Missing Lives [Paperback]

Americans are familiar with Bosnian victims in Srebrenica and Sarajevo. They are included in this book but so are a dozen families of other ethnicities living in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo during the violent break-up of the former Yugoslavia. Brief stories frame each ethnic group from the point of view of particular victims' relatives, augmenting the many photographs by Nick Danziger.

In a heart-breaking photo, Nasuf Berisha clutches a teddy bear as he waits at the Macedonian border where his mother and nephew left the Down's syndrome Kosovo Albanian Muslim man. Unable to say his name or his relatives' names, Nasuf died a year later in the Macedonian asylum at Demir Hisar before being reunited with his family. Two other stories of missing Kosovo Albanians are included in this collection.

A Kosovo Serb felt so safe in his Pristina apartment and neighborhood that he refused to leave Kosovo with his wife and in-laws as NATO invaded Kosovo after more than 11 weeks of bombing Serbia. Three weeks later, Rade's brother-in-law found four Albanian men living in Rade and Olja's apartment. A year later, Rade's beheaded remains (including his broken arms) were found in a mass grave of Serbs and identified by DNA testing.

One photo in the book is not by Danziger. It is a still from a Muslim propaganda video, showing the beheading of a Bosnian Serb by masked mujahideen in the style of the later Daniel Pearl murder video in Pakistan. A Bosnian toddler born in a Muslim family but raised in Serbia by elderly Serbs during the war, returns to Bosnia but not to her father. "A biological father is not necessarily your real father," she says after meeting him with his "fifth or sixth wife." Mila insists on keeping her adoptive Serb name, even though she thinks the Serb soldier who rescued her was probably her mother's killer. She arranges to talk to the imprisoned former Serb soldier a few days after her interview for this book. Tantalizingly, we are left to imagine the outcome of the interview.

By focusing on a few families, many circumstances had to be excluded. There is no one who suffered the ethnic expulsion from or disappeared in Slovenia, the first republic to take military action to secede from Yugoslavia. The most obvious missing group from this book is the Roma. They were murdered, robbed or expelled from all the secessionist territories of the former Yugoslavia, once again the invisible victims. Many ended up in refugee camps around Belgrade.

Nor is there any mention of the 300- 400 Serbs kidnapped for commercial organ harvesting in 1989-99--reported by Human Rights Watch, the Council of Europe, and the book, "The Hunt" by the former Chief Prosecutor at the International War Crimes Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (IWCTY). Last year Interpol named a doctor involved in that earlier organ trafficking as the central figure in commercial organ harvesting and trafficking in Kosovo and Albania over the decade. Subsequently, five personnel were arrested at the Medicus medical clinic in Pristina, Kosovo. The November 16, 2010 "New York Times" reported, "Officials said the ringleader was a highly regarded surgeon and professor at Pristina University Hospital, Dr. Lutfi Dervishi."

The introduction suggests that protection of Serbs after Croatia's secession was only a "pretext," but the minority's need for protection seems to have been real when "Operation Storm," expelled 200,000 Serbs from Croatia. On April 15, 2011 IWCTY convicted Croatian Generals Ante Gotovina and General Mladen Markac of that ethnic cleansing. The guilty verdict provoked protests in Croatian cities by government officials including the Prime Minister, Croatian newspapers, war veterans, and police as well as massive crowds of citizens. There were smaller demonstrations in May in Serbia--without any officials participating-- when Ratko Mladic was captured by Serb police on the Romanian border and sent to the IWCTY for trial within days of his capture.

This book's multi-ethnic approach is an important effort to build reconciliation by recognizing the suffering of all sides in the wars. It avoids labeling one ethnic group as guilty, an approach that countless other books and organizations have pursued producing increased ethnic alienation. Each subject's experiences are skillfully brought to an international audience in a sympathetic manner.