Rating: 
Summary: Shall we leave them to suffer and die alone?
Review: "Lord, may you never forgive them." Thus ends this book, by an Islamic journalist from Prijedor in Serbia which used to be Bosnia-Herzegovina. If past experience is a guide, thus the stage of revenge and pain is set for the next round of savagery in the Balkans. It's lasted for generations. These are deeply religious people, basically Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Muslim. Each faith has a long record of savagery toward others, a cruelty that can only be explained by the fundamentalist conviction that non-believers are devils. It's why American forces are now in Kosovo, to provide a few months or years of peace. But first, some recent background. During World War II, Germany broke up Yugoslavia and gave Croatia its independence. Croatian armed forces -- the Ustasha -- fought in Russia for the Germans, and in Yugoslavia became an especially brutal ally of the Germans. They were opposed by the communist underground, led by Josip Broz Tito; and by Monarchists. When the war ended, the communists took their revenge on both opposition forces. After the Soviet Union disintegrated, the collapse of central authority in Yugoslavia allowed for the rise of various ethnic factions. Almost immediately, Germany recognized Croatian independence; and the rest of Yugoslavia erupted into the chaos of various independence movements. What happened when the Confederate States of America declared independence? It produced the bloodiest war in American history. It also produced prison camps such as Andersonville; and mass murders of Black soldiers who dared to work or fight for the Union but were later taken prisoner. The Yugoslav story is not unique in its savagery; it is merely contemporary. This book explains the reality of "ethnic cleansing." The term is deceptively antiseptic, it hides a bloody brutality of drunken Serbian thugs turned loose in an ecstasy of perverted pleasure to torture and beat half-starved Muslim prisoners to death. Simple murders, such as a bullet in the back of the neck, may seem bad. The Serbs are never so merciful, these savage beatings were to inflict maximum pain and often an agonizing death. Hukanovic hammers that point home again and again, sparing no detail. It is a description of hate run amok, where torture and pain became the ultimate pleasure for the Serbs. This book is not one of combat, it tells of a hatred so lasting that it eventually erupts in depravity. It is not unique to Yugoslavia; a thousand years ago, Islam conquered India and left a divided people that may yet erupt into a nuclear war between Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan. Likewise, similar hates have ravaged East Timor. Will it end? Read this book, and ask "Will the Lord ever forgive them?" It doesn't describe the geopolitics and other fancy words about the Balkans, it explains the pain, suffering, misery, torture and spirit of eternal revenge to inflict more pain, suffering, misery and torture. Then ask, "Should the US intervene?" Or should the US pass by on the other side of the road, and leave victims of such savagery to suffer and die alone? The question is as current as this year's election. And, it has remained unanswered for at least a millennia.
Rating: 
Summary: Kill thy neighbors
Review: "Lord, may you never forgive them." Thus ends this book, by an Islamic journalist from Prijedor in Serbia which used to be Bosnia-Herzegovina. If past experience is a guide, thus the stage of revenge and pain is set for the next round of savagery in the Balkans. It's lasted for generations. These are deeply religious people, basically Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Muslim. Each faith has a long record of savagery toward others, a cruelty that can only be explained by the fundamentalist conviction that non-believers are devils. It's why American forces are now in Kosovo, to provide a few months or years of peace. But first, some recent background. During World War II, Germany broke up Yugoslavia and gave Croatia its independence. Croatian armed forces -- the Ustasha -- fought in Russia for the Germans, and in Yugoslavia became an especially brutal ally of the Germans. They were opposed by the communist underground, led by Josip Broz Tito; and by Monarchists. When the war ended, the communists took their revenge on both opposition forces. After the Soviet Union disintegrated, the collapse of central authority in Yugoslavia allowed for the rise of various ethnic factions. Almost immediately, Germany recognized Croatian independence; and the rest of Yugoslavia erupted into the chaos of various independence movements. What happened when the Confederate States of America declared independence? It produced the bloodiest war in American history. It also produced prison camps such as Andersonville; and mass murders of Black soldiers who dared to work or fight for the Union but were later taken prisoner. The Yugoslav story is not unique in its savagery; it is merely contemporary. This book explains the reality of "ethnic cleansing." The term is deceptively antiseptic, it hides a bloody brutality of drunken Serbian thugs turned loose in an ecstasy of perverted pleasure to torture and beat half-starved Muslim prisoners to death. Simple murders, such as a bullet in the back of the neck, may seem bad. The Serbs are never so merciful, these savage beatings were to inflict maximum pain and often an agonizing death. Hukanovic hammers that point home again and again, sparing no detail. It is a description of hate run amok, where torture and pain became the ultimate pleasure for the Serbs. This book is not one of combat, it tells of a hatred so lasting that it eventually erupts in depravity. It is not unique to Yugoslavia; a thousand years ago, Islam conquered India and left a divided people that may yet erupt into a nuclear war between Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan. Likewise, similar hates have ravaged East Timor. Will it end? Read this book, and ask "Will the Lord ever forgive them?" It doesn't describe the geopolitics and other fancy words about the Balkans, it explains the pain, suffering, misery, torture and spirit of eternal revenge to inflict more pain, suffering, misery and torture. Then ask, "Should the US intervene?" Or should the US pass by on the other side of the road, and leave victims of such savagery to suffer and die alone? The question is as current as this year's election. And, it has remained unanswered for at least a millennia.
