Paradoxically, a memorial can be part of a denial process and culture. Memorials can methodically conceal who was killed and why, and by whom.
The end of October and(/or) start of November 2023 will mark 30 years since the crimes at Kazani. The war crime committed by the Army of RBiH is a relatively well-researched topic that has been written and talked about for a full three decades. The victims were predominantly but not exclusively civilians, because they included, for example, Predrag Šalipur who was a member of ARBiH. At the same time, the victims were primarily, but again not exclusively, Serb in terms of ethnic identity. Several trials were conducted before various BiH courts, resulting in several convictions, while the Kazani site is marked with a memorial installed three years ago.
For each anniversary, in addition to this basic information, the question that always comes up is what do Kazani mean to us today? Or more precisely, what do Kazani mean for Sarajevo today?
Several convictions, a military action that stopped the crimes in the midst of the war and the siege of Sarajevo, at the end of October 1993, and the memorial, such as it is, make some feel they have the right to claim it as a shining example of dealing with the past and crimes committed “in our name”. Further discussion always leads down a slippery slope of seeking out a similar example on the “other two” sides, which some people again use to argue that Sarajevo has done enough or even more than enough. And that should be the end of the discussion. From that perspective, Kazani completes the circle, closes a chapter, proves the existence of “civilisational differences” between “us” and “them”.
Knowing about atrocities and suffering
On the other hand, Kazani can be viewed as a textbook example of denial as defined by Stanley Cohen in his book States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. According to Cohen, denial is a wholly understandable human need to find a way to deal with what is difficult and uncomfortable. “Our need to be innocent of a troubling recognition” is the main characteristic of denial, Cohen explains, making a clear distinction between denial and lying, but also between information, knowledge and acknowledgement.
How can Kazani be an example of denial if several people have been convicted, the crimes were stopped and the memorial, such as it is, has been erected? Cohen describes three elementary forms of denial. Literal denial would be saying Kazani never happened, which, if it even exists today, is a completely marginalised view of Kazani in Sarajevo.
However, the second elementary form of denial is interpretative. The bare facts are not being denied, people were killed, their bodies exhumed. In interpretative denial, Kazani is not primarily a war crime, the perpetrators are not members of ARBiH, but “individuals”, the victims are “citizens of Sarajevo” with no mention of their ethnic identity (Serb, in this case)… In the court judgements related to Kazani that were collected and published by UDIK, there is a glaring absence of convictions for war crimes. Members of ARBiH were only convicted of the crimes of murder, accessory to murder, failure to report the criminal offence of murder… Only Samir Bejtić had ever been accused of a war crime in relation to Kazani, but after a 20-year-long trial, he was ultimately acquitted of all charges. Although all the court judgements clearly identify the perpetrators as member of ARBiH, the memorial at Kazani, at the proposal of the Mayor Benjamina Karić and by the decision of the Sarajevo City Council, leaves out any mention of the perpetrators. Finally, even though it is clear from all the judgements and countless testimonies that the primary “sin” of the killed was their “wrong” ethnic identity (primarily Serb), the monument identifies the victims exclusively as our “fellow citizens”.
The third form of denial is implicatory. The obvious facts are not denied, people were killed, their bodies exhumed, the interpretation of this being a war crime by members of ARBiH is not denied either, nor is the interpretation that the victims were primarily Serbs who had stayed in besieged Sarajevo. Instead, what is being denied or minimised are the psychological, political or moral implications that follow from that war crime. This form of denial is reflected in statements such as: “This has nothing to do with us who were born 20 years later”, “No city has done as much as Sarajevo”, “The perpetrators were convicted, there’s a memorial, let’s close that chapter”, “The memorial shows the civilisational difference between us and them”… In that sense, the example of Kazani being recognised as a war crime is often used to “end” the discussion of other war crimes committed by ARBiH in the area of Sarajevo. There are a number of convictions for such crimes (“Veliki park”, “Silos” in Hadžići, sites of detention in Hrasnica and Alipašino Polje, etc.), but these sites are not marked as sites of suffering and are not part of the memory of today’s Sarajevo.
