Genocide After Emotion: The Post-Emotional Balkan War (review)

In August 1993, I found myself in the steel belly of a United Nations armored car rumbling into one of the bloodiest urban killing zones of the Balkan conflict.

Some 50,000 Muslim men, women, and children were corralled in the eastern side of the city of Mostar by Bosnian Croat forces armed and directed by neighboring Croatia. The sniping and shelling were so intense that to cross a street was to risk instant death. There was no running water or electricity and the hospital overflowed with casualties. Food and medicines came from the rare UN convoy allowed in by the Croats. The Muslims, most of whom had been expelled from west Mostar and nearby towns, had only light arms with which to defend their ghetto against attackers wielding artillery, rockets and tanks.

Despite their agreements to forge a federation with the Muslims and implement the Dayton Accords, Bosnian Croats are still preventing Muslims in east Mostar from returning to the homes from which they were swept more than three years ago. Condoned by Zagreb, the blockade threatens to undo the creaky but keystone Muslim-Croat federation and plunge Bosnia back into war unless resolved before the scheduled departure of NATO peacekeepers depart in June 1998.

Genocide After Emotion: The Post-Emotional Balkan War, says nothing about Mostar, Bosnia-Hercegovina’s fourth-largest city and once a symbol of multi-ethnic amity. Nor does it mention the massacres, forced population transfers or other heinous acts committed anywhere else by proxies of Croatian President Franjo Tudjman bent on ripping off a “purified” chunk of Bosnia and fusing it to Croatia.

Instead, the thrust of this collection of essays is that Croatia and the Bosnian Croats suffered the same Serbian genocidal aggression as Bosnia’s Muslims, and that western governments and media share the blame. It is apparent that the contributors are justifiably bitter over the West’s failures to halt the Serbian seizures of one-third of Croatia and attacks on Croatian areas of Bosnia. But they have allowed their indignation to corrupt their analyses. Edited by Stjepan Mestrovic, a Texas University A&M sociology professor, this book would leave a reader unfamiliar with the Balkan tragedy with the conviction that atrocities and land-grabbing were only committed by the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs and the Serb-dominated Yugoslav Peoples’ Army (JNA) at Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s behest.

The total omission of Croatia’s role in the betrayal and persecution of Bosnia’s Muslims—there is but a single reference to Croat-Muslim “infighting”—is all the more troubling given that one contributor, Slaven Letica, resigned in protest as Tudjman’s national security adviser the day after the Croatian leader and Milosevic agreed to carve up Bosnia between them.

This revisionism and the effort to equate the Serbs’ conquests of parts of Croatia with their genocidal onslaughts on Bosnia’s Muslims render this book little more than an attempt to obscure the roles of Croatia and its authoritarian president in Europe’s worst bloodshed since World War II. When compared with the raft of authoritative, even-handed accounts now available, it is of scant value to anyone seeking a balanced analysis of former Yugoslavia’s implosion and the ensuing violence.

Indeed, some of its assertions border on the absurd. These include a suggestion of a conspiracy between Western governments and media to disseminate pro-Serb propaganda. Even more preposterous is an assertion that it was the failings of a biased Western media that led “not only [to] the devastation of Croatia and Bosnia, but the destruction of a people and the evisceration of the spiritual core of the Balkans and the blatant moral failure of the West.” This statement ignores the historic, political and economic causes of the conflict. It also fails to acknowledge that it was primarily western coverage of the carnage that forced a procrastinating and morally bankrupt US and its NATO allies to eventually stop the Serbs. Finally, it demeans...