Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West.

Bosnia: A Short History, by Noel Malcolm (New York University, 340 pp., $26.95)

Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, by David Rieff (Simon & Schuster, 240 pp., $22)

Mr. Kelly is a diplomatic historian of the Middle East.

IT IS tempting sometimes, when contemplating the war in Bosnia, to agree with Bismarck's cynical conclusion that the whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. But then one recalls that a great many Pomeranian and other German soldiers laid down their lives in the general European war that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in June 1914. How much the recollection of that summer long ago may count in the calculations of the chancelleries in Berlin, Paris, and London today we do not know with any certainty. Whether it justifies the current flaccid behavior of the Western powers is another matter, though again, I suppose, one has to pause and ponder the possible reactions of Moscow to any determined Western intervention, especially in the light of Russia's savage repression of the Chechen uprising.

Noel Malcolm's short history of Bosnia is a positive gem, the product of profound scholarship, deep reflection, and a decency of sentiment that contrasts starkly with the palsied conduct of Western governments today. He begins his history in Roman times with the conquest of Illyria, the western Balkans, in the second and first centuries B.C. In the next few centuries Slavs and Croats migrated from the east (the Don basin and the northern Caucasus), establishing the kingdoms of "White Croatia" in Poland and "White Serbia" in Czechoslovakia before descending into the Balkans, where from the seventh century onward they came under the rule of Byzantium. The Ottoman conquest began in the second half of the fourteenth century, and by the late fifteenth century most of Bosnia was under Ottoman rule. It remained so until the Congress of Berlin in 1878, when it was placed under Austro-Hungarian administration. Thirty years later it was annexed outright by Austria - Hungary at the time of the Young Turk revolution in Istanbul. Finally -- or nearly finally -- Bosnia was incorporated in the new kingdom of Yugoslavia created in the aftermath of the First World War.

The practice of Islam by the Bosnian Muslims over the past century or so, it would seem, has been fairly haphazard or off-hand; probably no more so, however, from what Mr. Malcolm has to say, than the observance of Catholic or Orthodox Christianity by the two main groups, Croats and Serbs, who make up the other half of Bosnia's population. Whether these attitudes have changed under the impact of war it is difficult to determine, which is why, perhaps, Mr. Malcolm has little to say about the presence of foreign Muslim volunteers in Bosnia, or the financial aid supplied openly or surreptitiously by Muslim governments. It is an aspect of the conflict that should worry Western governments, for selfish reasons if not out of any higher motive. For the West's failure to end the killings and destruction in Bosnia is bound to provoke consequences as yet unidentifiable but which could prove highly dangerous.

Tito's epuration in 1945 - 46 of the Yugoslavs he considered a threat to him took the lives, Mr. Malcolm reminds us, of 250,000 people. The current Serbian campaign, whether mounted by the Bosnian Serbs led by Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, or by the Serbians proper of President Slobodan Milosevic, is designed to complete the task begun by Tito during the Second World War of eradicating the Bosnian Muslims as a people, and the Bosnian Catholics along with them. Mr. Malcolm is scathing in his denunciation of the ban imposed by the United Nations on the acquisition of weapons by Bosnia after the Serbian invasion of April 1992. He is coldly contemptuous, and rightly so, of the British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, for insisting on the maintenance of the ban since to allow the Bosnians to defend themselves would "only prolong the fighting."

There are few works of scholarship that I have read in recent decades that have impressed me as much as Noel Malcolm's. His range of sources is formidable -- Latin, German, French, Italian, and, in particular, Serbo-Croatian. He writes the clearest English prose imaginable, with an enviable talent for hitting upon the exact word or phrase to elucidate an argument or delineate a character. One can only hope that similar qualities, along with a measure of the courage and clarity of vision that Mr. Malcolm exhibits, will inform the judgment of the international penal tribunal at The Hague when it comes to assess, as it is now proposing to do, the guilt of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic for the genocide they have perpetrated in Bosnia.

The tribunal will not, alas, find much to help it in its task in David Rieff's book. His heart is undoubtedly in the right place, and there is no question that he writes well, even if given to a certain prolixity. But he really has nothing of measurable value to contribute to the melancholy debate over Bosnia. Well over half his book is taken up with expostulations against the United Nations, the Western powers, the Clinton Administration, the Serbs -- indeed anyone or any organization that has offended him or disregarded his views.

Something of a veil hangs over his own visits to Bosnia, and what he did or saw there. We don't even reach Bosnian soil until the second half of his book. There is nothing in the way of acknowledgment of what the military contingents from a dozen countries have done there, of the hardships they have endured or the casualties they have suffered. One is put in mind, though the comparison may be a little harsh, of Jimmy Carter's much publicized, brief visit to Sarajevo and Pale: show without substance. Mr. Rieff would have done better to concern himself with the realities on the ground in Bosnia, leaving the diplomatic debate to others. He might then have found out for himself what the former British commander in Bosnia, General Sir Michael Rose, wearily reported on his return: that so long as the arms peddlers, drug dealers, and dubious politicians continue to do a roaring trade out of the war, it is probably fated to drag on for years yet.