Bosanska Gradiška & Kozarska Dubica 1992

On 18 August 1992, Bosanska Gradiška was attacked with rocket launchers, artillery, and tanks; after hours of shelling its lightly armed defenders were overcome. Non-Serb civilians were apprehended and detained — a paramilitary group operating from the occupied Red Cross building, assisted by local police, held Muslims and Croats from April to December 1992 — before the population was driven out. Across the river in Serb-held Croatia, a parallel apparatus was at work, and UN documentation recorded that local authorities in the Serb-controlled zones of Croatia coordinated with their counterparts in northern Bosnia, including Bosanska Dubica, to render the border region ethnically homogeneous. The Sava, rather than dividing the two campaigns, became the axis of a single coordinated effort.

Cleansing as a transnational project

Gradiška and Dubica illustrate that the ethnic engineering of the early 1990s did not respect the borders of the republics. The coordination between Serb authorities in Bosnia and in occupied Croatia to clear the Sava corridor of non-Serbs reflects the underlying ambition of a contiguous Serb-controlled space spanning the former Yugoslav republics. For the study of the war, these border municipalities are evidence that the Bosnian genocide was one front of a larger project, linked across the Sava and the Drina to events in Croatia and to the direction emanating from Belgrade.

The instrumentalization of the Red Cross

The use of a Red Cross building as a detention camp at Gradiška carries a bitter symbolism. The emblem of the Red Cross is, in the laws of war, a universal sign of protection and neutral humanitarian aid. To convert such a building into a place of imprisonment inverts that meaning, much as the conversion of schools and hospitals did elsewhere — a small but telling instance of the campaign's systematic seizure of the institutions of civilized life and their turning to the ends of persecution.