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.