This piece originally appeared on New York Transatlantic.
NEW YORK—In 1999, the famous Red Mosque (Xhamia e Kuqe) in Pejë, Kosovo, burned. It wasn’t collateral damage, but “a strategic target,” according to research presented last week at Columbia. Serb forces destroyed the mosque in a systematic attempt to erase Muslims and their culture from the area.
This was not a solitary incident, researcher András Riedlmayer said. From 1991 to 1999, cultural sites—including churches, cathedrals, mosques, archives and libraries—were bombed, shot, burned, razed and erased from communities in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. While some Orthodox cathedrals were destroyed in Bosnia during the war and after the war in Kosovo, Riedlmayer said, Serb forces destroyed most of the structures and texts lost in those years. His presentation took place nearly ten years to the day when the International Court of Justice issued its judgement in Bosnia v. Serbia, in which Bosnia charged the Serbian state with sponsoring genocide in the Bosnian War.
Riedlmayer, who directs the Documentation Center of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University, discussed his 25 years spent documenting more than 530 damaged or destroyed sites during a presentation at Columbia’s Harriman Institute last Monday. He views these attacks as war crimes and evidence of intent to commit genocide, and has testified on multiple occasions before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
The goal of these demolitions, Riedlmayer stated, is clear: a cleansing of the area, of both culture and citizens alike. The Aladža mosque in Foča, Bosnia-Herzegovina, was built in the mid-16th century and blown up in 1992. “Later,” Riedlmayer said, “rubble from the mosque was found during the excavation of a mass grave at a depth of eight meters.” Rubble from the Sava mosque in Brčko was also used to cover a mass grave: “First you kill the people, then you kill the culture, then you put the rubble on top of them as an insult.”