Čajniče & Rudo 1992

The pattern in Čajniče and Rudo followed the now-familiar template of the Podrinje: the seizure of the municipalities in the spring of 1992, the rounding-up of Bosniak men into improvised camps — here a hunting lodge and a police station — the killing of detainees, and the expulsion of the remaining population across the lines or out of the country. The destruction of mosques, including Čajniče's historic Ottoman heritage, accompanied the removal of the people, completing the erasure. These were small communities, and their annihilation produced no single famous massacre; they were nonetheless "cleansed" as thoroughly as any place in Bosnia.

Completing the map of the Podrinje

Čajniče and Rudo are the last pieces in the geography of the eastern-Bosnian cleansing. Together with Foča, Višegrad, Rogatica, Kalinovik, Vlasenica, Zvornik, Bratunac, and Srebrenica, they complete a continuous belt of "cleansed" territory running the length of the Drina — precisely the contiguous, ethnically homogeneous corridor along the Serbian border that the campaign was designed to create. Seen on a map, the individual municipalities resolve into a single deliberate design. This is why even the smallest of them must be documented: each is a tile in a mosaic whose overall picture is the strategic objective of the genocide.

The 70% in four months

Čajniče and Rudo belong to the great wave of expulsions of April–August 1992, during which, by one accounting, some 70 percent of all the war's displacements occurred as Serb forces attacked dozens of municipalities and drove out their non-Serb inhabitants. The speed and breadth of this assault — an entire region transformed in a single summer — is itself evidence of coordination and intent, and the quiet erasure of communities like these is the granular reality beneath the statistic.