Volume 43, Number 4 · February 29, 1996
The Missed Chance in Bosnia
By Michael Ignatieff
Balkan Odyssey
by David Owen
Harcourt Brace, 389 pp., $25.00
The Dayton Peace Agreement on Bosnia Hercegovina
US Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, November 30, 1995
The Black Book of Bosnia: The Consequences of Appeasement
edited by Nader Mousavizadeh
BasicBooks/A New Republic Book, 219 pp., $10.00 (paper)
With No Peace to Keep: United Nations Peacekeeping and the War in the Former Yugoslavia 4DL. Include £4.50 for postage.)
edited by Ben Cohen, edited by George Stamkoski
London: Grainpress, 184 pp., £10.00 (Available from Media East West, 4 Panton Street, London SW1Y (paper)
Americans don't have much use for David Owen. As European peace negotiator during the Bosnian war, he came to symbolize for American policy-makers and many liberals everything that was temporizing and casuistical in the European response to the catastrophe. Worse, he had the effrontery to tell Americans that they had got Bosnia wrong. It was true, he said, that the Serbs were mainly responsible for oppression and brutality, but the conflict was not a morality play about blameless Muslim victims and evil Serb aggressors; it was a war in which all sides could be criticized. The story of his failed peace mission in the Balkans is crucial to understanding how the Dayton agreement became possible, but it is not a story likely to command great attention at a time when US and other IFOR troops are being deployed and a kind of peace is beginning to spread across the Bosnian winter landscape.
Review, 3955 words
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