Gilles Peress

The Graves is a sobering book that follows the UN forensics team while they excavated numerous graves around Srebrenica and Vukovar in 1996. We hear first hand testimony from the survivors, and see photos of the grave sites, giving the reader a powerful combination of evidence to the genocide. It also touches on the failure of the UN to stop such events from happening. Between an unwillingness to put UN Peacekeepers in harms way during the war (highlighted by a quote form a survivor that “the UN was telling us that our lives were not worth the lives of UN peacekeepers”) to the lack of funding afterwards to investigate (one doctor saying “you have the largest forensics investigation in the world, and it is being done on a shoestring budget”). You will be outraged by the narrative, but you will be shaken by the photos. Hearing about the grave sites is no comparison to seeing the bodies. This is a difficult book to get through, but one you must read. There is a quote in The Graves from Justice Richard Goldstone, the Chief Prosecutor of the UN War Crimes Tribunal. In discussing the prosecutions in Bosnia and Rwanda he says “Specific individuals bear the major share of the responsibility, and it is they, not the group as a whole, who need to be held to account.” While I certainly understand the view point that we can not paint all Serbs or all Hutus as being culpable to genocide, we also can not absolve the killers for what they did simply because someone else stoked the hatred. Blame for Rwanda and for the former Yugoslavia can certainly be placed with specific individuals who organized it. You can also trace events decades back in both places to try and understand the root causes. But for each death, there is an individual who pulled the trigger or swung the machete. Ratko Mladic or Radovan Karadzic organized and implemented the genocide in Bosnia, but ordinary Serbs and Bosnian Serbs saw that plan through. We must heal the underlying wounds that were allowed to fester into genocide, or else we will continue to see this cycle again and again.
There is another quote from Louise Arbour in The Graves that gets to the root of the matter, “Crimes are committed by people. They are not committed by abstract entities like nationalities.” But if we see the people who executed the genocide as clay molded by a few leaders, then we are doomed to have more books like The Graves and more graves to excavate.… (more)