Blood and Vengeance. By Chuck Sudetic.

I finally finished this on the plane back from an unreasonably short trip to Boston last week. It's a very compelling and personal telling of the war in Bosnia, although I admittedly had trouble following all the various people introduced.

The most amazing thing to me about it was the extent to which the UN military commanders and other Western political leaders were willing to ignore what was happening on the ground. While he doesn't say it outright, I started to think that it had to do with the fact that most of the atrocities were committed by Christians against Muslims, or at least that the Christians had superior military strength.

It also shows how the Cold War covered up regional and ethnic conflicts for so long. As soon as the dictatorship fell, all the old animosities came back, despite fifty years of ethnic peace and intermarriage. Was it the intense oppression of Communist rule on a fractured society, or would this happen anywhere the existing social structure broke down?