Managing Memories in Post War Sarajevo

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J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) , - Royal Anthropological Institute

C S University College London

In the wake of the 1992-5 war in Bosnia a number of anthropologists have written about the role

of memory in creating and sustaining hostility in the region. One trend focuses on the

authenticity and power of personal memories of Second World War violence and on the

possibility of transmitting such memories down the generations to the 1990s. Another focuses

less on memory as a phenomenon which determines human action than on the politics of

memory: the political dynamics which play on and channel individuals memories. In this article

I use the example of three Sarajevo Bosniacs whom I have known since the pre-war 1980s in order

to propose the merit of a third, additional, focus on the individual as an active manager of his or

her own memories. I briefly consider whether work by Maurice Bloch on the nature of semanticand of autobiographic memory supports a strong version of the first interpretative trend, or

whether, as I suggest, the conclusions of this work instead leave room for individual memory

management and for change down the generations.

I cannot speak of what happened at Ho in, in the faraway Russian land. Not because I dont remem-ber, but because I dont want to tell. There is no good to be had from talking of horrific slaughter,of human fear and of the brutality of both sides. It should not be remembered or regretted or cele-brated. The best thing is to forget, to let the human memory of all ugliness die, and for the childrennot to sing songs of revenge (Me a Selimovi , The fortress, ).

It makes intuitive sense that peoples memories of traumatic events such as those expe-rienced in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Second World War or the recent - war will continue to affect the social fabric in some perhaps intangible butnevertheless important way. We tend to feel that this will be the case even when, as inTitos socialist Yugoslavia, such memories cannot, for political reasons, be aired toopublicly. Most of us would further allow that the things which are often rather con-fusingly called transmitted memories, in other words the personally meaningfulimages and ideas of younger generations who did not experience the war but who havelived in intimate contact with elders who did, are also helping, in some less direct way,to shape the social and political environment. A number of anthropologists have builton these intuitions and tried to illuminate the role that personal memories and trans-mitted memories of the Second World War may have played in fuelling the - war

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Managing memories in post-

war Sarajevo: individuals, bad

memories, and new wars


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in Bosnia1 (see, e.g., Bax; Hayden ; Simi ). These scholarly approachestake seriously the authenticity and power of personal memories and transmitted mem-ories in shaping events. Beyond academic circles, the aid and policy-making world hasacted on the same intuitions. Large sums of money have been spent on psycho-social

programmes which aim to soothe or resolve painful memories of the atrocities of therecent war, partly for the benefit of the individual sufferers but sometimes also in thehope of avoiding future conflicts by intervening in the process of trans-generationaltransmission of trauma. The slogan of a May International Training in TraumaRecovery illustrates this ambition: Help heal this war and stop future war. Support realhealing and peace in the world.2

At the far end of this general approach to questions of memory are the ancientethnic hatred-style studies which imply that everyone who experiences war is lastingly,psychologically deformed and that the deformity can be xeroxed down the generationsby the simple means of repeating stories of suffering to ones children. This is what

seems to be implied, for example, by the depiction of Bosnia as a land deeply dividedand steeped for generations in tales of heroism and imbued with a quasi-religious ethosof revenge and retribution (Simi : ). This vision makes it hard to understandwhy anything ever changes at all and why children do not always and everywhere repeattheir parents animosities and wars.

In this context, another branch of scholarship (and policy-making) appears as awelcome corrective. The politics of memory is the label often given to the dynamicssurrounding the construction of monuments, the giving of speeches, the performanceof rituals, and teaching of texts practised by political, religious, and other leadingfigures (see, e.g., olovi ; Duijzings ; ; ani ). This approach takes

as its focus not the authenticity and power of individuals memories but the frameswithin which assorted political interests seek to constrain and channel those memo-ries. In the world of policy this approach finds expression, for example, in the effortsmade by the Office of the High Representative (OHR) and the Organization forSecurity and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to restructure Bosnias educationalsystem.3 Deliberations over the extent to which Serb-, Croat-, and Bosniac-dominatedschools should be allowed to teach different histories which tend to underwrite mutualhostility, or be made to teach a single version which is unlikely to correspond to whatchildren hear at home, are premised on the view that the frame (schooling) is crucialto the shaping of individual memories and thus to the future of Bosnia.

