Remembering the Past in Sarajevo: Rise of a Titan

The Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina boasts several detailed exhibits depicting important moments and movements throughout the Western Balkan region, with each exhibition presenting a unique snapshot that shaped modern-day BiH. As should be expected, the recent conflicts take precedence, with the particularly moving Siege of Sarajevo showcase demonstrating the day-to-day lives of people trapped for 1,335 days without access to water, electricity or heating. Being able to see the creativity with which ordinary people overcame these difficulties, all whilst under the constant threat of shelling and sniper fire, is a testament to the resilience of the local population. Similarly, Jim Marshall’s 15 Years retrospective, in which he took photos around Sarajevo in 1996 and then recreated them 15 years later in 2011, shows where the city has recovered and developed, and where the scars of conflict remain.

Whilst these stunning images expertly shed light on what it was like for ordinary people in a time of great uncertainty and danger, it was another exhibit focused on a far more obscure moment in Bosnian history that caught my attention. The Lost Sephardic World of the Western Balkans takes a look at the history of the Sephardic Jews in the Western Balkans since their arrival on the Iberian Peninsula in the 5^th century. Expelled from Spain in 1492 following the Alhambra Declaration – a decree issued by the Catholic Monarchs of the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in an attempt to reduce their influence on the large converso population (Jewish people who had converted to Christianity) in the region – the Sephardic Jews made their way to the Balkans, where they would remain for the next 500 years.

The Ottoman Empire was a safe haven for the Jewish community in the Western Balkans. Under the rule of the Ottomans there were no pogroms against them; they were free from the persecution that had faced in Western Europe. Throughout this time the Jewish community flourished, bringing the skills they had practiced in Spain and working as doctors, pharmacists, tinsmiths and merchants. Their influence on the culture of the Western Balkans was great. However, as the Ottoman Empire began to crumble in the 19^th century, Jewish communities became increasingly impoverished. Many German-speaking Ashkenazi Jews arrived in 1878 at the time of the Austria-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but fared less well than the established Sephardic communities in the area.

Throughout this period the Jewish population took an even greater role in society. Many served the Austria-Hungarian Empire in the First World War, but only a few years later following the formation of the pan-Slavic Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (colloquially, and later officially, Yugoslavia) a large number of Jews volunteered for the Royal Yugoslav Army. In the 1930s, some 8,500 Jews lived in Sarajevo alone, and played a central role in society, cementing their place as an important minority group that contributed much to the growth of the young Yugoslavia. However, 449 years after their expulsion from Spain, a new European power arrived in Yugoslavia and once again the Jews of the Western Balkans became a target. Following the arrival of the Nazis in April 1941, approximately 67,000 Jews, or 81% of the population, would be murdered. In “Independent Croatia” (which included much of Bosnia), Ustase death camps would become the final resting place for hundreds of innocent men, women, and children. In German-occupied Serbia, death by firing squad or transferral to concentration camps was almost unavoidable. The Jews that survived the initial wave of killings had a choice, to hide or to fight. Many chose to fight back. And of those that fought, many found their strength in an emerging resistance movement led by a then-little known communist agitator by the name of Josep Broz, better known colloquially as Tito.

Tito’s Partisans were a somewhat legendary group of fighters in the Second World War. Widely considered to be the most effective anti-Axis revolutionary movement in Europe, they developed their fighting prowess against Nazi Germany, Italy, Croatia’s Ustase, the Bulgarians, the Hungarians and even the Chetniks, a fellow resistance movement that the Partisans claimed were in fact suggestible to Nazi influence (a fact later borne out by German communications captured by the British). With fears that Yugoslavia could serve as a rallying point for a counter attack following the Allied invasion of Italy, Britain began to take an interest in Tito’s activities in the region, and in 1943 parachuted a small group of special forces operators into Yugoslavia in order to meet with the Partisans in Jajce, a small town about 150 km from Sarajevo.

