Peter Maass. Love thy Neighbor: A Story of War. New York: Vintage, 1997. Paperback, 305 pp. ISBN 0-679-76389-9

Peter Maass was a war correspondent for the Washington Post when assigned to cover the war in Bosnia in 1992-1993. Love thy Neighbor is a report of that experience told in a first-person narrative. As quotations on the cover of the paperback edition attest, his story is profoundly emotional. Words such as "angry," "passionate," "enthralling," "madly honest," and "profanely eloquent" have been asseverated by previous reviewers who were duly impressed by Maass's war chronicle. Granted, these are apt words because they convey a sense of what readers will encounter as they delve into the unhappy history of Yugoslavia's disintegration in the early 1990s and the ensuing genocide that occurred.
Yet, when reading the story, one is hard pressed to know what the argument is, what lesson there is to be learned by the startling tale that Maass tells through the many personal encounters of a war correspondent. Clearly, he blames the Serbs for the most egregious transgressions of human rights. Here are Maass's accounts of Serb-run concentration camps, images of which ricocheted around the global village in 1992-1993. Maass provides references to reports by the United Nations and the US State Department to support his assertions that, although the Bosnians and Croats are not without blame, the Serbs committed the most atrocities of the war and blatantly sought to obfuscate their culpability with propaganda-driven lies.

In the last pages of the book, Maass's lesson becomes evident: As a non-observant American Jew raised in Los Angeles (he attended an Episcopalian school as a child and even served as an altar boy but never considered himself Christian), Maass identifies strongly with the so-called "Muslim" Bosnians who are, as he is, equally secularized and far removed from their religious heritage. The convenient but unfortunate journalistic moniker for the war as one of "ethnic rivalry" is belied by the fact that the Croats, Bosnians, and Serbs share a common language, culture, and have thoroughly integrated in their many years of co-existence. Yet, inexplicably, in 1991-1992, a war erupts when the aggressive Serbs attack viciously an unarmed and militarily unprepared Bosnian population, which, while largely "Muslim," is also composed of Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians too, especially in the city of Sarajevo.

When considering his own secularized American experience as a Jew, Maass wonders how safe he is in his own country in which there is a lingering anti-Semitism that may erupt into violence. After all, what can be said, can be done, so the recent manifestation in the United States of "white power" and "Christian identity" groups should be a warning. Maass declares that, despite analogies the Balkans are a "powder keg" of ethnic conflict, the people are no different from the rest of us. What is happening in the Balkans is not the exception; it is the rule. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. The smug denial of such possibilities by Europeans or Americans is the complacency that permits a smoldering fear and loathing of The Other to turn vigorously ugly at any moment. This lesson, more than the titillatingly vivid descriptions of war and genocide, is what readers should be gleaning from Love the Neighbor. As Maass writes when alluding to the bloodlust of the Serbs: "Negotiation doesn't work with bullies" (180).

Trevor Montroy, Department of English, UNR