Left on the wrong side: Tony Benn Letter to the Socialist and goes back as far as the GEOFF RYAN reviews Norman Cigar: Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of "Ethnic Cleansing", Texas A&M University Press. £27.95. GENOCIDE in Bosnia is the best exposition so far of the fundamentally reactionary. racist ideology of the advocates of Greater Serbia.
Whilst Cigar is aware that Croats have suffered at the hands of Serbian nationalists (and have also been responsible for attacks on Muslims and Serbs) he focuses primarily on Serb attacks on the Muslim population of Bosnia.
According to Cigar 'the genocide - or ethnic cleansing as it has been commonly known - that befeli the Mus. lims of Bosnia-Herzegovina was ausch tional and unfortunate by-product of combat or civil war.
Rather, it was a rational policy, the direct and planned consequence of conscious policy decisions taken by the Serbian establishment in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina This assertion is meticulously argued and demonstrated throughout the book, with vast numbers of references to press sources throughout former Yugoslavia Nationalism Ethnic cleanser-in-chlel Radovan Karadzic monised by the Serbian chauvinists. thus fuelling hatred. But more importantly, there is a material basis for "ethnic cleansing*.
The more territory the Serbian chauvinists capture, the smaller becomes the percentage of Serb inhabitants. Because of the higher birth rate amongst non-Serb populations Serbs would soon become a minority.
In order to prevent this it is necessary to drive out people of different ethnic backgrounds:
Greater Serbian national. ism is, of coursc, by no means coherent. The Bosnian Mus. lims are presented both as Serbs who converted to Islam and as Turks who settled in Bosnia. such contradictory positions may well be irrational, but if anything the the hold of such a reactionary ideology.
US military
Norman Cigar is by no means a revolutionary Marxist. Indeed, he is an intellectual working for the United States military, It is no doubt this background that leads him to direct his fire against the failure of the United Nations to prevent slaughter in Bosnia.
Unlike his political masters Cigar clearly does believe in much of the tetone or ta New word Oract. Tie canner understand why almost the only intervention the U.N. has carried out effectively is to maintain the embargo agains: the Bosnian governmical Because Cigar is not a Marxist he talks in terms of a non-class world community He doesn't put forward any independent working class soHe also sends to present the conflict too much in the terms used by the wester meusa. Thus, although he is clearly aware that the Bosnian army is multi-ethnic he tends to refer to the Muslims, ratner than the multi-ethnic resistance.
Despite these weaknesses this is undoubtedly the best account of the nature. of Greater Serbian nationalism and a damnine indriment of the complicity of western leaders in genocide.
Althoush Cigar is an aca demic the book is well written and very easy to read. It spells out the real reasons for the war in Bosnia in terms that even Tony Been, Tony Cliff, Peter Taafe and others (who continue to portray Bosnia as a "civil war' between three equally bad "warring factions') may even be able to understand My one real objection is not the content of the book but the price. At £27.95 it is far from cheap: but well worth it.