Books like Srebrenica by Jan Willem Honig

A comprehensive account of the Balkan Crisis and the ensuing war in the Balkans, focusing on the human realities and politics behind the headlines of one of the most ferocious civil wars of our time.

This is a probing analysis of the crisis in Bosnia and the dilemmas surrounding international efforts to resolve it. The authors analyze the causes and conduct of the war; why, for more than three years, international efforts to resolve the conflict in Bosnia failed; and why one such effort finally succeeded in late 1995. They review the provisions of the Dayton accord and ask whether subsequent experience supports the hope that the accord will lead to long-term peace in Bosnia.

The war in Bosnia has confounded all our expectations. The end of the Cold War, most people imagined in 1989 and 1990, signaled the end of conflict in Europe. What Western Europeans already enjoyed - peace, prosperity, a common market - would be extended to countries like Yugoslavia. Like their neighbors in Croatia and Serbia, Bosnians - Croat, Serb, and Muslim alike - had the same expectations of the post-Communist era. Theirs was already a consumer culture, fueled by ever larger waves of tourists. In 1984, the Winter Olympics were held in Sarajevo. That event seemed to presage the rosiest of futures. . But when the Yugoslavian state began to collapse, Bosnia collapsed with it. Ferocious ethnic and religious antagonisms - held beneath the surface by decades of Communist rule - were seized upon by ex-Communist politicians now turned nationalist, who, desperate to hold on to power, sold them with inceasing propaganda to a nervous population terrified as the civic order they had grown up with fell apart. In 1991, war broke out in Croatia. In April 1992, it came to Bosnia. In reality, it was more slaughter than war. The siege of Sarajevo has gone on longer than any siege in modern history. And, as the world stood by, for the third time in twentieth-century Europe a small minority, this time not the Armenians or the Jews but the Muslims of Bosnia, underwent a genocide. In a shocking and deeply disturbing tour de force, David Rieff - perhaps America's most acclaimed chronicler of displaced people, of lives in flux - journeys into the center of the war in Bosnia, a slaughterhouse made even more horrible by the failure of the West and its surrogate, the United Nations, to do anything to stop the genocide. Rieff follows the civilians, not the fighting. He vividly documents the way the Bosnians moved from their initial shock that this fate of murder and loss was really to be theirs, to their belief that the West, the United States in particular, would help them, to their ultimate, terrifying certainty that they would be left alone to their fate.

The former assistant secretary of state and architect of the Dayton peace accords recounts his efforts to bring the war in Bosnia to an end, tracing the perilous diplomatic negotiations that finally have brought some peace to the Balkans. end, tracing the perilous diplomatic negotiations that finally have brought some peace to the Balkans.

Endgame tells how the fall of Srebrenica in 1995 led to the murder of 40,000 Bosnian Muslims and exposed the failure of the United Nations, Western governments, and the Bosnian state to protect the enclave during the Bosnian War.

Elizabeth Neuffer reports on genocide and its aftermath in Bosnia and Rwanda, tracing the parallel quests for justice through international tribunals and personal testimonies of victims, perpetrators, and those who bring war crimes to the world stage.