In his excellent book Eastern Approaches the commanding officer of that operation, Brigadier General Fitzroy Maclean, details the logic behind the mission to make contact with a figure that at the time the Allies knew very little about. According to Maclean, his first order of business when arriving in Yugoslavia (and an order direct from Winston Churchill himself) was to establish if Tito was in fact a man, a woman, or simply a title given to the leader of the Partisan forces. Rumours of his communist ideology made Maclean wary, but Churchill was to tell him that his mission was “to find out who was killing the most Germans and suggest means by which we could help them kill more”(p281). Armed with these instructions, Maclean made contact with Tito and described his time with a man that, whilst socially very shy, was also very sure of himself and of the decisions that he made. Despite their vast political differences, a mutual respect grew between the men.

Tito, himself an ethnic Croat, led a multi-ethnic band of men and women. Mosha Pijade, Tito’s deputy, was Jewish; one of the approximately 1,500 Jews that joined the Partisan’s at the outbreak of war. Many of his leading commanders were Muslim and Croat, and at the outbreak of war many Serbs served in the ranks of the Partisans as well. Tito’s pan-ethnic policy was a part of his plan for the establishment of a multi-ethnic Communist state in Yugoslavia, but due to continuing ethnic tension amongst the groups many of the Muslim and Croat commanders had to change their names in order to protect them from their Serb colleagues. The rival Chetnik militia were fighting for the retention of the Yugoslav monarchy as a way of protecting the ethnically-Serb populations, and this was the foundation for much of the conflict between the two groups, who saw their goals as incompatible. The Chetnik vision of a ‘Greater Serbia’, advocated for by high-ranking Chetnik intellectual Stevan Moljevic, was indeed incompatible with the multi-ethnic ideals put forth by Tito.

Fierce fighting from Partisan men and women, supported by Allied aid following Maclean’s mission, led to Tito’s victory over the Chetniks and the establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia following the end of the Second World War. Tito would rule Yugoslavia with an iron fist until his death in 1980. In many ways, he succeeded in building a multi-ethnic state, but the extent to which this uneasy ethnic peace was maintained by the power of his rule, and the threat of what would happen to someone who did conform to his ideals, is up for debate. Certainly, it was Tito’s death that would signal the resurgence of ethno-nationalist rhetoric in Yugoslavia, and it was this same ideology that would tear the country apart throughout the 1990s. The image of a ‘Greater Serbia’ re-emerged in the rhetoric of Milosevic and Karadzic and an increasing certainty among all parties that they simply would not be able to continue to live together under the same government contributed to the collapse of the nation.

The ability to wield ethnicity as a weapon has determined the history of this region in a way that cannot be overstated. Tito’s leadership has been bookended by devastating violence on an unimaginable scale, with both conflicts defined by their ethnic components. The ability to manipulate ethnicity into a force that can unite or divide is one that is often misused. It does not have to be. The Western Balkans is just one example of a region that has suffered because of a perceived incompatibility along ethnic lines. But it has also prospered greatly from its multiculturalism. One person cannot change the world, but an idea can. With a history so steeped in cultural heritage that has been blackened by moments of ethnic division, one must not lose sight of what unites us.

The region was viewed as a haven for the Sephardic Jews during its time under Ottoman Rule because ethnicity was not seen as a characteristic that should divide. A multi-ethnic Partisan militia resisted the Nazis, the proliferators of potentially the most toxic and divisive ethnic ideology the world has seen, at a time when even the American Allied forces did not allow black and white soldiers to fight in the same regiment. Today, there is much to celebrate in the multi-ethnic, multi-religious culture of the Western Balkans. But the ethnic tension remains, and it is important that it is kept in check. The spread of increasingly anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric that is advancing across the West has not gone unnoticed in the region. We must not allow ethno-nationalism to be used as a force to draw us apart. We must be aware of the dangers of accepting political dialogue without questioning, and of not being conscious of the historical implications that such thinking has had. This is a lesson for all of us.