Memorial to denial
Three decades after the war, the crime at Kazani is mostly denied in official ways, in the sense of institutional interpretative and implicatory denial. The memorial installed in 2021 is actually more of a memorial to denial than to the victims. At that time, the city authorities decided that the memorial should bear no mention of the fact that the perpetrators were members of ARBiH and that the victims were primarily targeted because of their ethnic identity; the memorial was installed at the Kazani site, which is far from the city centre and difficult to access; the sites of abduction within the city were not marked, nor was the HQ of the 9th Mountain Brigade where most of the victims were detained and tortured; the families of the victims were not part of the process for installing the memorial, and people who had spent years advocating for the memorial ultimately bowed out, dissatisfied with the actions of the Sarajevo mayor. Finally, it was decided completely arbitrarily that 9 November should be the date of commemoration, symbolising the first exhumations at Kazani in 1993, and not 26 October, which had become traditional as the date of remembering the military action against units of ARBiH that had been responsible for crimes in Sarajevo. The new commemoration date for Kazani is actually an attempt to distance it from the fact that members of ARBiH perpetrated the crimes, and that these were not just individuals, but quite powerful and well-organised units that took considerable force to subdue.
The memorial at Kazani thus served to “end” a story, which does not make it unique in post-war BiH. The authorities in Srebrenica, led by mayor Mladen Grujičić, built the Monument to Peace in an attempt to “end” discussion of the past, including the genocide and other crimes; in Žepče, the municipal authorities led by mayor Mato Zovko installed a memorial in front of the municipal building to all civilian war victims in an attempt to “end” discussion about the “unfortunate” conflict between ARBiH and HVO without, for example, enabling prison camp survivors to mark sites of their detention located only 50 meters away; in Vareš, they are still not sure who installed a memorial to civilian war victims in front of the municipal building and to whom it is dedicated… The dangerous paradox here is that the very act of installing a memorial may be part of a process of denial.
The only thing worse than official denial by institutions would be a culture of denial where institutions would no longer have to actively propagate denial, because the whole of society would be in a state of tacit agreement about what can be made public and what must not be remembered. Today, this unfortunately seems plausible, for a number of reasons.
Although, as a rule, waiting for the “other two” sides to make progress is used as an excuse for one’s own inaction, dealing with the past is a system of communicating vessels where one denial feeds another. The authorities of both Sarajevo and Istočno Sarajevo are doing everything they can to exclude “unpopular” victims from their moral memory; today, these two cities, physically so close, have almost no points of contact when it comes to remembering victims. There are separate commemorations and even killed children are commemorated separately, there is denial of victims, of the siege, memorial plaques dedicated to convicted war criminals, such as the one at Vraca honouring Ratko Mladić, or plaques where an entire ethnic group is condemned, such as the one at the entrance to the Vijećnica… In this atmosphere and without political courage for any joint steps forward, it seems that we are paving the way for future generations towards a culture of denial. If today we are somewhere in the middle of Cohen’s gradation of information-knowledge-acknowledgement, the current education policies on both sides will undoubtedly swing the pendulum not towards acknowledgement, but back to where new generations will not have even the basic information about the suffering of others. Today, Kazani and every other crime perpetrated by ARBiH in the Sarajevo Canton area have been excluded from school curricula under the pretext that teaching about the siege and the time of war is based exclusively on ICTY judgements which conveniently never dealt with these crimes. The history curriculum in Republika Srpska, though it stresses the importance of multiple perspectives and viewing events through the eyes of all participants, does not include anything on the siege of Sarajevo or any of the crimes committed by VRS.
The global context, with wars in Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, and now Israel and Palestine, leads to a dramatic turn towards militarisation where war is not just the primary, but the only solution, and where it seems that nothing is prohibited in fighting a war against the “enemy”. These broader circumstances have a negative impact not only on current wars, but also on peacebuilding and dealing with the past in post-war societies. The fact that the war in BiH ended with a peace agreement, such as it is, that thousands of perpetrators have been tried for war crimes and that we have at least started the process of what we can call transitional justice and(/or) peacebuilding is in some ways an opportunity that many other societies, unfortunately, evidently don’t and won’t have. When representatives of the Palestinian diaspora at a recent protest in Sarajevo say they’d like to see the international community do for Palestine just 20 percent of what it did for BiH, to many in BiH, this sounds strange and incongruous. Acknowledgement of that fact calls upon us to do more.