Endgame

"Yes, so this book is an incredibly detailed, day-to-day construction of the fall of Srebrenica in July of 1995 by a very brave and very smart investigative reporter for the New York Times. He’s the reporter who just escaped from the Taliban — he was seized seven months ago while doing interviews for a new book on America’s involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s indescribably wonderful that he’s free. He hates to talk about himself, but in 1995 he was also taken prisoner by the Bosnian Serbs while reporting on Srebrenica. Endgame is this completely gripping account of how the Srebrenica massacre unfolded — from the perspective of the Serbs who conquered Srebrenica, from the point of view of the Bosnian Muslims who fled or were slaughtered, and also the perspective of the UN peacekeepers there, who were Dutch. It’s really one of the great disasters of UN peacekeeping. Some 7,000 people are systematically killed by the Serb nationalist forces, making it the worst war crime in Europe since World War II, while you have this UN peacekeeping mission on the ground. It’s this incredibly vivid day-by-day and hour-by-hour reconstruction of the disaster, from every angle. You’re following it as the Serb nationalist forces led by Ratko Mladic are getting ready to go after the Bosnians. Mladic is the military leader of the Serb nationalist forces in Bosnia and has now been twice indicted for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by the UN war crimes tribunal. And he is still at large and has been spotted many times in Serbia . Mladic is driving the attack every step of the way, his military are sweeping in from the south. Along the way, they also attack the UN, the Dutch observation posts, and they take hostages. The Dutch are outnumbered and outgunned, and they’re abandoning their posts. And you know how it’s going to end — and yet it’s still just excruciating reading about the attempt to try and see if NATO will use air power, what’s called close air support, to try to stop this Serb advance. And in the end there isn’t. There’s one quick strike, after six Dutch requests, but there’s no serious use of close air support. There’s civilians desperately fleeing everywhere. Mladic personally enters the town. When the town falls, what the Serb forces do is separate the women from the men and boys – some as young as 12 years old, and some as old as 77 years old. And the men and boys of Srebrenica either flee into the woods and are hunted down and shelled and shot by the Serb nationalist forces, or the ones who don’t flee are gathered up and systematically executed by well organized Serb nationalist death squads. Late at night the Dutch troops hear gunshots coming from the soccer field. The most basic reason is that there aren’t really NATO governments that are invested in stopping this, that are prepared to make a big commitment, and to take risks. The UN forces on the ground actually functioned, in some ways, as hostages. There were 450 Dutch troops that are surrounded at their base in Potocari. And people are afraid that if you start bombing Mladic’s forces, he will retaliate against the Dutch. This was a classic move in Mladic’s playbook, to take UN peacekeepers hostage, and turn around and bluff the NATO governments saying “Look, I know you guys are much more worried about your own soldiers than you are about these Bosnians, so just let me get away with it.” And the UN has learned a lot of lessons from this, this real low moment of peacekeeping. Because considering the terrible situations UN troops are normally going into, the UN peacekeepers often do rather well, and they learned some important lessons from Srebrenica. For one thing, you can have your troops go in with rules of engagement, so that they can actually defend the civilian population properly. For the UN mission which was in place in Bosnia, their rules of engagement were that they were basically there to secure deliveries of humanitarian aid. So they can defend themselves, and they can defend UN aid convoys, but they weren’t allowed to return fire if Bosnian civilians were getting killed under their nose. The joint UN-African Union mission that’s on the ground in Darfur now, has much tougher rules of engagement. The UN has learned something from the experience in Srebrenica. So this book is just full of cautionary tales about intervention, about what it really means on the ground, about how to make intervention work properly, and the way in which things can go horribly wrong. It tells the story from every side, with this scrupulous commitment to getting the facts out, to telling the whole story. It’s an incredible piece of reporting. It’s just a great book."