Remembering the Past in Sarajevo: Between Empires

Since my arrival in Sarajevo I have spent most of my time focused on learning about and engaging with the current political climate in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The effects that the conflicts of the 1990s had on the region continue to have such an impact on the modern state-of-play in the political and social sphere that anything from before 1992 can seem like ancient history. Even the 1984 Olympic Bobsled Track, now overgrown and abandoned, stands as a ghost of a past that has little to do with the present, a hangover of a story that was violently interrupted by the outbreak of war. But of course, history is not that simple. Conflict does not occur in a vacuum, but is shaped by the social circumstances preceding it. Its legacy is often determined by the status quo that results from it. The story of Bosnia and Herzegovina is one that began long before the fall of Yugoslavia and that will continue long after we are gone. In order to understand where we are at we must know where we came from, and so it is important to take a step back and look at the past if you want to fully understand the present.

The National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina is itself a historical landmark, a magnificent building constructed between 1888 and 1913 in the Italian Renaissance Revival style which is in many ways symbolic of the multicultural history of BiH. I visited on a smoggy late-October day in 2017, over 130 years after František Topič took his camera around Bosnia and Herzegovina to capture the photographs that are now displayed in a temporary exhibition at the museum: "Between Two Empires: Bosnia and Herzegovina 1885-1919". As the exhibition makes clear, during this time period BiH was at the very centre of the world, where the interests of colonial powers intersected. After 400 years of Ottoman Rule, the westernmost point of the ailing empire was ceded to Austria-Hungary in 1878 and the influence of the east gave way to the modern domination of the west.

Topič’s photographs document the everyday lives of people during this time of great transition. It was, after all, the farmers, the factory workers, and the merchants that shaped the future of their little patch of land. There was also an image of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife’s bodies as they were being laid to rest, a reminder of the central part this region played in the world at the beginning of the 20^th century. Let us not forget that their assassin, Gavrilo Princip, was the son of poor farmers and a member of the serf classes. Scholars usually focus on the individual powerful people that supposedly shape history, but Topič’s photographs demonstrate the reality of life in the Balkans during a watershed moment in history that would catapult the world into the modern age. And the Balkan people, from the conquerors to the conquered, the emperors to the peasants, were central to this transition.

Transition and a push/pull relationship with the great powers of the world has shaped this region since the earliest days of civilisation. As the archaeological exhibition in the national museum demonstrates, what is now BiH has long been torn between east and west, with the local people co-opting certain parts of both but somehow maintaining a unique local identity. The Kingdom of Illyria, which today makes up much of the Western Balkans, is first mentioned in Greek records dating from the 4^th century BC, with the indigenous Illyrian peoples appearing as a force that battled the Greeks throughout the Hellenistic Period. From the 2^nd century BC, the Illyrian population found themselves in conflict with the Roman Republic, and by 168 BC Roman rule of the region had been established. This period of rule resulted in much of the western influence that can still be seen in the region today. However, when the Roman Empire split into the western Roman Empire and the Byzantium Empire in the East in 395CE, the region once again found itself at the centre of the two new powers, with the River Drina (now on the border between BiH and Serbia) acting as the border between empires. In this context, Serbia turned increasingly towards the east thanks to influence from the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. Bosnia, on the other hand, was still on the fringes of Rome’s sphere of influence.

In the 6^th to 9^th Centuries the Balkans saw looter invasions from the Pannonian Avars, a nomad population from Central Asia, and the Slavs, who brought with them the Slavic languages that are spoken today. Between the 9^th and 13^th centuries BiH was caught between the Hungarian and Byzantine Empires, falling under the control of both throughout the 12^th century and picking up influences from each. The local population, becoming increasingly diverse in terms of ethnic and religious affiliation, campaigned for independence throughout this time and by 1377 BiH became an independent kingdom. Nearly a century later, in 1463, BiH officially fell to the Ottoman Empire, and remained under Ottoman rule until 1878, around the time where Topič’s photography picks up.

