A Village Destroyed, May 14, 1999: War Crimes in Kosovo
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.)Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.