Remembering Srebrenica

I don’t know where to begin with this post and I’m crying as I try …
The IAGS conference (see previous post) was scheduled to fall around the date of the 12th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, and on Wednesday most of the conference participants went to the Potocari memorial site to attend the service.
There is much to the story of Srebrenica, and of neighboring Zepa, and, sadly, much that is unknown, denied or disputed by a range of groups.
During the war, Srebrenica became a refuge (albeit one whose inhabitants suffered hunger and constant danger) for Bosnian ethnic/religious Muslims throughout the region of Northeast Bosnia, much of which was controlled by the Bosnian Serb Army or threatened by Serbia itself. The people in the region feared that the international community would forget them, though, and when visited by French General Morillon and a group of UN aid workers (the army refused to allow their accompanying convoy of humanitarian aid supplies to enter the area with them), the residents of Srebrenica formed a human blockade to stop them from leaving. They felt that without an international presence they would be completely at the mercy of the Bosnian Serb Army.
Srebrenica (despite some heel-dragging at the UN) was declared a safe zone under UN protection and Dutch soldiers came to protect the area’s residents (about 50,000 refugees). By July 1995, however, the Dutch observed the Bosnian Serb army amassing forces in the area to threaten Srebrenica.

There are various explanations for what followed - including deals struck between Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic and the UN commander - but there is no reasonable explanation for why the UN refused NATO’s request for airstrikes on the advancing Bosnian Serb troops.
There is no explanation for why only 6,000 refugees were allowed to enter the Dutch Battalion’s compound, leaving more than 20,000 outside seeking safety and shelter, despite the fact that there was room for many thousands more people to come under Dutchbat’s immediate protection.

There is no explanation for why even those 6,000 were forced out of the compound by the Dutch soldiers and into the waiting hands of the Bosnian Serbs.
The UN soldiers watched as the Bosnian Serbs separated the refugees, women and children toward buses, men and teenage boys toward their deaths. Some men escaped into the woods only to be hunted down by the army, the rest were massacred and dumped into mass graves. More than 7,000 men and boys were killed, the Bosniaks’ fears were realized under the watch of the international community.

I’m crying, again.

At the memorial we stood at the place where thousands of Bosnians last saw their husbands, brothers, and sons, where they saw their worst nightmares came true. Students my age as well as older witnesses who spoke at the conference told us of the last time their fathers hugged them, of the terror of being twelve years old but tall for your age and waiting to see which line the soldiers would wave you into, of holding their mothers back from committing suicide in the following days, of their struggles to support their families in the following years, of their continuing struggles to find the bodies of their relatives (some lost 10, 20, or more family members), of their struggle to move forward with their lives.

The memorial site, well within the Republika Srpska region of BiH and nearly on the Serbian border, was filled with people on the anniversary, come to mourn and to bury another 465 bodies, corpses exhumed from new mass graves in the past year. The coffins - a bit of wood and heavy green cloth - lay in long rows, and as the service started a sea of men prayed together before them, the women filling the hill behind.

I was outside the fence around the site during the memorial service, in the odd position of facing the thousands of praying mourners. I had come close to choosing not to come on the trip (I worried that to go with all of the conference attendees was rather like genocide tourism), and it was strange to have gotten stuck outside the gates when the service started, to be facing the mourners as they prayed. As the imam’s words echoed over the site, though, and the men moved together through their prayers, touching the ground, their faces, lifting their hands, all I could do was rest my head against the bars of the fence and weep, and, I suppose, in my own way, to pray.
Ultimately, perhaps we scholars were there as witnesses and mourners, just like everyone else.
As the memorial service ended, the burials began, the green coffins going to join the many hundreds buried last year and the year before, some in graves marked with headstones, some marked only by a number. Each coffin was lifted by a group of men and carried toward the graves where the women waited, moving down a line of men and boys who would reach up to touch each coffin as it was carried past.

I ramble about genocide scholars ...

I spent last week attending the International Association of Genocide Scholars conference here in Sarajevo. Leslie Dwyer, my advisor, was here to present a paper on her continuing work surrounding the massacres in Indonesia in 1965. It was great to see her, to hear her present her work, and to see a new documentary that includes interviews both with her and with her husband Degung.
I was fascinated to get a peek at a bit of the varied scholarship going on in the field of genocide studies (and to see what sort of creatures genocide scholars are!), and to meet a range of professors, researchers and students from around the world and especially from Bosnia, who came to present their work or to share their experiences. I got to hear - and even meet - some of those scholars whose works I’ve been reading in my Peace and Conflict courses for the last few years. (Additionally, I got to meet one of the first students to graduate with a degree in Anthropology in Kuwait - Jawaher was also the first female student body president of a Kuwaiti university, if not in all of the Middle East - and I got to hear Vijaya Thakur BMC ‘08 bravely present a paper on Burundi on the same panel as Rene Lemarchand, perhaps THE Burundi genocide scholar).