There is a danger that, pushed too far, this more top-down approach to issues ofmemory could give the implausible impression that human minds are endlesslymanipulable and that schooling or the broadcasting of nationalistic commemorativeceremonies can fundamentally alter personal memories of strongly emotional, life-changing events such as violent bereavement. This impression may be created partlyby a somewhat imprecise use of the word memory, since studies in the domain ofpolitics of memory often say a lot about politics but not so much about memory; amonument is not a memory. The danger is that [w]hen historians attempt tointerpret evidence of memory from a representation of the past, the risk of a circularargument is high (Confino : ).

This approach follows in the tradition of the great French sociologist MauriceHalbwachs, who was a colleague of mile Durkheim and who has been closely asso-ciated with the phrase collective memory (Halbwachs ; ). Halbwachs pointedto the fact that memory is constructed within social frameworks. No contemporary

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psychologist or social scientist would dispute the central role of the social in memory,in what is silently recalled in the presence of imagined listeners, in what is encoded inthe mind by the listener, and in what is narrated. Halbwachs, however, went further,seeming to deny the existence of individual memory and to view the social context as

all-determining. From this approach flows much sociological and anthropologicalwriting on memory, which, at the expense of a focus on memory as a personal expe-rience, tends to exalt the political nature of social memory and the importance ofcommemorative practices for buttressing particular group identities.

Both of the approaches that I have outlined can yield important insights, but inthis article I attempt a third, additional, focus which is neither on memories asthings that control individuals, as in the first approach, nor on the political dynamicswhich seek to control individuals by shaping their memories, as in the second, but onthe individuals awareness of memory and his or her desire to control it for theperceived benefit of self and others. Like Selimovi s fictional protagonist in The

fortress, the three real-life Bosniacs depicted here all manage and work with their mem-ories and are able to reflect on the role of memory and transmitted memory in theirown lives and the lives of those around them. They are no less conscious thanthe anthropologist of the implications of imparting or not imparting information tothe young.

Without highlighting the individual,Keith Brown and Stef Jansen point in the direc-tion of memory management in their works on the Balkans. Jansens Serb and Croatvillagers attempt to exert a minimum of control over their own version of history andthereby over their everyday lives (Jansen : ) while Browns Macedonians handlocal knowledge down from knee to knee with successive generations but reveal a

nuanced awareness of the havoc that might be wreaked by injudicious narration oftheir recollections (Brown : , ). In foregrounding the individual, theapproach that I adopt here shares elements with that of Stoler and Strassler on whatthey call memory work in postcolonial Java. Having set out to investigate colonialmemory among former servants and hoping thus to discover alternative, subalternhistories to those propounded by the Dutch colonists, the ethnographers found that[o]ur attention was instead arrested by the ways in which people moved fromrecipe ingredients and dry shopping lists to dramatic re-enactments of pointed dia-logues [T]hese accounts refused the colonial as a discrete domain of social relationsand politics, of experience and memory and differed from individual to individual

(Stoler & Strassler

:

). Within the same anti-reductionist interpretative veinLambek has described memory as a moral practice or a form of practical wisdom,and suggested that [t]he value of articulating a particular version of the past [is] explicitly connected to its moral ends and consequences for relations in the present(: ). The individuality and unpredictability of memory and the moral andinterpersonal aspect of its management emerge strongly in the three Bosnian casesconsidered below.

These cases cannot in themselves disprove but do pose a challenge to those anthro-pological interpretations which rightly accord significance to emotion-laden personalmemories of trauma but wrongly suggest that these can be transmitted in any simpleway down the generations, causing renewed wars. Towards the end of this article I willconsider one small corner of the rapidly expanding field of cognitive psychology whichcould potentially be used to buttress the ancient ethnic hatreds school of Bosnianinterpretation. A recent article in this journal concerning second-generation mental

