Torture, Humiliate, Kill: Inside the Bosnian Serb Camp System

by Hikmet Karčić

Half a century after the Holocaust, on European soil, Bosnian Serbs orchestrated a system of concentration camps where they subjected their Bosniak Muslim and Bosnian Croat neighbors to torture, abuse, and killing. Foreign journalists exposed the horrors of the camps in the summer of 1992, sparking worldwide outrage. This exposure, however, did not stop the mass atrocities. Hikmet Karčić shows that the use of camps and detention facilities has been a ubiquitous practice in countless wars and genocides in order to achieve the wartime objectives of perpetrators. Although camps have been used for different strategic purposes, their essential functions are always the same: to inflict torture and lasting trauma on the victims.

Torture, Humiliate, Kill develops the author’s collective traumatization theory, which contends that the concentration camps set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities had the primary purpose of inflicting collective trauma on the non-Serb population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This collective traumatization consisted of excessive use of torture, sexual abuse, humiliation, and killing. The physical and psychological suffering imposed by these methods were seen as a quick and efficient means to establish the Serb “living space.” Karčić argues that this trauma was deliberately intended to deter non-Serbs from ever returning to their pre-war homes. The book centers on multiple examples of experiences at concentration camps in four towns operated by Bosnian Serbs during the war: Prijedor, Bijeljina, Višegrad, and Bileća. Chosen according to their political and geographical position, Karčić demonstrates that these camps were used as tools for the ethno-religious genocidal campaign against non-Serbs. Torture, Humiliate, Kill is a thorough and definitive resource for understanding the function and operation of camps during the Bosnian genocide.

Genres: History

276 pages, Hardcover

First published March 25, 2022

Reviews

[Majora · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book after Hikmet gave a book presentation on it when he was in Amsterdam in May 2024. I have much respect for this professor in how he was able to conduct research on such a horrible topic and read all those testimonies of survivors.

I finished the book in 3 days, because of how well and clear it was written. It gave me as a Bosnian detailed insights in how cruelsome the situation was from 1991 onwards, and it has shown that the genocide of Bosniaks did not begin and end with the fall of Srebrenica on july 11th 1995. It deeply pains me to see that genocide deniers and perpetrators from the 90s are still able to live a free and comfortable life in Republika Srpska, an entity of Bosnia that has emerged from genocide, austrosities, hate and by spilling innocent blood. May it never be forgotten.