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.
. , 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
), ‘ 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
Rever herself faced threats to herself and her family in Europe and Canada traced to Rwandan forces. 5 This claim is based on my own conversations with HRW officials during my time working for them. Bibliography Barnett , M. ( 2003 ), Eyewitness to Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda ( Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press ). Berry , M. E. ( 2018 ), War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press ). Bradol , J-H. and Le Pape , M. ( 2017
of land-holding elites (begovi), committed against Orthodox Serb peasants in the villages near Kulen Vakuf, see Sir Arthur J. Evans, Illyrian Letters: A Revised Selection of Correspondence from the Illyrian Provinces of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia, Addressed to the ‘Manchester Guardian’ During the Year 1877 (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007 [1878]), pp. 39, 77–81, 85, 90–1; for examples of violence that Serb Orthodox rebels com mitted against local Muslims, see Esad Bibanović, Stanovništvo Kulen Vakufa i okoline kroz
7 Disassembling the pieces, reassembling the social: the forensic and political lives of secondary mass graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina Admir Jugo and Sari Wastell Introduction In a powerful documentary film entitled Statement 710399, director, activist, and former employee of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Refik Hodzić follows a trail of clues that he hopes will lead to the discovery of the fate of four young men (one a boy of only fifteen), who escaped the Srebrenica massacres only to be recaptured, interrogated, and
2 Non-existent states with strange institutions Kristóf Gosztonyi Introduction Republic of Herceg-Bosna is an especially opaque phenomenon even taking into account the usual obscurity of Bosnian events. As fighting erupted in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatian Forces under the command of the Herceg-Bosna authorities fought together with the fledgling troops of the Bosnian government against the Serb aggression. Rivalries between Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks, which seemed to have been present from the beginning of their alliance (Halilovic 1997