Abstract
As we have seen, the online community of Kozarac.ba hosted some lively and heated discussions around the Omarska memorial debate, but its wider role in bridging between local returnees and the diaspora is worth further attention. With significant structural holes in the social network of the town, resulting from the deliberate policy of ‘eliticide’ in 1992 that saw leading figures and potential leaders eliminated, the online networks that connected Kozarac people around the world played an important role in overcoming the gaps, but sites such as Kozarac.ba also provided a safe space for survivors to tell their stories, find each other and remember the dead.
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Notes
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A survivor of Omarska camp and a pre-war journalist, Hukanovic (1996), describes in his book The Tenth Circle of Hell witnessing horrific torture of his friends in the the white house who were once the intellectual community of Prijedor. In his doctoral thesis, Gratz (2007) claims that the term eliticide was first used in 1992 by a British reporter, Nicholson M. Reporting from Bijeljina, a town in north-east Bosnia, Nicholson described the elimination of a dozen respected individuals in the town. A former Prijedor resident and journalist, Nedim Kadiric, who worked for local newspapers in 1991 and often reported about events in the local assembly sessions, reminded me of his observations on the tensions and hostilities among Prijedor politicians a year prior to the war. He felt fear at that time and decided to ‘run to Germany’. Unfortunately, as soon as Serb nationalists took Prijedor, his father was murdered. With Nedim’s help, we accounted for 55 intellectuals, doctors, professors and economists who were murdered (facebook chat, September 2011).
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La Capra (2001: 68), and to some extent Goldhagen’s provocative book (1997), in which he claimed a large number of ordinary people were ‘Hitler’s willing executioners’, write about an elevated state of awareness for those engaged in inflicting pain on ‘the other’ that cannot be rationally understood even for those participating in it. La Capra, notes that ‘the victimizing excesses of the Nazi genocide were related to a deranged sacrificialism in an attempt to get rid of Jews as dangerous, impure objects that contaminated the community of people’. In Bosnia, this sense of impurity is sometimes perceived as the legacy of the religious conversion left by the Ottomans.
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Sendo, kozarac.ba, 16 February, 2007, http://www.kozarac.ba/kolumne/item/2157-1739-272-sendo highlight=WyJzZW5kbyJd
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Vukic, Suzana, 2011, “Revisiting The Srebrenica Slaughter”, http://test.chicagoraja.net/2011/07/12/revisiting-srebrenica-slaughter/
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Sivac-Bryant, S. (2016). Kozarac.ba: Online Community as a Network Bridge. In: Re-Making Kozarac. Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58838-8_6
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