Source: Prometej.ba
Few people can bring together veterans of once warring armies and encourage them to talk and even build friendships. Prometej spoke with one such person, Nenad Vukosavljević, who has many important messages
At the end of last year, the Centre for Nonviolent Action (Sarajevo/Belgrade) published a book called We Come in Peace: War Veterans in Peacebuilding where the authors present their experience of working with war veterans from the former Yugoslavia over the past quarter century. In an interview with Prometej, one of the book’s authors and a founder of the Centre, Nenad Vukosavljević, says the book is a way to do some “stocktaking” and they wanted to convey their experience of working with war veterans to people even beyond our region. The book was edited by Ivana Franović, Martina Fischer and Davorka Turk, and in addition to Vukosavljević, Fischer and Franović, chapters were also contributed by historian Nedžad Novalić and Army of BiH veteran Amer Delić. They are currently also preparing a photo exhibition that will be presented across BiH and the region over the next years, especially in places where some of the veterans featured in the book come from, and the exhibition openings will include panel discussions with the veterans.
Harun Dinarević: You have been working with war veterans in the former Yugoslavia for almost 28 years now. In one chapter, you write about the “aura” of a deserter that had followed you throughout this long process. How did this momentous experience affect you personally and how did it shape you?
Nenad Vukosavljević: As a conscientious objector, I refused to serve in the army back when it was still peacetime. The fact is that many equate this with desertion, which is not the same thing, and that most soldiers see deserters as traitors and cowards, making them much worse people in their eyes than the direct enemies they are fighting. For me personally it was a challenge to face that kind of distrust brought on by the idea of a “deserter” and to build a relationship of mutual trust with veterans, former fighters. Because I’ve never thought of myself as better or worse than those who fought in the war, I think I managed to build a relationship of mutual respect and trust with the veterans we worked with. Working with them and going through many difficult situations and actions together changed all of us, it left a mark. I can certainly feel it for myself, but I also see it in them. More than that, I would say there is pride about the journey we took, the changes we experienced.
The Centre for Nonviolent Action recently published the book We Come in Peace where you are one of the contributing authors. What is new about this book compared to your previous publications and what is its aim?
This book is a kind of stocktaking after almost 25 years of work, a summing up of our results. We wanted to make our collected experiences visible, to leave a lasting testament to the road we travelled building peace and we wanted to make our experiences accessible to people outside our region, because at the international level, there are only sporadic attempts to work directly with veterans and former enemies. We believe that some of the problems, dilemmas, mistakes and successes we encountered will be useful to people in other parts of the world who are at a loss for how to heal their wounded societies and make them safe and free of hatred and the threat of violence being repeated.
On the other hand, the book is also there to celebrate the energy and courage that all of us, and especially the veterans, invested in this journey of peacebuilding. They are the heroes among us.
In one of the chapters you wrote, which gives a chronology of CNA actions, you look back at a commemoration in Brčko with touching scenes of mutual understanding and respect between different sides. One of the group’s participants said at the time that “in ten years or so, all our commemorations will look like this.” In retrospect – did this come about?
It did and it didn’t. Back then, in 2012 in Brčko, we were invited as the Centre for Nonviolent Action Sarajevo-Belgrade to lay a wreath at the unveiling of a monument to fallen fighters of the Army of RBiH. It was the first time we were officially present at a commemoration attended by a large number of citizens. And it was the first time that it was clearly said at a public commemoration that people from the “enemy” side have come to pay their respects. When the announcer read Sarajevo and then paused before reading Belgrade, there were a few seconds of silence, Adnan Hasanbegović and I stepped forward carrying the wreath and then we heard loud applause. For me, that moment is that little bit of reconciliation, when people accept a hand reached out to them and say, “Thank you for this gesture.” Many such small reconciliations with others and with ourselves are what builds peace.
