Places of Pain

Forced Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-local Identities in Bosnian War-torn Communities

Hariz Halilovich

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857457776
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Émigration et immigration

For displaced persons, memory and identity is performed, (re)constructed and (re)negotiated daily. Forced displacement radically reshapes identity, with results ranging from successful hybridization to feelings of permanent misplacement. This compelling and intimate description of places of pain and (be)longing that were lost during the 1992–95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as of survivors' places of resettlement in Australia, Europe and North America, serves as a powerful illustration of the complex interplay between place, memory and identity. It is even more the case when those places have been vandalized, divided up, brutalized and scarred. However, as the author shows, these places of humiliation and suffering are also places of desire, with displaced survivors emulating their former homes in the far corners of the globe where they have resettled.

Chapter 1

Klotjevac

Forced Displacement and Ethnic Cleansing in an Eastern Bosnian Village

I don’t miss home, mati. I’m there all the time. In the past.

In fiction.

Ismet Prcić, Shards, p. 41

Before 1992 hot summers would always attract visitors to Klotjevac and other towns along the river Drina, separating Bosnia from Serbia. Famed for its beauty, its clean water and the breathtaking canyon through which it flows, for centuries the river has boasted many notable bridges – including the bridge at Višegrad made famous by Ivo Andrić in his Nobel Prize winning novel The Bridge over Drina. In 1992, when war broke out in Bosnia, the eastern Bosnian border region along the Drina known as Podrinje assumed strategic importance for Serbia and their separatist Serb¹ compatriots in Bosnia, who planned to join the ‘Serb’ parts of Bosnia with Serbia and other ‘Serb lands’ such as Krajina (in Croatia), Posavina (in northern Bosnia) and eastern Herzegovina to create a Greater Serbia (Bećirević 2009). From a strategic point of view, it was practical to join the border region first. The problem was that Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were the largest ethnic group in Podrinje, with no Serb majority in any of its twelve major cities. To make the region Serb, a policy of ethnic cleansing was executed by regular and irregular troops from Serbia and Montenegro with militias made up of radicalised local Bosnian Serbs mobilised through Radovan Karadžić’s Serb Democratic Party (SDS) and the Yugoslav National Army (JNA).² At the beginning of the war, in the spring of 1992, the towns of Bijeljina, Zvornik, Bratunac, Srebrenica, Višegrad, Foča and Goražde were subjected to heavy attacks, and in the months and years that followed almost all non-Serbs were expelled from most of Podrinje’s major towns and villages. Mass executions, including the Srebrenica genocide of July 1995, saw some 30,000 predominantly Bosniaks massacred along the river Drina (Research and Documentation Centre 2007a, 2007b). Included in the carnage were 108 men, women and children from the eastern Bosnian border village of Klotjevac.

Reunion

Halid was one of the survivors. When he touched down at Sarajevo airport on 10 July 2006 he had more than twenty hours’ flying behind him. Waiting for him at the airport was a distant relative, Omer, an ‘internally displaced person’ and jobless chemical engineer. Ahead of them were four hours of driving in Omer’s twenty-two–year-old Volkswagen Golf. They had not seen each other since Halid, now a father of three sons, had migrated to Australia under the special humanitarian programme almost ten years earlier. Omer had tried to join him in Australia but his application was rejected. When they recognised each other in the crowd at the airport, they hugged firmly and greeted each other, an almost universal image of reconnection at any airport in the world. After the usual questions about each other’s health and the health of family members, the conversation turned more specific and included questions like, ‘Have they found any more people from our village lately?’ and ‘Any news about Senad?’ The questions related to the process of exhumation and identification of men and boys who had been gunned down eleven years earlier in the mass executions at Srebrenica. Senad was Omer’s only brother and Halid’s school mate – one of the tens of thousands of the missing who are yet to be positively identified,³ including many other of Halid’s and Omer’s relatives and friends who had perished at Srebrenica in July 1995.

But Omer and Halid shared more than this tragedy. They shared childhood memories and similar sentimental attachments to the eastern Bosnian village of Klotjevac, which had perished during the 1992–95 war. They both treasured memories of long summer school holidays spent on the Drina, where their village was located. They remembered the same customs and rituals, the same people with their distinctive nicknames, the same communal narratives and anecdotes passed down among the villagers over many generations. They knew the places and bays along the lake where a particular fish would bite, what bait to use and when. They knew the smells of each other’s mother’s kitchens and all the familiar landmarks, such as houses, trees, rocks and water wells that constituted the sense of place, that delineated the community to which they had once belonged – a community made up of people, places, stories and rituals (Rodman 1992). In such a community the subtle and sometimes not so subtle changes ushered in by the passage of time would usually be experienced as variations on a theme rather than a radical break with the known past and the anticipated future. But very little of this existed anymore, outside the memories of the few hundred survivors now dispersed across the globe in fifteen different countries.

