The Effects of Natural Disasters on Mental Health

The effects of climate change globally are well-researched and well-known. Increases in the frequency and severity of natural disasters in recent years bear out the evidence that the global climate is becoming more unpredictable. 2017 proved to be the costliest Atlantic hurricane season on record, described as “catastrophic” by NASA, and predictions for 2018 suggest it will also be more active than the average. Of the top 10 costliest Atlantic hurricanes, 9 occurred between 2004 and today (only Hurricane Andrew, 1992, makes the list as the 6^th costliest storm on record). Pacific Cyclone season has similarly been more active in recent years, with 2014, 2015, and 2016 all appearing in the list for most active tropical cyclone seasons. These are just some of the most immediately obvious consequences of climate change, but lower-level flooding, unpredictable monsoon seasons, droughts resulting in wildfires (such as the particularly damaging 2017 California wildfires, the deadliest on record) and other climatic disturbances are affecting and displacing millions of people globally year-on-year. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 24.2 million people were displaced by natural disasters in 2016 alone. This is compared to 6.9 million people displaced by conflict in the same year.

As Professor Helen Berry of the University of Sydney explains, it is now widely accepted that climate change is one of the leading global health risks today, but the effect that it has specifically on mental health has until recently been largely unexamined. This, she argues, does not make much sense, because those who have lost everything in a natural disaster are vulnerable to many of the same mental health issues as those who lost everything to conflict.

Because of the way that we view conflict and warfare, the issue of mental health in refugees is one that has been discussed at length and researched in-depth by academics and humanitarian professionals alike. The International Committee for the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (ICRC), the arm of the Red Cross best-suited to responding to conflict, has published guidance on mental health and psychosocial support for those affected by violence and conflict. A 2016 IFRC report examined Syrian refugees living in Sweden and found that one in three of those sampled suffered with depression, anxiety, and some symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A paper published in World Psychiatry by Silove, Ventevogel, and Rees (2017) acknowledges that the admission of PTSD into the DSM-III laid the groundwork for studies on refugees, starting with the victims of the Khmer Rouge’s bloody genocide. In this early study, half of respondents met the criteria for depression and 15% for PTSD.  Since then, humanitarians responding in conflict zones have been aware of the threat that violence poses not just to life, but to mental health.

Following the news that suicide rates in Puerto Rico have risen by a third in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which decimated the island in September 2017, more and more people have begun to consider what more extreme weather patterns might mean for the mental health of those affected. If the rising suicide rate in Puerto Rico is a result of the devastating hurricane, it is not difficult to see why. Over six months after the disaster much of Puerto Rico is still in blackout, with no access to electricity at all for most of the island. Despite the official death toll of 64, a recent NY Times report suggests the real number is likely over 1,000. It is estimated that Maria caused over $90 billion worth of damage in Puerto Rico alone, and coming at the end of a decade-long recession from which many were already struggling, this was likely the final nail in the coffin for many residents who were already in dire straits financially.

In examining this problem further, Professor Helen Berry reviewed reports from Public Health England concerning heightened levels of “psychological distress” following extreme flooding, that was still present in respondents up to four years after the event. Rates of PTSD were elevated in flooded areas, even amongst those who were not directly affected by the flooding. The reasoning behind this is interesting to consider.

PTSD has so-long been associated with violence and conflict that the thought that flooding could elicit PTSD symptoms may at first seem surprising. However, an understanding of how PTSD works in fact demonstrates that those affected by natural disasters may in fact be even more susceptible to it than those fleeing violence. Some evidence suggests that the heightened arousal caused by PTSD is a survival mechanism designed to better prepare the individual to deal with similar trauma should the causal event occur again. This is best demonstrated by the stereotypical PTSD sufferer, a combat veteran who has an intense reaction to the sound of a car backfiring once they have returned from war. The perceived similarity of the car backfiring and a gunshot triggers an automatic response. Why though, might this make those who flee natural disasters more prone to PTSD than those who are fleeing conflict?

It could be argued that those fleeing a natural disaster, for which there is often no discernible immediate cause that could predict when the next disaster might happen, would find themselves much more likely to be in a position where they could be re-exposed to the traumatic event than somebody fleeing violence. Consider the current Rohingya crisis. Rohingya refugees, fleeing violence and persecution by their own government in Myanmar, have retreated to the relative safety of Bangladesh. Here, their lives are not immediately threatened by violence. However, the same season of monsoons and cyclones that cause damage in Myanmar also affect Bangladesh, and so the refugee camps there are just as exposed as the homes of the Rohingya back in Myanmar. Syrian refugees fleeing conflict and arriving in Turkey or Iraq no longer need to fear Assad’s guns, but are still faced by the same droughts that plague the entire region. The victims of Hurricanes Maria and Irma, still in the process of desperately trying to rebuild, are now staring down the barrel of the 2018 Hurricane season which is set to begin in May. In essence, the soldier who returned from a war zone is less likely to find himself of the receiving end of gunshots again than the climate migrant fleeing from one town to another to avoid a storm.

