This paper traces the massacres of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war in November 1941
in the city of Bobruisk, Eastern Belarus. Sparked by a current memorial at one of the
killing sites, the author examines the historic events of the killings themselves and
presents a micro level analysis of the various techniques for murdering and disposing
of such large numbers of victims. A contrast will be shown between the types of
actions applied to the victims by the German army, SS, police personnel and other
local collaborators, reflecting an imposed racial hierarchisation even after their
death.
This article considers the contexts and processes of forensic identification in 2004
post-tsunami Thailand as examples of identity politics. The presence of international
forensic teams as carriers of diverse technical expertise overlapped with
bureaucratic procedures put in place by the Thai government. The negotiation of
unified forensic protocols and the production of estimates of identified nationals
straddle biopolitics and thanatocracy. The immense identification task testified on
the one hand to an effort to bring individual bodies back to mourning families and
national soils, and on the other hand to determining collective ethnic and national
bodies, making sense out of an inexorable and disordered dissolution of corporeal as
well as political boundaries. Individual and national identities were the subject of
competing efforts to bring order to,the chaos, reaffirming the cogency of the body
politic by mapping national boundaries abroad. The overwhelming forensic effort
required by the exceptional circumstances also brought forward the socio-economic and
ethnic disparities of the victims, whose post-mortem treatment and identification
traced an indelible divide between us and them.
International interventions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, that ultimately brought the war to
a standstill, emphasised recovering and identifying the missing as chief among the goals
of post-war repair and reconstruction, aiming to unite a heavily divided country. Still,
local actors keep,showing that unity is far from achieved and it is not a goal for all
those involved. This paper examines the various actors that have taken up the task of
locating and identifying the missing in order to examine their incentives as well as any
competing agendas for participating in the process. These efforts cannot be understood
without examining their impact both at the time and now, and we look at the biopolitics of
the process and utilisation of the dead within. Due to the vastness and complexity of this
process, instead of a conclusion, additional questions will be opened required for the
process to keep moving forward.
During the Spanish Civil War, extrajudicial executions and disappearances of political
opponents took place and their corpses were buried in unregistered mass graves. The
absence of an official policy by successive democratic governments aimed at the
investigation of these cases, the identification and exhumation of mass graves, together
with legal obstacles, have prevented the victims families from obtaining reparation,
locating and recovering the human remains. This paper argues that this state of affairs is
incompatible with international human rights law and Spain should actively engage in the
search for the whereabouts and identification of the bodies with all the available
resources.