On a warm spring morning in 1999, Serbian security and paramilitary forces descended on the small village of Cuska, near the western Kosovo city of Pec. The villagers were threatened and robbed of their money, jewelry, and identification papers. Twenty-nine men were divided into three groups and taken into three separate houses, where they were sprayed repeatedly with automatic weapons. Each house was then set on fire and left to burn.

The research project and resulting book, published in 2001, investigates the massacre at Cuska, and examines the changing face of human rights reporting in the age of information, digital photography, and war crimes tribunals.

"Seldom does a book take readers so powerfully inside war crimes—both into the pain of the victims and, even more chilling, into the minds of the perpetrators."—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa

"Gilles Peress's photographs take us where we have never gone before: into the killing zones of Kosovo where ethnic Albanians were tortured, executed, robbed, and driven from the land."—Gloria Emerson, author of Gaza: A Year in the Intifada