Natural disasters often arrive with less warning than conflict, which usually develops from tensions over many years, or at least shows signs of occurring prior to becoming extremely deadly. Even when they are somewhat predictable, such as in hurricane season, the ferocity of an individual storm is often not known until just days before, and even then the extent of the damage it will do is unquantifiable. For other events such as earthquakes, there may be even less warning. A sudden destructive event that fundamentally changes your life, sometimes permanently, is undoubtedly going to leave some form of mental scar.

Thanks to years of research and humanitarian trial-and-error, we know a little bit about the mental health toll that violence and conflict can have on its victims. Whilst lacking in many aspects, our understanding of this relationship is still light years ahead of what we know about the consequences of natural disasters on the mental health of those who survive them. Refugees and climate migrants each face similar challenges when they are forced to leave their homes. It is time to start considering how best we can support those who have no choice but to rebuild their lives from scratch, in a place that is not their home.

You can read more here:

Berry, H. L. et al. (2018) The case for systems thinking about climate change and mental health, Nature Climate Change, doi:10.1038/s41558-018-0102-4

The Looming Crisis in Bangladesh

Since the outbreak of violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine State in August last year over 1 million Rohingya refugees have crossed the border into Bangladesh, fleeing what the UN has called “textbook ethnic cleansing” by the Myanmar military. Bangladesh, already one of the most densely populated countries in the world and suffering with widespread poverty, is largely ill-equipped to deal with such a massive influx of people in such a short space of time. To give a sense of the scale of the crisis, the Rohingya settlement in Cox’s Bazar has rapidly become the world’s largest refugee camp, double the size of Dadaab camp in Kenya, which previously held the record. In July 2017, the two government-run refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar had a combined population of 34,000 people. Today, Kutupalong camp alone has an estimated 550,000 (compared to Dadaab’s 250,000), with another 25,000 in the neighbouring Nayapara camp.  

The sprawling camps have expanded exponentially in the past few months to accommodate as many of the fleeing Rohingya as possible, but even that has not been enough. Many more thousands of refugees have been forced to set up their own makeshift camps in the surrounding mountains and hills, and to spread deeper into Bangladesh in search of a safe space to survive. For those in the tent cities conditions are poor, with a severe deficit of resources, poor sanitation, and an almost complete lack of medical equipment for the majority of people. But for those who did not fit into Kutupalong or Nayapara, conditions are even worse.

A lot of these makeshift villages have been constructed on hills and mountainsides, completely exposed to the elements. The aid agencies working across Bangladesh are painfully aware of the approaching monsoon season, set to start in May and run through to September. On average, 80% of Bangladesh’s annual rainfall usually occurs between June and October (20 – 30 inches a month at the peak of the monsoon). This brings widespread devastation after the cold, dry winter that leaves the ground more vulnerable to flooding. Such flooding is rampant and, for the Rohingya camps that find themselves on or around the hillsides near Cox’s Bazar, landslides become a very real threat. UNHCR workers in the area have said that widespread flooding and unstable ground make landslides an inevitability. It is not if, but when.

The myriad camps that continue to appear across Bangladesh are not just in the wrong positions to deal with landslides, but they are also structurally unprepared to cope with the monsoon conditions. Camps with hastily-built latrines and sewage systems risk contamination of their water supply, and many of the tent structures are likely to be washed away with the mud beneath them. With no respite to the repression in Myanmar, and nowhere else for the Rohingya to go, these shelters are likely to become permanent housing for the people living there. It is not uncommon for refugees to live in camps like these for 20 – 30 years before they can go home or move on, and so it is vital that food and water supplies are secured for the long-term. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done.

And the threat to the camps does not end there. Bangladesh’s monsoon season coincides with tropical cyclone season. Cox’s Bazar, located on the coast, is regularly in the path of cyclones. In May 2017, Cyclone Mora forced 500,000 people to flee their homes and damaged 20,000 houses of Rohingya refugees who had previously fled Myanmar. This was before the current crisis, at a time when the two main camps in Cox’s Bazar held only 35,000 people between them. Needless to say, a cyclone of that size this year would cause havoc on an unprecedented scale. The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) successfully provided aid to the 500,000 people who left their homes before Mora hit, setting up emergency shelter stations in advance of the cyclone making ground and deploying volunteers to help with the clean-up in the immediate aftermath. The scale of the campaign was massive, with around 3.3 million people affected. However, since then the population of the cyclone-vulnerable region around Cox’s Bazar has risen by up to a third, with many of the 1 million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh settling in and around the area.

