This is an exceptionally brutal war.

The Yugoslav civil war is definitely a major tragedy. However, there are several far more brutal (and far less publiced) recent or current conflicts worldwide (e.g. Rwanda, Angola, Sudan). The frequent insistence that this one's location in the "heart of Europe" somehow augments its magnitude is irrelevant at best, racist at worst. And there have certainly been many - more or less recent - wars, fought by very "civilized" nations, with comparable or greater savagery.

Pieter Brueghel, The Fall of the Rebel Angels

"Indeed, events in such places as Sudan and Rwanda more closely fit the definition of genocide. Nearly 1 million black Sudanese have perished at the hands of the Arab government in Khartoum during the past decade. Strife between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda in spring 1994 claimed the lives of more than 200,000-and perhaps as many as 500,000-people, the overwhelming majority of them Tutsi civilians, over a period of eight weeks.[...]

Yet few of the individuals who demand that the United States use military force to stop genocide in Bosnia contend that there is a comparable moral obligation to intervene in Sudan or Rwanda. The U.S. Department of State, which has repeatedly accused the Serbs of genocide, declined to apply that label to the situation in Rwanda. Department spokeswoman Christine Shelly told reporters that while 'acts of genocide have occurred in Rwanda,' it was not clear that the situation met the standards of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. When one puzzled news correspondent asked Shelly how many acts of genocide it took to constitute genocide, she replied, 'That's just not a question that I'm in a position to answer.' If the slaughter in Rwanda fails to reach the threshold for genocide, the conflict in Bosnia does not even come close.

"By my count, the number of fatalities in Bosnia's war isn't 200,000 but 25,000 to 60,000-total from all sides. What surprises me is not that the popular figure is so inflated-informed people can and will argue about it for some time to come-but that it has been so widely and uncritically accepted."

"The Red Cross has confirmed well under 20,000 fatalities on all sides. Extrapolating from that and from the observations of experienced investigators in Bosnia, its analysts estimate total fatalities at 20,000 to 30,000, with a small chance that they may exceed 35,000."

"Today, Silajdzic, now the Prime Minister, routinely talks about genocide and the 'Bosnian holocaust' with nary an eyebrow raised in his audience. But there was no holocaust. For Bosnia, an area slightly larger than Tennessee, to have suffered more than 200,000 deaths would have meant roughly 200 deaths per day, every day, for the three plus years of war. But the fighting rarely, if ever, reached that level."

"A careful search through press reports shows unambiguously that estimates for huge numbers of fatalities came originally from the Bosnian government without documentation: journalists repeated them without corroboration, or even attribution, until the charges stuck. Reporters covering the Yugoslav war as NPR's Sylvia Poggioli put it (Nieman Reports. Fall 1993) 'have been better at pulling emotional strings than at analyzing facts.'"

"When prominent intellectuals consistently level charges of 'genocide', comparing events in Bosnia to the Holocaust, we must demand evidence. While any killing is to be condemned, circumstantial evidence isn't enough, and while it's unreasonable to expect absolute proof, there can be no disdain for facts. There has never been evidence presented for the widely accepted claim that 250,000 people were butchered in Bosnia. Throughout the war, we haven't known exactly what's happened, exactly how many have been killed who they were or how they died. Mass graves on all sides could contain civilians killed in cold blood or soldiers killed in battle who needed a rapid burial or, most likely, both. No doubt thousands were slaughtered in cold blood. This doesn 't mean, however, that Bosnia was a killing field on the order of Cambodia or Nazi Germany.

From contacts in the U.S. intelligence community, I am positive the US government doesn't have proof of any genocide. And anyone reading the press critically can see the paucity of evidence, despite interminably repeated claims and bloodcurdling speculation."

"The UN High Comissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Sadako Ogata said that the tragic tally of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina is between 30 and 60 thousand casualties. Serious information does not corroborate the exaggerated claims of the Sarajevo government."