November 22, 2009
UTNE READER

Before the War

(Page 2 of 2)

November / December 2007
by Courtney Angela Brkic, from Dissent 
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Author’s Note: When Srebrenica fell on July 11, 1995, requests by the Dutch battalion for air support were answered by the United Nations, but strikes were abandoned when the Bosnian Serb army threatened to kill Dutch hostages. Bosnian Muslim men and boys were shot beside pits and buried in mass graves. They were caught as they tried to flee, taken to warehouses and factories, and executed. In all, up to 8,000 were killed.

No one is sure how many people died in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1990s, but estimates range from 100,000 to 200,000—overwhelmingly Bosnian Muslims—with many hundreds of thousands more displaced. The problem with casualty figures is that they suggest that things can be quantified and boiled down to recognizable, if tragic, terms. Numbers can be disturbing or sobering. But they are never as chaotic as the realities they enumerate.

 

Courtney Angela Brkic is the author of Stillness and Other Stories and The Stone Fields. She teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Excerpted from Dissent magazine (Summer 2007). Subscriptions: $24/yr. (4 issues) from Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834; www.dissentmagazine.org.

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