Vukovar-Jasenovac-Prijedor Study Trip, 23-27.11.2015.
Impressions:
Holes Dalmir Mišković
How much are we killed, how much are we alive? Amer Delić
What is memory for? Nataša Okilj
From a culture of using the dead towards a culture of relating to the dead
Vukovar-Jasenovac-Prijedor Study Trip, 23 – 27 November 2015
We had spent a relatively long time planning the study trip to Vukovar, Jasenovac and Prijedor. Through our peacebuilding work in the former Yugoslavia and dealing with the past, which is one of its preconditions, we had encountered these sites many times, primarily as symbols of suffering and death. Although universal by nature, their prefixes are pointedly national. It is not a matter of simple attribution, but of human and historical fact. Namely, these are sites where people were killed precisely because they belonged or were perceived as belonging to a certain ethnic group. This historical fact remains the foundation for the use of these sites today. It therefore seemed important to us to invite our colleagues and friends, peace activists from Macedonia and Kosovo to join the CNA team made up of people from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia. We wanted to visit these places together and talk about them, about their complexities, similarities and differences, as well as the importance they hold in the ethno-national structure of the Dayton triangle (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia), as well as throughout the former Yugoslavia. We wanted to see how we remember the dead and what message for the future is inherent in this memory.
We set off on 23 November and we first visited Vukovar. Over the next few days we visited Jasenovac, Donja Gradina, Sanski Most and Prijedor (basic information about the places we visited). We chose these places because of how they intertwine in the national narratives of post-Yugoslav countries. They are the Past that keeps shaping our present and making the future quite (un)certain.
Vukovar in 1991 was in many aspects a preview of what would envelop the former Yugoslavia in the years to come — the siege of the city, torture, captured prisoners, executions, complete destruction of goods and life, human moral and every other type of degradation. The permanent exhibition “Site of Memory — Vukovar Hospital 1991”is a reconstruction of hospital life during the three months of the siege, without electricity, water, medicines or medical supplies. There are inscriptions of the number of wounded and killed brought to the hospital daily, as well as the names of the wounded patients and medical staff taken from the hospital to the execution site at Ovčara. A short film gives an introduction to the war days of the Vukovar hospital, a collection of TV reports from the surrounded and destroyed city, footage of corpses on the destroyed streets, of blood and destruction. The mannequins placed in what used to be the nuclear fallout shelter of the hospital where the wounded and hospital staff stayed are faceless and nameless. But it is clear “whose they are”; this can be seen from the rosaries placed across the chest of some of the wounded. In the final room of the museum, there is a burning candle, the names of the people who were taken from the hospital after its defences were broken are enumerated over the speaker system. This will stay with you for a while, when you leave the hospital, you feel defeated. If you are coming from “the other side”, the museum exhibition a priori condemns you, just as many other of our monuments do, no matter who erected them. I have been here a number of times over the course of a few years. It would seem that time takes its toll, so the guilt that flows down your shoulders and into your bones is now somewhat diluted. But, there is a lingering impression that the designers were aiming for this, or at least that they were thinking about the effects of an emotional response from the visitors.
We talked about the hospital the most, it leaves you felling powerless. The “we” here is self-explanatory. The same goes for the enemy, he has no name, but is ever present: the Yugo-army, the Greater Serbian aggressor, the Chetniks. We talked about the people we knew who were killed in Vukovar, and not just on the Croatian side. About a friend’s husband, a 21-year-old picked up off the street for a military exercise and sent off to war, never to return. About countless acquaintances who hid in other people’s houses and under false names. About JNA deserters. There is no room for them here, or anywhere else, these dead belong to no one. Because their story does not fit into any narrative, it is silenced. Robbery, looting, killings, rapes, you never hear of our people being known for good deeds, my colleague will say. You go 200 km further, and the story turns around.
The way things are set up makes war inevitable, completely legitimate, it’s just a matter of finding yourself on the “right” side.
We discussed the war with Brigadier Petar Ćavar, our guide through the exhibitions at the Homeland War Memorial Centre located at the barracks of Vukovar’s 204th Brigade. This undestined agronomist and poet (answers to our question of what he would have been if it were not for the war) talked to us about how there is no alternative to peace, and how that is the message they try to convey to primary school children who come to visit Vukovar. For some of the war veterans in our group, the smell of a hospital was worse than the smell of the front, they said. When we were at the barracks, the defence mechanism kicked in, turning the conversation towards weapons in order to avoid the difficult topics, from emotion towards banal rationalisation. War is a grand narrative that swallows up everything that does not fit into the heroic, epic narrative, it is devoid of subtleties and complexities.