Rating:
Summary: Kill thy neighbors
Review: "Lord, may you never forgive them." Thus ends this book, by an Islamic journalist from Prijedor in Serbia which used to be Bosnia-Herzegovina. If past experience is a guide, thus the stage of revenge and pain is set for the next round of savagery in the Balkans. It's lasted for generations. These are deeply religious people, basically Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Muslim. Each faith has a long record of savagery toward others, a cruelty that can only be explained by the fundamentalist conviction that non-believers are devils. It's why American forces are now in Kosovo, to provide a few months or years of peace. But first, some recent background. During World War II, Germany broke up Yugoslavia and gave Croatia its independence. Croatian armed forces -- the Ustasha -- fought in Russia for the Germans, and in Yugoslavia became an especially brutal ally of the Germans. They were opposed by the communist underground, led by Josip Broz Tito; and by Monarchists. When the war ended, the communists took their revenge on both opposition forces. After the Soviet Union disintegrated, the collapse of central authority in Yugoslavia allowed for the rise of various ethnic factions. Almost immediately, Germany recognized Croatian independence; and the rest of Yugoslavia erupted into the chaos of various independence movements. What happened when the Confederate States of America declared independence? It produced the bloodiest war in American history. It also produced prison camps such as Andersonville; and mass murders of Black soldiers who dared to work or fight for the Union but were later taken prisoner. The Yugoslav story is not unique in its savagery; it is merely contemporary. This book explains the reality of "ethnic cleansing." The term is deceptively antiseptic, it hides a bloody brutality of drunken Serbian thugs turned loose in an ecstasy of perverted pleasure to torture and beat half-starved Muslim prisoners to death. Simple murders, such as a bullet in the back of the neck, may seem bad. The Serbs are never so merciful, these savage beatings were to inflict maximum pain and often an agonizing death. Hukanovic hammers that point home again and again, sparing no detail. It is a description of hate run amok, where torture and pain became the ultimate pleasure for the Serbs. This book is not one of combat, it tells of a hatred so lasting that it eventually erupts in depravity. It is not unique to Yugoslavia; a thousand years ago, Islam conquered India and left a divided people that may yet erupt into a nuclear war between Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan. Likewise, similar hates have ravaged East Timor. Will it end? Read this book, and ask "Will the Lord ever forgive them?" It doesn't describe the geopolitics and other fancy words about the Balkans, it explains the pain, suffering, misery, torture and spirit of eternal revenge to inflict more pain, suffering, misery and torture. Then ask, "Should the US intervene?" Or should the US pass by on the other side of the road, and leave victims of such savagery to suffer and die alone? The question is as current as this year's election. And, it has remained unanswered for at least a millennia.
Rating:
Summary: "No comment"
Review: Dear Friends, imagine for one minute if you wake up one morning and find out that your childhood friends,your neighbours have turned into beasts and that you're the haunted one. Imagine for one minute that you have been a professor to a stupid student and now this stupid student has your life in his hands; imagine that you have been a judge who convicted a criminal and this very same criminal is a guard of yours and is your judge now!
Imagine the worst hell yet there'll be nothing as scary and terrifying than the memoirs of this remarkable man who has been at one of tens (if not hundreds) of death camps of Bosnia. Prijedor,may 30 1992, a sunny day. D is having his morning coffee as usual but the unexpected is soon to happen and D is taken away by serb terrorists, once his neighbours and friends.
