THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 26, 1996 TAG: 9605290598
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JAMES E. PERSON JR.
LENGTH: 69 lines
LOVE THY NEIGHBOR
A Story of War
PETER MAASS
Alfred A. Knopf. 305 pp. $25.
Imagine scenes from hell. Imagine a country in which one group of people, allegedly religious, torments another group of people with impunity, through disenfranchisement, humiliation, imprisonment, rape, torture, murder and starvation. Imagine this taking place while the enlightened people of neighboring countries not only politely look away and do next to nothing to help, but even go so far as to blame the victims for their fate.
This is the story of Bosnia from 1992 until late last year, as told by reporter Peter Maass of The Washington Post. It is a story of what a frail veneer civilization is, and the horror that is unleashed when order is dissolved. Order, the principle and the process by which the peace and harmony of any society are maintained, implies the obedience of a people to the laws of God and to just authority. With the disappearance of order, as Maass clearly shows, there remains only the law of the claw, lex talionis, and the descent of human beings into corruption and acts of unspeakable cruelty. Such acts are described in sickening detail in Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War.
Maass spent many months in Bosnia, covering the war against Bosnia by the Serbs and, to a lesser extent, the Croats. He interviewed the leaders of all the warring factions as well as leaders of the United Nations peacekeeping forces and the diplomatic corps. The author came out of Bosnia a shaken man, seared spiritually by what he had witnessed - not just the genocidal war against the Bosnian Muslims, but the smooth duplicity by which the forces of reason and peace justified their unwillingness to own up to the true nature of events in Bosnia, much less to intervene militarily or with effective diplomacy.
What resulted from Maass' experiences is a must-read book on a conflict many would like to ignore. One need not be in favor of U.S. military intervention to see from this sharply written work that something is afoot in the Balkans that sophisticated Westerners long ago dismissed from their consciousness: the existence of evil.
Indeed, Maass plainly states that his book ``is about the wild beast, which is not an animal, nor a person, but a spirit of evil that exists in all animals, all people, all societies.'' Understanding this enables us to understand better why paying attention to the situation in Bosnia is important to those of us who do not live there: Bosnia, Maass says, ``can teach us about the wild beast, and therefore about ourselves, and our destinies.''
As an example of what he observed in the Balkans, he sketches one of the beasts who have terrorized Muslim Bosnia for four years, Milan Kovacevic.
``He was a real piece of work,'' writes the author, echoing Hamlet. ``An anesthesiologist by profession, Kovacevic had a walrus mustache that, in other times would lend him a look of grandfatherly charm, but these were times of war, and the gray mustache served as little more than a stoarage facility for the remnants of his breakfast toast. He was bursting with crudeness and chutzpah. You could love him and be repulsed by him at the same time, like a comic who belches onstage and draws waves of laughter. . . . His right hand was on intimate terms with the pistol strapped to his waist.''
The Bosnian Muslims taught Maass by example that whether cultural conflicts pit ``Muslims versus Christians, Jews versus non-Jews, whites versus blacks, poor versus rich - there are so many seams along which a society can be torn apart by the manipulators. . . . The wild beast is out there, and the ground no longer feels so steady under my feet.''
As Maass clearly demonstrates, the lions still need keepers. MEMO: James E. Person Jr., a native of Virginia who now lives in
Michigan, is the editor of ``The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor
of Russell Kirk.'' by CNB