Book Documents Culture Buildings Used as Balkan War Jails

Photographer Hrvoje Polan, writer Viktor Ivancic and journalist Nemanja Stjepanovic presented their new book 'Behind the Seven Camps: From Crimes of Culture to Culture of Crime', about the use of cultural buildings as wartime detention and killing sites, on Thursday evening at Zagreb's Gric cinema.

Polan photographed 24 locations for the book - in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he took pictures at Houses of Culture in Trnopolje, Pilica and Vitez, at the Music School in Zenica and the Museum of the Battle for the Wounded on the Neretva River in Jablanica, while in Croatia he documented sites like Kerestinec Castle and the Lora harbour in Split.

"The reason why a large number of 'houses of culture' were chosen for this terrible transformation was pragmatically prosaic. The evildoers at that time needed such big, practical, spaces where large numbers of 'unwanted' people could be sent," Ivancic said.

Ivancic said that some executions were staged as if they were theatrical performances.

"For example, in Celopek [near Zvornik in Bosnia], people were liquidated on a stage. They did the same thing in Pilica [also near Zvornik] while performing some kind of play. At the Pilica Culture House, they opened fire with gun barrels pushed through a movie projector's aperture," he said.

Meanwhile the Lora military prison camp in Split, where crimes were committed against Serb prisoners of war at in 1992, is now used for cultural events.

"Today Lora has a multi-purpose hall that is open to the public, called the House of the Croatian Army, where theatre plays, public forums, film screenings, lectures and so on are regularly held," Ivancic said.

The authors of the book said they were astonished by the fact that places built by socialist Yugoslavia...

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