Assembled under the auspices of the Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley and Human Rights Watch, this book documents, in a manner that leaves no room for doubt or ambiguity, an account of a Serb massacre in the Kosovar towns of Cuska, Zahac and Pavljan. After an introduction by Human Rights Watch communications director Carroll Bogert, the book centers on a series of photographs by New Yorker
photographer and HRW research associate Peress taken in the aftermath of the killings, showing fresh graves, massive displacement, bullet holes and trauma victims, along with a family photo album caked with mud and, elsewhere, a man pulling along his exhausted grandmother in a metal cart. In chapters like "The Case," "On Method" and "The Victims," text by HRW senior researchers Abrahams and Stover, who is also a professor at Berkeley's School of Public Health, clearly outline the investigators' discovery process, which included showing to survivors photographs of soldiers that had been scanned into a laptop. A chapter called "Self-Portraits" shows pictures taken by Serbian soldiers of themselves (the undeveloped film was found in a field in Kosovo) backlit by fires and mayhem. The 52 color and 109 b&w photos are most powerful when the authors let the images and victims' words speak for themselves, doing the necessary work of forcing this horror into history. (Sept.)
