Vogošća & the Sarajevo Ring 1992–1995

At Planjo's House (Planjina kuća) and associated facilities in Vogošća, managed by Branko Vlačo, Bosniak prisoners were held in squalid conditions and put to forced labour of the most dangerous kind: digging trenches and fortifications on the front lines under fire, cutting wood, and burying the bodies of the dead — including, at times, the bodies of fellow detainees. Prisoners were also used as human shields. The pattern recurred across the Serb-held ring, binding the suburban municipalities into the machinery of the siege: the labour and bodies of the captive Bosniak population were spent in the service of the forces bombarding the city below.

The siege had an inside

The story of Sarajevo is usually told from within the encirclement — the shells falling on the trapped city. Vogošća and the suburban ring reveal the other side of the line. The territory from which the city was bombarded was not empty; it contained Bosniak communities that were themselves cleansed, and detention camps whose prisoners were forced to build the very fortifications used to maintain the siege. Understanding the ring corrects a partial picture: the siege of Sarajevo was not only an assault on a city from outside but a campaign of cleansing within the besieging zone itself.

Forced labour as a weapon

The use of detainees to dig trenches on active front lines, and as human shields, places Vogošća alongside Doboj in the catalogue of the war's gravest violations. It is doubly criminal: it exploits captive civilians as expendable labour, and it deliberately exposes them to death in combat for the protection of their captors. That prisoners were also made to bury the dead — sometimes their own — completes a portrait of total instrumentalization, in which the captive human being is reduced entirely to a resource to be used up.