The subject of forensic specialist‘s work with human remains in the aftermath of conflict has remained largely unexplored within the existing literature. Drawing upon anthropological fieldwork conducted from 2009–10 in three mortuary facilities overseen by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), this article analyses observations of and interviews with ICMP forensic specialists as a means of gaining insight into their experiences with the remains of people who went missing during the 1992–95 war in BiH. The article specifically focuses on how forensic specialists construct and maintain their professional identities within an emotionally charged situation. Through analysing forensic specialists encounters with human remains, it is argued that maintaining a professional identity requires ICMP forensic specialists to navigate between emotional attachment and engagement according to each situation.
International interventions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, that ultimately brought the war to a standstill, emphasised recovering and identifying the missing as chief among the goals of post-war repair and reconstruction, aiming to unite a heavily divided country. Still, local actors keep,showing that unity is far from achieved and it is not a goal for all those involved. This paper examines the various actors that have taken up the task of locating and identifying the missing in order to examine their incentives as well as any competing agendas for participating in the process. These efforts cannot be understood without examining their impact both at the time and now, and we look at the biopolitics of the process and utilisation of the dead within. Due to the vastness and complexity of this process, instead of a conclusion, additional questions will be opened required for the process to keep moving forward.
This article focuses on the judicial consideration of the scientific analysis of the Tomašica mass grave, in the Prijedor municipality of Republika Srpska in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Often referred to as the largest mass grave in Europe since the Second World War, this grave was fully discovered in September 2013 and the scientific evidence gathered was included in the prosecution of Ratko Mladić before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Based on the exhaustive analysis of all the publicly available trial transcripts, this article presents how the Tomašica evidence proved symptomatic of the way in which forensic sciences and international criminal justice intertwine and of the impact of the former over the latter on the admissibility of evidence, the conduct of proceedings and the qualification of the crimes perpetrated.
between public authorities and civil society organisations. The intended objectives of a corridor are largely contingent on the context in which it is implemented. Most of the time, it provides access to an area whose sovereignty is challenged, during an armed conflict, as was the case in Bosnia in 1992–95, in Chechnya in 2000, in Darfur in 2003–06, and more recently in Ukraine, for the evacuation of the cities of Donetsk, Luhansk and Horlivka in 2014. 2 But the opening of a humanitarian corridor can also be a response to border closure in peacetime. In 2014, for
. , 2020b ). Forms of violence vary between and within conflicts. For example, forced witnessing of sexual violence against others – an often overlooked type of sexual violence – was reportedly common in conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina, eastern DRC and Myanmar, among others ( Touquet, forthcoming ; Chynoweth, 2019a ; Promundo, 2013 ). Genital violence was commonplace against men and boys in conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kenya, and has been reported in other settings
–5). Témoignage , here, was not only an act of speaking out against state violence, but also an act of resistance against complicity with the notorious practices of the Ethiopian state. As cold war binaries collapsed in the 1990s, long-suppressed grievances erupted in the form of civil wars, posing new challenges to the stability of nation states. States retaliated viciously: from Iraqi Kurdistan to Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya, civilians came under increasing fire. Amid such
Cold War, which is endangering both humanitarian teams and the operations they conduct. References to ‘before’ have been heard since the mid-1990s, in the wake of the Bosnian War and the Tutsi genocide. The mass killings in Bosnia and Rwanda – coming on the heels of the Somali and Liberian civil wars – created a landscape of widespread violence, ‘anarchic conflicts’ in which not even humanitarian workers or journalists were safe. People stressed the contrast with earlier
Introduction As an academic and practitioner for more than forty years, we asked Tony for his take on innovation from a personal perspective and how this might have changed throughout his career. Tony has worked with medical emergency teams in a range of disasters and conflicts including earthquakes in Armenia (1988), Iran (1990), China (2008) and Haiti (2010), conflicts in Bosnia (1991–96), Kosovo (1999–2000), Sierra Leone (2000) and Gaza (2014
), ‘ Conflict-Related Sexual Violence against Males: Recognition by and Responses of Humanitarian Organisations in Africa ’ ( Unpublished doctoral thesis , Nelson Mandela University , Port Elizabeth ). All Survivors Project (ASP) ( 2017 ), Legacies and Lessons: Sexual Violence against Men and Boys in Sri Lanka and Bosnia and Herzegovina
this is legal, since 2006 ( Daccord, 2018 ). The British Red Cross also admitted ‘a small number’ of sexual harassment or abuse cases in the UK ( Gillespie et al. , 2018 ). This sits in a longer international context, including the controversies around UN peacekeeping forces, starting with Cambodia in 1993, encompassing Bosnia and Herzegovina, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, DRC and Haiti, which led to the UN concluding in 2013 that the biggest risk in peacekeeping