Final Program for Prijedor: Lives from the Bosnian Genocide Examines War Crimes Prosecution and the Search for the Missing

Sunday, April 6 at 2:00 pm in the Jewish Federation Kopolow Building
12 Millstone Campus Drive, St. Louis, MO 63146

Free and open to the public

A concluding panel of experts and Bosnian genocide survivors will convene on Sunday, April 6 at 2:00 pm in the in the Jewish Federation Kopolow Building, 12 Millstone Campus Drive, in St. Louis. Panelists will examine the legal and humanitarian issues raised by the exhibit Prijedor: Lives from the Bosnian Genocide, which is open at the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center in St. Louis until May 16.

• Jasmin Odobasic, former Vice Chairman of the Bosnian State Commission on Missing Persons, will discuss ongoing efforts to locate and identify the human remains of thousands who are still unaccounted for in the aftermath of the war and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
• Rezak Hukanovic, a survivor of the Omarska concentration camp near Prijedor, will recount his experiences in Serb concentration camps and his efforts to help rebuild a multi-ethnic society in Bosnia.
• Leila Sadat, Director of Global Legal Studies at Washington University, will report on the status of proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
• Bridget Conley-Zilkic, project director of the United States Holocaust Museum’s Committee on Conscience, will describe the role of public education and museum memorials in preventing future genocides.

St. Louis is today home to more than 50,000 Bosnians, giving us the largest Bosnian Diaspora community in the world. This panel commemorates the April 6, 1992 declaration of independence by Bosnia-Herzegovina and the beginning of a three-and-a-half-year siege of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

Speaker Biographies

Jasmin Odobasic is former Vice Chairman of the Bosnian State Commission on Missing Persons; he currently heads the law and financial sector of this commission, whose team of forensic experts has discovered the remains of more than 4000 missing persons in 126 mass graves throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina. Odobasic has completed twenty-two exhumations ordered by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and he has twice served as a prosecution witness at the ICTY. In his area of operations, twenty-five persons indicted for war crimes by the ICTY have been apprehended. Odobasic has lectured at numerous conferences, including the 2007 meeting in Sarajevo of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

Born in Prijedor, Rezak Hukanovic is a poet, journalist, and writer. His book Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in the Death Camps of Bosnia is an award-winning account of his imprisonment in the Omarska concentration camp. Following his release 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 books have been translated into English, German, Swedish, and Norwegian.

Leila Nadya Sadat directs the Whitney R. Harris Institute for Global Legal Studies at Washington University and is one of the country's leading experts in international and comparative law. She is the author of more than three dozen articles and several books on international criminal law, terrorism, crimes against humanity, and the International Criminal Court (ICC). In 1995 she was named chair of the International Law Association (American Branch) committee on the ICC. She subsequently served as an NGO delegate to the Preparatory Committee on the Establishment of the ICC and to the United Nations Conference in Rome at which the ICC was formally established. Professor Sadat’s analysis of the trial of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) can be viewed at http://www.asil.org/insights/insigh90.htm .

Bridget Conley-Zilkic is Project Director for the United States Holocaust Museum’s Committee on Conscience. Since she began working at the Museum in 2002, she has been a crucial contributor to its genocide prevention efforts, producing and directing the film Witnessing Darfur (2005) and producing Defying Genocide (2006). She has also conducted teacher training sessions introducing educators to genocide prevention. In April 2004, she was a member of the United States delegation to the commemoration ceremonies in Rwanda marking the tenth anniversary of the 1994 genocide. Working with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, she helped to supervise elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2000. Conley-Zilkic earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Binghamton University in 2001, writing about cultural responses to humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Haiti.
For more information, contact Ben Moore (889-4553; bmoore@fontbonne.edu) or Jack Luzkow (719-3623; jluzkow@fontbonne.edu).