The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society)

Sells barely veils his hostility toward religion (not only Serbian Orthodoxy), and although the events are tragic and terrifying, I hope we value clear thought and honesty more than Michael Sells. He feels passionately, but his book is merely another inflammatory tirade, nearly as mythological and certainly as simplified as the Serbs' Lazar myth.


Essential Realities   March 20, 2000
L. F Sherman (Wiscasset, ME United States)
12 out of 18 found this review helpful

Perpaps no other single book does so much to be 'scared straight' about the realities of 4 critical issues: how religion (here Christianity) and abuse of history can be mainpulated to cause war and attrocities; how and why the word (and international law implications) genocide was avoided; the resulting complicity of the press and international institutions that are supposed to keep peace and stand for principles; how simple answers like 'always fighting each other' were lies and evasions by people wanting a rationalization for not getting involved and even for not caring. It will be difficult to understand the early 21st century without reading this book!


Trenchant insight into the Bosnian crisis   March 30, 1999
10 out of 10 found this review helpful

Unlike other accounts of the recent wars in the Balkans, Michael Sells' book does not merely chronicle the events that led to the catastrophe. The value of this fine work lies in the author's ability to present the underlying ideas, cultural constructs and religious passions that have flamed the genocide in Bosnia. The author focuses mostly on the Serb-Orthodox construct of Christoslavism, but also shows how the Western prejudices against the region have allowed genocide to occur in Europe at the end of the twentieth century. Resting on well-documented research (over fifty pages of footnotes plus appendices), it is an erudite and passionate argument for kindness and humanity towards those less fortunate than us.


Religion as a Catalyst for War   September 29, 1998
9 out of 12 found this review helpful

Michael Sells has written an important book that ranges the history of Bosnia from the days of the Ottoman invasion leading to the war that tore apart the Balkans. Few people have read Sells' book, but it is intensely readable and is instrumental in anyone's comprehension of what really caused the carnage of the Balkan War. He acknowledges the complexity of the region, and does not pretend to portray a comprehensive view of the war from a purely objective stance. Those who pretend to be objective, he says, are naive at best. He therefore limits his explanation of the war through the lens of religion, and the role it played as a catalyst to the outbreak of hostilities. If you cannot spend time in Bosnia, talking to the people there, seeing the mass graves that litter the countryside-- reading this book is a good beginning in developing a basic understanding of what occured there and why.


Good sentiments, flawed analysis   February 16, 2001
Edward Bosnar (Zagreb, Croatia)
5 out of 7 found this review helpful

My relatively high rating for "The Bridge Betrayed" is more a reflection of my agreement with the author's stance than praise for the strength of his arguments. The strongest aspect of this book is the keen analysis and refutation of the key arguments used by both Serb and Croat nationalists to justify their actions in Bosnia-Herzegovina (aimed primarily against the Bosnian Muslims). He correctly notes the frequent contradictions involved in such racial stereotyping and he coins a term, "Christoslavism," to denote the merger of national and religious identity among both the Serbs and Croats. Sells explains that Christoslavic Serbs and Croats found it easy to demonize the Muslim Slavs of Bosnia as apostates and traitors to their Slav race. While this argument has merit and goes some way to explaining the hatred and violence in Bosnia, it does not explain the key national conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the one that more than any other led to its collapse: the conflict between the Croats and Serbs (indeed, Sells largely ignores the 1991 war in Croatia, although it was a full-scale, bloody dress rehearsal for Bosnia, with the Yugoslav Army and Serb paramilitaries honing the methods they would "perfect" in Bosnia later). Although much ethnic and religious stereotyping is involved in the mutual animosities between these two groups, it does not fit into the Christoslavic framework, simply because it is a matter of two Christian Slavic peoples. This leads to another, more important flaw: Sells' analysis is limited as an explanation, perhaps because he limits his focus on Bosnia. For even while it explains many of the hows and whys of the war in Bosnia, i.e. why the fighting was so brutal and why so many religious/cultural monuments were destroyed, how Serbs and Croats were mobilized against the Muslims and the concept of multiethnic Bosnia, etc., but it does relatively little to explain the deeper why: why this religious nationalism or Christoslavism (re)emerged at the end of the 1980s and eventually led to Yugoslavia's break-up.