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  Averted Gaze Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, – Tone Bringa This chapter examines some of the social and political structures that converged in the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina (B-H) and created a framework that enabled certain people to commit crimes against humanity at the end of the twentieth century in Europe. It argues that the particular kind of personalized violence directed toward individuals because they belonged to, or were identified with, a specific nationality or ethnic group was the expression of a politically organized attempt at radically redefining categories of belonging.1 This implied the redrawing of boundaries of exclusion/inclusion (that is, excluding certain people with their knowledge and their skills from a certain territory having a certain history, resources, and social fabric, while including certain others). These were new boundaries both in a physical (political/territorial) and in a symbolic sense. The criteria for who was included and who was excluded were new, too. The violence was directed not only toward those who because of their nationality were redefined as “not belonging” but also toward anyone (irrespective of nationality) who resisted this redefinition.2 I shall argue that this forced redrawing of boundaries of exclusion was the eventual resolution of authority—a delayed transition of authority—after modern Yugoslavia ’s founder and post–World War II leader, Tito, died in . This delayed transition coincided with and was influenced by the end of communist regimes in Europe, while the criteria according to which the new boundaries were drawn were a legacy of the political and social structures of communist (Titoist) Yugoslavia. Several strategies were used by the “new” power elites that came into power in Yugoslavia after the end of the Cold War in / in order to redefine social categories of exclusion and inclusion (such as, for instance, “enemies” and “friends”). Some of these strategies were directed toward members of the group that the new boundaries were meant to include, in order to convince them of the need to redraw these boundaries. Measures included the use of a “rhetoric of exclusion” (such as the renaming of neighbors and compatriots as foreigners/intruders and enemies) and the manipulation of fear (on the “rhetorics of exclusion,” see Stolcke ). Other strategies were directed toward those people who were to be excluded. Yet others were directed toward members of the included group who resisted the restructuring. (Measures were a combination of those applied to the first group—that is, “the included”—and the second group—that is, “the excluded.”) The most ferocious and violent strategies were reserved for the second group. Measures included the rhetoric of exclusion and the actual exclusion from positions of power or influence; harassment, terror, and the redefinition of public space as the “private” ethnic space of the group in power; and, finally, the physical removal by violent means of most or all members of the “excluded” group from their homes in villages and towns. The violent removal or expulsion was done in such a way as to make it very difficult or even impossible for the expelled ever to return. This is the policy of “ethnic cleansing,” and in some instances when it was pursued to its extreme logic—as in the case of Srebrenica—it turned into genocide. THE MESSENGER OF GENOCIDE On July , , I sat on the grass next to the tarmac at Tuzla airbase in North Eastern Bosnia. I was listening to the story of a man from the Srebrenica region. I was there with an UNPROFOR human rights team.3 About a week earlier thousands of women and children had started arriving in Tuzla from the Srebrenica region . These traumatized people had been accommodated in tents along the tarmac at the airbase where a Nordic U.N. battalion was stationed, and they were demanding to know where their men where.4 Women were crying for their husbands , sons, brothers, and fathers, who had been forced to stay behind at the mercy of Serbian soldiers, while they themselves had walked to Tuzla and Bosnian government –controlled territory after the Bosnian Serb Army commander, Ratko Mladid, had organized for them to be bused to the front line. The camp was crowded and seething hot. This is where the U.N. human rights team turned up to take witness statements from refugees and survivors. (This was routinely done in the wake of any military offensive, or whenever there were reports or suspicion of human rights abuses in...

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