Bosanska Krupa 1992

At least fifty Bosnian Muslims were detained at the Petar Kočić school in the suburbs of Bosanska Krupa. The conditions documented there are among the most brutal of the war's smaller camps: detainees suffered beatings, rape and sexual abuse, and, in one small room, torture by electric shock — wires from automobile batteries clipped to prisoners' fingers and toes. The detentions accompanied the broader campaign across the municipality, in which Bosniak villages including Arapuša and Jasenica were attacked and their populations driven out. The Petar Kočić school was one of an estimated 650-plus detention sites operated across Bosnia during the war — a measure of how completely the ordinary infrastructure of civic life was turned to the purpose of persecution.

The schoolhouse as torture chamber

There is a particular horror in the recurrence, across this catalogue, of the school as a site of atrocity — at Bosanska Krupa, at Rogatica, at Kalinovik, at Bratunac. The school is the civic institution most associated with a community's future, with children and continuity. Its conversion into a place where neighbours were tortured with car batteries inverts that meaning entirely, and it speaks to the totality of the campaign: not a single ordinary building was left to its ordinary use where it could serve the work of cleansing. The schoolhouse-as-camp is, in miniature, the whole logic of a society turned against a part of itself.

A town cut in two

Bosanska Krupa's division along the Una also illustrates how the war fractured communities at the most intimate, physical level. A single town became two: a "cleansed" Serb-held bank and a crowded government-held remnant, the river between them a front line. The reunification of such places after the war — the return, partial and contested, of expelled populations — remains one of the unfinished tasks of the peace.