The Graves: Srebrenica And Vukovar

by Eric Stover, Gilles Peress (Photographer)

This book is the harrowing account by Eric Stover, with photographs by Gilles Peress, of how, from a hell of mud and decomposing bodies, Haglund began to piece together the victims' identities and the terrible ways they died. Over 40,000 Muslim refugees were living in and around Srebenica when it fell to the Serbs, under General Ratko Mladic in July 1995. Of the men who fled, or were rounded up by Serb troops, many were never seen again. Stover talks to the surviving families, women and children including the women of Srebrenica still clinging to the hope that their men are alive even as Haglund's investigations prove otherwise. Mladic has since been charged with crimes of genocide. But Stover identifies a lack of political will to arrest the criminals and bring them to trial. Until then, justice will not have been done.

Genres: Photography, War, Nonfiction

333 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1998

About the author

Eric Stover is Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center and Adjunct Professor of Law and Public Health, University of California at Berkeley.

Stover has built the Human Rights Center into a premier interdisciplinary research and policy center that is highly regarded nationally and internationally. He is a pioneer in utilizing empirical research methods to address emerging issues in human rights and international humanitarian law.

Before coming to Berkeley in 1996, Stover served as the Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights and the Director of the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served on several forensic missions to investigate mass graves as an “Expert on Mission” to the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In the early 1990s, Stover conducted the first research on the social and medical consequences of land mines in Cambodia and other post-war countries. His research helped launch the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, which received the Nobel Prize in 1997. He has published six books, including The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promises of Justice in The Hague and The Breaking of Bodies and Minds: Torture, Psychiatric Abuse, and the Health Professions. He is a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Transitional Justice and Human Rights Quarterly and a board member of the Crimes of War Project.

Reviews

[Boris Cesnik · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tale of two books. Words and images. Whereas the first tend to be dry and provide a recount of random experiences, stories, tiny episodes and historical data without much of a thread or scope for understanding, the latter brings the meaning of the book alive. Although photos of dead bodies and bones usually would make a harrowing experience, in this occasion the portrait of survivors have the role of sharply communicating the unspeakable and unthinkable if you have never gone through it.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know what I can say. The photographs are powerful. The story is important.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

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. [return]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.

[Blaine Wajdowicz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elegantly concise, this book did a lot for me. I came into it knowing nothing of the Serbian genocide, but the authors provided just the right amount of political/ethnic background information and history to set the stage for the tragedy. More than that, this work is a detail of the forensic anthropolical team's work to uncover the mass graves after the tragedy, and finally begs to ask the question after WWII and Rwanda, why does the world so readily forget these horrendous crimes?

[jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moving book and quick read - I read it all on the train from NYC to Albany. Although, as a warning, it left with nightmares for several nights.