The Memorial Cemetery for Victims from the Homeland War features one of the aesthetically more pleasing monuments to victims from the wars of 1991-1999. It is situated next to the site of the mass grave, the victims symbolically depicted by rows of white marble crosses, the monument itself bears the symbol of the cross and fits seamlessly into the matrix of the victim, the Way of the Cross and resurrection. The narrative is, we talked about it later, of a Croatian Croatia, even though there are Germans and Bosniaks and many others buried there. Its purpose is to show the irrational hatred of “the others” against “us” in black-and-white. In that sense, the civilian and military victims are separated in the cemetery, and families are separated from soldiers, with the latter placed in the front row, according to their merit.
The Memorial at Ovčara is a dignified place. It is located at the hanger where prisoners captured from the Vukovar hospital were brought, tortured and then taken 800 meters further and executed. 261 light bulbs on the ceiling symbolises the number of victims. Their photographs and a few personal items found at the site of the mass grave are also exhibited in the hangar. In rhythmic succession the photographs are illuminated and dimmed, periodically bringing them back into existence. In the centre of the hanger is a spiral taking with it the names of the victims. The author called it the Spiral of Evil[1]. There is a monument at the site where they were shot and buried in a mass grave. Shortly before our visit was the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Vukovar, as it is officially called. Red-white-blue candles all around us. The inscription on the monument reads:
In memory of
200 wounded
Croatian defenders and civilians
from the Vukovar hospital
executed in
the Greater Serbian aggression
against the Republic of Croatia.
Ovčara 20 November 1991
The Croatian people December 1998
Today, Vukovar is visited by thousands of people. At the Vukovar Hospital Museum, we were told that it has up to 100 thousand visitors a year. Just like us, all these visitors will also visit the Homeland War Memorial Museum located at the barracks of Vukovar’s 204th Brigade, the Memorial Cemetery for Victims from the Homeland War, and the Memorial and monument at Ovčara. Vukovar is a memorial itself, reconstructed in memory of the “heroic sacrifice of the unarmed people defending their land from an enemy stronger both in numbers and in arms.” The victim is a collective, the enemy is a collective. That is how things are set out and inscribed, on monuments, memorials, flags and candles, here the Croatian narrative is given as self-sufficient, from Croats for Croats. However, there is no better evidence of crime than when the site of the crime is visited and the victims honoured by those for whom this place was not designed. The presence of “others” who come in good faith undermines that self-sufficiency. The suffering of Vukovar and its people is universally horrific, and should be remembered as such. Only if we recognise it as a universal human victim can we ensure that it never happens again.
The next day we visited Jasenovac and Donja Gradina, parts of what was once a unique memorial complex, subsequently divided between Croatia and the Republika Srpska entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina following the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Jasenovac is a place of eminent historical importance, but poor social status. The number of visitors, only a tenth of that in Vukovar, attests to this. Exceptional people work in Jasenovac and Donja Gradina – Ivo Pejaković, Đorđe Mihovilović and Dejan Motl – curators involved in active mutual cooperation across state borders and political restrictions in an effort to give the Jasenovac camp complex a primarily educational purpose, to make sure it never happens again.
Although it seems that everything is known about Jasenovac, in the past 20 years, it has been disappearing from the Croatian political and historical reality, which through attempts at historical revisionism or purely political manipulation, seeks to distance itself from it. Jasenovac is the site of holocaust against Jews and genocide against Serbs and Roma. In the Croatian present, this latter part of the above sentence is often neglected, even though of the 83145 victims identified to date, the majority, 47627, were Serbs. These numbers are materialised in the names of whole families executed here, now inscribed on the plaques of the Memorial Museum that both symbolically and literally hang like a sword over your head as you walk through its uneasy architectural structure.
Manipulation of numbers will become one of the most common justifications for starting the war in 1991. This is not relativisation, but a fact. It is like watching a materialised spiral of violence – the heroic victim and righteous wrath incurred by countless senseless deaths, unless they are approached constructively, will in time lead to the victim becoming the executioner. This is our legacy from the Yugoslav culture of memory. Never exhumed, never properly buried, never precisely counted, celebrated as nameless heroes and used to justify the violence that would ensue. That lesson is nowhere so evident as when you stand before the Jasenovac flower surrounded by mass graves.