Not all commemorations look like that today, so you can say we did not succeed completely. I say not completely, because where we organise for a group of war veterans to join a commemoration, or where we organise them ourselves, that is exactly what they look like. Former enemies coming together to pay their respects to the fallen, no matter where, without trading and tit for tat, without calculation. And the response of those present is by-and-large positive, because they see there is no hidden political agenda, no scheming, that the people came with pure hearts. And it is no longer big news, it’s becoming normal.
Your actions of joint commemorations and visits to sites of suffering are undoubtedly an important aspect in building trust between different sides, especially because veterans that used to be “enemies” participate in them. I suppose you would have also liked to encourage the political elites to adopt a similar approach. Did you manage to influence them and how much of this has “flowed over” into ceremonies attended by CNA?
We did not manage to have such an approach to memory built on peace established at the level of BiH, but I know from experience that locally, in municipalities and small towns, when local veterans jointly organise a commemoration with former enemies and invite local officials, they then feel encouraged to support this idea and see this approach as something good for their community. An important element there is that in the presence of local veterans, they are free from fear that someone might accuse them of betraying their own side. People feel free when we sit with them, and they also have the need to speak about their wartime experience and share it with former enemies. This freedom from fear is key, because when they see former enemies as people who listen to them and respect them, they stop seeing them as a threat, and they see that these people have crossed over to pay their respects to the victims on the other side. This sort of gesture cannot leave anyone feeling indifferent.
At higher political levels, where some sites of massacres still serve to support nationalist myths about eternal hostility, collective innocence and collective guilt, different rules are at play and the presence of former enemies disturbs the homogeneity. But we go wherever we are told that we are welcome. Sometimes, they tell us we wouldn’t be welcome, so we don’t go there. It’s not our aim to upset anyone or cause a disruption, it’s the very opposite.
But whether the actions of the current nationalist elite cause disruption or build peace, you can judge for yourselves.
Your interviews with veterans show that most of these people did not participate in the war out of ideological reasons, which are ascribed to them after the fact in the official, nationalistically marked culture of memory. Still, with their attitudes, they are a minority in their communities. How much can they influence the construction of a culture of memory built on piety and respect, and not on hatred and myths?
I don’t think they are a minority, but part of a quiet majority, except that they’ve had the opportunity to cross the borders that separate us, to feel the pain on the other side, the weight of places where their army committed crimes and this has helped shape their view of the past and the present. Most of them are still proud of their participation in the war, because at the time it seemed like the only just thing to do, to defend something of their own that was under attack. They did not have much choice, so they don’t regret not acting differently. In the group, you still have people who hold views from the nationalist discourse, but they stop where it becomes clear that they are discriminating or offending others. Ultimately, it is a process that takes time, it doesn’t happen overnight. The expectation that someone will change their opinion overnight and say they were completely wrong is ridiculous. If they are prepared to hear others, if they are prepared to openly talk about themselves and their experiences, that is more than enough for a start, for dialogue. Everyone will draw their own lessons, we’re not telling anyone what to think or what the “only” right and fair opinion is.
The people who can have the most influence on building an inclusive culture of memory are those who have the most legitimacy with the public, and they are first and foremost veterans and victims’ associations. Many veterans are also victims, many have disabilities because of the war, some were tortured as prisoners of war, and some have lost family members in the war.
Bridges (both metaphorical and actual) take a long time and a lot of effort to build, but they can be destroyed in a flash. How well did you manage to preserve the bridges that were built?
I think we did quite well, because when I look back, we never went back to zero, to the starting line; little by little, step by step, we kept achieving more, from the first encounters that were completely closed to the public to where we are today when we attend even some commemorations that are used to prop up national myths.
How do you view the position that your participation in constructing a culture of memory based on understanding and respect must “compete” with the official culture in education and commemorative events that insists on painting a black-and-white image of the past?
The default setting of our societies is a black-and-white image. That’s how it was in SFRY and that’s how it is today, and this is no accident, because people like it that way, and politicians like to pander to people because they gain from it, they buy trust. It’s all so simple, we are all good and they are all bad. It’s hard to get past that, but I don’t think it’s impossible, I believe people need to feel safe, that’s the precondition, because when they are afraid, they are under pressure and can’t think straight, they make irrational decisions. And it seems to me that the cold calculus of nationalist, but actually criminal elites is not to let people feel safe, to keep serving them fear of others, just so they could step in and pretend to be the protectors…
In our work, we try to build cooperation, communication, trust, that is the way to dismantle fear and hatred.
