Réapparaître.

Abstract

Résumé Près de 30 000 personnes ont disparu en Bosnie-Herzégovine pendant la guerre. Les fragments de corps retrouvés, une fois identifiés, permettent de faire passer les « disparus » au statut de « victimes », et sont mobilisés comme preuves judiciaires par le Tribunal Pénal International pour l'ex-Yougoslavie. L'article analyse tout d'abord les processus de localisation, d'exhumation, d'identification et de ré-inhumation des corps. Puis il décrit un cas exemplaire, celui de Srebrenica, qui met en exergue le problème des déplacements des corps de fosses primaires vers des fosses secondaires et tertiaires. La réapparition des fragments de corps a changé la qualification du conflit, qui n'a pas été un combat opposant des combattants contre des combattants, mais un nettoyage ethnique.

An anthropological approach to human remains from the gulags

“…By comparing the Soviet case with other practices of destruction or concealment, as applied, for example, in the context of the Holocaust through the use of specially designed cremation ovens, 38 under the Uruguayan dictatorship with the implementation of 'Operation Carrot', 39 or in the former Yugosalvia with the widespread use of secondary or tertiary burials, 40 it is possible to see that wherever the practice of confiscation of bodies by the state occurs, it is accompanied by the mobilization -or indeed the creation -of technological devices or practices which are specifically designed to facilitate the hiding of bodies, and which are distinct from techniques of killing.…”

Human remains and mass violence

“…Julia Kristeva in this regard, building on the work of George Bataille and Merry Douglas, suggested understanding the corpse as the ultimate 'abject', by which she meant a pre-objectified 'thing' whose radical exclusion constitutes one's subjectivity, and whose forced presence threatens to collapse one back into a pre-subjective mess. 40 This speculative explanation has its limitations of course -it is not entirely clear how Kristeva evades falling into the naturalistic assumption that all this somehow applies to all people at all times and in all cultures. However, it can be interpreted as dealing with the dynamic of real interactions that precede the emergence of a thinking subject and thought-of objects (before the successful exclusion of the abject) and what may still happen after the collapse (the failure of the exclusion) of the correlation between the subject and the object.…”

“…In other words, it is the scattering of unrecognizable corpses which makes impossible the constitution of identification links. 40 Further, by denying the existence of the victims through the destruction of their physical human aspects, the perpetrators leave the door open for the continued perpetration of the crime, through its denial. By denying the crime, deniers deny that there ever were victims and thereby question the existence of the victim group as such.…”

“…He found such literatures important for understanding and confronting these abuses and made at least three distinctive contributions. 40 First, the focus of the book is not primarily on the perpetrator, but on the bystander at various levels of analysis, including those proximate to and with demonstrable knowledge of an atrocity, but also more distal state-level observers in the international community. Cohen developed and extended Matza's concept of 'subterranean values' -the coincidence of the moral neutralization techniques of delinquents with the reasoning of juvenile justice actors and the content of substantive legal defences -to posit cultures of denial: routinized and immersive habits of moral non-engagement with the suffering of often distant (non-western) peoples and nations.…”

“…The Italian army therefore organ ized the recovery of corpses at dozens of locations where massacres had taken place and conducted targeted searches of the karst terri tories. 40 They went even further, questioning the residents of the surrounding communities and documenting the mass murders. 41 In the vicinity of the Herzegovinian town of Trebinje, for instance, thirteen corpses were recovered on 6 October 1941an operation which took an entire day.…”