Ethnic Cleansing in Srebrenica

It was difficult to get through a lot of this reading without being disturbed by the overtone of ethnic cleansing, but I would like to focus on one part in particular that really made me go back and read twice. The issue of identity annihilation (end of chapter 1) and the way in which DNA technology allowed some of these identities to be recovered (end of chapter 2) stuck out to me a lot. The three biggest ways in which identities were stolen by the Bosnian Serbs were through literally stealing identity (though identity cards or wedding rings that had the person’s wedding date on them), burying people in masses and not separating them, and tearing up bodies and carrying them to “secondary graves” (Wagner 56-57). These actions moved past murder and genocide. This was more than killing. It was removing people’s identities so that they could never be identified. At the end of chapter 2, Wagner spends some time talking about the way in which DNA technology has made it easier for people to identify some of the people who were killed, and has provided a reason for some people to return. However, before we get to that, I wanted to examine the methodology behind how this started in the first place.

While the big theme in this book is racial/ethnic cleansing, the way in which this was implemented reached a new level of emotionally jarring.  The “ethnic cleansers” knew exactly where the soft spots were, and they hit those spots as hard as they could. For instance, they knew that the wedding rings were perhaps an even more powerful sign of identity than even identity cards because the date of the wedding was inscribed on the ring. In a similar way, they knew that burial courtesy was extremely important, so they organized a mass burial and sometimes split bodies up, just to confuse the identity and make it harder to piece together. The idea of ethnic cleansing is horrific enough. The fact that they took it an extra level and absolutely obliterated peoples’ identity shows a disturbingly rational methodology to a completely irrational process.