Cigar, Norman

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CIGAR, Norman

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: Received Ph.D. from Oxford University.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, New York University Press, 838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003.

CAREER:

Writer and professor. U.S. Marine Corps School of Advanced Warfighting and Command and Staff College, Quantico, VA, professor of national strategy; U.S. Army staff, Pentagon, Washington, DC, senior analyst. Consultant to international criminal tribunal for former Yugoslavia, The Hague, Netherlands; consultant to Bosnian Institute.

WRITINGS:

Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of "Ethnic Cleansing," Texas A & M University Press (College Station, TX), 1995.

The Role of Serbian Orientalists in Justification of Genocide against Muslims of the Balkans, Institut za istrazivanje zlocina protiv covjecnosti i medunarodnog prava (Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina), 2000.

Vojislav Kostunica and Serbia's Future, Saqi (London, England), 2001.

(With Paul Williams) Indictment at The Hague: The Milosevic Regime and Crimes of the Balkan War, New York University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Also the author of The Right to Defense: Thoughts on the Bosnian Arms Embargo, 1995, War Crimes and Individual Responsibility: A Prima Facie Case for the Indictment of Slobodan Milosevic, (with Paul Williams), 1996, and numerous pamphlets, monographs, and bibliographic compilations for Vance Bibliographies (Monticello, IL), and Council of Planning Librarians (Monticello, IL).

SIDELIGHTS:

Former senior analyst for the U.S. Army at the Pentagon and professor of national strategy at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, Norman Cigar has written several books about the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the war crimes trials thereafter. In Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of "Ethnic Cleansing," Cigar examines the Yugoslavian tragedy, viewing the conflict "very much from the Muslim point of view," according to Richard Crampton in Times Literary Supplement. For Crampton, Cigar's "approach to the complexities of the Yugoslav problem are simple, if not simple-minded. The Muslims are the goodies, everyone else, to a greater or lesser degree, are baddies." Similar criticism came from Sanya Popovic in Political Science Quarterly. Popovic observed that Cigar's book "attempts, albeit unsuccessfully, to address the lacuna," or gap, in Western scholarly literature regarding the Balkans. Popovic reported that "unquestioned assumptions and slapdash research are the twin threads that run throughout the work and tie it together." Such oversights, according to Popovic, include what the reviewer stated are inflated numbers of Muslim victims in the genocide: nearly 2.2 million, when the 1991 population figures for Bosnia-Herzegovina recorded only 1.9 million Muslims total. For Michael Ignatieff, writing in the New York Review of Books, Cigar's Genocide in Bosnia is a more valuable effort, producing evidence that demonstrates "that ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, far from being the inevitable but random brutality of war, or the unplanned outbreak of immemorial ethnic hatreds, was a carefully planned program of territorial aggrandizement directly ordered from Belgrade," the capital of the former Yugoslavia.

Following the conflict in the Balkans, Cigar served as a consultant to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and in part used these experiences in the writing of Indictment at The Hague: The Milosevic Regime and Crimes of the Balkan War. Teaming up with law professor Paul Williams, Cigar examines the evidence against the former president of Bosnia, Slobodan Milosevic, and his colleagues, and their culpability for crimes against humanity. Mark Mazower, writing in Times Literary Supplement, felt that Cigar's association with the tribunal makes this book "less a historical or political analysis of the events of 1991-92 than a contribution to the prosecution's case." Mazower went on to note that the book "reads like a position paper rather than a comprehensive evaluation of the legal issues involved." On the other hand, James Pettifer, reviewing Indictment at The Hague for International Affairs, commented that "Williams and Cigar are both serious and committed scholars, and have used their combined international legal expertise and political experience in this book to illuminate many difficult questions." The same reviewer further praised the "coherent scholarship" both authors employ in the book. Cigar also focuses on the successor to Slobodan Milosevic as president of Serbia in Vojislav Kostunica and Serbia's Future.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Choice, November, 1995, H. Steck, review of Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of "Ethnic Cleansing," p. 533.

Historical Journal, June, 1996, Brendan Simms, review of Genocide in Bosnia, pp. 574-576.

International Affairs, October, 1995, Christopher Cviic, review of Genocide in Bosnia, pp. 819-826; October, 2002, James Pettifer, review of Indictment at The Hague: The Milosevic Regime and the Crimes of the Balkan War, p. 924.

Journal of Psychiatry and Law, spring, 1997, Stephen C. Light, review of Genocide in Bosnia, pp. 119-121.

Library Journal, May 1, 1995, Zachary T. Irwin, review of Genocide in Bosnia, pp. 116-117.

New York Review of Books, November 2, 1995, Michael Ignatieff, review of Genocide in Bosnia, pp. 17-19; December 4, 1997, Mark Danner, review of Genocide in Bosnia, pp. 55-65.

New York University Journal of International Law and Politics, fall, 2002, Nathaniel Glasser, review of Indictment at The Hague, pp. 264-266.

Political Science Quarterly, fall, 1995, Sanya Popovic, review of Genocide in Bosnia, pp. 485-487.

Publishers Weekly, June 17, 2002, review of Indictment at The Hague, pp. 56-57.

Slavic Review, summer, 1996, Francine Friedman, review of Genocide in Bosnia, pp. 461-462.

Survival, summer, 2002, Tim Judah, review of Vojislav Kostunica and Serbia's Future, pp. 157-167.

Times Higher Education Supplement, December 29, 1995, Paul Mitchell, review of Genocide in Bosnia, p. 19.

Times Literary Supplement, November 24, 1995, Richard Crampton, review of Genocide in Bosnia, p. 9; February 14, 2003, Mark Mazower, review of Indictment at The Hague, pp. 6-7.