Customer Rating: 
Summary: Powerful testimony to genocide
Comment: This is a best book on war in Bosnia by foreign writer that I have found to date. It is certainly not biased as Mr. Cigar is christian and Bosniaks are muslims. It is a powerful account of events that happened there and recommended reading for everyone interested in Balkans!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: pro-muslim bosniaks view on the war
Comment: The truth in every war has two sides, two stories. This book is half of truth about war in Bosnia.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Invaluable!
Comment: This book reveals the gruesome atrocities that were committed in Bosnia during the Bosnian war. Many people assume that it was a civil war, when in fact it was a genocide. It has been corroborated that Serbians started the war in an attempt to annihilate non-Serbs and create a "Great Serbia", comprising of serbs only. Other reviewers who have criticized the book are clearly oblivious to the following facts: of the 300.000 victims in Bosnia- 85% were Muslims; 90% of all war crimes in Bosnia were committed by Serbs ( Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, Arkan and numerous others). On that account, we can conclude that Serbs are the perpetrators and Muslims are the victims. This is a fact of life. I highly recommend this book to people who want to know the truth about the war in Bosnia.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not bad, but....
Comment: This book dissects meticulously various reasons & aspects of the bosnian deluge. All in all, it's an indispensable reading. BUT, it oversimplifies one aspect of war: Croat-Muslim conflict. An uninformed reader may get the impression that Croats tried to cleanse Muslims from Central Bosnia and Herzegovina. Numbers speak the opposite: 1. Intercommunal fighting ethnically "cleansed" 150,000 Croats from Muslim-held areas & 50,000 Muslims from Croat-held areas.
2. Civilian victims of coldly calculated massacres: circa 200 Muslims and 960 Croats.
3. In Central Bosnia, Croatian forces ( HVO) fought ( successfully ) an uphill battle-they were outnumbered 12/1 by Muslim soldiers.
*This* story was presented one-sidedly & schematically via accepted stereotypes ( poor Muslims, who as if by magic earned the name Bosnians, are purely & undisputably the sole victims ). Yet, they were as yet unrecognized aggressors & butchers as well.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A good general source
Comment: Cigar's "Genocide in Bosnia" is a commendable analysis of the political developments, primarily in Serbia, which eventually made possible the atrocities committed in Bosnia, and of the equivocation and general impotence of Western Europe and America in the early phases of the war. Cigar unambiguously takes the view that genocide was in fact committed in Bosnia, first and primarily by the Serbian forces and later by the Croats, and he backs up this argument with a great deal of meticulous research. Cigar's crucial point is that creating the political atmosphere which made it possible for a large number of people to accept what were generally genocidal actions was a top-down process, initiated and fomented by political leaders such as Milosevic (and later Croatia's Tudjman) who found that vitriolic and virulent nationalism was useful means to cement their hold on power. This, of course, flies in the face of the oft-repeated view of conflict fueled by irrational "ancient ethnic hatreds" proffered by spineless politicians and Balkan "experts." The truth was (and is) that the dubious concept of historical memory was simply a political tool to generate and maintain mass support. Perhaps Cigar can be criticized for having an excessively pro-Muslim bias, but regardless of what one thinks of individual Muslims political or military leaders, the Bosnian Muslims, and all of those (Muslim, Croat or Serb) who wanted a unified multiethnic Bosnia, were by far the primary victims of the war. My principal criticism is that Cigar overplays the extent of opposition and criticism to the Croat-Muslim conflict and official Croatian policy toward Bosnia in general among certain groups and institutions in Croatia (while at the same time downplaying such opposition in Serbia). Particularly questionable is Cigar's example of the Catholic Church as a source of opposition to Tudjman's policies in Croatia. While many in the Church hierarchy did make guarded public protests, much of the Church's rank-and-file passively or actively supported Tudjman's nationalist policies (this was very much the case in Herzegovina). Also, the last few chapters, in which Cigar discusses prospects for the future and dwells on junctions where different policy actions could have been taken are both dated (the book was published in 1995 before the key turning points in both Croatia and Bosnia that year) and engage in too much pointless speculation.