Aid agencies are already stretched to their limits coping with the world’s fastest growing refugee crisis. The Rohingya have fled their homeland to escape the violence perpetrated against them by their own military, and, with nowhere else to go, have ended up in overcrowded and increasingly precarious camps set to be battered by extreme weather in the upcoming months. Though actual figures are not available, conservative estimates suggest that at least 50,000 Rohingya have been killed in the military ‘clearing operations’ in Myanmar and over 1 million have been displaced to Bangladesh alone, with many more fleeing for Pakistan, India and Indonesia. The nightmare that began in August 2017 is far from over. And, as several aid agencies have cautioned, the real crisis is still to come.

For more information on the current crisis and to see how you can help, visit the IFRC website https://media.ifrc.org/.  

Budapest’s House of Terror: Examining the Dangers of Ideology and the Importance of Self-Determination

The winter of 1944-1945 saw 3,500 murders on the bank of the Danube, executions carried out by fascist Arrow Cross Party militiamen. This would be one of the final terrors the Nazis would inflict upon the people of Hungary, who were to be ‘liberated’ by the Soviets just two months later following the Siege of Budapest. The Soviet chokehold around the city would result in the starvation of 38,000 civilians, but would also force the desperate Nazi occupation to its knees. The unconditional surrender of the city on 13^th February 1945 was a major victory for the Allied powers, and for the Red Army on its long march to Berlin.

What followed was 44 years of Soviet occupation, coming to an end in 1989. For the war-weary civilian population of Hungary, the years of terror were only just beginning. Today, Budapest’s House of Terror tells the story of a nation held hostage by rival ideologies for half a century. For Hungary, the intricacies of the Nazi and Soviet occupations were lost to the overwhelming similarities of their methods. The Hungarian national socialist party, the Arrow Cross, boasted 300,000 members in 1939. Emboldened by the expansion of Germany and subordinate to the Nazi Party, the Arrow Cross recruited thousands from working-class districts around Budapest to march in its rank-and-file. By 1945, these young men and women were rounded up by the Hungarian Communist Party and the Soviet occupiers and forced to renounce their allegiances to the national socialists. An entire society was forced to turn coat overnight. For many members of the Arrow Cross Party, this was as simple as switching out their uniforms. Nazi terrorisers became Communist terrorisers over night through a costume change.

An ordinary Hungarian peasant at the time could be forgiven for not even noticing the dramatic shift of power in Budapest. Widespread land reform that was supposed to secure the livelihoods of peasant farmers made little real difference to their predicament due to the continuation of war time restrictions and compulsory food quotas to supply Soviet troops and their Hungarian lackeys. Those who refused to hand over their quota no longer had to fear the concentration camps of Germany and Poland, however; their fate lay eastwards in the Siberian gulags. Before being sentenced, many in Budapest would be processed at the “House of Horrors” by the State Protection Authority (AVH). Many locals knew of this building as the “House of Loyalty”, once used by the Arrow Cross secret police to ensure allegiance to the fascist regime and now repurposed by the AVH to ensure allegiance to the communists. The methods of physical and psychological torture utilised by the Arrow Cross and AVH at the House looked remarkably similar.    

As the House of Terror Museum demonstrates, these two rival ideologies each created a reality that was largely indistinguishable from the other. Ideology itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but any idea taken to its extremes necessitates imposition of that idea onto others. Often that means against their will. The 400,000 Jews forcibly moved to concentration camps throughout Hungary by the Arrow Cross in the 1940s and the 20,000 wounded and killed by Soviet tanks on November 4^th 1956, following the October revolution, were all victims of ideologies that painted anyone with differing opinions as enemies. Nothing mobilises men and women to kill their neighbours like ideology. But as the speed with which Nazi ideas were dropped and Communist ones adopted by so many complicit Hungarians demonstrates, ideology is usually just an excuse to exert power over others. For every genuine believer in the cause there are a hundred more willing to adopt it for their own personal gain. This includes the people who turn a blind eye to the violence committed in order to protect themselves.

