Natasa Kandic at The New School 11/15 – picture gallery
MEMORY AND TRANSNATIONAL JUSTICE IN FORMER YUGOSLAVIA
Natasa Kandic presents The Kosovo Memory Book, 1998-2000
Natasa Kandic is a human rights activist, the founder and director of the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Center. A dissident under Tito, she has later documented war crimes committed during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Among the evidence she gathered, there is a video recording of the Srebrenica massacre, the murder of eight thousand Bosniak civilians by Serbian troops. She is currently driving a regional effort to promote RECOM, a Regional Commission Tasked with Establishing the Facts about All Victims of War Crimes and Other Serious Human Rights Violations Committed on the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia in the period from 1991-2001 (RECOM).
The Kosovo Memory Book. 1998-2000 registers all the individuals killed or missing, to include the factual circumstances in which 2,064 persons lost their lives. It represents a public recognition of human losses in the war in Kosovo, and public recognition of the victims of war crimes – women, children, the elderly and the ill, as well as the unarmed men. Some have objected to the fact that the book juxtaposes civilian casualties with military losses; or Serb, Roma and Bosniak deaths with those of Albanians, who are 1,705 of the above total. The answer of the authors has been that all the dead are equal and deserve to be known, breaking with the tradition of nameless victims in the Balkans. This book is the first in a series.
