NONFICTION - Oct. 24, 1993

A WITNESS TO GENOCIDE: The 1993 Pulitzer Prize-Winning Dispatches on the “Ethnic Cleansing” of Bosnia by Roy Gutman. (Macmillan: $25; 180 pp.) In the dust jacket photo Newsday correspondent Roy Gutman, head resting on one hand, eyes sunken, looks down and away from the camera. He looks like a man who has seen too much. Gutman was the first Western reporter, in July of 1992, to visit the Bosnian Serb-run death camps in northern Bosnia. The story, in which Gutman interviewed detainees from camps at Omarska (where 5,000 of the 13,000 prisoners were killed) and Brcko Luka, ran on Newsday’s cover, under the two-inch headline “The Death Camps of Bosnia.” German photographer Andree Kaiser’s photos of emaciated prisoners ran with the story. By August, 1992, 94 such camps were listed by the Bosnian State Commission on War Crimes. Gutman was also the first to cover the rape of Muslim and Croat women by Serbian soldiers in the Serb prison camps of northern Bosnia. Gutman’s reports are composed primarily of personal accounts and interviews with victims and local officials, like this account from a gynecologist at Tuzla hospital: “One nurse from Brezovo Polje had lost her mother, father, husband and 4-year-old child ‘in front of her eyes.’ The women told doctors the Serb conquerors decided not to kill her but brought her to their military hospital. She worked every day for them, but every night she was raped. She was sick. She was desperate. She told them she was between two and three months pregnant. But it meant nothing to them.” Reading stories like this, one after the other, is like swimming in blood. You can’t imagine what you were doing on the mornings, afternoons and evenings that these things were happening. But Gutman’s disdain is for the politicians that, as in World War II, closed their eyes to the atrocities and even turned away refugees once eyewitness accounts began to surface in the major media. The stories are bracketed by comparisons, in the author’s note and the epilogue, to Hitler and the “spineless behavior” of Western politicians.