Just as the Cold War came to an unexpectedly peaceful end in 1991,a series of wars engulfed the former Yugoslavia. The Balkan warsbrought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people andthe forced dislocation of millions more, singled out for persecutionbecause of their ethnic and religious identity. The violence againsthuman beings was accompanied by the systematic destruction ofthe cultural record???libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage.This article is an attempt to put the destruction of libraries duringthe wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo into a broadertheoretical and legal context. It examines patterns and methods ofdestruction, the track record of legal and practical measures to protectendangered collections in time of armed conflict, the ongoingquest to bring those responsible for attacks on libraries to justice,the responses of the international community and of the librarycommunity to this cultural catastrophe during the war and in thepost-war period, and the growing recognition of the nexus betweencultural heritage and human rights. It also addresses the troubledaftermath of ethnic conflict and the perils of reconstruction in apost-war environment, in which libraries continue to be endangeredby nationalist politics.
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