9781422281369

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What Is Genocide?

F or most of his adult life, Muhamed Cehajic worked as a teacher. He lived in a small city called Prijedor, which had a population of about 90,000. It was located in the province of Bosnia, which for most of the twentieth century was part of a country called Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia had been created shortly after World War I ended in 1918, by uniting several provinces in southeastern Europe where Slavic peoples lived. However, by the late 1980s tensions were beginning to show among Yugoslavia’s different ethnic and religious groups. One group, the Serbs, were led by a man named Slobodan Milosevic. He was president of the Serbian Republic, which like Bosnia was part of Yugoslavia. However, Milosevic wanted to expand his province and create a “Greater Serbia” that would be open to all of the ethnic Serbs from Yugoslavia.

United Nations forensic experts unearth victims from a mass grave in Bosnia. The victims were killed by Bosnian Serb soldiers in Srebrenica during July 1995.

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