"Complicity With Evil": The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide [Hardcover]

Adam LeBor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2006

From the killing fields of Rwanda and Srebrenica a decade ago to those of Darfur today, the United Nations has repeatedly failed to confront genocide. This is evinced, author and journalist Adam LeBor maintains, in a May 1995 document from Yasushi Akashi, the most senior UN official in the field during the Yugoslav wars, in which he refused to authorize air strikes against the Serbs for fear they would “weaken” Milosevic.  More recently, in 2003, urgent reports from UN officials in the Sudan detailing atrocities from Darfur were ignored for a year because they were politically inconvenient.
This book is the first to examine in detail the crucial role of the Secretariat, its relationship with the Security Council, and the failure of UN officials themselves to confront genocide. LeBor argues the UN must return to its founding principles, take a moral stand and set the agenda of the Security Council instead of merely following the lead of the great powers. LeBor draws on dozens of firsthand interviews with UN officials, current and former, and such international diplomats as Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke, Douglas Hurd, and David Owen.

This book will set the terms for discussion when UN Secretary General Kofi Annan steps down to make room for a new head of the world body, and political observers assess Annan’s legacy and look to the future of the world organization.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“When the nations of the world are prepared to do something about genocide, beyond decrying it, they will have the use of Adam LeBor’s scrupulous and unflinching history to remind them of the cost of inaction.”—Alan Furst

(Alan Furst )

"The author makes a very strong case—backed by research and investigation, and supported by quotations from key players in and around the United Nations."—Diego Arria, former Venezuelan ambassador to the UN

(Diego Arria )

“Adam LeBor has crafted a top-notch exposé of the failings of the United Nations in the age of genocide. It is painful to be reminded of the organization’s errors and lies about Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan, but this is a book we should all be thankful for. LeBor makes a furiously persuasive case that the United Nations must become a force against genocide rather than a cover for its execution.”—Peter Maass, author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War

(Peter Maass )

 “A timely, important book about the way in which the UN has allowed itself to drift ineffectually in confronting the realities of genocide. I wish policy makers world-wide would read LeBor''s trenchant analysis of where the international order has gone wrong.”—Margaret MacMillan, author of Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World

(Margaret Macmillan )

“LeBor''s heartfelt appeal for UN reform points the finger at official Washington, which too often withholds support for the institution and instead panders to radical rightists seeking to destroy it.”—Roy Gutman, Foreign Editor at Newsday and author of A Witness to Genocide

(Roy Gutman )

"Complicity with Evil is a highly readable discussion of the UN''s response to genocide. . . . It is an excellent contribution to popular accounts of international inaction in the face of genocide, and it deserves a wide readership."—Ernesto Verdeja, Journal of Genocide Research

(Ernesto Verdeja Journal of Genocide Research )

About the Author

Adam LeBor is the Central Europe Correspondent for the Times, covering the former Yugoslavia  and the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (November 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300111711
• ISBN-13: 978-0300111712
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #887,208 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Adam LeBor is a British author and journalist. He has written seven critically-acclaimed non-fiction works including the best-selling 'Hitler's Secret Bankers', an investigation into Swiss complicity with the Third Reich, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and 'City of Oranges', the story of six Arab and Jewish families in Jaffa, which was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize.

His most recent non-fiction work, 'The Believers', an investigation into the Madoff fraud, focusing on the psychology and sociology of the $65 billion scam, is published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. His first novel, 'The Budapest Protocol', a conspiracy thriller inspired by wartime US intelligence documents about the Nazis' secret post-war plans, was published this year to great reviews. Foreign rights to his books have been sold in fourteen countries including America, Japan, France, Spain, Israel, Poland, Hungary and Indonesia.

He writes for The Times of London, the Sunday Times and Monocle magazine and reviews books for The Sunday Times, the Economist, the New York Times and the Jewish Chronicle. He has appeared at the Edinburgh and Bath literary festivals, Jewish Book Week and the Montreal literary festival.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mixed Bag, November 25, 2006

By 

maskirovka (Alexandria, Virginia) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: "Complicity With Evil": The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide (Hardcover)

This book excites conflicting emotions and thoughts in me. On one hand, I have little use for the UN as a force for security in the world. Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Iraq, and Darfur have convinced me that if I ever was told that my life was in the hands of the UN, I should start writing out my last will and testament.

On the other hand, I spent six months in the former Yugoslavia in 1994 in the American contingent to the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). I was located up in Zagreb, Croatia and only got into Sarajevo once.

