Bosanski Petrovac 1992

The Kozila camp, a forestry estate turned detention site, is characteristic of the improvised but systematic detention network of the Krajina: a remote, hidden facility where men could be held, exploited for labour, and abused away from any outside scrutiny. The roughly eighty Bosniak civilians detained there were part of the wider clearing of Bosanski Petrovac, which left the municipality almost without its Bosniak inhabitants by the end of the summer. Like so many such places, Kozila was reclaimed for its original use after the war and long went unmarked; peace activists drew attention to it in 2018 as one of the countless unmemorialized sites of atrocity across the country.

The unmarked site

Bosanski Petrovac and its Kozila camp raise the problem of memory that haunts the smaller sites of the genocide. The famous camps — Omarska, Trnopolje — are at least named and known. But the campaign was conducted through hundreds of lesser facilities, most of which have since been quietly returned to their everyday functions, their walls bearing no plaque, their histories preserved only in court files and survivors' memories. The struggle to mark these places is itself a continuation of the war over memory: to leave them unmarked is to allow the erasure that the cleansing intended; to mark them is to insist that what happened there be remembered.

One municipality among many

Petrovac is, statistically, an "ordinary" case of the Krajina campaign — no single famous massacre, a camp of dozens rather than thousands. Its importance lies precisely in being representative. The genocide against the Bosniaks was not a handful of spectacular events but the accumulation of scores of Bosanski Petrovacs: municipality after municipality subjected to the same sequence of dismissal, detention, destruction, and expulsion, until the human map of an entire region had been redrawn.