The fall of the United Nations 'safe area' of Srebrenica in July 1995 to Bosnian Serb and Serbian forces stands out as the international community's most egregious failure to intervene during the ...Bosnian war. It led to genocide, forced displacement and a legacy of loss. But wartime inaction has since spurred numerous postwar attempts to address the atrocities' effects on Bosnian society and its diaspora. Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide reveals how interactions between local, national and international interventions - from refugee return and resettlement to commemorations, war crimes trials, immigration proceedings and election reform - have led to subtle, positive effects of social repair, despite persistent attempts at denial. Using an interdisciplinary approach, diverse research methods, and more than a decade of fieldwork in five countries, Lara J. Nettelfield and Sarah E. Wagner trace the genocide's reverberations in Bosnia and abroad. The findings of this study have implications for research on post-conflict societies around the world.
In July 1995, the Bosnian Serb Army commanded by General Ratko Mladic attacked the enclave of Srebrenica, a UN "safe area" since 1993, and massacred about 8,000 Bosniac men. While the responsibility ...for the massacre itself lays clearly with the Serb political and military leadership, the question of the responsibility of various international organizations and national authorities for the fall of the enclave is still passionately discussed, and has given rise to various rumors and conspiracy theories. Follow-up investigations by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and by several commissions have dissipated most of these rumors and contributed to a better knowledge of the Srebrenica events and the part played by the main local and international actors. This volume represents the first systematic, comparative analysis of those investigations. It brings together analyses from both the external standpoint of academics and the inside perspective of various professionals who participated directly in the inquiries, including police officers, members of parliament, high-ranking civil servants, and other experts. Evaluating how institutions establish facts and ascribe responsibilities, this volume presents a historiographical and epistemological reflection on the very possibility of writing a history of the present time.
In the aftermath of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, the discovery of unmarked mass graves revealed Europe's worst atrocity since World War II: the genocide in the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica.To Know ...Where He Liesprovides a powerful account of the innovative genetic technology developed to identify the eight thousand Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys found in those graves and elsewhere, demonstrating how memory, imagination, and science come together to recover identities lost to genocide. Sarah E. Wagner explores technology's import across several areas of postwar Bosnian society-for families of the missing, the Srebrenica community, the Bosnian political leadership (including Serb and Muslim), and international aims of social repair-probing the meaning of absence itself.
Worlds Apart tells of a well-meaning foreign policy establishment often deaf to the voices of everyday people. Its focus is the Bosnian War, but its implications extend to any situation that prompts ...the consideration of military intervention on humanitarian grounds. Ambassador Swanee Hunt served in Vienna during the Bosnian War and was intimately involved in American policy toward the Balkans. During her tenure as ambassador and after, she made scores of trips throughout Bosnia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia, attempting to understand the costly delays in foreign military intervention. To that end, she had hundreds of conversations with a wide range of politicians, refugees, journalists, farmers, clergy, aid workers, diplomats, soldiers, and others. In Worlds Apart, Hunt’s eighty vignettes alternate between the people living out the war and “the internationals” deciding whether or how to intervene. From these stories, most of which she witnessed firsthand, she draws six lessons applicable to current conflicts throughout the world. These lessons cannot be learned from afar, Hunt says, with insiders and outsiders working apart. Only by bridging those worlds can we build a stronger paradigm of inclusive international security.
In July 1995, the Army of the Serbian Republic killed some 8,000
Bosnian men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica-the
largest mass murder in Europe since World War II. Surviving the
Bosnian ...Genocide is based on the testimonies of 60 female survivors
of the massacre who were interviewed by Dutch historian Selma
Leydesdorff. The women, many of whom still live in refugee camps,
talk about their lives before the Bosnian war, the events of the
massacre, and the ways they have tried to cope with their fate.
Though fragmented by trauma, the women tell of life and survival
under extreme conditions, while recalling a time before the war
when Muslims, Croats, and Serbs lived together peaceably. By giving
them a voice, this book looks beyond the rapes, murders, and
atrocities of that dark time to show the agency of these women
during and after the war and their fight to uncover the truth of
what happened at Srebrenica and why.
