Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo

Blue Helmets and Black Markets provides a template for analyzing international interventions, suggesting that looking beyond the standard actors and actions yields some significant insights.

Andreas does not deny the suffering or the heroism of those caught in the siege of Sarajevo or the deadly earnestness of those who maintained it. But he wants to make this savage tale whole by exposing corruption's part in exploiting and sustaining the violence. Andreas, with prose as lean as his analysis is rich, avoids moral judgments and focuses instead on the two-sided aspects of this sort of war: the illicit commerce between the warring parties, the profiteering by politicians struggling to save a community, the indulgences of outside agencies sent to help the victims.

In this provocative study, Andreas examines the unexpected consequences of humanitarian intervention.... Drawing on extensive interviews, diaries, and memoirs of participants, and newspaper accounts, among other sources, Andreas argues that the internationalization of the siege paradoxically prolonged the conflict. Humanitarian assistance the international community provided to the people of Sarajevo became incorporated into the criminalized war economy that flourished in the besieged city.... The study also reveals the much more complex social dynamics that emerged and flourished during the conflict. In particular, far from severing ties between ethnic groups, the war economy sustained informal contacts and cross-ethnic collaboration in the midst of conflict. Andreas argues that the example of Sarajevo strongly suggests that uncovering the hidden dynamics of war economies is important because their legacies outlast a conflict's end and continue to shape postconflict reconstruction. Highly recommended.

Blue Helmets and Black Markets is absolutely fascinating. It is a focused, balanced, original, well-researched bottom-up perspective on what really happened during the siege of Sarajevo. Sanctimonious and widely accepted cliches are overturned on nearly every page.

In this pioneering book, Peter Andreas tells the true underlying story of the four-year siege of Sarajevo. Peopled by war profiteers, smugglers, gangsters, common criminals, greedy nationalist politicians, and most surprisingly the endemically corrupt international peacekeeping forces, his account captures the seamy underbelly of the Sarajevo siege, all without losing sight of the suffering of the city's innocent victims. He argues convincingly that the feeble peacekeeping mission helped prolong the siege and in many ways added to the misery of the encircled city's inhabitants. This work will disabuse every reader of the notion that resurgent urban warfare in our time is only about ethnic conflict.

This bold and provocative book is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the dilemma of humanitarian assistance in war. Peter Andreas describes a flawed international humanitarian relief effort that helped perpetuate the longest siege in modern history, in a manner that enriched criminals and war profiteers. Only by understanding why and how such things could happen can we hope to prevent them from happening again.

We know that some profit from war and that some of these profits help finance war, but Peter Andreas pulls back the curtain to reveal how the political economy in complex emergencies is sustained by the very international actors who are charged with trying to limit the suffering. A fascinating and depressing story well told.