As the remains of hundreds of victims of the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre are reinterred, Philip Farrell addresses the wounds that have yet to heal in the former Yugoslavia. Over 2,000 residents of Sarajevo lined the streets of the city on Tuesday 9 July to pay their respects to 409 recently identified bodies of the massacre in Srebrenica that took place this month 18 years ago.
As the remains of hundreds of victims of the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre are reinterred, Philip Farrell addresses the wounds that have yet to heal in the former Yugoslavia.
Over 2,000 residents of Sarajevo lined the streets of the city on Tuesday 9 July to pay their respects to 409 recently identified bodies of the massacre in Srebrenica that took place this month 18 years ago.
The remains, which were being brought back to the eastern Bosnian town for burial last Thursday, slowly moved through the heart of the capital as people of all ages waited patiently to pray and mourn as the three large trucks passed by.
It was an emotional event, with many in tears. Braving the heat and unable to drink water due to Ramadan, people stood for over an hour to wait for the procession when finally it moved through the city close to noon. The 409 previously lost souls made their way down Marsala Tita, one of the main thoroughfares in Sarajevo, surrounded on either side by the quiet public.
Between the Presidency Building and the eternal flame, families of those who died in the massacre held a string of pillowcases with the names of their lost loved ones sewn into the pattern.
Many of the people around me were children and teenagers. Too young to remember the Bosnian War, if they were even born then at all, they watched in curious respect. Without a state-approved curriculum for the teaching of the Bosnian War – its causes, events or effects – children are routinely taught about the conflict by their parents or by subjective local media to the extent that their knowledge of what happened is highly selective and one-sided. In Muslim Sarajevo, these young people will have been educated thoroughly on what happened at Srebrenica.
Thursday 11 July marked the 18th anniversary of the genocide. Eighteen years, not of rebuilding and reconciliation, but rather of unhealed wounds, deep scars and everyday tears that have kept the war so fresh in the minds of the people of Bosnia. It’s a looming spectre that refuses to go away.
The Dayton Agreement, which ended the war and slaughter in 1995, is still in place today. Bosnia and Herzegovina therefore remains a divided country, a state whose legitimacy is still questioned and ignored by many Serbs in their Republika Srpska to the east and north, and a country that’s having terrible trouble building, tackling corruption or getting its three main ethnic groups to reconcile, acknowledge their collective guilt and move on. The long searched-for but still elusive unity is a thorny issue, to say the least.
The procession of coffins began at the Presidency Building in the heart of the city. Quietly and slowly it moved down Marsala Tita and stopped for a moment at the Memorial to the Murdered Sarajevo Children, a large fountain and sculpture dedicated to the 1,300 innocent children of all ages who lost their lives in Sarajevo’s long siege. Many of the children around me are no older than the names listed by the monument. Some names have the same birth year as me, 1986, which gives me a shudder every time I see it. This year’s procession of remains from Srebrenica includes an infant baby girl.
The lead-up to 11 July is marked every year in Bosnia by a series of pilgrimages made by citizens from all ethnic groups and backgrounds, who march to Srebrenica in honour of the men and boys who escaped the town and walked through minefields for three days to reach Tuzla, a city to the west under Muslim control.
This morning, thousands of marchers from many nations gathered in the town of Nezuk to begin their three-day pilgrimage to Srebrenica in time for the burial on Thursday.
The day before, a large group of Croatian veterans of their own war began a walk from Vukovar – their own Srebrenica. The sense of unity and sympathetic grief between Bosnian Muslims (called Bosniaks now) and Croats – both in Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina – is a positive example of co-operation and progressiveness. Croats and Muslims fought each other for a brief time during the war, too.
It’s hard to imagine many Serbs from Sijekovac or Mitrovica making a similar trek. The general relationship between the Bosnian Serbs and their Muslim and Croat countrymen remains as poisonous and virulent today as it was in 1992.
Memory is selective; victimhood is competitive. It’s difficult for me, as an Irish person, to comprehend the scale of death between 1992 and 1995. In 40 years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, 3,500 lives were claimed, many of them innocent. In just four years of war in Bosnia, 100,000 died, most of them murdered. Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a massive country; its population is roughly 3.8 million. A country of this size will naturally have a difficult time dealing with a death scale that high.
In 1995, the focus of the international media and public moved away from the western Balkans to other parts of the world then at war. Attention returned to Kosovo at the turn of the century, but Bosnia and Herzegovina has been rather forgotten. As more immediate conflicts presented themselves in Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq and Syria, less focus is on those states that are deemed to be ‘at peace’.
But peace cannot simply mean ‘not fighting’. Peace is security, piece of mind, safety, co-operation and a civil society. Peace is a government whose sovereignty and legitimacy are unquestioned by its citizens. Peace is when a country works together and moves forward. Peace is achieved when different ethnic groups collectively address their past and acknowledge their guilt and present burden of rebuilding.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is not fully at peace. People here don’t murder one another to prove their patriotism any more, but there is very little collective identity and no harmony. Harmony is as important as peace if another war is to be avoided in the future.
The 409 bodies that moved through Sarajevo remind the people here what war can do. But they have yet to see what peace can do for them, as the country stalls and those around it – many of them aggressors during the war – join the European Union or move closer to that end.
These 409 people were finally laid to rest last Thursday, and the war will finally be over for their families. But the International Commission for Missing Persons estimates that 30 per cent of the victims in the war remain missing, their bodies unfound or unidentified. For their families, the Bosnian War goes on.
Philip Farrell works with the Post-Conflict Research Center in Sarajevo.