Soon,D's son, a teenager, and lots of D's cousin and friends join him in the place where they were gathering the peaceful enemies of terror. After they get maltreated in so many ways, the serb terrorists decide to send them to an administrative building in Omarska, in which place thousands join D's fate.
They are to see a living hell with their own eyes, and even though their imagination in regards of their fate was quite rich, the unexpectable kept coming from serb terrorists, the runners of this death camp.
The introduction : 1. The prisoners in the hands of terrorists, are left without food for four days then... 2. Later, when they were fed, they were allowed to eat not longer
than two minutes as they were beaten at the meantime... 3. The serb terrorists, called out the names of prisoners, chose them like if they were soccer balls, and played and kicked them all over without any mercy... 4. The prisoners were so thirsty and the serb terrorists refused to give them water to drink so the solution to this was : ......
(Goodness me)....People wetted their lips with their urine, some even drank it. 5. The serb students (now terrorists) called out the names of prisoner teachers and... The serb convicted criminals called out the names of presidents of justice and judges...then.... 6. One of the favorite "game" serb terrorists enjoyed was getting an old man have sexual intercourse with a much younger lady. As a honourable man, he refused but died with dignity. Then the serb terrorists chose two man to bite two other men's genitals and they did... And so so many horrible stories that will make you shiver just by reading it.
We Albanians have a saying "A human being is as strong as steel yet as weak as glass". In this case, the author of this very important book must be as strong as steel to go through all that hell and still remain a normal person. I mean what would you do, if you were him??? I am terrified at the thought.
Anyways, even though serbs are very familiar to me for the crimes they did in my country Kosova who is safe thanks to U.S.A.
now - I found one more reason to despise them for as long as I live, and I'll make sure my descendants will despise them too forever. I mean, the serbs horrible crimes in Croatia,Bosnia and Kosova, must have made them immortal beasts and they will always remain like that in all our minds. "We will never forget and I hope the world will never forget either" - because what can you really expect from a lifetime neigbour and friend who has the ability to turn into a beast to you in a matter of minutes, and refuses to see you like a neighbour or a friend, let alone a fellow human being like they were supposed to be!
Rating:
Summary: There are no words.
Review: In his foreword to this book, attempting to clarify where the tragedies at Omarska and other Serbian concentration camps stand in the canon of human suffering, Elie Wiesel says that "Nothing, anywhere, can be compared to Auschwitz." When I closed 'The Tenth Circle of Hell' - a third person account, though clearly a memoir of Hukanovic's own experience - I wondered not how, but why, Wiesel would choose to make such a distinction. In this corner of existence, when "right" and "wrong" become meaningless and survival becomes not so much an act of defiance but a grinding and hopeless routine, there is no grayscale. In this corner of existence, the whole world becomes black, and the suggestion that any one concentration/internment/death camp can be compared to another becomes moot. In clear-eyed and painful prose, Rezak Hukanovic gives voice to the thousands of interned Muslim and Croat civilians whose lives were destroyed by the next-door neighbors they once knew as friends. Too often, the atrocities detailed in this book become so horrible, so surreally depraved, that Hukanovic is brave simply in his willingness to recount them. How anyone lived through them, and how the rest of the world looked on in such a willfully Orwellian stupor, is an entirely more difficult discussion. In this slender book, probably the most powerful single document to come out of the Bosnian conflict, Hukanovic makes few attempts at understanding how these horrors happened. The logic in that choice is clear - there is no understanding. No, nothing, anywhere, can be compared to Auschwitz. Nor can anything, anywhere, compare to Omarska.
Rating:
Summary: There are no words.
