Eastern Herzegovina 1992

Gacko. More than a hundred Bosniaks were killed in the Gacko area, and many of the rest were taken to detention in nearby Bileća. The town's mosques were destroyed and its Bosniak community erased.

Bileća. The municipality became a centre of detention for the region. Bosniak (and some Croat) civilians were held at the Moše Pijade military barracks, the police station, the student dormitory, and the old prison, where they were beaten and abused. The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina later convicted several former guards — among them Boris Bošnjak (eight years), Ilija Đajić (three years), and Miodrag Grubačić (eighteen months) — for the mistreatment of detainees.

Nevesinje and Trebinje. In both municipalities the Bosniak population was driven out and the mosques and other Islamic heritage destroyed — in Nevesinje the Catholic churches as well — though no battle was fought there. The systematic character of the destruction across all four municipalities was later reflected in the region-wide campaign to rebuild the mosques of Nevesinje, Gacko, Bileća, Trebinje, Ljubinje, and the surrounding villages.

Cleansing without a war

Eastern Herzegovina offers some of the purest evidence that the destruction of the Bosniak communities was a deliberate policy rather than a consequence of combat. In Gacko, Nevesinje, Bileća, and Trebinje there were essentially no military operations — no front line, no contested ground, no armed Bosniak force to speak of. The Bosniak minority was simply too small to resist. That its members were nonetheless killed, interned, expelled, and their every mosque dynamited demonstrates that the violence was not a means to a military end but an end in itself: the removal of a people and the erasure of the evidence that they had ever lived there.

The minority as target

These municipalities also illuminate a particular cruelty of the campaign. Where Bosniaks were a majority, their removal could be rationalized — however falsely — in the language of territorial control. In eastern Herzegovina they were a small minority posing no conceivable threat to Serb dominance. Their destruction therefore cannot be explained by any security logic at all; it can be understood only as the working-out of an ideology that held that no Bosniak presence, however minimal, was tolerable in the desired Serb space. It is the clearest possible refutation of the claim that the cleansing was a reciprocal tragedy of war.