Briševo: A Village Wiped Out in 1992

Abstract

Using primary sources and eyewitness accounts as well as the relevant literature, the author writes about the crimes committed by Serbian military and police structures in Briševo, a village in the Prijedor Municipality with a Croatian majority population. Shelled during the first days of an ‘ethnic cleansing’ operation in late May 1992, Briševo was attacked two months later; a number of the locals were killed, while the village was looted and pillaged. After the attack, the remaining locals were expelled or taken to camps and other places of illegal internment. This village became a paradigm of crimes committed in the Prijedor Municipality and the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A similar fate befell Bosniaks and Croats in other settlements of the Prijedor Municipality. The systematic destruction of this village during the spring and summer of 1992, and the consequences thereof, are the topic of this paper.