I was intrigued by the experience of Amer Delić, a veteran of ARBiH from Zavidovići, who recounts how due to a nicotine crisis in 1993, he met with enemy soldiers to procure cigarettes, and then years after the war he became part of your team. How important is the experience of such extraordinary individuals in peacebuilding?
If it weren’t for Adnan Hasanbegović and Amer Delić, as people who were veterans and became members of our team, I can safely say that we wouldn’t have even tried working with war veterans, because it would have been impossible. Establishing those first contacts, going for meetings in offices decorated with pictures of at the time indicted and now convicted war criminals, this took an incredible amount of patience, empathy, faith. It was a thorny path that they were prepared to take only because they had experienced war, and war was worse.
And of course, speaking veteran to veteran, even enemy to enemy, they feel much closer to each other then they would with someone like me, “some deserter”. They are connected by very similar experiences they’ve been through, they know they felt the same, and that brings them closer, as crazy as that may sound.
I also want to ask you about something that isn’t dealt with in the book, but must be an important part of your help to veterans in overcoming trauma. In one chapter, there is mention of a veteran who would “go to bed and wake up with a bottle of brandy”. It is clear that PTSD has terrible effects on individuals and leads them to self-destructive behaviour in trying to escape trauma. Have your activities had therapeutic effects on these people, do you have any insight into that?
Many of the veterans still suffer from PTSD, our meetings do not magically erase trauma. People are struggling to learn to live with their traumas and everyone is seeking their own way, assistance from professionals should not be underestimated.
We are not therapists and I would never claim to be doing that kind of work, but I know from the veterans how significant it was for them to meet former enemies. In these encounters, people feel a weight has been lifted, some of them told me that afterwards they were able to sleep without taking sleeping pills for the first time.
Everyone needs peace, it is a basic human need, within us and around us.
How would you assess the position of our societies today compared to when you started this work? After making significant progress in the past quarter century, have we started going downhill again?
Our societies are still poisoned with nationalist myths, but there is also a lot of resistance to this authoritarian uniform view of the past that seeks to impose itself as the only right and legitimate way of looking at things. The resistance is reflected, on the one hand, in alternative forms of memory practiced by various people, organisations, institutions trying to provide non-selective and inclusive views of the past. I would put what we are doing in that category, and we are also trying to make sure we leave a trace so it’s not forgotten that such things were done.
On the other hand, you also have a generation of young people who only know of the war from stories they were told, their healthy rebellious response is that there is something wrong with monolith narratives that brook no criticism, they know intuitively that this can’t be the whole truth and their need to learn about the world leads them to cross lines, resist and question. A healthy society is one where questioning is common, where there are no sacrosanct authorities, either political or “moral”. And I believe our youth has this in them. Opportunities for learning, communication and movement of ideas and people have drastically improved compared to the 1980s when preparations for the wars of the 1990s had started.
Both highs and lows are probably part of progress, it isn’t linear. When I look at Serbia in the past 10 years, I see a steep decline, but then I look at the thousands upon thousands of students, at these young people now, and I can’t seem to wrap my head around how they managed to become such decent, kind, smart and brave people. But actually, the quiet majority of decent people capable of empathy with others has been there all along, sometimes asleep, sometimes distraught by fear, but always there.
Just because people are quiet doesn’t mean they accept everything, maybe they just didn’t have a chance, maybe they were convinced that they were alone and everything was hopeless. It is always up to us.
If someone had asked me back in 1997, when we were starting our work in Sarajevo, if in 25 years veterans and former enemies would be coming together to lay flowers at sites of suffering, appearing together on TV and having people call in to thank them, I would have said no way will that ever happen. But it does happen.
It was our dream to get there and we worked to get there. It may be just a drop in the ocean, but it ripples.