History, Memory and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe

Memory Games

G. Mink, L. Neumayer, G. Mink, L. Neumayer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230354333
• eBook ISBN: 9781137302052
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Fourteen specialists of Central and Eastern European politics explore memory policies and politics by examining how and why contested memories are constantly reactivated in the former Soviet bloc. The book explores how new social and political actors can challenge the traditional narratives about the past produced by state bodies.

Part I

Mobilizations around Memory: New Actors, New Issues

1

Would-be Guardians of Memory: An Association of Camp Inmates of the 1992–95 Bosnian War under Ethnographic Scrutiny

Cécile Jouhanneau

Varieties of both constructionists and deconstructionists emphasize that the past is produced in the present and is thus malleable. ( . . . ) Within presentism, however, it is possible to emphasize either instrumental or meaning dimensions of memory: the former see memory entrepreneurship as a manipulation of the past for particular purposes where the latter see selective memory as an inevitable consequence of the fact that we interpret the world – including the past – on the basis of our own experience and within cultural frameworks.

(Olick and Robbins, 1998, p. 128)

In the fall of 2010 a public debate arose on Bosnian war victims’ spokespersons.¹ It was sparked by what some remember as the ‘Angelina case’. Hollywood actress and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Ambassador Angelina Jolie was about to shoot her first movie on the Bosnian war. The press caught wind of the fact that it would be a wartime love story between a Bosnian Muslim woman detained in a rape camp and one of the Serb camp guards. Soon enough, the spokesperson of an association of women victims of wartime rape, Bakira Hasečić, expressed her outrage with the idea that Angelina Jolie might portray ‘a victim in a rape camp falling in love with her rapist. That’s not only impossible,’ she said, ‘but the idea is insulting’ (Meikle, 2010). She subsequently tried and succeeded in having the film permit withdrawn. In some of the independent Sarajevo media, this move stirred up strong criticism against Bakira Hasečić. A journalist from Sarajevo weekly Dani harshly criticized the association leader on three main grounds: first, according to her, Bakira Hasečić had turned her activism as a victim into a professional ‘business’; second, she was exploiting the victims for her own interest and for political manipulation; and third, she was claiming an exclusive right over the interpretation of the victims’ memories of war rape.²

This vignette is part of a larger debate on Bosnian war victims’ associations. In the wake of the 1992–95 Bosnian conflict, several war-related organizations have been formed or reactivated. Today, associations of families of missing persons, victims of war rape and former camp detainees are a frequent feature of media and political discourse in Bosnia and Herzegovina. More often than not, they are presented either as respectable figures providing a moral compass, or as strategic, cynical actors – as in the vignette described above. A dichotomy tends to be made in public discourse between ordinary victims in a quest for justice versus associations’ spokespersons using their victim status to pursue their self-interests. Moreover, associations’ spokespersons are said to impose a certain interpretation of their wartime experience onto the very victims’ memories, and into the public sphere. Such a ‘manipulation’ of the victims is considered to be part of post-war politicking. However, even though war victims’ associations are omnipresent in media and public discourse in Bosnia and Herzegovina, they have attracted limited academic attention, except for a few noteworthy pieces of research.³ A lot has yet to be written on the relationships between associations’ spokespersons, members and the wider social groups they claim to represent, and about the links war victims’ associations have with political parties and the media. Besides, these public qualifications of Bosnian war victims’ associations, based as they are on dichotomies between morals and strategy, victims and spokespersons, are in tune with a body of academic work dealing with ‘victims’ competition’ and ‘memory entrepreneurs’ outside of Bosnia.

Since the mid-1990s, among scholars interested in present discourses on past experiences of war and mass atrocity, an approach that we may refer to as the ‘memory wars’ paradigm has gained momentum. Reacting to the diffusion of the notion of devoir de mémoire (duty of memory) in 1980–90s France, some authors have endeavored to denounce the ‘memory abuses’⁴ that victims’ spokespersons commit by the ‘harnessing of the victims’ mute voice’ (Ricoeur, 2000, p. 109). In the same vein, without hiding his moral disgust, Jean-Michel Chaumont described ‘the competition of victims for the palm of the greatest suffering’ (Chaumont, 2002 p. 179). Last, public controversies on the French colonial past inspired works on the ‘memory wars’ supposedly waged by public authorities, historians and ‘memory activists, a sort of police that imposes what ought to be done or not [and] registers any distancing from the doxa established in advance’ (Benbassa, 2008, p. 592).⁵ All in all, this body of work considers victims’ mobilizations as voicing symbolic claims to the acknowledgment of their suffering, thus fueling a ‘depoliticization’ of the public debate (Stora, 2008, p. 41) and serving memory entrepreneurs’ self-interests (Erner, 2006, p. 20; Benbassa, 2010, p. XV). However, seldom has the category of ‘memory entrepreneurs’ been empirically documented and reflexively used,⁶ hence recent calls for a banal sociology of memory entrepreneurs that ‘documents how these mobilizations fit within ordinary political life’ (Lefranc, Mathieu and Siméant, 2008, p. 18). To cast a sociological look at ‘memory entrepreneurs’, one can fruitfully go back to historian and sociologist Michael Pollak’s pioneering work. By analogy with Howard S. Becker’s ‘moral entrepreneurs’, Pollak designed the expression of ‘memory entrepreneurs’ to refer to actors who ‘create common references and those who make sure they are respected’ (Pollak, 1993, p. 30).⁷ He developed this analysis in the case of Nazi camp survivors’ associations:

The representatives of the associations of deported persons and Resistance fighters have turned into ‘guardians of memory’. They are solicited when witnesses are needed for judicial, pedagogic or commemorative purposes. They take care of the transmission of their experience, while simultaneously defending the image of the group and the association. ( . . . ) What is at stake is the integration of the history of the deported into the wider, political and national, history. Thus a field of competitive associations emerges, with its orthodox and heterodox discourses, its scissions and its exclusions.

(Pollak, 2000, pp. 246–7)

Do Bosnian war victims’ spokespersons try to elaborate and impose memory norms – authoritative interpretations of the victims’ experience – into society and onto victims’ memories? Beyond accusations of political ‘manipulations’ of the victims, what are the relationships between victims’ associations and political actors? To try and provide empirically documented answers to these questions, I have engaged in ethnographic fieldwork in Brčko District, located in northeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, mainly from 2008 to 2010. I have conducted in-depth interviews with former camp detainees, logoraši, as well as ethnographic observations in Brčko’s association of non-Serb camp detainees, Udruga zatočenih – Udruženje logoraša Brčko Distrikta BiH.⁸ It was founded in September 2005 and it counted about 400 members at the end of 2010. The association’s members were mainly detained by the Serb armed forces in Luka, the city’s fluvial port facilities, and/or in Batković, an agricultural complex in Bijeljina municipality. However, very few of them were actively engaged in the association and on a daily basis the work of the organization came down to its president’s activities: he received individuals wishing to get a camp detainee certificate, delivered press releases, asked local authorities for funding, organized commemorations, and so forth. The association’s outward discourse on wartime camps and the communication of detention memories within the organization do reveal that the association’s spokesperson tried to elaborate an authoritative interpretation of detention to be conveyed into Brčko’s public spaces. Such a memory norm was also proposed to the organization’s members through everyday memory-framing practices within the association’s office. However, this chapter argues that one should not assume that these memory-framing practices had any effects on individuals’ recollections. Moreover, while champions of the ‘memory wars’ paradigm consider the elaboration of antagonistic interpretations of past atrocities as part of memory entrepreneurs’ self-interested strategies, this chapter contends that in Brčko’s association, memory entrepreneurship served the building of a collective cause of camp detainees within the specific political and social context of a District under international supervision.

Contested elaboration of a memory norm

Located in northeastern Bosnia, the city of Brčko suffered a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing of its non-Serb population during spring 1992, and later represented a safe destination for thousands of displaced Serbs during the war and early post-war period. In late 1995, the Dayton Peace Agreement maintained Bosnia into its pre-war frontiers while dividing it into two so-called ‘entities’, Republika Srpska (Serb Republic) and the Federacija Bosne i Hercegovine (Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, subdivided into ten cantons, most of which have a Croat or Bosniac majority). Due to Brčko’s highly strategic position as a nexus of river and road communication and as a link between Republika Srpska’s eastern and western halves, negotiators could not decide upon the fate of Brčko municipality at Dayton, and it was not until 1999 that an international ad hoc tribunal turned it into a District belonging to neither of the two Bosnian entities, and placed it under international supervision. A particularly heavy international intervention, embodied by the international supervisor for Brčko, was meant to achieve peace in the District by turning it into a democratic, multiethnic place. To do so, the international intervention focused on supporting the return process and imposing multiethnicity in all the institutions of the District, being wary of anything that could appear as public manifestations of ethnonationalism. More than ten years after its creation, the District officials often present Brčko as a model of ‘multiethnic coexistence’ for the rest of the country. It is important to keep this distinctive atmosphere within Bosnian ethnopolitical landscape in mind if one is to understand collective mobilizations and policy-making in the District.

The non-Serb association of camp detainees of Brčko District was founded on 24 September 2005, with the aims of documenting the history of the war camp detainees from the District, and helping them achieve social rights. Since the association’s creation in 2005, its leaders did elaborate an authoritative interpretation of camp detention. First, the local association stayed in tune with the narrative of detention promoted by the Sarajevo-based, mainly Bosniac, Union of camp detainees of Bosnia and Herzegovina,⁹ which more or less consistently defined war camp detention as a proof of the international aggression against Bosnia and the genocide against Bosniacs. Hence the phrasing of the first commemorative plaque that was placed on Brčko’s camp Luka, which read:

Let it not be forgotten, let it not be repeated! During the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992–1995, in this place, Serb authorities formed a camp in which 3,000 Bosniacs and Croats suffered unprecedented tortures.

