If the twentieth century was “the century of camps,” as Zygmunt Bauman famously remarked, then it is perhaps not surprising that the Bosnian war (1992–95), which brought to a close a century of European mass carnage, introduced us to camps like Manjača, Omarska, Keraterm, and Trnopolje. Although the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (hereafter BiH) has generated an extensive academic literature, the camps and other detention facilities remain one of its lacunae.
Hikmet Karčić's book is one of the first scholarly works to tackle the under-researched topic of camps in the Bosnian war. His focus is the camp system established by the Bosnian Serb authorities between 1992 and 1995 as part of their wartime policy of ethnic cleansing. His argument is that the camps’ primary role was to inflict collective trauma—physical and psychological brutalization by way of murder, torture, sexual violence, and humiliation—to prevent non-Serb survivors from returning to their pre-war homes. Able-bodied males drawn mainly from the Bosniak elite were detained and often killed, while the remaining Bosniak population was brutalized in camps and detention facilities. The camps ultimately enabled the Bosnian Serb authorities to secure their objective of an ethnically cleansed Serb state within BiH.
Karčić's book is comprised of an introduction and seven chapters. A brief overview of inter-ethnic relations in BiH (Chap. 1) is followed by a short history of the modern concentration camp (Chap. 2). Here the author lays out his argument that the purpose of the wartime Bosnian Serb camp system was the collective traumatization of non-Serbs. The next four chapters focus on regional case studies of Bosnian Serb camps: in Višegrad (Chap. 3), Prijedor (Chap. 4), Bijeljina (Chap. 5), and Bileća (Chap. 6). Methodologically, Karčić relies heavily on case law and judgments delivered by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, the BiH State Court and other national courts, and the evidentiary documentation and expert witness reports used at these trials. In addition to providing the ethnic structure of and political conditions in each of the four municipalities on the eve of the war, Karčić discusses how local camps were formed and operated, who commanded them, and many of the perpetrators who inflicted the trauma.
The book originated as a PhD thesis and occasionally still reads like one, as it is at times repetitious, requires copyediting, and often lacks theoretical precision. Although Karčić is interested in concentration camps as an instrument of genocide (31), in discussing Bosnian Serb detention facilities his terminology is often imprecise and interchangeable. It is often unclear what fundamentally distinguished a concentration camp from a detention camp, a transit camp, a prison, or a jail. The trauma inflicted on non-Serb civilians was remarkably consistent across all these facilities—whether they were temporary or intended as long-term camps—which reflected an organized system with a common criminal purpose based on the unlawful detention of non-combatants. But the terminology used in the book is fluid. For example, the Batković camp near Bijeljina is referred to as a “transit camp” facilitating prisoner of war exchanges (156, 160), but also as a “concentration camp” (167). The Batković camp existed for the duration of the war—far longer than most Bosnian Serb camps, many of which existed only for a few weeks or months—possibly necessitating a change in its main purpose. But the author's terminology often leaves the reader questioning the difference between these myriad facilities and how they fit individually and collectively into the Bosnian Serb strategy. Furthermore, despite Karčić's detailed study, it is still unclear how many camps—whether concentration camps, transit camps, jails, prisons, and/or impromptu detention centers—existed as part of the overall Bosnian Serb camp system.
Nevertheless, Karčić demonstrates that this camp system successfully facilitated the Bosnian Serb leadership's policy of ethnic cleansing. The postwar demographic data make clear that only a small number of non-Serbs remain in these areas—which now form part of the Republika Srpska or the Serb half of BiH—although this also likely speaks to the dysfunctional nature of the peace in BiH since 1995. All in all, Karčić's book is a welcome contribution to the nascent literature on camps in the Bosnian war and should stimulate further research on this important subject.
