David Rieff

David Rieff is an American journalist, and the son of Susan Sontag, who reported from the Balkans during the 1990s. Diana Johnstone, in Fools' Crusade, provides an account of Rieff's role in selling the US intervention in Bosnia. Rieff was also a strong proponent of the invasion of Afghanistan.

Diana Johnstone provides a critical overview of Rieff in her book, Fool's Crusade: (p. 48):

"Bosnia was and always will be a just cause", wrote David Rieff...Rieff s conviction was all the more rapid in that it pre-dated his discovery of its apparent embodiment in Bosnia. He had left the United States in order to write about the effect of non-European refugees and immigrants on Europe, firmly persuaded in advance of the imperative need to transform old Europe into a new Europe that was "genuinely multicultural and multiracial". Rieff was openly and fervently convinced that Europe must become another United States, a melting pot. He had gone to Europe "in search of this 'Americanization' of the European future" with the "didactic conviction that in the twenty-first century we would all be polyglot or we would kill one another off".

We did not just think that what was going on was a tragedy - all wars are tragic - but that the values that the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina exemplified were worth preserving. Those ideals, of a society committed to multiculturalism (in the real and earned rather than the American and prescriptive sense of that much overused term), and tolerance, and of an understanding of national identity as deriving from shared citizenship rather than ethnic identity, were precisely the ones which we in the West so assiduously proclaim.

As to the devotion to multicultural society of Izetbegovic's followers, Rieff himself admitted that their "commitment ... to the values of multiculturalism and their belief in civil society had been far less firm" before Bosnia's recognition by the West in April 1992, and "began to wane in late 1994". He explained this short-lived commitment by the fact that "the Izetbegovic government's strategy was to try to get the West to intervene militarily". Particularly in Central Bosnia, he acknowledged, "the Islamic fundamentalists became more and more important as the conflict dragged on ,.."(p. 53):

David Rieff's mother, Susan Sontag, actually attempted to turn Sarajevo into the Bosnia cult's vision of it by going there and staging Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot", in an apparent snipe at the "International Community" which was slow to rush to the awaited rescue...After his first trip to Bosnia in September 1992...Rieff returned repeatedly, "resolved to write as frankly incendiary a narrative as I could", with the idea that what he wrote could end the slaughter...

"Genocide" was a leitmotif of this "frankly incendiary" narrative, which did not fail to compare "the Serbs" to the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge...Rieff evidently considered the genocide charge so self-evident that he made no effort to prove it. He simply repeated the figure that everyone else repeats: 200,000 dead...As to the oft-repeated and never verified statistic, former State Department official George Kenney traced its origin to the Bosnian information minister, Senada Kreso, who in late June 1993 "told journalists that 200,000 had died. Knowing her from her service as my translator and guide around Sarajevo, I believe that this was an outburst of naive zeal. Nevertheless, the major newspapers and wire services quickly began using these numbers, unsourced and unsupported."(p. 55):

A decade later, it is still impossible to say exactly how many people were killed in the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (just as it was impossible to determine how many people were killed in the war half a century earlier). The 1996 SIPRI Yearbook, an authoritative source, estimated the number killed at between 30,000 and 50,000 on all sides.

Kenney concluded:

In the words of the writer David Rieff, "Bosnia became our Spain", though not for political reasons, which is what he meant, but rather because too many journalists dreamed self-aggrandizing dreams of becoming Hemingway.

References, Resources and Contact

Publications

• Texas Boots (with Sharon Delano) (Studio/Penguin, 1981)
• Going to Miami: Tourists, Exiles and Refugees in the New America (Little, Brown, 1987)
• Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World (Simon & Schuster, 1991)
• The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami (Simon & Schuster, 1993)
• Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (Simon & Schuster, 1995)
• Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know (Co-editor, with Roy Gutman) (W. W. Norton, 1999)
• A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (Simon & Schuster, 2003)
• At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention (Simon & Schuster, 2005)

Commentary

• Carnegie Council's resources by David Rieff
• PBS Frontline interview with Rieff (online only) (March 25, 2003)
• Curtis Bowman commentary on Rieff opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (April 7, 2005)
• Foreign Affairs review of At the Point of a Gun (March/April 2005)
• Archive of writings by David Rieff for The Nation.

Affiliations

• Council on Foreign Relations -- member
• Human Rights Watch a board member of the Arms Division
• Open Society Institute -- board member of the Central Eurasia Project
• EurasiaNet -- Editorial Advisory Committee
• Crimes of War Project -- Director
• World Policy Institute -- Senior Fellow
• New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University -- Fellow
• Central Eurasia Project of the Open Society Institute -- board member