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representations of the Second World War massacres in Tuscany cites Maurice Blochswork on autobiographical and historical memory, arguing that there is no differencebetween the representations of autobiographical memory and those of historicalaccounts (Cappelletto : , my emphasis), and that therefore the representations

of the younger generation are the same as those of the older generation whose accountsof witnessing massacres they have imbibed and made their own. I will suggest that acloser reading of Bloch does not entail this conclusion or give support to an ancientethnic hatreds interpretation, and that, rather than thinking of memories as activelyhanded down by elders and absorbed wholesale by passive youth (as the phrase trans-mitted memories tends to suggest), it is more helpful to think of them as activelyinferred by the younger generations, whether Bosniac, Tuscan, or other, on the basisof information emanating from the elders. This approach allows for the fact that,

just as people manage their own personal memories, so they manage and work withthe ideas and images they have acquired through proximity to elders (transmitted

memories).The three Sarajevans on whom I focus are people I have known since the pre-warmid-s, but there is nevertheless,of course, a possibility that I have over-interpretedthese most inaccessible of data about peoples innermost concerns and memories.Except in the clear-cut case of Hamida, I have not here attempted a detailed trackingof changes over time in the way these three individuals have expressed memories. Mygeneral observation is that, as time has passed since the war ended in , wartimeincidents have been narrated less frequently and less spontaneously and that manyindividuals appear to narrate the same one or two episodes repeatedly, and to narratethem in a more organized, story-like form than previously. This observation fits with

psychological work on the way in which trauma survivors impose narrative structureon memories about experiences which themselves lack essential narrative elements(Barclay ). It is important to stress, however, that, contrary to the tacit implica-tion of some works in the politics of memory genre, memories are not limitlessly vul-nerable to alteration through narration or social pressure: Narrative patterning doesnot get in the way of accurate autobiographic reporting or interpreting, but rather,provides a framework for both telling and understanding (Bruner & Fleisher Feldman: ).

Three Sarajevans and their social milieu

Hamida, Amra, and Omer are all Bosniacs who lived in Sarajevo both before andduring the war and who derive some status from this. In socialist Sarajevo the conceptof the dobra, stara porodica (good, old family) was an important one (Sorabji ;see also Brown : - on Macedonia). Part of its significance lay in the charac-teristic Bosnian and wider former Yugoslav disdain felt by urbanites for rural dwellers(see also Bringa, : -). The many Sarajevans whose parents had moved to thetown from villages did not advertise this image-tarnishing fact, and during the warthere was a widespread urban tendency to blame the seljaci (villagers) orpapci (bump-kins) for the violence.4 Combined with urbanity, longevity implied that the family inquestion somehow pre-dated socialism. This conferred prestige not because of wide-spread disapproval of or resistance to Communist rule but because longevity wasseen to imply the containment and contextualization of socialism within an olderand deeper moral tradition which, from the Bosniac perspective, also contained Islamicpiety.

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Amra was always closer to good, old family status than Omer or Hamida but warhas blurred such distinctions. This is in part because some of the previously good, oldfamilies are perceived as having become over-associated with the corrupt business-political elite which emerged out of the war. It is also because old status distinctions

between Sarajevo residents have been challenged by the arrival of two new categoriesof resident the in-migrated Bosniac displaced persons (DPs) from ethnicallycleansed villages, and a new wave of religious believers who have adopted a version ofIslam widely associated with some of the Arabs who participated in the war (seeBellion-Jourdan ). This manifestation of Islam, sometimes pejoratively dubbedWahhabi, is experienced by many believing Muslims in Sarajevo, and particularly bythose closer to the pre-war dobra, stara porodica end of the spectrum, as an attack onBosniac national identity, familiar values and practices, and their own sincerity asbelievers and legitimacy as religious authorities. Against such perceived new threats(corrupt elites, in-migrated villagers, Wahhabis) there is a tendency for pre-war

Sarajevo Bosniacs to play down status divisions between them in the interests ofunity. Thus Hamida, Amra, and Omer are socially less distant than they were beforethe war.

All three also have a certain threadbare status as people who remained in Sarajevoduring the siege. In the early days of the war staying was squarely understood by Bosni-acs as the brave and patriotic choice. As the war ground on, resentment towardsdeparted Bosniacs became more tempered with understanding of their motivations.None the less, in few Bosniacs claimed that, given the choice again, they wouldstay in besieged Sarajevo. In retrospect staying is seen as having been pointless: justicedid not triumph in Bosnia, and those who left have returned with educational quali-

fications, language skills, and money.Amra is employed, Omer is self-employed, and Hamida has an employed daughter.All three are linked to pre-war neighbourhood communities which offer a degree ofmutual support and have managed to build upon the remains of pre-war and wartimenetworks ofveze (connections) which, now more than ever, are of vital importance forgaining and retaining employment, expediting medical treatment, registering a childat a desirable school, and so on. While aware that their situation is far better than thatof most DPs, people from this milieu are more consistently conscious of what theyhave lost than of what they currently have. Before the war most felt themselves to beupwardly mobile. Regaining economic ground lost in the war is now seen as an aspi-