Despite playing host to the triggering event of the First World War, Bosnia and Herzegovina remained largely unscathed throughout the conflict and in the aftermath was incorporated into the South Slav Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which would later become Yugoslavia. Attempts at drawing political boundaries that avoided ethnic and historic lines proved difficult to realise in the increasingly nationalistic fervour of the 1930s, and, following the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941, much of Bosnia came under the rule of the Independent State of Croatia, a fascist puppet state that began to target Serbs, Roma and Jews, in addition to dissident Croats and Slovenes, throughout the conflict. The Serb ‘Chetniks’ emerged as a fighting force in response to the persecution of Serbs by the Croat Ustaša death squads. However, in their attempt to form an ethnically homogenous Greater Serbian state, the Chetniks were themselves responsible for much persecution and violence against the Bosnian Muslim population, and many others. It was in this context that Josip Tito’s multi-ethnic, communist resistance group, the Partisans, emerged. Although they too were responsible for atrocities against political opponents of all ethnicities, their military success prompted allied support for their cause and by the end of the conflict the Partisans controlled Sarajevo. This laid the groundwork for the emergence of Tito’s Yugoslavia, which would survive until 1992, when its violent collapse would result in the conflicts with which we are all familiar.

Throughout this entire history remains one constant; the ordinary people of the region. With a culture steeped in several different histories, the population of the Western Balkans boasts some of the most diverse ethnic and religious identities of anywhere in the world. A lot of the history of this area has been defined by violence, and that obviously remains true today, but the legacy of cultural exchange between these different peoples is the most enduring facet of the region. The Roman conquest of two thousand years ago gave way to the gelato stands and European-style cafes of the west-side of downtown today, the Ottoman rule of 500 years ago brought Islam and Orthodox Christianity, Bosnian coffee and Old Town’s markets and bazaars. Austria-Hungarian architecture can be seen throughout Sarajevo. Most people here speak several languages; they learn English or German, sometimes they learn Russian. A lot of the panels and conferences we have visited have touched on the thorny issue of Bosnia’s desire to join the EU. In Ilidža there are neighbourhoods being built with road and shop signs written in Arabic in order to accommodate the increasing number of expats from Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait moving to Bosnia for the economic opportunities and beautiful scenery. If you want to go anywhere in Old Town you have to fight your way through hundreds and hundreds of tourists from all over the world, seemingly regardless of the time of day. It really feels here like you are at the centre of the earth. 

What all this demonstrates, and what Topič’s photography captures beautifully, is that whilst it is easy to get lost in examining the big events of history, of focusing on the conqueror and conquered, one must remember the day-to-day lives of ordinary people and at least attempt to understand their experience in order to fully explain history. Those ordinary people might one day become Gavrilo Princip, or Josep Tito, who also came from a farmers’ background and became interested in politics after joining a labour union whilst working as an apprentice locksmith. But even those that do not go down in history shaped the circumstances and contexts in which these people operate, influence them and steer them in ways that might never be recorded in history books but are nevertheless hugely important.

I took a detour on the way home from the museum to go and stand on the Latin Bridge, where Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28^th June 1914. Being one of the oldest bridges still standing in the city, with its wooden predecessor standing from at least 1541, it was already a historical landmark at the time of the assassination that would change the world forever. In Topič’s photographs of Sarajevo’s skyline circa 1908 it can be seen, looking exactly as it does now. In his picture you can just about make out the shapes of people going about their lives in the city, and it makes you wonder. What were their thoughts on the Austria-Hungarian occupation of their country? Were they engaged politically in what was going on? Would they agree or disagree with what would happen there in just a few years time? Maybe 100 years from now someone will look at a picture of me standing on that bridge, or of anybody else, and wonder the same things.

And that is the thing about history. It was not just something we should learn about, or that we remember. It is something we are living. And, regardless of whether we go down in the history books or not, we are shaping it in our own little way. This region in particular has got to where it is today through the actions of the local population in response to the influence of outside factors from all sides. It is multicultural and multiethnic as a result, and this has proven to cause tension and conflict, but also a unique environment of growth and a meeting of peoples that I would argue is not seen to this extent anywhere else in the world. At the root of it all are the people that make up not just this region but the whole of our globalised world. If history is still being written, what we need to ask ourselves is how do we want our chapter to end?

Remembering the Past in Sarajevo

My first three weeks in Sarajevo have taught me more than any other three weeks of my life. It is a magnificent city, seemingly growing out of an idyllic mountain range in central Bosnia, blending the cultures of East and West to create a truly unique place unlike any I have ever previously visited. It is easy to be awestruck by the beauty of the landscape, and even easier to be horrified by the history that it bears. Remembering the past is key to understanding the present of not just the city or the nation, but of the entire Western Balkan region. This is done in different ways to different effect, but all are equally thought-provoking.

