The Enemey Is Not Human, Rieff

• The following section is drawn from the book Slaughethouse - Bosnia and the Failure of the West (1995) by David Rieff


• Rieff concedes that all sides in the war committed atrocitites


• But he comes down hard on Serb leaders and on Western nations for failing to curb their aggression


• The slaughter of Bosnia is the story of defeat


• War has its laws, and soldiers, at least when they are failthful to their codes, rightly claim thiers to be an honorable as well as a terrible calling


• If Bosnia proves anything it is that this is a shameful lie


• 200,000 Muslims died in Bosnia in front of the world's tv cameras, while 2 million more were displaced


• A State formally recognized by the European Community, by the U.S., and by the UN was allowed to be destroyed


• The slaugter was led by a group of extreme Bosnian Serb nationalists


• They succeeded through a campaign of propaganda and terror


• Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was about methodically humiliating a people and destroying their culutre, as well as killing them


• A crucial factor in their success was convincing the Serbs they were an injured party


• The waves of UN officials who went to talk to the leader Radovan Karadzic proved to be a hopeless exercise


• Over the years Karadzic and other Serb leaders learned that the Un and the great powers were not going to lift a finger to stop them


• With the world community supine, the Serb leaders only had to win a propaganda war among thier people, which they did surprisingly well


• In reality, the victory of the ethnic nationalists was not inevitable


• They won because of what they did, and because of what others did not do - particularly the West - not because history was on thier side


• They won because the idea of Greater Serbia was coherent in a way that the idea of the Bosnian state never succeeded in becoming


• Because the Serb fighters had 100 guns for every one the Bosnian side had


• They won because they knew how to take old fears and complaints, repackage them, and cause otherwise decent Serbs to commit genocide