"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [4]

Chapter 7

The role of international aid and humanitarian campaigns; the establishment of safe areas; different peace plans and the creeping institutionalization and acceptance of ethnic partition among the Western powers; the Croat-Muslim war; atrocities carried out by Muslim forces; "lift and strike"; criticism of the inactivity and passivity of the international community by Western observers in and outside of Bosnia.

Haskin passes along this quote from Lewis MacKenzie: "Now obviously the critics will say this rewards force and sets a bad example. I can only say to them, read your history. Force has been rewarded since the first caveman picked up a club. occupied his neighbor's cave, and ran off with his wife." She got this quote from Norman Cigar's "Genocide in Bosnia." She provides no comment; hopefully that is because she believes the stupidity (what sort of "history" has MacKenzie read?) and amoralism of his comment requires no explication. Unfortunately, after reading her book I am not at all certain that Haskin has a firm enough hand on the rudder.
Despite the fact that the book purports to "[show] how Western plans for the liberalization of the country resulted in ethnic polarization and the election of ethno-nationalist leaders", it is largely a mediocre and flaccid work of historiography; little more than a "this side vs. that side" summation of other people's work, with occasional--and not very convincing--editorial asides.

Chapter 8

The war ends, finally--and in this chapter, pretty quickly--11 pages to cover the Markale Massacre, the Srebrenica genocide (she calls it a "slaughter" but given how superficial her knowledge seems to be it is not surprising that the April 2004 ruling that it was a genocide had not yet registered wtih ther), Operation Storm, the intervention of NATO, and Dayton. Haskin veers dangerously close to justifying the Serb attack on Srebrenica as being of "military necessity" but at least she doesn't accept the rationales for how that attack was carried out or for the genocide which subsequently took place. She mostly rejects Sremac on the subject--but then again, why quote her at length (as she does yet again) in the first place?

This account is so perfunctory it simply isn't worth the time it would take to analyze what little substance is here.

Conclusion of Part 1

This five-page summary of what Haskin claims to have shown in the first eight chapters. As I hope to have sufficiently expressed already, I remain unconvinced, to put it mildly. Haskin sees parts of the whole, but she began by uncritically accepting the notion that Yugoslavia was broken up "by Western manipulation of the Yugoslav economy"; and that subsequent events were stage-managed by Western powers in order to achieve an end result which benefitted Western financial interests. This, in spite of the fact that even the back cover preview of the book admits that "no formal plan has surfaced to show that the whole thing was engineered to provide a base fo US/NATO troops"; I have no problem with speculative writing, except that in this case she seems to be forcing 'evidence' to fit an ideologically motivated thesis. It never occurs to her than Western inaction might have been a product of a lack of domestic political support, for example.

All in all, a very flimsy case for a very dubious thesis, made with a hodgepodge of hardly-esoteric secondary sources. I won't be reviewing Part 2 in such detail; I will summarize it briefly in my next post.

"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [2]

I'm going to preface this post with two short apologies:

1) Sorry it took me over a week from the first post to continue this review; and

2) Sorry I selected this book without knowing more about it. Haskin does not seem to have anything particularly original to add to the debate on Bosnia. This is not necessarily a bad thing--I don't I have much to add to the debate on Bosnia, either, but I'm an amateur blogger. I freely admit to being a non-specialist and a non-speaker/reader of Serbo-Croat who relies entirely on secondary sources in English for his information. As such, I try to focus more on book reviews and historiography rather than any pretense to original research or analysis. Of course, this requires that I exercise some judgement and a willingness to make critical evaluations of the sources I rely on.

I am not convinced that Haskin is sufficiently aware that she works under the same limitations I do. This book is little more than a summary of other works, seemingly shoehorned into an ideologically pre-determined conceptual framework. A quick visit to the website of the publisher, Algora Publishing, reinforces that perception.

I will stick with this review, if only to give Haskin the chance to redeem herself, but so far I am not impressed.

Part 1
Chapter One: The Pre-War Situation

This chapter explicitly rehashes the argument made by Susan Woodward and Michael Chossudovsky--that the breakup of Yugoslavia was a direct result of a Western-imposed financial crisis at the end of the Cold War. The argument here is nuanced to the extent that she doesn't believe that the West intended to destroy Yugoslavia, but rather merely intended to overthrow the Communist government. The theory here is that disparities between the different republics created fault lines that nationalists were able to exploit; Milosevic most adroitly.

Her 'evidence' is slim, and the weakness of her book is evident within the first few pages; she states her positions briefly, includes a handful of footnotes from the same few sources, and considers her case made. If this were merely an aside to the larger issues to come, the reader could forgive her--but the premise of the entire book is that the West, particularly the United States, were primarily responsible for the breakup of the country and therefore bear a great deal of the blame for the violence which followed. Because of that, it is important that the author should establish this crucial point as best she can before moving on. She fails to do so.

Chapter 2

And yet--often is seems that Haskin's heart is in the right place. Although she accepts one of the key premises of Balkan revisionism, she seems not to have followed Woodward and Chossudovsky into the arms of Johnstone, Parenti, and company.

In this chapter, she briefly summarizes some of the context for the rise of nationalism in post-Tito Yugoslavia; specifically among Serbs and Croats. Nothing here will surprise any readers of this blog, but frankly they will surprise a reader who has just finished Chapter 1 and thinks he or she knows where Haskin is going.

Chapter 3

This chapter briefly summarizes the preparation for war among Serb nationalists, within the Milosevic regime and its proxies, to a lesser extent among nationalist Croats and the Tudjman regime, and the lack of preparation by Izetbegovic and the nascent Bosnian state. Again, there is nothing new here.

One interesting note: While Haskin accepts Woodward's thesis that Western-imposed economic hardship was the primary cause of the eventual breakdown of the Yugoslav state, she explicitly rejects Woodward's claim that the RAM--the Serb paramilitary forces created either by Milosevic or his allies--was created to defend against Western aggression. While I suppose it is good that she rejects Woodward's ridiculous claim, it is curious that she doesn't recognize that this is a warning sign that Woodward's thesis is an ideologically driven project to make the facts fit the theory rather than the other way around. Haskin picks and chooses which trees she likes without any awareness that someone is trying to get her lost in a forest.

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I will probably continue to review Part 1 in a perfunctory manner; Part 2 might merit slightly more measured consideration and attention.