The attack of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and other Serb forces on Podrinje in the spring of 1992 was followed with mass detention, persecution, and mass killings of Bosniaks in towns and ...villages in the Drina River Valley. The beginning of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina found the Islamic Community in new circumstances and faced with new issues. Mosques and other facilities of the Islamic Community were the target of destruction by Serb forces. The imams were purposely sought by the perpetrators in order to be killed. In addition to the biological threat itself, the Islamic Community and imams were faced with other issues arising in the midst of the war - burial of victims of mass crimes, moral support for victims and their families, and religious activities including religious instruction and support for defenders. The Srebrenica Islamic Community Committee's May 1995 report states that there are 51 imams in their area, most of whom have been involved in the work of the Islamic Community. This paper deals with elitocide on the example of the murders of imams in Srebrenica and its surroundings from 1992 to 1995. Elitocide is one of the key segments of the genocide against Bosniaks in Podrinje, which has not been the subject of significant research so far. This paper specifically deals with the murder of imams as an important aspect of elitocide in the context of Podrinje and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The work is based on information gathered from war reports, as well as the testimonies of surviving imams and witnesses to their killings or disappearances. The aim of this paper is to present a rather unexplored segment of our recent history based on case studies of Srebrenica - the United Nations enclave. One of the most brutal executions of the imam took place at the very beginning of the genocide, in May 1992 in the Bratunac camp when Mustafa-ef. Mujkanovic was publicly tortured and killed. The aim of this harassment and public murder was to send a message to the Bosniak population in Bratunac - that this awaits them as well. In the Bosnian context, especially in traditional Bosniak communities such as eastern Bosnia, imams have represented and continue to represent not only religious authorities but also socially active actors in their micro-communities. Given the specifics of the communist organization of the Islamic Community of Yugoslavia, and the specifics of their status in the then socio-political paradigm, imams cannot be considered elites in the narrow sense, which mainly means influence, power and wider influence and education. Their status is far from any wider and more important influence, but in Bosnian cultural circles, especially in micro-regions, the role and importance of imams is very important despite their unenviable socio-economic status. During the genocide in Srebrenica in July 1995, 26 imams were killed, or half as many as there were in the enclave. This destroyed not only families and settlements, but also complete spiritual communities, which existed for decades on these sites. The planned killing of imams as religious authorities in local communities was aimed at leaving the Bosniak population of the region completely without important local authorities. The genocide of Bosniaks in Podrinje, perpetrated by Serb forces - the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), the Republika Srpska Army and Police and other special units and paramilitary formations from the Republic of Serbia - began in 1992 and ended in July 1995 - left local Bosniak communities almost completely destroyed and survivors with little chance of complete recovery.
Reporting on cases of genocide presents distinct complexities and challenges for journalists, who must negotiate practical, professional, and emotional experiences that challenge traditional ...expectations of their role. Previous research has provided strident critiques of this reporting, arguing Western reporting of genocide in Rwanda and Srebrenica was reductionist and biased and contributed to the lack of Western intervention. Drawing on 22 interviews with print journalists who reported on genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica, this article challenges this dominant critique by foregrounding the voices of journalists and their experience of reporting. Themes of inaccessibility, the moral imperative to report on these events, and the intersection with emotional labour on emotional effects of this reporting crucially demonstrates and acknowledges the challenges of conflict reporting. This adds to contemporary debates around how emotion, attachment and morality intertwine in journalism practice and the importance of this consideration when assessing the impact of reporting.
During ethnographic research into newly established suburbs around Sarajevo, which are mainly inhabited by Srebrenica’s population who survived the persecution and genocide of 1995, I had the task of ...recording certain lifestyle changes of these refugees. This paper analyses the oral literary lyrical heritage of the Srebrenica region, ie. oral songs which were remembered mostly by women. Since I was myself one of those populations I relied on my personal experience that expanded my insight into more detailed knowledge, as well as the various circumstances that shaped the way of life of my respondents. On the other hand, the research aimed, among other things, to examine the role of Srebrenica women in the memory of the intangible cultural heritage of their region in recent times. First, I considered women’s self-organizing as a response to the genocide and the consequent absence of male family members and community leaders. Then I draw upon my research to consider the impact of these activities on collective attitudes toward the memory of the Srebrenicas' former spiritual life examining the presence of traditional and oral patterns in everyday life. The paper relies on interpretative and analytical methods of the science of literature.
The article analyzes how Republika Srpska publicly articulated its stance regarding the July 1992 massacre in Srebrenica, which the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal for ...the former Yugoslavia both classified as genocide. It assesses how this Bosnian entity grapples with and communicates its response to this internationally recognized atrocity within the public domain. The conflicting conclusions of three reports on Srebrenica—issued by the Bureau of the RS Government for Relations with the Hague Tribunal of the Government of Republika Srpska (2002), the Commission for the Investigation of Events in and around Srebrenica from July 10 to 19, 1995 (2004), and the Independent International Commission for Research on the Suffering of All Peoples in the Srebrenica Region in the Period 1992–1995 (2021) — illustrate the ongoing initiatives of local communities to memorialize the 1992–1995 war and reflect shifts in official political discourse.
