“I am not an academic by any means and I don’t want to be,” Chuck Sudetic told Oberlin students last Monday. “I’m not a scholar [or] a historian...I’m a journalist.”

Sudetic, a Balkans expert and former journalist for the New York Times and Rolling Stone, delivered his lecture as a part of the politics department’s mini-course titled, “Memory, Truth and Justice.” He told the story of three generations of a Serbian family, the Lukic family, living in Bosnia throughout the Bosnian War and beyond. The tale was extracted from his book, Blood and Vengeance.

The account began in Rujista, a poverty-stricken village of no more than 20 houses in Bosnia on the border with Serbia, along the Drina River. According to Sudetic this was “the land of hard-drinking men...[and] knife-fighting...where the men work the women to death to drink themselves to death.” This was a climate of “blood vengeance,” where the killing of a member of one family was often met with direct retaliation.

Sudetic provided historical background for his story. During World War II, Bosnia was under the control of Croatia’s fascist government. These fascists, fearing resistance from the Serb majority, started to kill the Serbs and drive them out of the country. One member of the Lukic clan, Novica, was one of the Serbs who died.

In Rujista, the Serbs crossed the border into Serbia to get weapons to protect themselves. Then they started murdering the Muslims, the same Muslims who had helped and protected them in the past. Some of these Muslims were Nurko Carkisic and his family, whom the Lukics relied on to survive. Carkisic managed to escape the killings due to the Lukics’ warning, but his family was left behind and burned to death in their house.

After World War II, the Communist dictator Tito made reconciliation possible among Bosnians and Serbs by implementing what was essentially a police state, jailing anyone who discriminated against the other culture, talked politics or fought. And conditions improved — many people had jobs and were getting educations. Neighbors like the Lukics and Carkisic’s new family cooperated again, and their children, Rale Lukic and Hasib Carkisic, became friends.

Then, in the 1980s, Tito’s combination of socialism with market influences failed. There was hyperinflation and saving accounts were completely wiped out. Along with the Soviet Union abandoning the area due to internal issues, conflict arose. Milosevic, the emerging leader of an emergent democracy, was up for election in a time of economic depression, and the only way to win the support of the people was to blame others for the national problems. His scapegoats were the Muslims.

Using propaganda and invoking memories of World War II, Milosevic managed to turn Bosnian Serbs against their Muslim neighbors. One man who took arms in aid of Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing was Rale Lukic’s nephew, Milan Lukic.

Milan, like many children of his generation, grew up listening to the boasts of family members who had killed Muslims during World War II. Inspired by these stories, he and his gang of followers went door to door killing Muslims, burning them alive or shooting them into the Drina River. Those they did not kill ran away.

When there were no Muslims left in Rujista, Milan organized raids into Serbia, killing Muslims there. Then in 1995, Milan and his gang completely destroyed one of the safe zones for Muslims set up by the United Nations in Srebrenica. One of the last men Milan killed was Hasib, the Lukics’ neighbor and friend.

Sudetic is now working for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, trying to prevent this from reccurring. “Remove someone like this [Milan] from the scene, then you can talk about reconciliation.”