What is sorely missing in Jasenovac is the perpetrator. Apart from a few Ustasha proclamations, exhibits at the Memorial Museum, you will find out nothing about NDH at Jasenovac. The scale of the crime required a supporting state structure, racial and discriminatory laws, and the quiet acquiescence of the majority of the population looking on as their neighbours are taken away to be killed. However, instead of constructively dealing with this side of the Croatian past, silence was chosen, as if history were a linear trajectory whose parts and consequences can be isolated in segments. If Jasenovac is an example of collective memory, what is its social function? What have we learned from Jasenovac?
Donja Gradina was part of the Jasenovac camp intended for executions of tens of thousands of people who remain buried in the ground there to this day. The execution site with over a hundred mass graves — you will see them as depressions in the ground — is a place of silence. In almost poetic surroundings, for in Donja Gradina there are only meadows and forests, these numbers stand. At the foot of Mount Kozara, which both in the Second World War and our latest war, counted thousands of dead, it is hard to resist the impression that all we care about here are numbers – in a regional contest, the numbers show who sacrificed more, who was killed the most and who is the greatest victim. What follows is a relativisation of crimes committed by “our” side and a relativisation of the suffering of others. Numbers are the fatal enemies of empathy for “others”, which is why everyone is busy falsifying them or at least doing nothing to get to the real numbers. This applies to all the post-Yugoslav countries.
50 km from Donja Gradina is Prijedor. The crimes committed in this area from 1992 are well-documented and proven, and it was on their account that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was initially established. In contrast to Vukovar,where the suffering is commemorated by the majority and is even recognised by the state, in Republika Srpska, despite a series of proven facts, trials, and the largest number of convictions for committed crimes, these places and events are still veiled in silence. It is not easy to be in Prijedor, or to write about it. Camps, torture, rapes and executions are easier to bear when they hark back to a more distant past, when the participants are long gone, when their crimes can be considered within pathological categories. But this scale of crime is never so much the product of a deranged mind as of a systematic campaign at all levels of (para)government, of tyranny and the silence of the majority, and these are defeating facts. The sites of the crimes in the Prijedor Municipality are mostly unmarked, and access to them is obstructed.
Visiting the sites of suffering and memory in Prijedor, we were joined by Edin Ramulić from the Izvor Association of Women of Prijedor, a witness of these events and the editor of the Book of the Missing from the Prijedor Municipality “Innocents”. Working with Edin is profoundly inspirational. Into a difficult context and reality, he brought in another dimension, the question of how to constructively deal with what we are facing.
We started our visit in Keraterm.
That the hangars we found ourselves before were sites of crimes is attested to by the bullet pockmarks on their walls. And the memorial plaque mounted in front of one of them in a guerrilla act, without a permit. The machines, the guard post, the guard dog and the pervasive cold are the only witnesses of our visit. Edin explains where the infamous room number 3 was, telling us what happened there. Damir Došen, one of the men convicted for this crime, has served his sentence and can be seen on social networks or on the street.
To enter Omarska we needed a permit from the mine management currently owned by the world leading iron producer ArcelorMittal. The time of the visit was strictly limited to one hour. It had snowed shortly before our arrival, there was mud all around. They made us stand in the mud, even though there was an asphalted parking lot in front of the mine buildings. We were then warned that we may only take photographs of the infamous White House, everything else was prohibited to safeguard against, as they said, industrial sabotage. We stand in front of the White House, physically prevented from seeing and walking around the entire camp. Prisoners were brought here for interrogation, they were beaten, tortured and killed. It is not the most horrific building on the premises of the mine-camp. Atrocities were committed in all parts of the camp; from the small red house some 100m from us, no one came out alive, which is why there is no testimony about what happened inside. Since we are familiar with the fact that the families of victims have been endeavouring for years to have the premises of the camp marked accordingly, we discuss the possibilities. It is estimated that ArcelorMittal will exhaust the iron ore from this locality in a few years, which will probably facilitate efforts to memorialise this location. This is, at the same time, a tragic fact. For decades, the planned mining of iron ore, in contrast to the present capitalist approach, provided livelihoods to numerous families in the area. But everything has been changed. As of 1992, Omarska shall remain known as a concentration camp.
