1 of 5
The headlines were eerily familiar, their sequence predictable, as in a recurring nightmare. August 5, 1998: Kosovo: Serbs Roll As West Watches; September 9: Serbs, Ethnic Albanians Trade Atrocity Charges; September 16: Kosovo's Crisis Is Bad, and Getting Worse; September 30: New Massacres by Serb Forces in Kosovo Villages; October 2: The Killing in Kosovo; October 3: U.S. Sets Deadline for Bombing Serbs; October 9: New Kosovo Refugees, Many Ailing, Scramble to Survive; October 14: Milosevic Accepts Kosovo Monitors, Averting Attack.
When was it that we saw those headlines, with just a few words changed, datelined Bosnia? Two years ago? Five years ago? A century? Time moves so fast. And did we learn anything from that time? Can we learn something still?
Books chronicling the horrors of genocide in the Balkans are not bedtime reading. I know: I've spent too many evenings reading these books, then tossed and turned through sleepless nights hoping to shake the images seared into my soul by these graphic texts. My nights and days are haunted by a whole host of troubling questions. What drives a Serb guard to force a Muslim prisoner to bite off the testicles of another prisoner? How can a human being crush another man's skull under his boots, cut off a woman's breasts, force a father to rape his own daughter, then command prisoners to bludgeon each other with sewer pipe—all without going stark raving mad? That's just the trouble with what happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and now in Kosovo: the dividing line between sanity and insanity, between heaven and hell, is terribly thin and alarmingly fragile. With frightening ease, men and women stepped over a line and fell into a world that would appall Edgar Allan Poe and sicken Stephen King.
These books are a witness to that descent, a testament of unimaginable and unbearable brutality, a free-fall into a new moral universe in which there is no law, no conscience, no limitation. Brought face to face with the dark side of the much celebrated ideal of autonomous individualism, we readers are challenged to re-evaluate many of the assumptions of the modern Western world. For in Bosnia, the unencumbered self did not soar like an angel toward the heavens, but made its demonic descent into the depths of hell.
Many remember the first televised images of life in the Serb-administered camps of Omarska and Trnopolje, which shocked the world on August 6, 1992: the skeletal bodies of men, eyes hollow from fear, abuse, despair. We were incredulous. We'd seen pictures like this before: photos of life in Auschwitz, Dachau, and Belsen. Never again, the world then chanted. How hollow were our words. How na•ve our resolve. And frankly, those photos from Omarska didn't describe half of it. The "killing centers" of Bosnia were theaters of personalized violence, where Serb guards indulged in perverse orgies of physical and psychological torture.
There in the death camps "dying was easy," testifies Omarska survivor Rezak Hukanovic; "living was hard." Such horrors are grisly enough when related by observers like Peter Maass, Michael Sells, and David Rohde. But when revisited by one who spent a long a bitter season in hell at Omarska, the specter of raw evil burns itself into the reader's mind. Hukanovic will never let me forget the picture of
a man forced to drink dirty motor oil. Nor will I be able to erase images of a guard firing into the back of a defenseless man's head and forcing every witness to applaud. The fear petrified upon the scorched face of Durat, who used to be a goalie on the Prijedor soccer team, as the guards pushed his head through a burning tire. A scrawny, dried-up skeleton of a man tearing apart a dead pigeon for food. A son weeping as he is forced to watch the bloodthirsty monsters plunge daggers into his father's body.
share this page
RSS Feed
