Claire Binkley’s Reviews > Why Bosnia? Writings on the Balkan War > Status Update

I keep saying "That's enough, I don't need to know anything else, I know all I need to know about the horrendous atrocities in the 90's Balkans, but then I see a creative form of evil, and I can't throw it away.There are about 350 pages.

"[T]he tragedy of Bosnia has inspired hundreds of learned doctoral dissertations." Go on...

That last tale reminded me of the Gulag nightmare, if maybe a bit worse, if that's even possible. OH: seeing Босна и Херцеговина gives me a better guideline to pronouncing Herzegovina! I sat in the Bosnia & Herzegovina seat at the UN and wasn't too familiar with it, beyond maybe touching on it once in class.

This transcript of an interview with a Serbian officer reminds me EXACTLY how many people from the Soviet sphere act and talk - don't ask questions about all the violence and death stuff. You don't need to know.

OH. Ibrahim Kajan helped me understand why absolutely NO ONE in the Soviet sphere condones Russian adoptions, esp. by American families! They are so loudly against it.

"[Genocide] includes acts where the goal is... to forcibly tansfer children from one group to another." p.86 (besides all the standard group destruction stuff)

NO WONDER. That attitude now makes SO much more sense politically it hurts.

Wow.

The School of Music was burnt in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to Rupert Neudeck in '92! That is upsetting! Andrea, my high school bassoonist friend, performs in the Sarajevo Symphonic Orchestra, and Sarajevo is just between 75 and 80 miles away by automobile. True. the early '90s and the mid '10's are about twenty-five years apart, but that isn't so far away.

At least I had a quick emergency bookmark for the next writing's endnotes! The one I'm on currently, Culture Under Fire, by Smail Balić, had surprise endnotes. I'm still interested in the former Yugoslavian culture and curious about the Serb/Croat conflict - next time I get to the Library I'll check the big Reference book which isn't in circulation to see what it says about Bosnia and Hercegovina.

Now that I have few exams approaching, I may pay less attention to the exact details of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but I'm still interested!

"But the Koranic dietary laws are waived in life-or-death situations..."

The other one I'm especially reading with due date pressure.