HIS 213: Genocide

Blood and Vengeance by Chuck Sudetic A riveting account of the events that led to the slaughter of Muslims at Srebenica--the Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee of the Bosnian conflict. In July 1995 approximately 7,000 Muslim men, women, and children died at Serbian hands in and around the old Bosnian mining town of Srebenica. It was the largest mass execution in Europe since the Nazi era; a stunning failure for the United Nations and the Western powers; and the grim watershed that led, finally, to massive NATO air strikes and the current fragile peace. How and why this shocking act of genocide was allowed to take place is still imperfectly understood. Blood and Vengeance puts a human face on the grim statistics and tangled politics of this event. Through the odyssey of one Muslim family, the Celiks of the remote mountain town of Kupusovici, journalist Chuck Sudetic tells the epic and tragic story of a people and a nation. His narrative reaches as far back as the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, where the Turks conquered the Serbs, and unfolds with sweeping and inexorable power toward the Celiks' rendezvous with history in the so-called "safe area" of Srebenica. Not since The Killing Fields has as powerful a nonfiction tale of spinelessness, savagery, and heroic survival been told. Here is a book as sweeping and powerful as a panoramic, historical painting, yet with the heartbreaking intimacy of a family snapshot. Even readers who may once have felt that the Bosnian War was beyond comprehension will find themselves in its masterful grip.

Balkan Struggles by Andrew Rawson The Balkans witnessed several bloody conflicts during the twentieth century. New nations emerged in 1913, after 500 years of Ottoman rule, only for them to go to war just weeks later. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914 sparked the series of events that led to the Great War. Most of the belligerents would be drawn into the region, while the post-war border changes created tensions.Italian designs on the Balkans resulted in the occupation of Albania in March 1939, but it failed to take control of Greece over the winter of 1940-41. A German blitzkrieg quickly defeated both Yugoslavia and Greece in the spring of 1941, and the population of both countries then suffered terribly as the occupying forces encouraged collaboration and punished resistance.The area was rife with guerrilla activity, as monarchists, nationalists and communists fought each other as often as the occupying troops. This, in turn, led to communism sweeping across most of the region in the post-war years, while Greece was taken over by a fascist regime.Communism eventually ended, but ethnic troubles resulted in a ten-year conflict across Yugoslavia. It would be divided into Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, at the end of the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II.

Yugoslavia by Laura Silber; Allan Little Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation is the first comprehensive political history to be published of how the West lost Yugoslavia. The war is the most violent and costly conflict that Europe has seen since 1945. This extraordinary book is the first to identify and reconstruct the key moments and pivotal events in both the path to war, and in the war itself. For the first time, all the heads of the rival states tell the inside story of the start of the conflict. Written with flair and authority, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation explains how we arrived at the atrocities that no one could imagine in the euphoria surrounding the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Torture, Humiliate, Kill by Hikmet Karcic Half a century after the Holocaust, on European soil, Bosnian Serbs orchestrated a system of concentration camps where they subjected their Bosniak Muslim and Bosnian Croat neighbors to torture, abuse, and killing. Foreign journalists exposed the horrors of the camps in the summer of 1992, sparking worldwide outrage. This exposure, however, did not stop the mass atrocities. Hikmet Karčić shows that the use of camps and detention facilities has been a ubiquitous practice in countless wars and genocides in order to achieve the wartime objectives of perpetrators. Although camps have been used for different strategic purposes, their essential functions are always the same: to inflict torture and lasting trauma on the victims. Torture, Humiliate, Kill develops the author's collective traumatization theory, which contends that the concentration camps set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities had the primary purpose of inflicting collective trauma on the non-Serb population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This collective traumatization consisted of excessive use of torture, sexual abuse, humiliation, and killing. The physical and psychological suffering imposed by these methods were seen as a quick and efficient means to establish the Serb "living space." Karčić argues that this trauma was deliberately intended to deter non-Serbs from ever returning to their pre-war homes. The book centers on multiple examples of experiences at concentration camps in four towns operated by Bosnian Serbs during the war: Prijedor, Bijeljina, Visegrad, and Bileća. Chosen according to their political and geographical position, Karčić demonstrates that these camps were used as tools for the ethno-religious genocidal campaign against non-Serbs. Torture, Humiliate, Kill is a thorough and definitive resource for understanding the function and operation of camps during the Bosnian genocide.