ration for the next generation. Relative economic hardship is compounded by thelasting sorrows of war injury, bereavement, broken relationships (the divorce of war-separated couples, family quarrels over resources), lost ambitions (vanishing careerplans and marital prospects), and sometimes tarnished self-images (discovery of oneslimitations). During that war Sarajevo was encircled, sniped at, and shelled from thesurrounding hills so that, as the Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladi putit, they cant sleep, so we drive them out of their minds (da ne mogu da spavaju, daim razvu emo pamet njihovu, see BBC ). Omer, Amra, Hamida and many thou-sands of Sarajevans live now with this legacy.

Omer: unwelcome memories

Before the war Omer was a married man with a young son and was self-employed inone of the small private businesses allowed in socialist Yugoslavia. He had a car anddrove his family to the coast most summer weekends. When the war began he and his

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wife, who was not a Yugoslav citizen,agreed that she should take their son to her home-land for safety. Omer did not go; he felt it a duty to stay rather than shirk and, in anycase, like almost everyone in the town, he did not think the war would last so long andbe so brutal.

Sarajevo was militarily unprepared for the attack upon it. Its defence was initiallydrawn from the ranks of the Territorial Defence, from the police force, from thePatriotic League military organization established in under the wing of the Partyof Democratic Action (SDA), the Bosniac party within the pre-war coalition govern-ment, and from local volunteers, some of them organized into units known as GreenBerets (zelene beretke). Eventually all troops were merged into an army, the Army ofthe Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH), of which the First Corps was thatoperating in and around Sarajevo. Between and , , First Corps soldierswere killed, over half of them within the beseiged city.5

Owing to a lack of weaponry and other equipment, the ARBiH operated a military

shift system and Omer spent periods ranging from two days to two months on thefrontline, interspersed with similar periods spent at home. His longest stint was onTreskavica mountain, which he reached by first walking the long, snipered miles fromhis home to the airport, then making his way through the hand-dug tunnel under theairport runway to Butmir, then climbing Mount Igman. During the climb he and hisfellows were given chocolate and cigarettes to keep us happy and keep our minds offthe frontline. They were then picked up by helicopter and flown to Treskavica, beingshot at en route. On the frontline the soldiers built log bunkers for shelter. The foodwas terrible and frozen in winter, but more plentiful than in civilian life. Hoistingthemselves up by rope to the literal frontline for two days at a time, they carried water

bottles and rations on their backs or in their teeth. None the less, Omer says he foundlife easier at the front than in the town below because on the line he was unable toworry too much about his loved ones. During his spells back in town, Omer, withouthis wife and child, strengthened his relations with neighbours. They cooked, washed,mended, and were company for him while he shared with them food parcels sent byhis spouse and news brought from other parts of town which he had gleaned fromfellow soldiers.

In , thanks to his energy and ingenuity, Omers business was still alive, butailing. His marriage was over. Omer was never especially religious and after the warprofessed himself even less inclined to faith as a result of the thievery (lopovluk) of

religious functionaries he witnessed during it. He saw much post-war religious obser-vance as battery-powered (na bateriju) hypocrisy designed to curry favour with thepolitical and business elites but was respectful of those whom he viewed as sincerelydevout.

What of his frontline memories? Most of them he does not enjoy or talk about and,as he told me, You cant forget but you try to wipe it away (izbrisati). They are notpretty memories. Mostly we recall funny or strange things that happened. His wordsecho those of the Greek Cypriot refugee Petris interviewed by Loizos in : I wantto forget, not to remember. But you cant forget completely, you just cant (Loizos :).6 Both during the war and after, Omer has indeed tended to tell me curious anec-dotes and funny stories of the frontline. He told me of how they all laughed when aself-consciously pious comrade tried to perform abdest(ritual washing before prayer)in the dark in what he thought was a pile of snow but was in fact ashes from a campfire. He told me of a dog who dug up a land-mine and stood in the doorway of the

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newly built log bunker with the deadly weapon in its jaw, causing the men to demol-ish the back wall of their just-completed handiwork and flee. He told me of a rain ofartillery fire battering the forest during the Geneva Peace negotiations and how a fellowsoldier lay flat on the ground yelling sign, Alija, sign!.7 He told me of a conversation

between Serb and ARBiH troops on the frontline where they were close enough to heareach other, jocular and friendly, until one of the Serbs lobbed a grenade. He also spokeof an ARBiH sniper who shot a cow, waited until its owner came out to check on it,and then shot her too.