Zmaja od Bosne Street

Known colloquially in the 1990s as Sniper Alley because, situated as it is between the industrial and commercial/residential areas of the city, and being the main stretch of road used by UN forces, it became a hunting ground for Serb snipers during the siege of Sarajevo. In 1995 it was estimated that 1,030 people were wounded and 220 people, included 60 children, were killed by snipers on this stretch of road. The high rise buildings that line it made for perfect snipers nests, and many of the buildings still bear the graffiti reading “Pazi, Snajper!” and “Pazi, Metak!”, which respectively warned people of snipers and bullets as they attempted to cross the road. People would run alongside UN convoys in order to travel the road safely. Today, many of the buildings still bear the pockmarks of sniper fire.

Another sobering sight beyond the pockmarked buildings are the chunks of missing pavement and tarmac in the roads, some of which have been painted red. These are shell craters from artillery fire that rained down on the city daily for 1,425 days between 5^th April 1992 and 29^th February 1996, most of which have now been covered up but some of which have been painted and left as a reminder of the city’s violent past.

The War Childhood Museum

Originally conceived as a book in which the author asked young adults who were children at the time of the siege of Sarajevo to explain in 160 characters or less their experience of growing up in war, the museum was founded after he discovered that many had kept their childhood belongings from that time and wished for them to be seen. The exhibition is made up entirely of donated items from these children of war, and each item is accompanied by a story told by the child. This way of presenting information was very affecting because it humanised the experience of the war in a way that documentaries, facts and figures do not. Exhibits that stood out were

1)      A bright, almost fluorescent blue gown that belonged to a little girl which she said was worn out of spite. People told her to dress in grey and pastels in order to blend in with the background when traversing Sniper Alley, but she as a child felt she wanted the shooters to know that she was alive and not scared of them.

2)      Teddy Bear Meho, a scruffy looking pink and blue teddy bear with uneven button eyes and a bow tie that was made from fabrics and items donated by the international community by Ermina, a little girl who had lost her original stuffed toys when she fled her hometown and wanted comfort.

3)      A blue bunny, another stuffed toy that belonged to Meliha, only born in 1991 and therefore an infant throughout the war, who lost her brother and stated that this bunny was the only thing that bought her joy, even on her gloomiest days. Once her family had reached safety she donated all of her other toys to other children who had lost everything, keeping only the blue bunny.

4)      A bike that saved two little girls’ lives. They were playing outside without the knowledge of their parents when shells began to fall. One girl jumped on her bike to escape and the other asked if she could sit on the back because she had to get away from the shelling too. “I’m not supposed to be outside because it’s not safe, and if I die my mum will kill me!”

5)      A diary entry written by Dzenita, a teenager at the time of the siege. The note that accompanied the crumpled page simply read “Written in English. That way it looked as though all of this was happening to someone else”.

11/7/1995 Exhibition

11/7/95 was the date that Srebrenica fell to the Drina Wolves battalion of the Army of Republica Srpska and the UN safe zone was transformed into the site of the greatest massacre in Europe since the end of the Second World War, where 8,000 men and boys were killed and dumped in mass graves, and 20,000 women and children were forcefully displaced from their homes. As expected, it was a harrowing exhibition.

As you enter the exhibition you are met by the faces of all of the people who died during the Srebrenica massacre. There are extremely detailed videos explaining step by step the events of a two week period around the 11/7/1995, showing the build up, the UN failures, the progressively more aggressive tactics being employed by Mladic’s men as they surrounded the besieged city, and the aftermath of the killings all in explicit detail. It was a little overwhelming both in terms of the detail in which it goes into and the emotional reality of what occurred. All of this detail makes it even more troubling that the current mayor of Srebrenica, a Serb named Mladen Grujicic, can deny that there was a massacre at Srebrenica, or that Serb violence against Bosniak Muslims was ethnic cleansing. His claims that the events at Srebrenica were simply events of war, and no worse than similar Bosniak violence against Serbs are extremely contentious and potentially mark the beginning of a shift back towards an ethnically divided culture. A denial of these kind of atrocities is often the first step towards history repeating itself, which makes exhibitions like this all the more important.

