A riveting account of the events that led to the slaughter of Muslims at Srebenica -- the Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee of the Bosnian conflict.

In July 1995 approximately 7,000 Muslim men, women, and children died at Serbian hands in and around the old Bosnian mining town of Srebenica. It was the largest mass execution in Europe since the Nazi era; a stunning failure for the United Nations and the Western powers; and the grim watershed that led, finally, to massive NATO air strikes and the current fragile peace. How and why this shocking act of genocide was allowed to take place is still imperfectly understood.

Blood and Vengeance puts a human face on the grim statistics and tangled politics of this event. Through the odyssey of one Muslim family, the Celiks of the remote mountain town of Kupusovici, journalist Chuck Sudetic tells the epic and tragic story of a people and a nation. His narrative reaches as far back as the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, where the Turks conquered the Serbs, and unfolds with sweeping and inexorable power toward the Celiks' rendezvous with history in the so-called "safe area" of Srebenica. Not since The Killing Fields has as powerful a nonfiction tale of spinelessness, savagery, and heroic survival been told. Here is a book as sweeping and powerful as a panoramic, historical painting, yet with the heartbreaking intimacy of a family snapshot. Even readers who may once have felt that the Bosnian War was beyond comprehension will fin Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

At once a stunning piece of war reporting and a heartbreaking, deeply personal story, Sudetic's account of Yugoslavia's bloody breakup enfolds a family saga into an epic historical chronicle. Sudetic is a former New York Times correspondent, a Croatian-American now living in Belgrade. His Serb wife is related to the Celiks, a Muslim family who narrowly escaped death as refugees in Srebrenica in 1995, when Bosnian Serbs overran a U.N. "safe area" and decimated and expelled the town's Muslim-majority population. Tracing the Celiks' history over five generations, Sudetic illumines the inner workings of Tito's police state, charting the family's survival through the German invasion of Yugoslavia and under Communist rule. He brings history into the present when Serbia's president Slobodan Milosevic, "the prime mover in Yugoslavia's slide into chaos," precipitated a warÄwith the aid of his accomplice, Croatian president Franjo TudjmanÄby seizing Muslim territory. The war, according to Sudetic, was basically a landgrab by Milosevic, but was cleverly presented to the West as an age-old ethnic conflict or a struggle between Christianity and Islam. Shocking in its graphic account of atrocities committed by all sides, Sudetic's unsettling narrative gives human dimensions to a historical tragedy. Photos. (July) From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

With thorough, textured reportage Sudetic, who wrote for the New York Times from Bosnia throughout the war, examines the conflict there through the lens of one Muslim family. He follows the Celiks through several generations as they struggle to survive displacement and the loss of family members. His insightful historical analysis establishes invaluable context for readers as they plunge into the complicated historical and political animosities that tore multiple generations apart. Traveling deep behind the headlines, Sudetic's tale offers a lasting contribution to our knowledge about one of the most devastating conflicts of our time. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Most "sociological" analyses of the recent war in Bosnia have been written by journalists, e.g., Noel Malcom's Bosnia: A Short History (CH, Apr'95), Roy Gutman's Witness to Genocide (1993), and Peter Maas's Love Thy Neighbor (1996), among many others. Sudetic concentrates on the fall of the "safe havens" of Zepa and Srebrenica (the best account of that event this reviewer has read) into Serbian hands. He writes primarily, but not exclusively, through the perspective of one family's tragedies in this war, engaging in history, old-fashioned journalism, and even some autobiography, in addition to a postmodern sort of ethnography. The result is eclectic and uneven. Unlike most historians, Sudetic notes that WW II Chetniks sought to exterminate Muslims. But he makes historical errors, as when he claims that "Hitler also created the puppet 'Independent State of Croatia' and endowed it with all of Bosnia." The most problematic aspect of this work is the author's conclusion that both victims (Bosnian Muslims and Croats) and victimizers (Serbs) are the same when it came to stories and "memories of a time long before the war." In the prologue, Sudetic confesses that he obtained his facts through the method of "detachment, disinterestedness, dispassion, distancing." This journalistic attitude is at odds with the social scientist's efforts to attain "empathetic understanding." Sudetic has grafted journalistic methodology onto a sociological search for "deep structures" (his words). The result is a unique study, yet one cruel to the victims of Serbian-sponsored genocide. Very limited bibliography, extensive index. General readers; graduate, faculty. S. G. Mestrovi'c; Texas A&M University From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.