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Part I
Ritual practices
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Chapter 1
Srebrenica
Conflict and ritual complexities
Martin Hoondert
Introduction
The massacre of more than 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Serb forces led by Ratko MladiÄ in Srebrenica in 1995, is the worst act of genocide in Europe since the Second World War. For the Netherlands, the fall of Srebrenica has become a national trauma. This is because a battalion of Dutch UN peace-keepers in Srebrenica and the neighbouring village PotoÄari failed to protect the UN safe area and the people in their care. For many years, Srebrenica haunted Dutch politicians, struggling with the issue of responsibility, and Srebrenica survivors used lawsuits in their fight for recognition and justice (Attila Hoare, 2010; Spijkers, 2016).
In 2003, a memorial centre was opened in PotoÄari. This PotoÄari Memorial Centre (PMC) is located at the Dutchbat compound, a former battery factory. On the other side of the road, the victims of the Srebrenica genocide are buried (Pollack, 2003a). Every year, on the 11th of July, various commemoration practices take place here, attracting both Bosniaks ā as the Bosnian Muslims are called ā from the whole of Bosnia-Herzegovina and a large international public (sympathizers and delegates of governments, NGOs and international organizations). Although the commemoration on the 11th of July in Srebrenica gets the most attention in the international media, it is not the only ritual related to the fall of the enclave and, more broadly, the Bosnian War, which lasted from 1992 to 1995 (Burg & Shoup, 1999). In this chapter, I will explore the rituals and ritual-like practices in Srebrenica and neighbouring villages, showing how the ritual dynamics resurrect the (past) conflict, making Srebrenica a prisoner of its own history. Second, I will reflect on the necessity to design places of shared truths, which enhance the process of social reconstruction and reconciliation in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Rituals and counter-rituals
In PotoÄari
In 2015, I visited Srebrenica and attended the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide at the PotoÄari Memorial Centre (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). Srebrenica and PotoÄari, two small villages in the Eastern part of Bosnia Herzegovina, were crowded. The road leading to the Memorial Centre was full of cars and buses. The official commemoration on the 11th of July started at the Memorial Centre, located in the former battery factory. While most of the participants gathered on the other side of the road, at the cemetery, waiting for the burial ceremony to start, we listened to speeches by, among others, the Mayor of Srebrenica, former US President Bill Clinton and the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs Bert Koenders. One of the guests was the Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar VuÄiÄ, who was welcomed by Bill Clinton and praised because of his courage and his endeavour to make a first step to reconciliation.
After the speeches by the officials, we all left the Memorial Centre and walked to the cemetery. There, 136 coffins with the remains of the victims of the Srebrenica genocide, recently identified using DNA analysis, were waiting to be buried. When VuÄiÄ entered the cemetery, a few people in the crowd started booing and whistling, while others shouted āGenocide!ā. Stones and other objects were thrown at him, and VuÄiÄ was forced to leave the site. Although the Mayor of Srebrenica and representatives of survivorsā associations (the āMothers of Srebrenicaā) distanced themselves from these hostilities, the damage had already been done. Later that day, the Serbian Minister of the Interior, NebojÅ”a StefanoviÄ, declared on Serbian Pink television: āThis is a scandalous attack and I can say it can be seen as an assassination attempt. Bosnia has failed to create even the minimal conditions for the safety of the prime minister.ā1
Apart from this incident, the mass burial of the 136 victims was an impressive and worthy ceremonial. Ten thousand Muslim men and women took part in the funeral prayers before the coffins were carried to the graves (Figure 1.3). In the meantime, the names of the victims were read by a woman as a litany of dead. Each coffin was accompanied by an imam, who said the required prayers at the graveside. Not being a Muslim, I felt like an intruder, watching a ritual in which I was not able to participate. While all the people surrounding me bowed and kneeled, I stood upright. While the survivors of the genocide and the next of kin were digging the grave and others were praying, weeping or taking pictures, I walked around on the cemetery and took pictures. Although the ceremony had started as a collective Muslim ritual, the ritual changed into 136 individual family rituals (see also Pollack, 2003b). While the families gathered around the graves, others left the cemetery to have lunch or to visit the exhibition in the Memorial Centre. The crowd slowly resolved, although it took hours before all the cars and buses had left the venue.
Figure 1.1 The cemetery in PotoÄari, a day before the commemoration and burial, July 10, 2015.
Source: Ā© Martin Hoondert.
Figure 1.2 The monument with the names of the Srebrenica genocide, PotoÄari, July 10, 2015.
Source: Ā© Martin Hoondert.
Figure 1.3 A coffin with the remains of one of the victims of the Srebrenica genocide is carried to its grave, PotoÄari, July 11, 2015.
Source: Ā© Martin Hoondert.
From Nezuk to PotoÄari
The day before the official commemoration I witnessed the arrival of the participants of the so-called āMars Miraā at PotoÄari and had informal conversations with some of them. Since 2005, several Bosnian survivors and families of the victims organize a Peace March beginning on the 8th of July. This Mars Mira memorizes the escape of 15,000 Bosnian men from Srebrenica-PotoÄari to Nezuk (near Tuzla) in July 1995. Because of illness, infirmity because of the war, and due to snipers and land mines along the route, only 3,500 survived the march.2 In the Peace March, participants walk this āpath of deathā in the reverse direction, from Nezuk to PotoÄari. Starting as a local event, the Mars Mira now attracts visitors from all over the world and thousands of people participate in this march every year. The marchers pass near mass grave sites, and at some locations they get āhistory lessonsā by survivors, forensic specialists and others. There are periodic stops for food and drink and three overnight camps are encompassed by the organizing committee. Nettelfield and Wagner, who described the 2010 Mars Mira, call the march a āsymbolic act of movement ā an inverse trek to defy the attempts of General MladiÄ and his army to eradicate a people from a placeā (Nettelfield & Wagner, 2015, p. 61). The arrival of the walkers is both an event of sorrow and joy: people along the road are applauding and a lot of international media pay attention to the walkers finishing. The march is framed as a ācampaign of solidarityā,3 and for some of the participants it might be a healing ritual, a symbolic walk from ādeathā to ālifeā, symbolically bringing the beloved deceased home.