But I feel that I had a pretty good handle on what was going on down there, and I don't totally agree with the author's take on it. LeBor pretty much scoffs at the "ancient hatreds" theory of the conflict, laying virtually all the blame at the door of Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, and many other infamous Serbs. But while I am willing to say that Milosevic and his murderous little helpers bear the main share of the blame for what happened in Croatia, Bosnia, and later Kosovo, they couldn't have done what they did without some historical factors giving them material to work with.

Let's talk about the "ancient hatreds" problem first. LeBor doesn't explore why the Serbs would have been so susceptible to a leader like Milosevic. You don't have to go back to the medieval era to know why. You just have to go back to World War II. In that conflict, the Serbs suffered greatly at the hands of the Nazis' minions in Yugoslavia, the Ustasha (fascist Croats) and worthies from the "Handschar Division" (a Bosniak division of the Waffen SS). It's too complicated to get into here, but with that sort of "not so ancient history," one can understand why the Serbs might be a little unhappy at being minorities in a Croatian state or in a Bosnian state dominated by Croats and Muslims.

Now, I stress, this in no way whatsoever excuses the conduct of the Serbs, but it does better explain it than the "monster plot" theory of the Balkan Wars (i.e. "but for the machinations of Slobodan Milosevic, everything would be right as rain in the Balkans").

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting book with some flaws, August 7, 2007

By 

Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: "Complicity With Evil": The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide (Hardcover)

`Complicity With Evil', the title of this interesting and important work, is derived from the U.N's self-critique of its operations in the 1990s. In short this is LeBor's thesis, the U.N has paved a road to hell with good intentions in the Balkans, Rwanda and lately in Sudan. Many readers may find it troublesome that half the book is devoted to the Bosnian-Serb war, and principally to the massacre at Srbrenica in 1995. LeBor notes that he hopes to "provide a detailed template for understanding why the U.N has not stopped genocide in Darfur." This is a worthy endeavor, but it sheds light on the most significant problem with this book, it is far too detailed on the subject LeBor is most familiar with: Bosnia, and ignores the really massive genocides of the last thirty years, from Cambodia to Rwanda and Darfur, where millions of have died, rather than thousands, where whole peoples have been almost whiped off the earth.
The greatest contribution of this book is the analysis of the inner-workings of the U.N, its slow incompetence and competing interests that time and again frustrated any efforts by any parts of it to do anything in the conflicts discussed. However LeBor's claim to offer a new insight into the Balkan wars and the ethnic-cleansing(page 7) is inaccurate when it comes to framing the Bosnian-Serb conflict. LeBor's bias against the Serbs is shown again and again: "The Bosnian-Serbs killed their prisoners...many of the killers enjoyed their work" and "the killings of Srbrenica were not carried out by battle-enraged soldiers."(pages 117-118) "The Bosnian-Serbs proved less efficient in fighting proper soldiers than in shelling women and children.(page 129)"

The author asks rhetorically "where did this come from, this hatred of Bosnian Muslims." Perhaps LeBor should have asked the same questions to the Croats who elected Tudjman and admired their Nazi ancestors, the Ustasha, or the Bosnians who also ethnically cleansed all the Serbs from the Muslim parts of Bosnia. Unlike in the Holocaust, the hate in the Balkans never went one way. Boutros-Ghali was also correct in 1992 when he noted that there were "ten other places all over the world"(page 29) that had more problems than Sarajevo. One of those places was Sudan, another would soon be Rwanda.

Chapter 6 is devoted to Sudan and the following chapters detial the hypocrisy of the Arab member states of the U.N and the Islamic blocs support of the Sudanese genocide as well as the African blocs ignoring of the Rwandan genocide.

The book insinuates that the U.S has frustrated the U.N in its ability to confront genocide. However the fact is that there are more than 180 other member states of the U.N who ignored genocide in the last thirty years and two security council members, France and China, collaborated in the Rwandan and Sudanese genocides respectively.

The book's conclusion that "arguably the world is more, not less in need of the United Nations(page 265)" is hard to swallow in light of litany of evil that the book has described.

However the wealth of information provided by Lebor on obscure massacres, such as those carried out by Robert Mugabe in Operation Murambatsvina in 2005, the Egyptian massacre of Sudanese, and the thousands of Arab mujahadin that came to fight in Bosnia is important. But these interesting asides also illustrate the general lack of organization in the second part of the book. Unlike the first section on Bosnia, which is lucid, well written, and brilliantly told(if biased), the second seems to be a little cobbled together. In the final analysis, any book which takes the U.N to task for its failures is important and this book makes significant steps in the right direction.

Seth J. Frantzman