Monday, February 27, 2012

Blog Post 3: Current Event

http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/23/world/meast/iraq-violence/index.html?iref=allsearch
An Iraqi firefighter douses a car as security forces inspect the site of a blast in the northern city of Kirkuk on February 23, 2012.



     The intended audience for the article would be the Americans. The purpose of this article is to inform the American people about the situations going on in Iraq right now. The claim is that there are too many deaths in Iraq now that the American troops are out. The evidence that they support is that since the troops left in late 2011, there has been more attacks in the country. More civilians are being killed randomly in the streets.
     The article Dozens Killed in Wave of Attacks Across Iraq connects with the book Safe Area Gorazde when the Serbs attacked Gorazde many times. In the first attack by the Serbs, they were firing shots into the town and setting homes on fire. The Serbs were killing innocent civilians on the street trying to run away. The Iraqi's were also killing innocent civilians on the street. The Iraqi's were blowing up cars and houses and the Serbs were setting them on fire. In Gorazde after the first attack, there were 250 fatalities and in Iraq they had 151 people killed.



Saturday, February 18, 2012

English Blog 2: Letter

February 17, 1993

Dear Joe,
     The trip to Grebak is very dangerous, hard and just horrible. But I had to make that terrible trip for food! My family had none! We were so starving and the outside world wasn't bringing us any food.
     Grebak is an army mountain post that has food and supplies for us. The only problem is that they wouldn't send the food to us, we had to go there and get it ourselves in the freezing cold winter. There were about 200 of us taking the journey. I paid two kg of flour for the truck ride to Zorovici. When we finally got there, we had to travel by foot to get all the way across Zorovici. This was about two or three kilometers. The hiking was the most difficult part. There was a guide at the front of the line who showed us the way to get to Grebak and we had to wait a lot for everyone else in the back to keep up. Many obstacles included streams that were too wide to jump across. That's where a lot of the people got stopped because they fell in and couldn't get out. We arrived in Grebak at around 4 or 4:30 in the morning. Everyone was trading goods at the black market and we would set off again in the evening.
      I left with a good amount of things. Enough that me and my family needed. When I arrived back home I was a hero in my family. There was only four people to feed but still the food only lasted about 20 days. I slept for about two to three days when i returned. The trip to Grebak is torture but i still do it so that my family doesn't starve. So that was my experience at Grebak and I'm sure a lot more men have stories like mine. I'm just glad i survived.


Your Friend,
Edin

Monday, February 13, 2012

Stages of Genocide in Safe Area Gorazde

The stage of genocide that relates to the book, Safe Area Gorazde is classification. Classification means to classify someone or a group of people by their race, nationality or religion. On page 19, a map shows how Bosnia is divided by different ethnic groups including Croats, Serbs and Muslims. It shows that Bosnia isn't just one country, it's divided by ethnicity. On page 40 it explains how two different coffee bars are specifically for different ethnicities; "In some coffee bars, all the people were Muslim and 15 meters away another coffee bar was full of Serbs"(Sacco, 2001, p. 40). In both of these examples, they are showing how people only classify each other by their ethnicity and not just as people.