This last tale, told to me in , was recounted in the same appalled but humor-ous tone as the rest but it was obviously morally darker and was perhaps a sort of testballoon. For, as Omer was later to explain, he spent five hundred days in the army andfelt proud that in all that time he was never promoted from the rank of ordinarysoldier. Those who were promoted were villagers who had ingratiated themselves withtheir commanders by performing terrible acts inside the houses so you didnt see. In

contrast to most of Omers talk about the war there was no anecdote here, and nopunch-line. When others left the room, Omer told me that we were just as bad as they.He did not mean this numerically or strategically (few outsiders and no Bosniacs couldaccept the all-sides-equally-guilty thesis), but it seemed clear that he wanted me toknow something that is not easily spoken of in public or, I suspect, in mixed-civilian/soldier or mixed-gender company. Although he waited until the other twowomen were out of the room, I felt that his voice was not so quiet that it would beimpossible for them to overhear.

I present Omer as someone who would like to forget certain things but cannot. Hetries to focus his recall on selected amusing tales and to wipe away the rest. However,

his desire to forget conflicts with his wish not to let certain things slip from the record.In telling me (and the other two women?) about the darker side of the heroic defenceof Sarajevo, he challenged what he saw as the Bosniac elites version of events, whichlines its own pockets while belittling the lived reality of those who actually fought onthe frontline. Omer was cautious in this, partly out of respect for the different per-spective more characteristic of civilian women, whose experiences were statisticallyless perilous but often marked by a terrible sense of powerlessness. He tries to managehis memories with a view to his own emotional well-being, his personal relationshipswith others (including me a ready ear for war narratives, and less likely than insid-ers to become upset), his animosity towards an elite perceived as corrupt, and his

desired relationship to History and Truth (as an outsider I probably play somerole here as a vessel for fragments of a future version of history not to be asserted inthe public space of todays Sarajevo). I doubt that I have really captured the complex-ity of Omers thought processes and motivations, but what I think is clear is that he isconsciously trying to work on and with his memories rather than being fully com-pelled by them or allowing them to be controlled by the official version as purveyed,for example, by the dominant SDA or the religious establishment, the IslamskaZajednica.

It would, of course, be possible to argue that Omers narratives, although not deter-mined by the dominant Bosniac political discourse of the day, are in fact conditionedby a minority Bosniac perspective as propounded by sections of what is called theindependent media. My purpose is not to claim that Omers recall or narration isentirely divorced from any social context or influence, but to highlight the individualand self-consciously reflective nature of his memory management techniques.

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Amra: the problem of what to pass on

Amra is in her late thirties and has a husband, children born at the tail end of thewar, and a professional job in the public sector, where her pay is well above theaverage. She was brought up in a house in one of the oldest Sarajevo neighbourhoods,

to which she still feels strongly tied, although she and her husband have boughtand live in a modern flat in another part of town. Both have been practising Muslimssince long before the war and are also caf-goers and globe-trotters. With hereducation and contacts she could probably have secured one of the much-coveted jobswith the UN peacekeeping forces during the war, but she preferred to remain in thestate sector in order to build a professional role and stake in the post-war Bosnia shebelieved would endure. She now has this stake but, like many, feels that the Bosniashe stayed for does not actually exist. As she put it, In the war it was simpler; youknew who was your friend and who was your enemy, but today she feels it is hardto trust anyone beyond ones own immediate circle who is not personally vouched

for by that circle. Amras husband told me: If ever a single shell falls on Sarajevo againIll be the first out of town. Oh no you wont, Amra interjected, youll be second,behind me.

Like many, Amra is troubled by what she sees as the betrayal of past Serb friendswho left without warning on the eve of war or during it (see also Ma ek: -).Serbs who remained in Sarajevo during the siege face difficulties in negotiating newrelationships in the post-war city, and therefore in procuring necessary papers or per-missions, but they are not subject to the suspicion of pre-war Sarajevo friends, neigh-bours, and colleagues who know their wartime pedigree. Those who left the town,however, are often seen as having put themselves na njihovoj strani, on their side, that

is, the side of the enemy.

