5 The disposal of corpses in an ethnicized civil war: Croatia, 1941–45 1 Alexander Korb Introduction In May 1943, an Italian general who was being held prisoner of war was discussing the course of the war with his colleagues. He was describing an incident that had occurred in the territory occupied by Italy in Croatia and, unknown to him, he was overheard by his British supervisors. The incident concerned the recovery of the corpses of murdered Serbs thrown by the perpetrators – Croatian nationalists – into karst caves, which are typical land formations in that
This paper traces the massacres of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war in November 1941 in the city of Bobruisk, Eastern Belarus. Sparked by a current memorial at one of the killing sites, the author examines the historic events of the killings themselves and presents a micro level analysis of the various techniques for murdering and disposing of such large numbers of victims. A contrast will be shown between the types of actions applied to the victims by the German army, SS, police personnel and other local collaborators, reflecting an imposed racial hierarchisation even after their death.
This article analyses the management of bodies in Brazil within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its objective is to examine how the confluence of underreporting, inequality and alterations in the forms of classifying and managing bodies has produced a political practice that aims at the mass infection of the living and the quick disposal of the dead. We first present the factors involved in the process of underreporting of the disease and its effects on state registration and regulation of bodies. Our analysis then turns to the cemetery to problematise the dynamics through which inequality and racism are re-actualised and become central aspects of the management of the pandemic in Brazil. We will focus not only on the policies of managing bodies adopted during the pandemic but also on those associated with other historical periods, examining continuities and ruptures, as well as their relationship to long-term processes.
The appearance of corpses in rubbish tips is not a recent phenomenon. In Argentina, tips have served not only as sites for the disposal of bodies but also as murder scenes. Many of these other bodies found in such places belong to individuals who have suffered violent deaths, which go on to become public issues, or else are ‘politicised deaths’. Focusing on two cases that have received differing degrees of social, political and media attention – Diego Duarte, a 15-year-old boy from a poor background who went waste-picking on an open dump and never came back, and Ángeles Rawson, a girl of 16 murdered in the middle-class neighbourhood of Colegiales, whose body was found in the same tip – this article deals with the social meanings of bodies that appear in landfills. In each case, there followed a series of events that placed a certain construction on the death – and, more importantly, the life – of the victim. Corpses, once recognised, become people, and through this process they are given new life. It is my contention that bodies in rubbish tips express – and configure – not only the limits of the social but also, in some cases, the limits of the human itself.
The rich earlier Mid Upper Palaeolithic (Pavlovian) sites of Dolní Vĕstonice I and II and Pavlov I (∼32,000–∼30,000 cal BP) in southern Moravia (Czech Republic) have yielded a series of human burials, isolated pairs of extremities and isolated bones and teeth. The burials occurred within and adjacent to the remains of structures (‘huts’), among domestic debris. Two of them were adjacent to mammoth bone dumps, but none of them was directly associated with areas of apparent discard (or garbage). The isolated pairs and bones/teeth were haphazardly scattered through the occupation areas, many of them mixed with the small to medium-sized faunal remains, from which many were identified post-excavation. It is therefore difficult to establish a pattern of disposal of the human remains with respect to the abundant evidence for site structure at these Upper Palaeolithic sites. At the same time, each form of human preservation raises questions about the differential mortuary behaviours, and hence social dynamics, of these foraging populations and how we interpret them through an archaeological lens.
solid network, such as MSF. When it is time to set off, I will probably turn to the humanitarian organisation’s jeeps, which are considered safer and faster than public transport, or even to a MONUSCO flight if I want to get to hard-to-reach places quickly – for example, the high plateaus of Minembwe. If, finally, I have the misfortune to be a freelance journalist and have no media outlet placing a satellite telephone at my disposal, my usual response would probably be to
,000 volunteers, confirming its ability to generate immune response, but had not been tested in outbreaks to demonstrate its efficacy ( Mahamba et al. , 2019 ). The Wellcome Trust concluded that there was a ‘pressing need to introduce a second vaccine, by Johnson and Johnson, in the DRC – to protect communities outside of the current outbreak zone who are likely to be affected next’, while the director of LSHTM concluded: ‘[W]e must use all the tools and approaches at our disposal
improvement concerns critical infrastructure. In a gesture of transparency, humanitarian innovation accepts that after sixty years of terrestrial development, a billion or more people still lack access to piped water, stable electricity, proper waste disposal, adequate housing, comprehensive schooling, professional health care and regular financial services. Levelling up or reconstructing a fixed grid, however, hasn’t been a serious international objective since the onset of the downturn. The logistical mega-corridors that are being built sidestep
Proactiva Open Arms was seized on the request of the Catania prosecutor in March 2018 (although released by a court order a month later). In November 2018, the Catania prosecutor announced an investigation into MSF for illicit waste disposal on SAR boats, including rescued people’s clothes that it claimed were highly infectious with diseases such as HIV. The
tools at their disposal – for example, relationship building and modes of seeking creative compromise – so that the outcome is not mere submission to the interlocutor’s wishes? The pathway forward for addressing the challenges of negotiating the protection of humanitarian action has various dimensions. At the individual level, there is a need for humanitarian actors to commit themselves to a long-term process of cultivating their own negotiation capacity. The humanitarian sector has made some significant strides towards grappling with some of these challenges