A video documentary that discussed some of the events and interviewed people who were present was particularly insightful. A quote from one of the Dutch peacekeepers who were powerless in the face of the massacre stuck with me because of how it resonated. He said that being born in a wealthy country that was largely untouched by conflict meant that he could not fully understand what the Bosniak refugees fleeing Srebrenica were going through. “I understood the words they said, but I did not understand the feelings”. I feel that this is a large part of the reason why the world is so often unresponsive when events like this unfold, as we were with Aleppo in Syria, and seem to be now with the quickly degenerating situation in Myanmar. How can ordinary western people be expected to empathise with something that is completely beyond our realm of emotional understanding?

Two quotes at the end of the exhibition take on a darker meaning when viewed in relation to that question. One from holocaust survivor Primo Levi: “It happened, therefore it can happen again. It can happen anywhere”. The other from Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”.  After the discovery of the horrors of the holocaust, the Geneva conventions laid out the groundwork so that things like that would never happen again. And yet, in Srebrenica, in Rwanda, in Aleppo and Armenia and Myanmar and East Timor and Sri Lanka and Cambodia and the DRC and Chile and Iraqi Kurdistan and any other number of places around the globe that you care to mention, atrocity crimes continue seemingly without end. Is there a way to end this cycle of violence?

The Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide

Amid images of people sprinting across crossroads with their bags of shopping to avoid the snipers that were ready to pick them off “like a hunting game” and shelled out schools, mosques and churches were the real life stories of people who lived through the 1,425 day ordeal. There were tales of death; such as the stories of families who tried to smuggle their children out of the city via the trams and buses, only for them to be picked off by snipers on the way, and of life; a pet dog who refused to leave the house for a walk just moments before a shell exploded where they would have been standing had they left on time. Most intriguing were the stories of survival. One man told of how excited he was one day to trade a book he owned for half a bottle of cognac and went home excited that he would finally be able to relax and sleep well, only to remember on the way that he had no flour left and would have to trade that cognac so that he could eat. Several told stories of listening to the local radio, ran by youths who played songs from faraway places to try to feel normal, a DJ who would start every morning with the welcome “well it seems I survived the night, and that’s good. So please listen along with me if you’re still alive as well”, callers-in asking for family members to reach out and contact them, to let them know they were ok, kids excited to hear this week’s number one.

The picture painted of life in Sarajevo at the time of the siege is one completely alien to me, but also one that in many ways feels very familiar. The capacity for humans to adapt to such a situation, to continue to survive and even to thrive when the threat of death is quite literally around every corner is truly astounding. Video footage showed elderly people running across the street with their shopping and men and women going about their daily business suddenly finding themselves dragging a neighbour or stranger out of the road as the sniper fire punctured the day. People spoke fondly of going to football matches and other sporting events during the siege, proudly wearing their Sarajevo team colours and defiantly standing out in sporting stadiums as the shells and the sniper bullets rained down. The reality of living in a warzone is that you still have to live, and these videos were testament to the fact that even in the gravest of situations, humanity finds a way.

The rest of the exhibitions are not so much a celebration of humanity overcoming great torment as an examination into the depths to which humanity can stoop. As you trace the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) timeline to the present day you are confronted with exhibits detailing several of the concentration camps employed by the Army of the Republic of Srpska and the individuals behind them. One can take solace in the fact that as of today not one single fugitive wanted by the ICTY remains at large, but the fact that so many perpetrators received lighter sentences due to plea deals and that some continue to be seen as heroes by many is extremely troubling. A documentary produced by P-CRC, Uspomene 677, showing a demonstration of ethnic Serbs protesting the arrest of General Ratko Mladic in 2011, who they view as a hero and defender of the Serb cause, reveals the extent to which the ethnic divide in Bosnia and beyond remains. Mladic, known colloquially by some as the Butcher of Bosnia, was largely responsible for orchestrating both the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Srebrenica, two of the most defining points of brutality in the conflict.

