The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

genocide in bosnia-herzegovina, 1992‒1995 195
enemies) and the manipulation of fear (on the “rhetorics of exclusion,” see
Stolcke 1995). Other strategies were directed toward those people who were to be
excluded. Yet others were directed toward members of the included group who resisted
the restructuring. (Measures were a combination of those applied to the first
group—that is, “the included”—and the second group—that is, “the excluded.”)
The most ferocious and violent strategies were reserved for the second group. Measures
included the rhetoric of exclusion and the actual exclusion from positions of
power or influence; harassment, terror, and the redefinition of public space as the
“private” ethnic space of the group in power; and, finally, the physical removal by
violent means of most or all members of the “excluded” group from their homes
in villages and towns. The violent removal or expulsion was done in such a way as
to make it very difficult or even impossible for the expelled ever to return. This is
the policy of “ethnic cleansing,” and in some instances when it was pursued to its
extreme logic—as in the case of Srebrenica—it turned into genocide.
THE MESSENGER OF GENOCIDE
On July 22, 1995, I sat on the grass next to the tarmac at Tuzla airbase in North
Eastern Bosnia. I was listening to the story of a man from the Srebrenica region.
I was there with an UNPROFOR human rights team. 3 About a week earlier thousands
of women and children had started arriving in Tuzla from the Srebrenica region.
These traumatized people had been accommodated in tents along the tarmac
at the airbase where a Nordic U.N. battalion was stationed, and they were
demanding to know where their men where. 4 Women were crying for their husbands,
sons, brothers, and fathers, who had been forced to stay behind at the mercy
of Serbian soldiers, while they themselves had walked to Tuzla and Bosnian government–controlled
territory after the Bosnian Serb Army commander, Ratko
Mladid, had organized for them to be bused to the front line. The camp was
crowded and seething hot. This is where the U.N. human rights team turned up to
take witness statements from refugees and survivors. (This was routinely done in
the wake of any military offensive, or whenever there were reports or suspicion of
human rights abuses in U.N.-controlled areas. However, access for the team was
not always forthcoming. Thus there was no human rights team in Srebrenica itself.)
An appeal was made over the loudspeakers for witnesses to come forward. Suddenly,
I saw a man hurrying to the information desk by the tarmac. Both his body
language and words expressed intense urgency: “I have to speak to them”; “I must
tell them.” He was agitated. He had come to look for his family but said he had to
tell us his story first. While the human rights officer was asking, through an interpreter,
the specific and detailed questions she is trained to ask, I was listening in to
the man’s account in Bosnian. For the officer, this was a routine statement; initially,
perhaps, she thought she had listened to many similar stories during the wars
in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia—stories from people who were victims of what
had become known as “ethnic cleansing.” It was perhaps hard to see that this man’s