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Theater of Atrocities: Toward a Disreality Principle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Branislav Jakovljevic
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Extract

In October 1992, the united nations security council requested the secretary-general to appoint an impartial commission to examine and record the atrocities committed in the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Two years later, this commission produced its final report. Some of the goriest pages in this catalogue of infamy are dedicated to the explosion on the Markale open-air market in central Sarajevo that took place around noon on Saturday, 5 February 1994. The report describes it as “the worst attack on civilians during the siege” of Sarajevo, citing that it killed at least 66 persons and wounded 197 (781). This explosion can be said to represent the turning point in the Bosnian war, which by that point had lasted some twenty-two months without any reasonable resolution in sight. David Binder, a New York Times reporter and the author of the most detailed account of this atrocity to date, writes that it

provoked the first engagement of NATO in European hostilities since it was founded four decades earlier and the first involvement of U.S. forces in combat in Europe since the beginning of the Cold War. Within days it also drew Russia into the hapless circle of Balkan problem-solvers, along with a unit of Russian peacekeeping troops—the first entry of Russia into the former Yugoslavia since Joseph Stalin's break-up with Josip Broz Tito in 1948. (70)

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 5: Special Topic War , October 2009 , pp. 1813 - 1819
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2009

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