Book Talk. Torture, Humiliate, Kill: Inside the Bosnian Serb Camp System

Please join us for a discussion with genocide scholar Hikmet Karčić, author of Torture, Humiliate, Kill: Inside the Bosnian Serb Camp System (University of Michigan Press, 2022) with discussant Iva Vukušić (Utrecht University). Moderated by Tanya Domi (SIPA/Harriman Institute).

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.