The exhumation of the Tomašica mass grave has been completed, a fact you will not easily find by googling. It is not a fact that is readily mentioned, given that mass graves of this size are given to endless political exploitation, as with other sites of suffering, and not just in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We became painfully aware of this as we stood among the heaps of earth left after the exhumation and the small pond where snow and rain now make a natural filling. Edin tells us the facts, figures, answers our questions. The human propensity for romantic notions is incredible, like our idea that the location of the grave was reported by someone who could no longer suffer the pangs of conscience and nightmarish dreams. Such events are rare, as can be seen from the number of people from Prijedor still listed as missing. The story is that the grave was discovered through an exchange of information, perhaps even in part through political trade-offs between the Federation and RS. Many politicians visited this site promising justice for the victims. Little has changed in the meantime.
It is not our first time in Trnopolje, which is why we already know that in the yard, in front of the camp, there is a monument to fallen fighters of RS from Trnopolje. It is hard to resist the impression that this initiative was a way to “mask” the space or steal memories of suffering, even though the monument itself is somewhat worse for wear; time has taken its toll and lack of maintenance has seen the plaque fall from the monument. Here we met with Fikret Alić, a man who was photographed in 1992 behind the barbed wire fence of the camp, ghostly undernourished and tortured, and became a symbol of suffering in the Prijedor camps. Owing in part to this photograph, the world was made aware of the existence of the camps, eventually leading to their closing. After a difficult wartime period and long recovery, in 2006 Fikret returned to Kozarac in the Prijedor Municipality. This humble man, bearing all he has suffered stoically and peacefully, is turned towards the future. He met with us in order to convey a message of peace, he said. That is how he tells his story, with the intention of making sure it never happens to anyone again. We were all deeply shaken by this meeting.
From Trnopolje, we set off for Sanski Most, and then to Hrastova glavica. Here in 1998, the remains of 124 people were exhumed, previously prisoners at the Keraterm and Omarska camps, and the remains of another two persons forensically determined to have been thrown into the pit at the time of the Second World War. This natural pit is situated in the forest, at the end of a forest road. The surroundings are idyllic, covered in show, undisturbed by passers-by. The opening of the pit is now covered. Since this locality is in the territory of the Federation, the monument was inaugurated on the 20th anniversary of the crime:
Above this pit, on 6 August 1992
members of the Serb army and police killed 124
prisoners from the Prijedor death camps
Keraterm and Omarska.
They killed three at a time, tied with wire, and threw them
into an abyss more than 20 meters deep.
Their skeletal remains were found in 1998
along with the bones of two men from Sanski Most
killed in the Second World War.
This memorial is dedicated on the 20th anniversary
of the crime in the hope that this pit shall never
again see innocent people thrown in.
Association of Prijedor Women “Izvor”
Association of Camp Survivors Sanski Most
Edin asked us whether we thought the plaque was too generalising and whether as such it could be perceived as a threat to Serb returnees to the surrounding villages. Thanks to research we conducted over the past three years about monuments and memorials in BiH following the 1991-1995 wars, we had become familiar with numerous memorial inscriptions. Very often, out of pain, sorrow and anger, inscriptions mention foes, Chetniks, Ustasha, criminals, the words forever and never forgive or forget, an eternal lesson. This is not one such memorial, it does not hate anyone, it warns and remembers. The memorial plaque includes the names of those killed and their age at the time. Our wars have left us without generations and generations of people.
On our way back, we visited the Šušnjar Memorial Complex in Sanski Most. It is perhaps the best example of how monuments change in keeping with the times. Erected to commemorate victims of fascist terror and fighters of NOR[2], it was heavily damaged during the last war and subjected to interventions aiming to change its ideological background, as well as the ethno-national structure of victims and fighters is honours. A few years ago it was proclaimed a national monument of BiH. We don’t believe it should be reconstructed. It is ostensibly a monument to a glorious past, but also a monument to its bloody ideological deconstruction. That is why it should be preserved as it is and schoolchildren should be brought to see it to learn about shame. Perhaps shame will be the beginning of doubt in the gloriousness of their forefathers who in the fight for their better future got a bit carried away and left them this legacy, of which Šušnjar is a prime example.