From Visoko to PotoÄari
A few days before July 11, 2015, the 136 coffins with the remains of the victims of the Srebrenica genocide were brought from Visoko, near Sarajevo, to PotoÄari. I did not witness the arrival of the coffins in PotoÄari, but was informed about the convoy and its route by employees of the Dutch peace organization, PAX. In the months before the official commemoration, the remains of the victims had been identified in Tuzla, in the ICMP (International Commission on Missing Persons)4 Identification Coordination Facility (ICF) (Delpla, Bougarel, & Fournel, 2012) in cooperation with the Missing Persons Institute (MPI) of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In spite of efforts that were employed to hide or relocate the bodies of those killed to cover up the genocide, the ICMP was able to identify nearly 7000 victims of the genocide using DNA techniques. One thousand victims are still missing.
The convoy carrying the coffins of the newly identified victims of Srebrenica passed through Lapisnica, Sokolac, Vlasenica, Milici, Bratunac and Srebrenica.5 In several towns, for example in Bratunac in the Republika Srpska (the Serb entity of Bosnia-Herzegovina; Srebrenica and PotoÄari also belong to the Republika Srpska), the convoy passed by posters displaying the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, who had, less than two weeks before the commemoration, vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that called the Srebrenica massacre a āgenocideā.6
These posters were more than a political statement and an expression of gratitude by the Bosnian Serbs towards Putin. From a ritual studies perspective they might be analysed as a materialization of genocide denial and as a counter-ritual against the Bosniaksā commemoration in PotoÄari, which almost exclusively dominates the media. Also in former years, from the first large-scale commemoration in 2000 and the opening of the PotoÄari Memorial Centre in 2003, local Serbs expressed discontent with the commemorations, jeering the arriving mourners, welcoming them with the three-finger Serb nationalist salute and holding pictures of the former Bosnian-Serb General MladiÄ and President KaradžiÄ. In July 2001, some Serbs roasted pigs on a spit in Kravica, apparently set up for the Muslims to see (Bougarel, Helms, & Duijzings, 2007). From a ritual studies perspective, this seemingly innocent barbecue party is a ritual to make the place impure for Muslims.
In Belgrade
On the eve of the official commemoration and burial service in PotoÄari, on the 10th of July, a group of women and other citizens gathered in downtown Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. I gathered information about this group, the so-called āWomen in Blackā, through literature and online sources. The group Women in Black was formed in 1991, just after the former Yugoslavia began to disintegrate and the war broke out.7 Since the very first years of the July 11 commemorations, the Women in Black travelled to PotoÄari to attend the ceremony and to show their support (Nettelfield & Wagner, 2015, p. 51). During the war, the Women in Black were already standing in weekly vigils at the Republic Square, protesting against the war, the killing of innocent people, and against silencing of the perpetration of war crimes. In the aftermath of the war, the group continued to remind the citizens of their country of Serbiaās atrocious past. The yearly gathering on the 10th of July has become part of their commemoration calendar, but also part of a āwar of memoriesā. While the Women in Black commemorated Srebrenica as genocide, others protested against the Women in Black, celebrating the 11th of July as the āLiberation of Srebrenicaā. As Orli Fridman wrote in her article regarding alternative calendars and memory work in Serbia,
the square became a contested territory of interpretations of the past. From 2006 on, police began escorting the Women in Black on their way to and from the square. After the 2008 arrest of Radovan KaradžiÄ, in 2009 the square literally was divided into two by police forces standing as divider between those attending the Women in Black vigil and counter demonstrators [ā¦].
(Fridman, 2015, p. 218)
The presence of the Women in Black in Belgrade is an attempt to restructure the narrative of Srebrenica in the minds of the Serbs, and to offer a counter-narrative against the genocide denial and the relativism of numbers of victims. As the counter-demonstrations showed, the Women in Black only partly succeeded in their pursuit.
In Zalužje
The day after the commemoration and burial service in PotoÄari, a memorial service and wreath-laying ceremony took place in the village of Zalužje (also: Zalažje), near Srebrenica. I did not visit this ritual myself, but was informed about it by one of the members of the delegation with which I visited Srebrenica. I interviewed this member, a former Dutchbat soldier, on the day of the Zalužje ritual and received the pictures he took during the ritual (for example, Figure 1.4).
Figure 1.4 The Bosnian-Serb memorial in Zalužje, July 12, 2015.
Source: Ā© Marco Smit.
On the 12th of July, the Serbs commemorate the massacre of Serb civilians and soldiers by Bosnian Muslim forces under the command of Naser OriÄ on July 12, 1992. This commemoration, and there exist a lot more of them in the villages of Republika Srpska, receives hardly any attention in the international media.
The ceremony took place at the memorial in Zalužje and was led by Orthodox Serb priests. According to Serb sources, 69 Serbs were killed and 22 were taken prisoner. All prisoners were tortured and eventually murdered in Srebrenica camps.8 The memorial consists of two mausoleums and a wall with the names and pictures of the 1992 victims. According to a speech, held by Borislav Paravac, a member of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Presidency, on July 12, 2005, one mausoleum contains āthose who were executed on the Christian feast of the Holy Trinity in 1943, and another c...