The brutality of the violence is not brushed over, with graphic images of the conditions inside the concentration camps taking centre stage as you make your way around the exhibit. It is harsh viewing, but it succeeds in ensuring that the viewer will not forget what they see. One particular concentration camp, Vuk Karadzic, an elementary school bearing the same name as Radovan Karadzic, President of the Republic of Srpska during the conflict and the man with whom Mladic shares the Butcher of Bosnia title, was the site of some particularly brutal violence, with witnesses claiming that “those who were killed in this camp were butchered, with nose, ears and genitals cut off, and crosses being cut into their bodies” according to a Human Rights Committee report. Similar atrocities occurred at Keraterm camp, home to infamous ‘red room’ and over 1200 detainees, along with many other camps operating all over the former Yugoslavia. But it is important to remember that the horror did not end at the barbed wire surrounding the camps. Crudely cut wooden rifles were given to prisoners of the Croat military, who were also forced to dress in Croat military uniforms so as to attract the fire of the opposing side. Mass graves continue to be uncovered to this day, and there are likely many more still to be found. We may never truly understand the true scale of the violence inflicted by and on all sides of the conflicts during this time, but this exhibition is a disturbing and sobering start.

In the midst of these atrocities remain stories of hope and of bravery. The tale of Goran Cengic, the righteous man, is one such story. Cengic was the winner of the Yugoslavian Handball Championship and played for the national team. On June 14^th 1992 he lost his life attempting to save his neighbour who was being tortured by Veselin Vlahovic Batko, known as the Monster from Grbavica. He was honoured by the city of Sarajevo for his bravery, and is remembered today as a hero in the face of terror. Stories like this remind us of the two faces of humanity, and calls us to question how things would have turned out if these two individuals, one a brave hero giving his life to save his neighbour and the other a murderer now serving 42 years in prison for crimes against humanity, had been on the opposite side of the conflict. If nobody is born evil, what drives individuals to commit such evil acts? Why did one grow up to become a righteous man, and the other a monster? People often call these acts inhumane, to give the perpetrators names such as the monster or the butcher, but the frequency with which they occur suggest that is in many ways just as human as the righteous acts that we celebrate. The best in humanity must be celebrated, but the worst in humanity must be acknowledged.

A particularly moving finale to the museum is a wall of post-it notes where visitors can write a message and leave it for others to read. Amidst the expressions of horror and outrage were some of hope, hope that by remembering the past we can change the future so that this does not happen again. “We cannot forget, and we cannot ‘leave it behind’. For if we do, the violence of the past will continue to repeat itself”. Bosnia has come a long way since the conflict that threatened to tear it apart, but the threat of a return to violence remains present. The ethnic tensions that exploded into conflict in the 1990s have not gone away, and such ethnic politics remains globally relevant. The expressions of solidarity with the people of BiH and the former Yugoslavia that dominated the wall at the end of the exhibit were interspersed with acknowledgements that such violence is not a thing of the past. “It is happening right now. All over the world”. “Bosnia is strong. We must stop the same from happening in Myanmar”. Once again, as the world looks away, the face of genocide rears its ugly head.

Exhibitions like these are incredibly important in that they tell the story of atrocities that would otherwise be forgotten, and they do it in a way that humanises the victims and raises important questions about the nature of the perpetrators and why they were capable of doing what they did. The problem is that they are largely preaching to the converted. We visited them because we were interested in the history, because we already had a base understanding and because we care about the events and about their repercussions. What about those who don’t know, don’t fully understand, or simply don’t care? Is there a way to galvanise those people to act and to speak out against atrocity crimes? For every organisation working to make post-conflict environments better, and for every well-intended UN intervention and peaceful protest there are those willing to commit acts of unspeakable violence on a group they view as lesser than their own. As the UN failures of Srebrenica demonstrate, a willingness to engage in the most heinous violence imaginable cannot be met with a peaceful or passive response. And yet meeting violence with more violence can lead to escalation and increased instability. Not to mention that a more robust UN will need better funding and better support, which is difficult to achieve when the western world has interests and priorities that lay elsewhere.

Learning about the terror of BiH in the 1990s demonstrates the importance of change, of making a stand against ideologies of hate and dehumanisation tactics, and yet it gives us little in the way of answers as to how we should do this. That is for us to figure out.