*The writer is the Director of the Srebrenica Memorial Center. A part-time lecturer at the International Relations Department of the International University of Sarajevo (IUS), Dr. Suljagić is also the author of two books: Ethnic Cleansing: Politics, Policy, Violence - Serb Ethnic Cleansing Campaign in former Yugoslavia and Postcards from the Grave.
SREBRENICA
When I was younger, every memory of war hit me like a speeding train. I remembered the day I had to leave home, and it cut inside me like a razor. I remembered the day I found out my father had died and was hastily buried and left behind in what was by that point in time enemy territory, and it filled my soul with darkness. I remembered the day Srebrenica fell, and the pain was almost physical. Surviving used to hurt intolerably.
Now the pain is more subdued, but also more insidious. It is silent, and it is cruel. I no longer see people I know are dead in the faces of those passing by me on the street. Now in fact, I struggle to remember them. Yet, the imprint they left on my soul remains. In ways of which I’m barely cognizant, they continue to influence who and what I am, what I do, and how I do it.
The feeling of belonging to them, to a community that no longer exists, is stronger than ever. With each passing day, I become more and more aware of the chasmal void left by their departure. The pain was once focused—concentrated in the memory of a particular person, a particular feature, or a moment in time; now, it’s like an abyssal lake. I wade neck-deep in its unmoving waters, struggling against submersion, trying just to stay afloat.
There was a time when I dreamt of them—my father, my family, my friends. I would wake up in tears, but also with the warm sensation that I had just seen them, that we had spoken. Now, I never dream of them. Instead I dream only of monsters. Towering, hideous creatures visit me during the night, they preside over my unconscious hours and I am powerless to do anything but sit and await their judgment.
Two weeks ago, I was in The Hague. More than fifteen years had passed since my time there as the only Bosnian correspondent for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Although I went there for other reasons, I found myself walking along the same streets I used to walk all those years ago, chasing ghosts from a period in my life when I thought that justice was more than just a concept. Since then I have come to realize that only loss is eternal.
While I was visiting the Hague two weeks ago, Jessica Stern, an American scholar, published a book based on 48 hours of conversation with the individual who is ultimately responsible for the course my life has taken in the last quarter of a century—Radovan Karadžić. The book, boasting the unsavory title “My War Criminal”, received scathing reviews, as most everyone who wrote about it saw it for what it was: the flagrant canonization of a man convicted of genocide, and his life’s work. At best, the book trivializes genocide; at worst, in the words of Janine di Giovanni, who covered the Bosnian genocide in the 1990s, it is outright genocide denial, standing shoulder to shoulder with Peter Handke.
Buttressing every ill-intentioned or uninformed Western scholar writing about genocide in Bosnia (a pack of which Stern is now no doubt the leader), is the deceptive argument that, rather than genocide, what occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina was “only” ethnic cleansing. The argument contends that whereas genocide is driven by the intent to destroy a group, ethnic cleansing is “only” aimed at removing the group from a given territory.
It would perhaps be a legitimate argument, but for the omission of one crucial detail: peoples exist in their geographies. Groups live within the context of geographies, conquered and constructed, which are uniquely their own. As integral to group identity as culture, language, and religion, geography is an essential component of imagined communities, and these communities are inextricable from their geographies. Where else can Bosniaks be Bosniaks—with their distinctive vocabulary, architecture, literature, cuisine, and folk dances—but in Bosnia and Herzegovina? Remove any group from its geography, and it becomes, at best, a network of atomized individuals.
To the extent that they perceived us as existing at all, criminals like Radovan Karadžić and Slobodan Milošević as well as members of Serbian academia such as Dobrica Ćosić, Mihajlo Marković, saw Bosniaks as living in tent cities. They saw our geography as ghettoized, surrounded by barbwire, or better yet, by foreign lands and in alien geographies. There is more than one way to destroy a nation, and that is exactly what Karadžić set out to do. This is attested to by an unassailable mountain of judicially established facts, and myriad witness testimonies.
I still live in the same geography that I lived in more than 25 years ago. Most of the time, I go about my work as I would anywhere else. At other times, I work the land that has belonged to my family for as long as I can remember—doing what my father and grandfather would do, the way I believe they would do it. Sometimes and only sometimes, after a long day, when I sit with my surviving neighbors and friends, talking until the morning dew forms on our clothes, I become aware of our geography. It lies vulnerable and bare, ripe for the taking. We are its last keepers, men and women at the frontier, engaged in a battle for those of whom we have long stopped dreaming.
