Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace

2006; American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages; Volume: 50; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/20459406

2325-7687

Cynthia Simmons, Swanee Hunt,

Balkan and Eastern European Studies

September 11, 001, I was sitting at my desk, writing captions for my photographs of shelled buildings in Sarajevo, for the Bosnian edition of this book.With shock written across her face, a colleague summoned me to the tv.I watched as a plane hit the second World Trade Center tower.Then I returned to my desk, not daring to say aloud what I was thinking: ''Now maybe we'll understand what the people in Bosnia felt.''How naïve.Wasting no time on reflection, America's leaders launched into bellicose breast-pounding.Human rights were flagrantly disregarded.The world map was painted in black and white: ''You're either for us or against us,'' President Bush declared.The terrorist act was transformed into an excuse for attacking Iraq, whose leader, our erstwhile friend Saddam Hussein, was suddenly worth spending hundreds of billions of dollars to bring down.The ''opportunity costs'' of that decision were staggering.With the same resources, America could have solved most of the humanitarian crises in the world and become the friend of billions.Instead, legions of Muslims feel humiliated by the arrogance implicit in our go-it-alone foreign policy and have vowed revenge.What went wrong?The swagger in our current foreign policy leadership is not only unseemly but also dangerous.To quote a wise bumper sticker, ''We're making enemies faster than we can kill them.''In contrast, this book proposes a decidedly unswaggering view of foreign policy.It looks to long-term relationships rather than short-fused rhetoric.It grapples with issues in the gray middle-issues like accountability in the midst of mass hysteria, the preservation of privilege cloaked in victimhood, and the psychological demand for justice.It elevates the voices of those who can distinguish between religion as a path for life and religion as a pretext for killing.It empowers leaders invested in a safe place for their children more than territory for themselves.It listens to the cries of women in war, understanding that their experience is instructive and their perceptions insightful.