Abstract
The imposition of the Law on the Prohibition of Genocide Denial and the Glorification of War Criminals by amending Bosnia’s Criminal Code was passed on 23 July 2021, by the internationally appointed envoy, the High Representative (HR) Valentin Inzko. Valentin, an Austrian diplomat who served as HR in BiH from 2009 to 2021, used his special ‘Bonn powers’ to make the amendment, which unfortunately pushed Bosnia towards another ‘political upheaval’. Genocide (Srebrenica genocide), one of the most heinous crimes and a type of ‘political violence’ committed with an intent to wholly destroy a group’s identity, is denounced by many public intellectuals and political leaders. Despite mounting evidence and forensic reports approved by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), deniers of Srebrenica continue to reverse the roles of victims and perpetrators. Moreover, the ardent advocates of genocide denial regularly occupy the space by disseminating Serbian nationalism which is inherently sponsoring the genocidal affinities. Serb political leadership and academicians are constantly declaring the Srebrenica genocide as the ‘greatest deception of the twentieth century’ and often refer to it as a fabricated myth laid by Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims). The ‘genocide denial’ narrative in Bosnia is as old as the genocidal tendency, whose trajectory lies within Serbian ethnonationalism.
While much scholarship has been written on the subject of genocide, this treatise goes beyond the conventional explorations and attempts to theorise what had befallen in Bosnia–Herzegovina at the time of genocide. The book Torture, Humiliate, Kill: Inside the Bosnian Serb Camp System by Himet Karčić, a genocide and holocaust scholar, has produced a timely work covering the inhumane incidents of genocide, its significance and its discourse with genocide denial.
This book provides an explanation of the circumstances surrounding the genocidal events that unfolded in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country that had a history of multicultural and multireligious identities, or ‘diversity with unity’ under Josip Broz Tito. One of the most important points the author makes in this book is that the genocide in Bosnia did not begin and culminate with the ‘Srebrenica genocide’. However, the world came to know about it after a reign of terror unleashed in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995, which was first exposed by a few foreign journalists and later led to global outrage.
This book is divided into seven chapters, excluding the Introduction. In this book, the author has dealt with the six strategic goals which were promulgated under the guidance of Serbian political and academic leadership to achieve their ulterior ethno-nationalist agendas.
Bosniak victims were subjected to a variety of gruesome methods of torture before Serbian authorities could conduct the genocide of Bosnian Muslims. Bosniak women and children were earmarked and separated from their males before the mass executions took place. The whole exercise was conducted in a clandestine fashion inside the detention/concentration camps/ torture centres set up throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, also referred as ‘death camps’ and which continue to be infamous for their barbarity.
The author emphasises that ‘torture’ and ‘humiliate’ were the most ‘choiciest’ weapons used by Serb forces on their opponents (Bosniaks). Since the aim to kill their ‘mortal enemy’ (Hajdarpasic, 2015) was not enough, therefore Serbs relied on ‘collective traumatisation’ to weaken them and break down their morale. This victimisation, which contributed to their goal, was not only inhumane but also beyond human endurance. The ‘collective humiliation or traumatisation’ as theorised by the author was a principle strategic aim present at the core of all concentration camps in the country and is the primary argument of this book.
The prime objective for setting up torture and concentration camps was the permanent erasure of enemies from territory that Serbs considered their own. According to the author, the threefold objective of Serb perpetrators was to humiliate the enemy, traumatise the Bosnian population and force them to flee. Karčić further argues that the absence of foreign media in Bosnia due to the blockade would have exacerbated the death rate if the aim of the perpetrators was only to kill, but the aim was to dehumanise them in the first place by inflicting lasting physical and psychological trauma on the survivors. The most excruciating details from the ICTY and ICJ, examined by the author, determine that these strategies satisfied Serb aggression. Retreating those dehumanising methods employed by the Serb army/ police/ high-rank officials and security guards stationed outside the concentration camps, the author provides a brief summary of events in this book. Employing diverse methods such as witness statements, archival documents, accepted evidence and court judgments, Karčić illustrates that the torture camps run by the Serb police were relatively more brutal than the torture camps run by the Serb army.
Another main contribution of this book is that the author analyses the multiple stages of torture and it reveals that the roots of violence have evolved from a micro to a meso level. The idea behind what the author refers to as ‘personalised crime’ originated at the micro level, when those who committed murder, torture and rape were aware of the victims. Later, the meso-level criminals organised it. For example, the micro-level perpetrators included the local police force, and municipalities and Crisis Committee (a governing body) were meso-level perpetrators.
The last four chapters are the thematic chapters that deal with the four geographically unique towns from Bosnia and Herzegovina—Višegrad, Prijedor, Bijeljina and Bileća—have been used as case study. In these thematic chapters, Karčić provides a snapshot of political and military events specifically with respect to massacres, ethnic cleansing, extermination, forced deportation, destruction of religious figures, plight inside miliary barracks and police stations resulting a clear demographic changes in Bosnia–Herzegovina. In the last three chapters, Hikmet Karčić maps out those gruesome tactics that were used by Serb perpetrators to exterminate the non-Serb populace quickly.
These four towns were chosen by perpetrators because they were more significant from a political and strategic standpoint. But these four towns are the main focus of the book because, despite being geographically distinctive, the cleansing patterns followed by the perpetrators were similar in all four. Although genocidal tendencies were predominantly present within the Serbian community and were aggravated after independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the camps were used by perpetrators as tools to execute their ethno-genocidal campaign. In the aftermaths, pre-engineered coverup operations were carried during night time which included digging up victims from the original place of mass execution and reburying their body parts at different places in order to completely destroy the evidences from international communities.
First and foremost, the book is crucial in establishing credible proof of the occurrence of the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is being refuted by numerous eminent authors, media outlets, journalists and politicians. For instance, Serbian and Russian media outlets are actively sponsoring and propagating the false narratives of genocide. One of the leading deniers of the Bosnian genocide is the Austrian author and Nobel laureate Peter Handke. Noam Chomsky, who believes that the crimes in Bosnia do not meet the definition of genocide, is another genocide denier. Serbian Presidents Tomislav Nikolić, Alexander Vučić, Prime Minister Ana Brnabić and the leader of BiH Republika Srpska entity, Milorad Dodik, have openly denied saying that ‘there was no Genocide in Srebrenica’. The rhetoric of denial of genocide in Western Balkans is mixed up with toxic narratives such as revisionism, negationism and triumphalism. The president of Genocide Watch, Gregory H. Stanton, who has developed at least 10 stages of genocide, considers denial of genocide or existence of crimes to be the final stage of genocide. Through this work, the author debunks those who deny that the Bosnian town of Srebrenica was the site of a genocide, or ‘Srebrenica deniers’.
To establish fresh facts and arguments within the domain, the book adhered to a strict historical study and historical comparative research methodology. It also brings theory of collective traumatisation into fore. Moreover, it is a thorough piece of research which is full of facts and evidences with the testimonies of survivors, court judgements and proceedings and perpetrators documentation burrowed from the rulings from the ICTY, the Court of BiH, cantonal and federal courts, the Vancouver Federal Court in Canada, the Dubrovnik Municipal Court.
This study is one of a kind and was conducted using a technique to explore the case study of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s torture cells or concentration camps. Karčić’s work would help bridge the knowledge gap between domestic and foreign audiences regarding the genocidal events and how its intentions manifested in the Bosnian villages, municipalities, towns and cities. Numerous books and articles have been written about the Bosnian genocide, but none of them include in-depth analyses of the camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Instead, they tend to focus on mass crimes and genocide in general or on a single town or village.