have been able to stop the massacre of Srebrenica, only one side actually started it, the Serbs.

The book is excellently researched and clearly organized. By allowing the facts to speak for themselves and eschewing vociferous moral censures, Honig and Both have indicted us all for our roles in the worst European massacre since World War Two.

Rating:
Summary: A Study of the Massacre in Srebrenica
Review: The massacre of thousands of Bosnians by Bosnian-Serbs following the fall of Srebrenica during the summer of 1995 was a lamentable and heinous crime in a civil war already noted for its unspeakable brutality. The events also served to show the indecisive and weak-willed approach the UN and the Americans adopted in response to the crisis. The events are complex and there is no doubt much that we are still not aware of, but the authors manage to piece together a sound account of the events surrounding this incident, in particular concerning the under-manned and ill-equiped Dutch contingent deployed in the Srebrenica "Safe-Area."