Bosnian Genocide

       

       Slobodan Milosevic was elected the Serbian president in 1987. Riding the wave of intensified Serbian paranoia, he used his platform to fuel rather than pacify these irrational fears of domination.

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        According to contemporary Serbian nationalist propaganda, the Serbian identity had been "under attack." This apprehension was relayed in a Memorandum released by the Serbian Academy of the Arts and Sciences for public view in 1982.   It revived Serbian fears about their endangerment and called for immediate action on part of the Serbs to protect themselves from extinction.

 

       The memorandum was triggered partially by the 1974 declaration of Kosovo’s autonomy from Serbian control through the Constitution of 1974. Kosovo was is a territory just South of Serbia. Serb resentment of Muslims was also fostered in the media.  Propaganda pushed forward stereotypes and rekindled the historic slaughters of WWII. Muslims were deemed as “subhuman and inferior” while all Croatians were equated with the WWII “Ustashe”

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       The Bosnian wars that culminated in the Bosnian genocide can be traced to Yugoslavia’s dissolution into the independent countries of Slovenia and Croatia (1991) followed by Bosnia (1992.)

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       In 1991, the Yugoslav Army invaded Croatia under the pretense of protecting its endangered Serb population (According to the 1981 Census referenced in the Memorandum, Serbian population within Croatia had declined by 10,000 compared to 1948 Croatia.)   The invading Yugoslav army massacred hundreds of Croatian men, burying them in mass graves. In 1992, although nominally “withdrawn” from the area, the Yugoslav army united with armed local Serbs and commenced their purge of the Muslim Bosniaks in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital.

 

        “The Siege of Sarajevo” expanded for over four years claiming 10,000 lives within this period. Rural areas lost 100,000 of their residents. Concentration camps and mass executions were common.​

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       Bosnian prisoners at the Osmarka concentration camp were allowed exactly three minutes to gulp down boiling hot soup. It burned their mouth, peeling off the walls of their cheeks.

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“The bones of their elbows and wrists protrude like pieces of jagged stone….They are alive but decomposed…. they fix their huge hollow eyes on us with what looks like blades of knives.” (PBS)​

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       One prisoner reported counting 700 people surrounding him within the rooms that the prisoners were contained.

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The Osmarka camp guards desecrated the prisoner’s souls and committed unspeakable abominations against their bodies. One prisoner’s skin was severed off of the bloody flesh, all that were left of his eyes were now sunken bowls brimming with black clumps of blood. Girls were raped over and over, mutilated, and then finally killed.

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       Muslim politicians, prominent intellectuals, and other particularly "visible threats" had their bones snapped into half. The mangled flesh of their corpses was left sitting in a pool of its blood until it was thrown onto a truck towering with a mound of other bodies. The dead “stock” was discarded and then replenished the next day.

 

“You’ll all end up like this, you and your families. We killed his father, mother, and his wife. We’ll get his kids and yours. We’ll kill you all.”

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-Zoran Ziga, Osmarka guard reputed to have killed over 200 men, women, and children.  (PBS)

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