Hikmet Karčić

This in-depth study of one crucial aspect of the victimization, expulsion, and dispossession of non-Serbs during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), between 1992 and 1995, begins with a gruesome incident in Višegrad, eastern Bosnia.This town will be familiar to readers interested in the breakup of Yugoslavia, as it became synonymous with violence, especially rape and sexual abuse of women and girls.Karčić commences the story in June 1992, at the height of the Bosnian Serb effort to seize territory, when hundreds of Bosniak civilians were incarcerated in the Hasan Veletovac Elementary School.This is just one of the locations where illegal detention, beatings, torture, murder, and rape were perpetrated against ordinary civilians, especially the elite such as doctors, professors and lawyers, politicians, and community leaders.This book is the first scholarly analysis of some of the numerous places of detention, big and small, "official" or "unofficial" (i.e., operating privately in peoples' garages), long-lasting or brief.The book describes the camps as "echoes" of the Holocaust, quoting the British journalist Ed Vulliamy who was part of the group of reporters visiting Omarska and Trnopolje camps in the summer of 1992, bringing widespread attention to civilian suffering there (2).The stage is set by placing the camps in a wider context of illegal, illegitimate detention of civilians across different territories, through the 20th and 21st century.The book is comprised of eight chapters, where a brief overview of the history of inter-ethnic relations in BiH is followed by a chapter presenting the groundwork for the main argument of the work-about the purpose of the camp system being the collective traumatization of non-Serbs-which is then followed by four empirically rich chapters and a conclusion.The four case studies are Višegrad, Prijedor, Bijeljina, and Bileća, where the latter especially represents an important contribution to scholarship as it is a municipality which is virtually unknown to non-expert scholars.This valuable book answers the call made by researchers to deepen our knowledge on perpetrators in the former Yugoslavia of the 1990s, given that, even 30 years after the war started, we know surprisingly little about them. 1 Furthermore, 1

Bosnian · Political science · Torture · Balkan and Eastern European Studies · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Law · Medicine · Philosophy

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