All of this left us considerably concerned and disheartened. Along with everything else, apart from the past, we also share a culture of memory whose epic, heroic narratives in education and the public arena allow for no questioning of the basic matrix. Our (recent) war past clearly tells us how wrong this approach is. It contains a grave danger that threatens endless returns to violence, and bears forth a feeling of it all hanging over our heads, ready to happen again.
In memorialisation and culture of memory, multiple perspectives are necessary to counteract black-and-white world views of the struggle between good and evil, because the truth is somewhere in between, in the grey zone. For us it is important how we as the living relate to the dead. But, with all due respect, there are some among the living who deserve nothing less. It is only through respect for human life, for live in general, that we can create the space for questions, for dialogue, a way out of the vicious circle, this is what we should strive for. That is why we should visit marked sites of suffering, especially if you are perceived as belonging to the “enemy group”. Your presence will enable the transformation of the ideological matrix and make room for being respectful of the dead and humane towards the living. And it is especially important visit unmarked sites of suffering; we mark them by being there, we remember and restore dignity to the dead. We are here to make sure it is not forgotten and that it never happens to anyone anywhere again.
Davorka Turk
[1] The hangar reconstruction was designed by Miljenko Romić
[2] NOR – Narodnooslobodilački Rat / National Liberation War (of Yugoslavia during WW2)
In bodies
In skulls
In borders
In the mud of Jasenovac
In the grave fields of Gradina
In the tin plates of Keraterm
In Tomašica
In Hrastova glavica
In the walls of Vukovar
In the red cross on the hospital
In the bodies of the unlucky
In the memories of the lucky
In the souls of mothers
In the futures of children
In us
Paid for in lives
By toys that take lives
Very dear
Our holes
Dalmir Mišković
How much are we killed, how much are we alive?
They ask me whether it’s my first time in Vukovar. I say it is, but I feel like I’ve been here before. Coming to the photography exhibition “Vukovar”, put on at the Theatre Club in Sarajevo in that winter of 1992, took me through shell-rutted streets and crumbled pavements, through rows of destroyed and burnt out houses. In my mind at the time, I mingled with the column of refugees, tremulous with fear and apprehensive about my fate. I had been at the hospital, too. Why are all war hospitals so similar? The crowd, commotion and cries at the entrance, and the darkness and ominous silence in the wards where people lie wrapped in bandages like Egyptian mummies. And the smells, the chloroform, characteristically strong and sweet-smelling, bringing back memories of childhood. The first visit to the doctor, the first vaccine. In a war hospital, that smell is accompanied by two other contenders for intensity. The smell of blood and faeces. That’s what it smells like. Add in the smell of gunpowder and that’s what war smells like.
Remembering my impressions of Vukovar from that time, gained both through media reports and the photography exhibition, I know I could not identify with the conquerors of the city, the victors. They seemed to be from another planet. I could only identify with the defeated, in their agony. Being here now, after having become familiar with the feeling of walking through other people’s yards carrying a gun, I find it easier to imagine myself in the role of a soldier on both sides. In the war, I was not a civilian, or a refugee, or a prisoner. Now, I can once again imagine what that would have been like, although I was a soldier. Psychopathic killers and sadistic torturers are still from another planet as far as I’m concerned. It’s easier that way, than having to imagine them as people.
I regret this place does not offer that opportunity, to hear the voices of those that participated on the other side of its Golgotha. There is no need to speak of justification, negation of guilt and other nonsense. Places like this one need to offer an opportunity for someone to say they’re sorry, that they wish it had been different. That he tried to get out of it, but did not succeed. Or that he imagined it differently until it happened. How long will such opportunities be missed?
I am surprised at my reaction as we visit the memorial with the military exhibits. I cannot overcome the urge to talk about it. A delirium similar to that experienced by an addict looking at a syringe.
What did the war do to me? How do I squeeze it out of myself? I listen to the details of street battles, breaking out of the encirclement, the killings and imprisonment in the camps. Who was in front, and who was behind these guns, cannons and tanks?
At the Memorial Cemetery of Victims from the Homeland War, the plots with gravestones separate soldiers from civilians. The marble is differently coloured. In the fields, behind the “Air Cross” monument, there are 938 crosses, one for each victim exhumed from the mass grave at the site. A monolith piece of stone for each life gives an impression of the scale of the tragedy. How much did the loss of each of those lives change the lives of those around it? How many of those left to live still died in a way, in some part of themselves? What should I multiply 938 by?