The interpretation of the war as an ‘aggression’ (and not as a ‘civil war’, which is the Serb ethnonationalist stance), the ethnonational identification of victims and culprits and the high number of victims all serve as a reminder of the Sarajevo Union’s discourse. However, the District’s authorities considered the plaque as provocative and had it removed. A new plaque that very well reflected how Brčko’s association was distancing from the Sarajevo Union then replaced it and read:

In this place, in May (maja/svibnja) 1992 in Luka camp, several hundreds of innocent civilians were killed. Bosniacs and Croats. May they rest in peace (Neka im je rahmet i vječni pokoj).

Significantly, the new plaque used Bosnian and Croat words for ‘May’, and Muslim and Catholic expressions of mourning. It did identify Luka camp victims ethnonationally, but remained vague as far as the culprits were concerned. The association’s interpretation of detention was obviously shaped by the specific District expectations of ‘multiethnic coexistence’. But it was also elaborated in interaction with the public discourse of Brčko’s Serb association of camp detainees, which defended the interpretation of the war as a civil war in which all parties committed crimes and formed camps. According to one of the Serb spokespersons in the District, there were as many as 21 camps for Serbs in Brčko wartime municipality. The non-Serb association’s president, Admir, would publicly contradict these claims through press releases. In his own words, ‘mora se malo boriti’ (‘one has to fight a little’),¹⁰ and the insistence on numbers of camps and victims in the associations’ narratives of detention was therefore largely shaped by the ‘fight’ between Serb and non-Serb spokespersons.

However, the association’s narrative of the camps also resulted from the interactions with Bosniac victims’ associations, especially with the older, better-structured association of Bosniac families of missing persons of the District. Admir struggled to impose a definition of the camp detainees as a specific victim category according to international law, different from other non-Serb war victims – relatives of missing persons, victims of sexual violence or civilian war invalids. For instance, he insisted on organizing the Day of the Camp Detainees (Dan logoraša) on 2 May, that is, neither on 9 May – the day chosen by the Sarajevo Union of camp detainees, nor on 4 May – the day of the commemoration of the District’s Bosniac civilian victims of the war, which was organized by the District’s association of relatives of Bosniac missing persons. This raised tensions within his very association, since some active members wished for the overall public acknowledgment of the district’s non-Serb civilian victims, without any distinction of the type of victimization suffered.¹¹ On the contrary, Admir struggled to define the District’s camp detainees as distinct from those in the federation’s mainly Bosniac associations, and from the District’s other civilian victims. He was thereby discursively constructing the District’s camp detainees as a collective fighting for a distinctive cause, and as a legitimate beneficiary group of specific District social policies. By doing so, Admir did not compete for the camp detainees to win ‘the palm of the greatest suffering’ among Bosnian civilian victims (Chaumont, 2002, p. 179). He rather sought to build a collective cause for the camp detainees within the specific social and political context of the District. Not only was the association’s memory norm elaborated in a discursive fashion, but it was also conveyed within the association through what we could refer to as memory-framing practices.

Memory-framing practices and their limited effects

Students of ‘transitional justice’ literature – familiar as they are with its calls for the voice of the victims to be heard, for their suffering to be acknowledged and their right to speak out publicly to be respected – could be quite surprised when discovering the workings of Brčko’s association of camp detainees at the moment of my main fieldwork, from March to August 2008. Every day or so, Admir would receive the District’s former camp detainees wishing to get officially registered as logoraši. The association had a ten square meter, modestly furnished office in the center of the town. It had a computer, a shelf and a table on which, significantly enough, no ashtray or coffee cup was placed. Indeed, in the association’s office there was little room for small talk or sharing intimate details. To obtain a certificate of ‘logoraš’, aspiring members had to answer a number of precise questions, ranging from the dates of their arrest and release to the number of people imprisoned with them. Then they had to give a deposition (izjava) describing their stay in the camp in further detail. Sitting in front of his computer, Admir would carry out the registration procedure in a systematic, distanced manner. He would not let the aspiring member tell his or her story in his or her own way. Through methodically rephrasing and formally correcting the deposition as he typed it on his computer, he would somehow frame the aspirant’s restitution of memories.

Not only would he frame the form of the deposition, to such an extent t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• General Editor’s Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Mobilizations around Memory: New Actors, New Issues
• Part II: Memory Policies and Historical Narratives: How Do States Deal with Memories of the Past?
• Part III: International Norms and ‘Geopolitics of Memory’
• Conclusion
• Index