Suchergebnisse

"This is the first book to offer a comprehensive analysis of the emergence, nature, and function of Serbian paramilitary units during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. The book investigates the nature and functions of paramilitary units throughout the 1990s, and their ties to the state and President Slobodan Milošević. The work relies on the archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, which conducted dozens of trials relating to paramilitary violence, and records from judicial proceedings in the region. It discusses how and why certain important paramilitary units emerged, how they functioned and transformed through the decade, what their relationships and entanglements were with the state, the Milošević regime, and organized crime. The study thus investigates the interrelated ideological, political, and social factors and processes fuelling paramilitary engagement and assesses the impact of this engagement on victims of paramilitary violence and on the state and society for which the units purportedly fought. It argues that coordinated action by a number of state institutions gave rise to paramilitaries tasked with altering borders while maintaining plausible deniability for the sponsoring regime. The outsourcing of violence by the state to paramilitaries led to a significant weakening of the very state these units and their sponsors swore to protect. The book also analyzes differences between the units and how they attacked civilians, arguing that the different forms of violence stemmed not only from the function they fulfilled for the state but also the ways in which they were set up and operated. The final chapter brings the different strands of the argument together into a coherent whole, suggesting avenues for further research, in the former Yugoslavia and beyond. This book will be of much interest to students of ethnic conflict and civil war, war crimes, Balkan politics and International Relations in general"--

Abstract
The most relevant collection for studying the wars accompanying the breakup of Yugoslavia, which resulted in over 130,000 dead or missing, is the archive of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. The Tribunal established by the UN Security Council in 1993 to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes indicted 161 people and had accumulated millions of pages of testimony, military and police reports, and videos when it closed in late 2017. This invaluable record details the massacres and includes well-known incidents, such as the mass executions after the fall of Srebrenica, but also killings and torture elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia. This article investigates the history of this archive, analyzes its contents, and argues that the collection has two important features which present both a huge opportunity and a significant challenge for research—the immense volume of the archive, and a lack of access to important parts of it.

After the fall of Srebrenica in summer of 1995, the Scorpions unit, dispatched to support the Bosnian Serb Army as it took over the enclave, shot six men in Trnovo. The men, three of whom were underage, were some of thousands of Bosnian Muslims that fell into the hands of Bosnian Serb troops, and that were executed in the days and weeks following July 11th. A member of the unit filmed the execution. Fragments of the video were first shown during the Slobodan Milosevic trial, and multiple times in the years after, in the courtrooms in The Hague and Belgrade. The video provides unique insights into the nature of the crime, as well as the behavior of the perpetrators, and this article will discuss them in detail, contributing to what we know about Srebrenica, and how individuals are held accountable for mass atrocity crimes.

After the fall of Srebrenica in summer of 1995, the Scorpions unit, dispatched to support the Bosnian Serb Army as it took over the enclave, shot six men in Trnovo. The men, three of whom were underage, were some of thousands of Bosnian Muslims that fell into the hands of Bosnian Serb troops, and that were executed in the days and weeks following July 11th. A member of the unit filmed the execution. Fragments of the video were first shown during the Slobodan Milosevic trial, and multiple times in the years after, in the courtrooms in The Hague and Belgrade. The video provides unique insights into the nature of the crime, as well as the behavior of the perpetrators, and this article will discuss them in detail, contributing to what we know about Srebrenica, and how individuals are held accountable for mass atrocity crimes.