As present as the effects of the war are in Sarajevo, as moving and painful as the stories I come across in my research are, as many times as I’ve cried (quietly!) while the choir rehearses, nothing has been quite as academically and emotionally exhausting as a week focused exclusively on genocide ... on so many genocides. There were papers about Armenia, about the Holocaust, about Rwanda, Burundi, Guatemala, about the Kurds in Iraq and the Pontic Greeks, about Indonesia, about Darfur, and, many, many, about the former Yugoslavia.

IAGS does not normally hold its conferences in places where genocide has occurred, I don’t think, but it was fascinating and moving to have the participation of so many scholars and witnesses from Bosnia. It grounded the academic work being presented, and the tense and difficult questions being raised brought home how important (and, sadly, how contested) this ongoing work is for the region as well as the discipline.
Carla del Ponte, for example, received an award from the IAGS for all the work she has done (she’s the prosecutor for the ICTY) and some very blunt questions from the audience about all those war criminals she’s failed to bring to justice. In a wonderful gesture, the students of the Sarajevo law school invited their colleagues at the Belgrade law school to attend the conference. Security was higher than I think it might normally be for an academic conference, but I saw no problems.

Mountains and Mines

I meant to mention it in my history post, alonside the picture there, but my absolute favorite thing about Sarajevo is that one can look up from anywhere in the city and see green, largely undeveloped hills above. The picture in the history post is the view from half-way up a hill (near the music school, I think, where one can always hear the sounds of a piano), looking across the old part of the city (not visible) toward a lovely green hill on the other side. Imagine the people who live in those little houses ... they're surrounded by the countryside but their view is of the whole city below them, twinkling at night. I know that it was these hills that made the long siege of Sarajevo possible, and I have been told that one of the reasons that they have remained undeveloped is that they may still be mined (some are obviously being used for agriculture though, so they must be safe ... I think to a degree it is just easier for the city to expand down the valley than up the steep sides of these hills).

I got a chance to go hiking with a member of Pontanima, the choir that I am visiting. It was a chance to see the countryside around Sarajevo and a chance to really talk with him (gotta love being able to do interviews in a big field of wildflowers with fresh air and an amazing view). The picture above is from that trip, as are the ones below.


He shared amazing stories ... from heart breaking to hilarious. He is an experienced hiker and was a member of the army protecting Bosnia during the war, so I felt fairly certain that he wasn't going to lead me through any mine fields. That said, we had seen a (clearly marked) mined area on our way to the mountain, and, as we were wandering back out of the big field where we'd eaten lunch he said 'Careful, mine!' and pointed at the ground ahead of me .... my heart nearly stopped and I stood rooted to the spot while he chuckled. What he was pointing to was a cow pie; it was the same joke I might make in a field in Vermont ...

Stari Most

I've been having trouble finding internet cafes where photos can be uploaded at any reasonable speed, so I'm somewhat behind in letting you all know what I've been doing here in Sarajevo.

This is the famous bridge in Mostar, taken during a day trip one weekend. Mostar is an important center of the Herzegovina part of BiH, and this bridge is the heart of the city, its most famous monument. The original bridge was destroyed in November of 1993 after the alliance of Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats fell apart (Mostar's population was primarily divided between these two groups). Croat tank round destroyed the bridge, breaking the hearts of Mostar's residents. An exact model was constructed about three years ago with much international support (I think Jimmy Carter may have shown up for the opening celebration). Tourists again flock to Mostar to see the bridge and to gasp at the young men who jump from it. They plunge 21 meters into the river ... it's said to be about 2 seconds of free fall, which is quite a long time, and it's said that one risks castration - and death, of course - if the jump is made improperly.

The bridge has been reconstructed, but the rest of Mostar is not as it was before the war ... a lot of social tension and prejudice is said to remain, discouraging many of the refugees who fled during the war from returning. The picture below is of a ruined house near the center of the city, you can see the holes in the walls from bullets and shrapnel.


A large Catholic cross now looks down over the city - a very common sight in Italy, I am told, but unseen in BiH other than at Medugorje, a major Catholic pilgrimage destination where Mary is said to have appeared to a group of teenagers in the 1980s. The cross above Mostar is placed precisely on the spot where anti-aircraft guns were located during the war; Mostar was in a no-fly zone, however, so the guns were tragically used to kill the citizens below.

A Little History

Sarajevo is a city of about 440,000 (600,000 before the war) and is the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), a nation of the former Yugoslavia. The architecture in Sarajevo bears the evidence of centuries of Ottoman rule (the old center is full of little Turkish-style shops and streets surrounding the Sebilj fountain), then Austro-Hungarian rule (moving out from the old town the buildings in the center are handsome and more Western European), and eventually several decades of communisim under Tito (the city expanded greatly during this period and I find very little of the architecture appealing).