Review: In his foreword to this book, attempting to clarify where the tragedies at Omarska and other Serbian concentration camps stand in the canon of human suffering, Elie Wiesel says that "Nothing, anywhere, can be compared to Auschwitz." When I closed 'The Tenth Circle of Hell' - a third person account, though clearly a memoir of Hukanovic's own experience - I wondered not how, but why, Wiesel would choose to make such a distinction. In this corner of existence, when "right" and "wrong" become meaningless and survival becomes not so much an act of defiance but a grinding and hopeless routine, there is no grayscale. In this corner of existence, the whole world becomes black, and the suggestion that any one concentration/internment/death camp can be compared to another becomes moot. In clear-eyed and painful prose, Rezak Hukanovic gives voice to the thousands of interned Muslim and Croat civilians whose lives were destroyed by the next-door neighbors they once knew as friends. Too often, the atrocities detailed in this book become so horrible, so surreally depraved, that Hukanovic is brave simply in his willingness to recount them. How anyone lived through them, and how the rest of the world looked on in such a willfully Orwellian stupor, is an entirely more difficult discussion. In this slender book, probably the most powerful single document to come out of the Bosnian conflict, Hukanovic makes few attempts at understanding how these horrors happened. The logic in that choice is clear - there is no understanding. No, nothing, anywhere, can be compared to Auschwitz. Nor can anything, anywhere, compare to Omarska.
Rating:
Summary: Yes, this kind of thing still happens
Review: Journalist Rezak Hukanovic's very short book about his experiences in the captivity of the Serbs is a harrowing reminder of how cruel people can be, even in this day and age when educated people tend to think such inhumanity is behind us. How, in the shadow of the Holocaust, can people convince themselves it's okay to act this way? Hukanovic does not know and does not pretend to know -- he simply reports the facts of his captivity and the monstrous depravities he witnessed and suffered. The book stumbles into near-banality whenever Hukanovic does anything other than straightforward reporting of the facts. Perhaps this is due to difficulty of translation; perhaps it is just because any philosophical musing or attempts at poetry seem ludicrously flimsy in the face of the events reported. But almost all of the book is simple reporting of true occurrences. Technique is beside the point when the events themselves have the power of a waking nightmare. There are still people who believe things like what happened to Hukanovic are impossible -- that no one could behave so reprehensibly towards other humans. Those people should read this book. Perhaps the knowledge that this sort of thing was happening in 1992 will awaken them and they will join the ranks of those, like the International Red Cross monitors Hukanovic lauds for mitigating his own plight, who try to ameliorate such horrors rather than ignore them.
Rating:
Summary: Shocking, sickening, and heart-wrenching!
Review: The author Rezak Hukanovic is a Bosnian Muslim living in a small city of Prijedor. As the country Yugoslavia breaks apart, an independent republic Bosnia emerges. The Serbs act on this and take over some cities such as Prijedor. The Serbs round up the Muslim and Croat males and put them in concentration camps. Even though Rezak has some friends who are Serbs and he is apolitical, he is put in the same camp as all the others.
First the Serbs rob them of their possessions. Then they rob them of their humanity. The Serbs torture and execute their victims, even though they knew them in a prior life. Rezak details all these dispictable crimes committed on the Muslims and Croats. Even though humanity stated never again after the killing of the Jews in WWII, Rezak details that most of humanity just stood and watched what happened in Bosnia to the Muslims and Croats. This is a good short read.
Rating:
Summary: Bosnian Muslims and Croats in a Serb concentration camp.
Review: The author Rezak Hukanovic is a Bosnian Muslim living in a small city of Prijedor. As the country Yugoslavia breaks apart, an independent republic Bosnia emerges. The Serbs act on this and take over some cities such as Prijedor. The Serbs round up the Muslim and Croat males and put them in concentration camps. Even though Rezak has some friends who are Serbs and he is apolitical, he is put in the same camp as all the others.
First the Serbs rob them of their possessions. Then they rob them of their humanity. The Serbs torture and execute their victims, even though they knew them in a prior life. Rezak details all these dispictable crimes committed on the Muslims and Croats. Even though humanity stated never again after the killing of the Jews in WWII, Rezak details that most of humanity just stood and watched what happened in Bosnia to the Muslims and Croats. This is a good short read.
Rating:
Summary: A memoir in the tradition of Wiesel and Solzhenitsyn.
Review: THE TENTH CIRCLE OF HELL does not provide much background on the circumstances in Bosnia-Herzegovina that led Rezak Hukanovic and other residents of Prijedor being forced into a death camp, but the exact context is not especially important. As one reads about the real horrors behind the rather antiseptic phrase "ethnic cleansing," it is enough to know that this happened in the last decade of the twentieth century. People should keep memories such as Hukanovic's in mind the next time they wonder whether the civilized world ought ever to intervene in the "internal affairs" of other countries.
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