Hi all, this is my first post, I'm starting a short story about a family torn by war, specifically war crimes.. child homeless, house taken out, father killed etc... I am just not decided on which era to focus, a modern-day war like the Kosovo war and so pick up a village from there, or WW2 for example where I have many countries from Europe? Any suggestion of a suitable village would be appreciated. Thanks
I suggest you research 'ethnic cleansing in Krajina'. Over 200,000 people were ethnically cleansed by Croatian forces from there, thousands killed. These days, if you go by a bus, from Zagreb to Šibenik, you'll see dozens of burned and abandoned villages. A town of Knin was one of the hardest hit. Also, you have Vukovar in the vicinity. Historically, in that area Serbs were hit by genocide carried out by nazi Croatia, concentration camps like Jasenovac, Gradiška and dozens more, also villages burned to the ground. Almost a milion people perished then. It's all the same area, two attempts at genocide in the same century.
Well, this might sound silly but I still don't know how can I send a pm! So I'll ask you something here . I am trying to avoid any political controversy, even the slightest, in my story... just innocent people suffering. But how can I do this if - for example - I want to tell the story of a woman raped by soldiers who belong to an X army? Will this put me in the zone of political debates?
Take the village nearest you and write about a fictional civil war a year from now. Avoids many clichés like Bad Croatians, Bad Serbs, Bad You Name Them.
What I would do if I were you is, I wouldn't write about any real country or people. Because if you want to write about real war crimes, and name names, political controversy is inevitable. War crimes are highly emotionally charged topics and every victim of such a travesty will have definite political views about people who inflicted suffering on them. Instead, you can set your story in an imaginary setting. It's a difficult thing to do but it can be done. Has been done many times in fact. Perhaps something set in the future, or past, or an imaginary country. Use the real stories, footage, images, ideas, but steer clear of politics. There's too much of it in the world at the moment, I would be reluctant too. You send a pm by clicking on "Start Conversation". I think if you click on someone's avatar, one of the options in the upper part of the window says that, click and you are pm-ing away
Putting something into a historical context can provide for a sense of authenticity and resonance that a purely imaginary setting may not. Besides, researching historical atrocities can give you additional details (not just on the atrocities but the background in which they occurred) that you can incorporate into your story. Keep in mind that atrocities don't just happen. They have causes, too. Just a thought.
There are other more subtle ways that Empires committed genocide and other war crimes than modern day war mongering in smaller, defenceless countries. In 1845 of course the Irish were starved to death under the guise of a potato blight - like the only food in the 1840s were potatoes! In fact there was tons of food, every other vegetable grew despite the good old potato being wiped out from a disease which started in Central Europe and made it's way West from Germany to France, Holland and Belgium to Ireland but somehow miraculously missed Britain - how lucky was that huh? Anyway, food was denied to the Native Irish, the people were made work like slaves for greedy English landlords for a pittance and over a million starved to death and or died of dissentry and other such diseases, a million more were forced to emigrate and most of them died on the coffin ships on route to the New World - America. While, at the early stages of this genocide, many "war-crimes" such as rape, kidnap, torture were committed, within a year the women were too disease ridden to be touched and hundreds of thousands were corralled into walled fields and left to die in each other's arms under the sun/stars. It riles me to write this but I am just explaining the powers that be had more subtle devices of wiping out nations and their propaganda machines were so good that even today, over 150 years on, people in this world still believe there was an unfortunate incident of a famine in Ireland.