Out of the Siege of Sarajevo by Jasna Levinger-Goy The horrors of the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the very heart of Europe in 1992, may be all but forgotten - but not by everyone. In this book, Jasna Levinger-Goy offers a vivid, personal story of a family of Jewish origin who identified as Yugoslavs. It traces their journey over a period of ten years, starting with their life in Sarajevo under siege and ending in the United Kingdom.Without belonging to any of the warring factions, this is Levinger-Goy's true story, a story that takes place on the front lines in the heart of Sarajevo. The book offers a percipient view of the civil war through the eyes of those who witnessed it. We are presented here with the motives, reactions and behavior of people caught in the crossfire of political and military events outside their control. It illustrates coping with dangers and the resourcefulness needed during the siege and during the perilous journey out, which were needed almost as much in adapting to new circumstances and in building a new life.Levinger-Goy's venture into the unknown is tangled with the sense of loss - of home, of a country and the loss of identity. Her experience provides an insightful commentary on how these intersect, overlap and ultimately affect an individual. It sheds light on human suffering and resilience, frailty and ingenuity, cruelty and empathy. It describes unique personal circumstances, but illustrates universal behaviors. Although the book inevitably deals with fear, pain, desperation, loss, and even hatred, it also reveals much about love, hope and happiness and above all about the prevalence of good even in the most difficult of circumstances.Set against the backdrop of a brutal conflict, this book reminds us of the very human cost of war.

The Last Refuge by Hasan Nuhanovic; Alison Sluiter (Translator); Mirjana Evtov (Translator) In 1992 the growing threat of Serb nationalism in Bosnia forced Hasan Nuhanovic and his family to flee their home for the safety of Bosnia's mountainous countryside. High up in the woods along the Drina River, Hasan and thousands of Bosniak refugees faced bitter nights, deprivation and death, while Serb soldiers covered their retreat with sniper fire and artillery shelling. After many months on the move, the Bosniaks battled their way to the town of Srebrenica, their last refuge, under the charge of a small UN force. When the Bosnian-Serb army laid siege to the town, Hasan's life once more became a daily struggle for survival, battling starvation, sniping and shelling. This book is a powerful first-hand account of the barbarism of those years leading up to the massacre in Srebrenica; it is also an action-packed, gripping true story of struggle, survival and heroism.

Voices from Srebrenica by Ann Petrila; Hasan Hasanović In the hills of eastern Bosnia sits the small town of Srebrenica--once known for silver mines and health spas, now infamous for the genocide that occurred there during the Bosnian War. In July 1995, when the town fell to Serbian forces, 12,000 Muslim men and boys fled through the woods, seeking safe territory. Hunted for six days, more than 8000 were captured, killed at execution sites and later buried in mass graves. With harrowing personal narratives by survivors, this book provides eyewitness accounts of the Bosnian genocide, revealing stories of individual trauma, loss and resilience.

The Muslims of Bosnia - Herzegovina by Mark Pinson (Editor) suzerains. This updated edition features new bibliographic material, including a new section on resources covering Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia available through the Internet.

When History Is a Nightmare by Stevan Weine Stevan M. Weine is a psychiatrist who has spent the past decade working with Bosnian survivors of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. As he listened to their testimonies, Weine concluded that these narratives were capable of bearing a complex truth about the horrific events in Yugoslavia that often were lost in more analytic works on the subject. When History is a Nightmare also explores how these traumatic events affected not just individuals, but an entire society and its culture. Weine investigates the survivors' attempts to reconcile the contrasting, collective memories of having lived in a smoothly functioning, multiethnic society with the later memories of the ethnic atrocities. He discusses the little-known group concept of merhamet. Denoting compassion, forgiveness, and charity, merhamet was a critical cultural value for the Bosnian Muslims. Weine also explores how ethnic cleansing was justified from the vantage point of psychiatrists who played prominent roles in instigating the horrors. He also provides personal portraits of leaders such as Jovan Raskovic and Radovan Karadzic. He concludes by describing the recovery efforts of survivors--how they work to confront the destructive nature of their memories while trying to bring about healing, both individually and collectively.