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BOSNIAN EXPERTS ON WAR AND GENOCIDE TO SPEAK AT FONTBONNE UNIVERSITY APRIL 7 AND APRIL 8 Two experts on the war and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina will speak on April 7 and April 8 at Fontbonne University. Both events are free and open to the public and will be held in the Lewis Room in the lower level of the Fontbonne University Library. • 7:00 PM, Monday, April 7, Lewis Room in the lower level of the Fontbonne University Library: Jasmin Odobasic, former Vice Chairman of the Bosnian State Commission on Missing Persons, will speak about his experiences exhuming mass graves in the area near the city of Prijedor, site of some of the worst atrocities in the Bosnian war and genocide. • 7:00 PM, Tuesday, April 8, Lewis Room in the lower level of the Fontbonne University Library: Rezak Hukanovic, author of the award-winning book Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in the Death Camps of Bosnia, will speak about his experiences in the notorious Omarska concentration camp near Prijedor. Limited parking is available along Wydown Avenue and in the back student parking lots with entrances east off Big Bend Boulevard. Additional parking is available in the shuttle lot located at 6501 Clayton Road, with shuttle service to the Fontbonne campus every 10 to 15 minutes. Mr. Odobasic and Mr. Hukanovic are traveling from Bosnia-Herzegovina to St. Louis to participate in a panel discussion at the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center; this discussion is part of the ongoing exhibit titled Prijedor: Lives from the Bosnian Genocide. For more information about the exhibit, see http://www.fontbonne.edu/bosnia. Speaker biographies:
Jasmin Odobasic grew up in Bosnia-Herzegovina and practiced law until the start of the Bosnian war and genocide in 1992. From 1992 until 1994, Mr. Odobasic was held prisoner by Serb authorities and subjected to beatings and forced labor. In the decade following the conclusion of armed conflict in 1995, Mr. Odobasic oversaw the exhumation of some 4000 bodies from 126 mass graves in Bosnia-Herzegovina, many in the vicinity of Prijedor. He has also worked closely with families and forensic experts to identify human remains and reconstruct the circumstances under which victims were killed and their remains hidden. This work has special importance for St. Louis, with a Bosnian population of some 50,000, many of whom are still seeking information about missing relatives. Mr. Odobasic has twice testified before the U.N.’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and he has presented papers to numerous civic and academic organizations, including the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Having grown up with neighbors and friends of different ethnicities, he remains an advocate of a multiethnic Bosnia. His work in exhuming and identifying the remains of genocide victims is rooted in the belief that truth is necessary to a lasting peace and that all people must be accorded respect. Rezak Hukanovic was born in Prijedor, a city in northwestern Bosnia-Herzegovina that in the 1990s would become see some of the worst acts of “ethnic cleansing.” In the late 1970s, Hukanovic published three books of poetry and established a career as a radio journalist. Shortly after the Serb takeover of Prijedor in 1992, Hukanovic’s family was violently evicted from their home, and Rezak and his sixteen-year-old son were taken to the prison camp at Omarska, one of the worst torture and killing centers in Bosnia. When Omarska was closed, Hukanovic and his son were transferred to a nearby concentration camp at Manjaca. Following his release from Manjaca in a prisoner exchange, Hukanovic was sent to Norway as a refugee, where he edited the newspaper Moja BiH (My Bosnia and Herzegovina). Upon his return to Bosnia, Hukanovic became the editor for Slobodni Radio Prijedor (Radio Free Prijedor) and made several films for German, Swedish and Norwegian television. Since 1998, Hukanovic has been owner and editor of Nezavisna TV 101 (Independent Television 101). His book Tenth Circle of Hell, which chronicles his experiences in Omarska and Manjaca, has been translated into English, German, Swedish, and Norwegian. Elie Wiesel has called it a “poignant and overwhelming, often unbearable, account, by a man who has witnessed and lived in the flesh the tragedy of the oppressed and the persecuted . . .” For additional information about Mr. Odobasic’s work exhuming mass graves, see:
http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/srebrenica/KevljaniMassGrave.htm
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20010827/ai_n14412720
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4161/is_20011007/ai_n14537788 For a review of Tenth Circle of Hell by noted British journalist Ed Vulliamy, see: http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/bosnia/10cirhl.html For more information about these events, contact Ben Moore at 889-4553 or bmoore@fontbonne.edu. Thanks to Alem Hadzic and Patrick McCarthy for contributing information for this announcement.
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