Halid asked if their childhood village friends Sakib and Fadil had arrived yet from Germany and Sweden, to join up with them and Almir, now living in Austria, and Halćo, now in the U.S. For more than three years they had been planning the July reunion at Srebrenica, the first time since the war that they would all be on Bosnian soil.

When You Forget July⁴

July was traditionally a month reserved for holidays in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Before the war it was the month when all the schools and universities would start their three-month vacation. Two major public holidays, 4 July and 27 July, both marking anti-fascist uprisings during the Second World War, were publicly acknowledged and celebrated. The cities would lose more than half of their population during the summer: almost everyone went to spend some time somewhere else. Many people flocked down to the Adriatic Sea. Many university students and urban dwellers would temporarily move to one of more than a thousand villages across the country to visit parents, relatives and friends, spending at least a part of their holidays helping with picking fruit and harvesting crops, mowing and collecting grass and doing other fieldwork that required many hands to be completed in time.

Times have changed, but hundreds of thousands of displaced Bosnians have reinvented July and the holiday season and, on a more or less regular basis, have started to revisit the old homeland during the European summer. They come from places as distant and diverse as Melbourne, Atlanta, Stockholm and Kuala Lumpur. Many visit the place of their birth. Some build holiday houses on the ruins of their burned-out family homes, perhaps even occupying them for a week or two once every couple of years. Others include in their four-week visits to Bosnia a week or two holidaying on the Adriatic coast, feeding the nostalgia for times past.

But for Halid, Omer and the thousands of displaced people from Podrinje and the Srebrenica region, July has forever lost its old connotations and attractiveness as a month of relaxation and holidaying. For them July is overwhelmingly associated with July 1995, when the UN safe haven at Srebrenica was overrun by the Serb military and more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were systematically executed. Since 2003, on every 11 July, the commemoration and burial of identified bodies recovered from the mass graves has been taking place at the memorial centre in Potočari, at the spot where the victims were separated from loved ones and taken to killing fields by the Serb military (Stover and Peress 1998). Each 11 July survivors from Srebrenica and supporters from all over the country, the region and the world attend the burial ceremonies; as Katherine Verdery (1999: 108) points out, ‘burials and reburials serve to order and reorder community’. While most of the people attending the ceremony have in one way or another been directly affected by the Srebrenica massacres or genuinely moved by the great human tragedy, the occasion has also become political opportunism, a photo opportunity for local, regional and international politicians. The presence of former U.S. President Bill Clinton at the first Potočari commemoration in 2003 – like his decision to finally send in planes against the Serbs in September 1995 – was seen by many as a political act which came far too late to change anything for the victims of Srebrenica.

On 11 July 2006 more than 500 identified bodies of victims killed eleven years earlier were to be put to rest and Halid and Omer wanted to pay their last respects to the victims, many of whom were their relatives and friends. At Potočari they met with Halćo, Almir, Sakib, Fadil and many others among the crowd of 50,000 people who had come for the same reason. Many had once lived in the area, and survived Srebrenica. On their faces one could read that they were conscious of the fact that this could have been their burial and that by some random act of fortune they had survived – unlike the five hundred and five in the seemingly endless row of green coffins. One could read the deep sadness in their eyes, the omnipresent silence only serving to amplify their survivors’ guilt. Many of the names read out belonged to members of the same family: the remains of sons and fathers, brothers and cousins carried in coffins to a long row of freshly dug graves and finally laid to rest next to each other.

Thoughts turned to the victims’ last hours in that tragic July in 1995, when, with no escape from the ‘UN safe haven’ of Srebrenica, most families decided not to separate from each other. In the mass of thousands of desperate men, women and children, people were frantically calling the names of relatives trapped in the crowd. And then came probably the most dramatic and most shameful moment in the history of the UN when UN Dutch troops stood by while the Serb military selected men and boys and ordered them to leave all their belongings behind and get onto the convoy of buses and trucks. Mothers desperately tried to cling to their underage teenage sons being dragged away by the feared and despised Chetniks.⁵ Herded to the dozens of buses and trucks waiting to take them to their fate, hundreds of fathers, sons and brothers held each other’s hands as the only comfort, the only thing they could do for each other. The buses took them to warehouses and the killing fields at Bratunac, Kravica, Zvornik, Pilica … One can only hope that they could not have believed that this was happening to them. A couple of survivors have given detailed testimonies about their last moments⁶ and the executioners themselves, the Serb military, have provided graphic evidence in the form of triumphant amateur videos they took of the killings. Serb soldier Dražen Erdemović⁷ has told the story from the perspective of a member of a death squad that participated in the killings of twenty busloads of people from Srebrenica at a farm in Pilica, confessing how many of his victims were elderly and teenage underage boys, none of whom had tried to escape (Drakulić 2004). The thousands of bodies recovered by forensic anthropologists working on the mass graves around Srebrenica – their hands tied by a wire to each other – tell their own story (cf. Koff 2004 and Samarah 2005).