I remember Ovčara from stories of liquidations of captured soldiers, the wounded and the staff from the Vukovar hospital. Now, where the livestock hangar used to be, there is a museum. Treading over the hundreds of brass rifle shells pressed into the floor of this memorial, a chill runs up my spine. The feeling intensifies as I look over the walls, with the light growing brighter and dimmer, revealing photographs of those killed interspersed with their names and dates of birth. In the middle of the room is a light installation in the form of a spiral elevating the names of those killed towards an image of a starry sky. War brings home that idea of ascension to the divine heavenly pedestal. Innocent victims are awaited “up there”, but also those whose guns were blessed and courage boosted with promises that they would be transported straight to the gardens of paradise if they should die.
Between the walls and the floor is a moat covered by thick glass. The moat is filled with hay, evoking the conditions in the hangar at the time, and placed in the hay are items and documents belonging to the killed. And pieces of barbed wire. I know of no other item so instantaneously evocative of imprisonment and execution. That wire.
A few hundred meters from the hangar is the site where executions were carried out and the bodies were buried. Now, there is a monument there in memory of the 200 wounded Croatian soldiers brought there from the Vukovar hospital and killed. Next to the monument is a plot with smaller memorial plaques mounted by associations not satisfied with the design of the initial monument. Flowers are laid at both places and candles are lit.
I had visited Jasenovac while still in primary school, during one of the organised school trips.
It is more or less the same as some thirty odd years ago, apart from the exhibits in the museum. I noticed that photographs depicting harrowing scenes of killing and torture were removed. To me they are still very much alive. They have been replaced by personal stories of camp survivors. The Jasenovac concentration camp and the scale of suffering inflicted therein had been a taboo topic in what was then the socialist Yugoslavia, up until the mid-1960s, some twenty years after the end of the Second World War. I assume the authorities at the time, constructing a new society founded on brotherhood and unity of the Yugoslav peoples and nationalities, wanted to postpone the realisation of the general public that our territory had also contained a death factory, a place of Holocaust and genocide. The Jasenovac concentration camp run by the puppet Independent State of Croatia represented a dimension of crime that they were perhaps ill-equipped to deal with at the time.
Across the Sava River is the Donja Gradina memorial, a place to which camp prisoners had been ferried in order to be killed and buried in mass graves. The paths leading through fields and groves took us along depressions in the ground with regular shapes, meaning they were the work of human hands. Over a hundred have been unearthed, and it is presumed there are another thirty to fifty pits.
The pits had not been exhumed due to the primitive methods for identification at the time.
The Jasenovac and Donja Gradina areas were a single memorial complex in the former Yugoslavia. Today, they are separated by an international border and run independently. What they now have in common is the absence of mass school visits. The visits are mostly by organised groups and individuals. Politicians “pull out” Jasenovac as needed, and each side marks the commemoration in its own way. They will never agree on the number of victims, but there is no denial of the atrocities that took place and the way lives were taken away. There were no gas chambers, the killings brought the victim and executioner close together. By bullet, bat, knife, hanging. Enough to make you disgusted with the human race.
I had already known many things about the camps of Prijedor, the killing of over three thousand Bosniaks and their mass graves. I had visited some of the sites during this year’s commemorations. The tension in my stomach resurfaces, where are the limits of human evil? This time I had the opportunity to hear the testimony of camp survivor Fikret Alić, a symbol of the camps from the past war. But he did not speak as a symbol, instead I heard a human story and an appeal for our society to start treating the crimes and their participants, the victims and the perpetrators, fairly at last. His suffering did not plant hatred in this heart. I wanted to embrace him so that we could cry together, but all I managed was to ask for a photo together.
What can I say about Prijedor, where the attitude towards the crimes cannot be articulated within the Bosniak and Serb community, dialogue is practically non-existent. Commemorations are one-sided, with the exception of a few activist groups and individuals.
The town park has a memorial bearing the names of some 850 soldiers of VRS[1]. What is it with this town and so many dead? What is the genesis of evil, how can it be stopped? Should we speak, exchange, express solidarity? How else?