Budapest is a testimony to the power of individuals and their capacity to overcome a uniform ideology. Today you can buy t-shirts depicting communist party members wearing party hats, drink at Communist-themed bars and visit memorials both commemorating the victims and denouncing the actions of those that embraced both Nazi and Communist ideals at the cost of their own sense of humanity. The actions of the parties of terror have become something to mock, and that is a good thing. It is by promoting individuality and encouraging us to see the fallacies in such simplistic thinking that we prevent something like this from happening again. It prevents these excuses for violence from gaining any traction in society. Today we have more information at our fingertips than at any other time in history, and yet many people still choose to listen to only one source, and to accept what they are told as fact because it is what they want to hear. At its most extreme, this kind of behaviour becomes dangerous.

The crushing of the 1956 revolution in Hungary by superior Soviet firepower at first appeared to be a defeat for the first student protestors and their many supporters, but it revealed some of the cracks in what otherwise appeared to be an iron-clad system of rule. Change did not come immediately after these brave actions and sacrifices, but the seeds were sowed. As best said by the House of Terror exhibition itself, “no people can be subjugated forever; one can and must take up the fight even against a power thought to be invincible”. History is awash with examples of dictators failing and regimes built on terror collapsing. The common denominator in those victories is the unwavering humanity of the individuals who fight against those systems of oppression. That is the only ideology worth fully embracing.

The Somme: Exploring a War Torn Landscape

The 1^st of July 1916 was the bloodiest day in British military history. Nearly 20,000 British and colonial troops lost their lives in an offensive that marked the beginning of the bloodiest battle the world had ever seen. By the end of this first day, the British forces had suffered over 57,000 casualties; more than the number of casualties seen in the entirety of the Crimean and Boer Wars. By November 19^th of that same year there had been around 420,000 casualties on the British side, 200,000 French and an estimated 465,000 German dead and injured. The Somme saw the first use of tanks on the battlefield, the first widespread issuing of steel helmets to all front-line soldiers, and the continued use of machine guns, chemical weapons, and increasingly-accurate artillery intended to beat the enemy into submission. In 141 days, around 1.5 million people were casualties and the British advanced a grand total of 7 miles. This was brutal, bloody, futile, modern war.

100 years after the most infamous battle in modern history, photojournalist Jonathan Eastland retraces the footsteps of the soldiers who gave their lives in the muddy fields in order to tell the story of a land shaped by blood. His book, The Somme: Exploring a War Torn Landscape, captures the natural beauty of the river after which the battle was named, and of the surrounding landscape. On viewing the pictures, we are reminded that the now century-old violence left its mark on the region, in some cases permanently changing the geography of the land. Sprawling fields are punctuated by mass grave sites. Pillboxes that survived the artillery bombardment remain standing at the roadside. Caves once dug as trenches now act as homes for local wildlife. The annual harvest in the region still reveals thousands of shells, some unexploded, presenting a major risk to local farmers and requiring removal (the Amiens bomb unit, responsible for bomb clearance in the region, estimates it will take another 500 years before the Somme is bomb-free). A century later and the Somme still lives with the consequences of war.

The sheer scale of the death and destruction of the Somme is both horrifying and awe-inspiring. In the author’s own words, looking over one of the war cemeteries on a brilliant summer afternoon “it was difficult to distinguish an individual gravestone from the whole uniform mass of gleaming white” (p7). However, closer inspection reveals the names of the dead on each of the individual gravestones. One photo shows the Villers-Bretonneux memorial to the missing: “Billingsly, B. L.; Black, J. F.; Blain, N. G. H.; Bongers, H. J...” and so on. The uniform mass of gleaming white is  comprised of the remains of hundreds of thousands, stretching to millions, of young men who lost their lives in a battle that very literally also changed the shape of the earth beneath their feet.

It is easy for us to forget about individual humanity when thinking about conflict on this grand scale. A number like 1.5 million is impossible to comprehend, and so we often do not even try. 20 years after the war to end all wars much of the horror was consigned to history, and so we did it all over again. Even more young men were sent to die in the fields of France and around the world, and this time they took even more civilians and non-combatants with them as our capacity to kill each other grew exponentially. Today, as with the conscripts of World War One, the majority of the casualties of war are those who did not ask for it and do not stand to gain from it. We cannot afford to allow the horrors of conflict to be forgotten. We cannot afford to dehumanise the experience of warfare, and to think solely in terms of numbers of dead or of miles gained or lost.

All told, over 20,000 people lost their lives on the first day of one battle of one war over 100 years ago. There have been many more wars since and many, many more have died. The Battle of the Somme ushered in this new century of modern conflict that destroyed lives all over the globe.

The Somme: Exploring a War Torn Landscape reflects on how this one battle has affected the development and collective history of the region in which it raged. It is important to reflect not only on the battle itself, but its long-term ramifications and the 100 years of history that were written after it. Do we want the next 100 years to look the same?

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.