The Betrayal Of Srebrenica

Presents an account of the recent history of the Bosnian village of Srebrenica, the site of a massacre of five thousand Muslims two years after being declared a UN "safe haven" in 1993, written by the first reporter on the scene.

“Powerful… definitive… Rohde tells the Srebrenica story with all the shades of gray the truth demanded.” —The Washington Post In 1996, at the height of the Bosnian wars, a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor named David Rohde uncovered a horrifying story that became an enduring symbol of the genocidal nature of that conflict, earning him his first Pulitzer Prize. Endgame is the full-length narrative of the nightmare he stumbled upon in the town of Srebrenica, where a massacre of historic proportions has been allowed to happen due to the negligence of the United States, NATO, and the United Nations. Told through the eyes of the soldiers, peacekeepers, and civilians who were there, this is a vital, unforgettable work of history about an atrocity that could have been prevented.

In the hills of eastern Bosnia sits the small town of Srebrenica--once known for silver mines and health spas, now infamous for the genocide that occurred there during the Bosnian War. In July 1995, when the town fell to Serbian forces, 12,000 Muslim men and boys fled through the woods, seeking safe territory. Hunted for six days, more than 8000 were captured, killed at execution sites and later buried in mass graves. With harrowing personal narratives by survivors, this book provides eyewitness accounts of the Bosnian genocide, revealing stories of individual trauma, loss and resilience.

In a shocking and deeply disturbing tour de force, David Rieff, reporting from the Bosnia war zone and from Western capitals and United Nations headquarters, indicts the West and the United Nations for standing by and doing nothing to stop the genocide of the Bosnian Muslims. Slaughterhouse is the definitive explanation of a war that will be remembered as the greatest failure of Western diplomacy since the 1930s. Bosnia was more than a human tragedy. It was the emblem of the international community's failure and confusion in the post-Cold War era. In Bosnia, genocide and ethnic fascism reappeared in Europe for the first time in fifty years. But there was no will to confront them, either on the part of the United States, Western Europe, or the United Nations, for which the Bosnian experience was as catastrophic and demoralizing as Vietnam was for the United States. It is the failure and its implications that Rieff anatomizes in this unforgiving account of a war that might have been prevented and could have been stopped.

"Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, experts on the Bosnian crisis, recount the Srebrenica massacre in all its horrific detail--including eyewitness accounts of the deportations and the mass executions. They also take a complete look at the incoherent Western plans that led up to the slaughter and offer a balanced and penetrating analysis of this international tragedy and its implications for American and European foreign policy."--Page 4 of cover.