In the vicinity of Sanski Most, situated in the hills is the Hrastova glavica pit. Going through the forest, you come out onto a plateau where a memorial to the killed from Prijedor has been placed at the site where they had been brought from the Prijedor camps. There they had been shot and thrown into the pit. I look over the years of birth, they all fall between 18 and 60 years of age. Who drew up the lists, could they sleep in the years that followed?
I had come to Sanski Most perhaps a year after the end of the last war. At the time it was a ghost town. The Serbs had been expelled in 1995, and the Bosniaks and Croats had not started returning in larger numbers to the place from which they had been expelled in 1992. I had found out then that it was a town of camps. And of mass graves, too. Bosniak and Croat from the start of the war, and Serb by the end.
We visited the monuments. The Šušnjar Memorial Complex was constructed during the time of the former Yugoslavia. It has retained its appearance from the last war during which Bosniak names had been removed from the memorial plaques. An Orthodox cross had been added, and the central memorial had been largely destroyed.
The roundabout in the centre of town contains a Memorial Complex with a number of installations related to the past war. I notice the figure of a camp prisoner with bowed head and hands on his back. It is the very image of the humiliation and helplessness when you are deprived of your freedom. I look at the Monument to the Liberators, a carved figure of a soldier in full combat gear, and the only thing that comes to mind is that the artist was taking the piss.
This was a difficult study trip. You are filled with all these human misfortunes and you don’t know what to do but feel worried and scared. We have continued our quarrel using monuments. As if our societies had no fear that the evil might return. All we care about it pointing our finger at those to blame for our pits and marking with monuments the places to which we expanded our territories. We’ll see how far that will take us.
Amer Delić
[1] VRS – Vojska Republike Srpske / Army of Republika Srpska
I don’t believe man was given language to ask for shoes or salt. Language reveals the soul. That is why I fear my need to be quiet, because I know it means my soul is silent. The places we visited forced me into silence, by their very existence. I grieved for man.
The Homeland War Memorial Cemetery. I was defeated by the vanity, more vanity, vanity all around. Even at the cemetery for those who are today said to have been prepared to die for a “higher cause”. And they did die. If they had known, would they have given their lives? We know today, would we?
People are clever at deceiving themselves. That is what I’m afraid of. Man relies on his adaptability. An advantage can easily become a disadvantage. I look at the camps, the execution sites, and I think how man can get used to anything, the guards got used to it and those that were under guard. It seems unbearable when I picture it, in reality it was. An incredible level of tolerance. I tolerate today, I even protest, at least I don’t consciously contribute.
It comforts me that understanding is founded on the personal, which need not be historical or national, but on the deepest personal, similar or identical experience, which at some remote imaginary point of intersection unites into a form of mutuality. That is what I think as I stand in Vukovar, Jasenovac and Prijedor. The situations are different, but reminiscent of each other. They have a common desperation that connects them. I think with hope, do we understand this and can it be a guarantee of a future peace? Is there a warranty? So that I may sign it, knowing others will need it too.
Years have passed, and we still don’t know who won, but we ask. I hear the question… Them or us? I see that it is not about the answers, I’m afraid the questions are wrong. Perhaps we should be asking who are they, and who are we? What is it that makes us different? I ask myself. And I think I should ask out loud.
The stories that are told and maintained in the dominant discourse are stories of attackers and defenders, of history and daily life, of victims and perpetrators. They remind me of two images of almost the same shape, so that when you lay them one over the other, you get an approximate picture of those areas and times. A few will say publicly how the two images can let you see the whole picture, the essence. This is needed.
Dijana Budisavljević, for example, let just one person be human, restoring faith in people. I am in dire need of this.
They are difficult, these images close in essence, far away only in time. The invisibility with which we can live next to each other is chilling. I look at the monuments around Prijedor and Sanski Most and I wonder whether the war is really over or just moved to a different place? It’s easy to love you own, an animal can do that in its lair. But humanity likes to boast about having conquered nature and technology, gone to space, soon man will learn to overcome even himself. Love the whole world, persevere, that’s how you make it better. The world rests on human solidarity and the conscience of individuals. I am that individual.
All epochs are tainted with the infliction and suffering of evil, but also with a motley palette of kindness that is not ostentatious. Small acts of humanity that make living among people bearable, sometimes even beautiful, in towns beset by silences. If I speak and ask, others will speak. I know the burden is heavy, but I also know I must carry it. That is why I do this.
Nataša Okilj