Podrinje-Srebrenica

Book title: To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica's Missing,

Author: Sarah E. Wagner
Reviewed by: Peter Locke (Princeton University)

Sarah Wagner’s ethnography To Know Where He Lies examines the innovative DNA technology developed to identify the remains of the estimated 8,000 men and boys killed in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is characterized throughout by remarkable emotional reserve and analytical humility: theoretical ambition is sharply circumscribed, if it is present at all, and the terrible loss and grief of Wagner’s key informants—the bereaved women of Srebrenica—are consistently approached from a respectful distance, with sobriety and sensitivity. In this, says Wagner, she is emulating the dispassionate and somber seriousness, the “careful restraint,” and the dedication to detail and documentation that she observed among the scientists and case managers of the ICMP (International Commission on Missing Persons), the organization most responsible for carrying out the identification process (19). As an anthropologist, Wagner clearly feels greater responsibility to the concrete social and scientific realities she chronicles—the magnitude of the crimes committed in and around Srebrenica, the scope and scientific achievement of the ICMP’s response, the dramatic contrasts between human capacities for cruelty, on the one hand, and resilience, on the other—than to high-flown theoretical debates in anthropology and science studies, which might seem self-important, if not beside the point, in light of her material. Latour and Rabinow are briefly invoked, and Halbwachs’ mentor Henri Bergson pops up here and there to offer guidance on issues of social memory; but otherwise Wagner’s book remains firmly, laudably anchored in the concrete details of the extraordinary story she has to tell.

Author: Oliver Kamm

Careful refutation by a prominent blogger and leader-writer for The Times (London) of the spurious claims still being made to this day by people who, for whatever reason, seek to deny or minimize the reality of major crimes committed during the 1992-95 war in B-H

This is a long post on an insanitary subject. Whereas my colleague David Aaronovitch covers the waterfront in his research on conspiracy theories, I concentrate on sub-sections of that group. I have read most of the main books published in the last 40 years that deny the Holocaust. These volumes of pseudo-scholarship and conspiracy theory are predominantly in French and English. For obvious reasons, this stuff doesn't get published in German. The Holocaust denial that's promulgated in the Arab world is, I believe, almost entirely derivative of this body of bogus history. Being familiar with its techniques, I can recognise them elsewhere. There is a method to the denial of genocide. The subject matter of war crimes committed out of xenophobic fanaticism is, unfortunately, extensive.

Author: Suad Ibišević (MA - International Relations)

In the period between April 1992 and November 1995, when the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed by the states involved in the longstanding conflict, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were systematically terrorised, expelled from their homes, detained and tortured in concentration camps, and many of them were brutally killed.[i] Due to various reasons a small number of responsible perpetrators were indicted and only a few of them convicted for crimes of genocide. As one of the rare convictions of genocide, the International Court of Justice, the highest UN judicial organ, on 26^th of February 2007, ruled that the Army of Bosnian Serbs committed genocide at Srebrenica when more than 7000 men and boys were killed and the Court concluded that the Army officials had the specific intent to destroy, in part, a group of Bosniaks from Srebrenica.[ii]

"He [the sniper] skipped me but got my [7-year old] child. I didn’t have the money for a tombstone so I got a donation from some charity for the purpose." Dzenana Sokolovic, survivor.

"Karadzic was a key figure in the joint criminal enterprise aimed at the forcible and permanent elimination of Bosnian Muslims and Croats from large parts of the BH territory in order to create ‘an ethnically clean Serb state’ there, the prosecution emphasized. On the eve of the war, Karadzic said that Muslims would ‘disappear from the face of the earth’, that Sarajevo will become ‘a black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die’, that he, Karadzic, would tell ‘Europe to go f**k off and stay away until we have finished the job’. According to the prosecution, those quotes clearly indicate the mens rea of the accused and his intent in the war."

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