The Miljacka river runs through the city and there are many bridges that span it, including one now known as Princip’s, where a hotheaded Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia, thereby starting World War I (the Great Powers all had manipulative alliances with various Balkan states, so the fact that the war started was not really the fault of anyone in the Balkans, it was just what finally sparked outright aggression among the Powers). Tito emerged as the leader of Yugoslavia as WW II ended, initially ruling the country as a strict Stalinist, brutal and repressive, but after being expelled by Stalin from the union of Communist governments, he became more of a “social visionary” and Yugoslavia enjoyed several decades of greater economic prosperity and excellent social systems. During this period more than a million people in BiH listed themselves in the census as “Yugoslav” without defining a separate national or religious identity.

Tito died in 1980, and while Yugoslavia held together for another decade, crises in Kosovo (then a semi-autonomous region in Serbia because of its primarily Albanian population) began to fuel Serbian nationalism. By the end of the ‘80s Milosevic had risen to power in Serbia and was manipulating Serbian nationalism, calling for the creation of a greater Serbia and - as Slovenia and Croatia, to the north of BiH, grew increasingly nationalistic and eventually announced their independence - threatening that any country that suceeded would face disputes over their borders so that all ethnic Serbs could live in Serbia.

BiH, sandwiched between Croatia and Serbia and with a 44% Muslim population (who were quite secular after decades of communism), remained fairly calm until 1992. One person that I’ve talked to here said that war seemed inevitable because the population of BiH was a microcosm of Yugoslavia. After a referendum in March 1992 in which 65% of Bosnians voted for independence and the EU and UN recognized the nation, Serbian paramilitary forces (who had been quietly occupying villages and massing heavy artillery and tanks on the hills surrounding Sarajevo) attacked the city. Thousands and thousands of Sarajevans of all backgrounds took to the streets to protest the barricades and a sniper fired into the peaceful crowd, starting a war that would last until 1996 and a genocide of proportions not seen in Europe since the Holocaust.

Atrocities were committed on all sides during the war (Croats and Muslims in Bosnia maintained an alliance against the Serbs for a time, but when that fell apart Croats and Muslims fought each other as well). Nobody escaped suffering. There was massive internal displacement of populations, refugees were scattered across the world, and people were robbed, killed, raped, and brutally torn from their families and their homes. The West had said “never again” after the Holocaust, but again concentration camps and genocide appeared on European soil. Twelve years ago next month nearly 8,000 men and boys were killed at Srebrenica, an area under UN protection.

Sarajevo itself survived the longest siege in modern military history: over 1200 days with little food and water, under constant sniper and artillery fire, over 11,000 of its inhabitants died while the rest were supported by what little they could carry into the city through a 1 meter square tunnel that ran under the airport’s runway. Some neighborhoods, like Grbavica, where I now work, were under Serb control, completely cut off from the rest of the city. The park near the Olympic Stadium (the largest Olympics held up to that point were here in 1984) was turned into a massive graveyard because it was one of few open spaces were people could bury their dead without being under fire from snipers.

Some people here credit Clinton with finally ending the war with the signing of the Dayton Accords ( negotiated in Ohio and signed in Paris in 1996), some question why he waited so long. One of his campaign platforms had been, after all, to bring an end to what was then just the beginning of war. Srebrenica is said to have caught the attention of many Americans who in turn pressured the government, as were the deaths of 60 people in an open market in the middle of Sarajevo when a grenade was launched into the crowd.

Much has been restored in Sarajevo in the last 11 years. Many buildings that were in ruins or mined have been torn down and replaced. The national post office (where women, in an act of resistance to the war and the snipers’ fire, would go to work every day, dressed and made-up, until the building was too shattered to be safe) has been restored, as has the national museum. There are still, however, many buildings in ruins, skeletal apartment houses, roofless structure - even in the heart of the city - where trees now push their way up out of the rubble. Bullet, shrapnel, and mortar holes are everywhere.

Welcome

I have been in Sarajevo for three weeks at this point, so I’m still less than half-way through my stay (but already sad that I’ll have to leave).

I am visiting Pontanima Choir, an interreligious choir that has been singing music of faith since 1996, when the war here ended. The choir includes people of all of the Bosnian ethno-religious backgrounds,* as well as Jews,* people of other religions, and atheists. They sing music from each of these religious traditions, and have held concerts all over Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) as well as in other parts of the former Yugoslavia, other nations in Europe, and in the U.S. They represent a powerful example of a community in which religious difference can exist peacefully and be celebrated.

*These are Bosniak/Muslim, Croat/Catholic, and Serb/Christian Orthodox, some people practice the religions associated with their ethnic background, and some do not ... BiH is - and was also before the war - a fairly secular country.

* There is a long Jewish tradition in Sarajevo, as many Sephardic Jews came here when they were expelled from Spain. Many were killed or left during World War II, and many left during the war here in the 1990s. What was once a large population has now shrunk to about 1000 in the city of Sarajevo. The University here once had the second largest Ladino (the Sephardic language) department in the world, but it has not existed since the war. Jews greatly influenced life in Bosnia; the root of much of the traditional music is actually in Jewish music, some of the traditional sevdalinkas, in fact, are Jewish songs with different words.