In 2006, courtesy of Bosnian satellite NTV Hayat, displaced Bosnians across the globe could watch the burial ceremony at Potočari live in their new homes and, in this way, vicariously participate in a transnational mourning. This year, with no list of names available before the ceremony, many waited anxiously to hear if the names of their relatives were called. Watching the satellite broadcast from the sitting room of his outer-suburban home in Melbourne Australia, Suad texted his old school friend Omer:

Suad: Is there anyone I know being buried today?

Omer: They just read the name of our friend from primary school, Fajko. Do you remember, he always used to sit in second row on the left in the classroom? And his name was the second on the class list – Avdić Fahrudin – just after his relative Alija?

Suad: Yes, he was the best mathematician – I didn’t know he was killed.

A number of names from their village followed. But not the name of Omer’s brother, Senad. Nor of his brother-in-law, Sadik. Nor any of Halid’s uncles and cousins. But the names of Ahmet, Džemal, Dževad, Džemir and Islam, members of three generations of the same family and Halid’s, Fadil’s and Sakib’s distant relatives were called. Together with Omer, Almir and Halćo they pushed themselves forward to help carry the five coffins to the graves. At that moment they felt closer to their dead fellow villagers and to each other than ever before.

Journey to a Village

Later that afternoon, after the funeral and the commemoration ceremony, Omer and his overseas guests travelled together to their village of Klotjevac – that is to say, to the place where it once stood – some 25 kilometres from Srebrenica. They took a road now rarely used, which used to connect a number of villages along the Drina. With villages reduced to rubble and with no people in sight, they hardy recognised the area. Only the river looked the same.

The Drina, Bosnia’s fastest flowing and second largest river, was once a demarcation line between the eastern and the western portions of the Roman Empire (Ibrahimagić 2003: 9). Historically it mirrored other parts of the world where human settlements were first established on riverbanks and fertile valleys with access to drinking water and the other natural resources essential for survival (Hamidović 2000). The Drina valley has never lacked any of these. The hinterland to the east, known as Podrinje, covers the largest part of eastern Bosnia, with some of the country’s oldest towns: Zvornik, Srebrenica, Višegrad, Foča and Goražde. Smaller prehistoric settlements like Klotjevac, Žepa, Đurđevac and Divić had played an important role as the first populated areas in Podrinje (Bojanovski 1964; Wilkes 1992, 2003). Initially the region’s strategic, economic and communication centres, during Roman times, they were overtaken in size and importance by newer and bigger towns. They either regressed and stagnated, or maintained the size of their population at a more or less constant number for hundreds of years as they continued to play an important role as trading centres and defence outposts against invaders from regions to the east of the Drina. The glorious past of such towns, in the modern era reduced to isolated villages and hamlets, is still evident through the presence of the ruins of medieval castles, Roman fortresses and numerous stećci,⁸ the medieval stone tombs found mainly in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the regions bordering the country – in Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia (cf. Bešlagić 2004; Fine 1994; D. Lovrenović 2010; Miletić 1982).

Many of the ruins date back to Roman times, as does a still functional road stretching along the Drina valley, connecting this part of Bosnia with the rest of the world (Bibanović 2012). The river itself was also used as an important communication line for most of its 360-kilometre length. After the Second World War, during the period when Bosnia and Herzegovina was the central republic of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, three dams for hydroelectric plants were built across the river, at Zvornik, Perućac and Višegrad. This resulted in the creation of three artificial lakes that partially tamed the wild Drina and put an end to the region’s long history of splavarenje⁹ (raft navigating).

Although relatively geographically isolated from the outside world, the Podrinje region was never completely immune to outside influences, good and bad. However, such influences tended to adjust to the social norms and a way of life in Podrinje, albeit often masked by outward conformity to the new forces. Flexibility and pragmatism had ensured not only physical survival but also survival of many aspects of the local culture and social order in the form of narodni običaji (folk customs) (cf. Mulahalilović 1989; F. Friedman 1996; Malcolm 1994). Of course, the succession of empires that ostensibly ruled this area believed and behaved as if their ideas would last forever. But after hundreds of years of administering its vast territories and peoples, the Roman Empire vanished, as did the Ottoman and then the Austro-Hungarian, followed by the ‘first’ Yugoslavia (1918–1941), the Independent State of Croatia (1941–1945), and the ‘second’ Yugoslavia (1945–1991).

Once There Was a Community

Klotjevac,¹⁰ the destination of Omer and his former neighbours and fellow displaced IDPs and refugees, is located in a fertile valley some 50 kilometres down the Drina from Višegrad and 30 kilometres from Srebrenica. It faces Mount Tara and Mount Zvezda across the river in Serbia and is backed by the Sušica gorges on the Bosnian side. Just under 280 metres above sea level, its geographical location is fixed at 43.9864 latitude and 19.3442 longitude.

Like other Podrinje villages, Klotjevac was one of the places that had successfully managed throughout its long history to accommodate different conquests, administrations and all manner of social and cultural incursions. According to Ivo Bojanovski (1964) and John Wilkes (...