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Amra knows that not all Serbs who left did so with the activeaim of shelling the city, but argues that being on their side is not a complex mentalstate but a simpler positional one; it is about having been used for an immoral purposeand allowing those who stayed to suffer the consequences. Bosniacs who left Sarajevomay be viewed as shirkers,9 but Serbs who left were, regardless of their own personalmotives, used by the enemy propaganda machine as evidence of a policy of violentethnic cleansing of Serbs from the town.10 Their departures therefore helped bolsterthe Serbian political claim that, rather than attacking Sarajevo, Serb forces were merelydefending against Bosniac or Islamic persecution. This claim affected popular percep-tions and decision-making processes in wider Bosnia, in Serbia, and in the interna-

tional community, and is one component of the uncomfortable logic behind theSarajevo Bosniac phrase na njihovoj strani. Such a logic of polarization was fully com-prehended by the orchestrators of war, whose aim was precisely to divide Bosnians intoethnically determined sides.

In Amra was particularly troubled by her chance meeting with an old collegefriend, Biljana, a Serb who had left for Serbia at the beginning of the conflict. Duringthe seige Biljana had sent Amra a food parcel, and Amra was genuinely pleased whenshe ran into her friend at a ski resort on the edge of town. She expressed to me hercertainty that Biljana was not in any way anti-Bosniac and had never wanted to attackSarajevo. However, a close relative of Biljanas was at that time an important figure inthe administrative structure of Serb Sarajevo, the semi-rural suburb which BosniasSerb-dominated entity (Republika Srpska) ambitiously claims as a counterpart to theactual city.11 Amra raised with me the topic of her meeting with Biljana on variousoccasions, obviously turning it over in her mind, but I felt that she was ultimately glad

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that Biljana did not intend to return to live in Sarajevo since any such return wouldentail far more frequent thought on a painful set of issues.

This reluctance to dwell on emotionally difficult issues is relevant to Amras stateddesire to ensure that her children know what happened during the war. Although she

feels it her duty to pass on her knowledge, and told me in some detail of the experi-ences of her relatives who were expelled from the suburb of Dobrinja, when she startedto talk of her own wartime experiences she tended to become agitated and come to ahalt, dismissing the topic with the claim that we hardly talk about that any more we used to talk about it all the time. Amra did not enjoy talking about the war andalso appeared convinced that her children would not understand anyway. She cited theexample of her own grandfather, who, in the s, warned the family that the Dobrinjaflat was too close to the airport, which would be the first location to be captured if awar broke out. At the time, said Amra, she merely laughed at what seemed a fantasti-cal concern of an old man, but in retrospect she feared that her own children would

laugh in the face of any warnings she offered them.From a social science perspective this view may seem defeatist; Amras historicalinterpretations will receive more support in the public sphere of Bosniac-dominatedSarajevo than did her grandfathers in socialist Yugoslavia. They should therefore,arguably, have more chance of influencing her children. Perhaps, however, part ofwhat Amra and others are expressing is the impossibility, in any political circum-stances, of truly conveying memory with all its attendant emotions. In , one yearafter the wars end, another woman, Suada, joked to me about how she herself wasbecoming like a foreigner, unable to believe how bad the war had really been; another

year and Ill be denying there ever was a war!, she laughed. Both Suada and Amra were

perhaps expressing the disjunction between the experience of a world turned upsidedown by war, and that of trying subsequently to describe that experience. When pastevents already seem vaguely unreal to those who actually experienced them, it mayindeed seem impossible that the next generation should ever grasp their reality.Lawrence Langer, speaking of the experiences of Holocaust survivors, writes of anunderlying discontinuity [which] assaults the integrity of the self and threatens thevery continuity of the oral narrative (: ). It may be due to such a sense of dis-continuity that, despite her desire that her children should know what happened,Amra has at one level given up in advance on transmitting her memories down thegenerations.

Hamida: memories not narrated

Hamida was born in a distant village before the Second World War and moved toSarajevo with her husband and in-laws in the s. She retained all her traditionalvillage domestic skills, habits, and industry while watching her upwardly mobile chil-dren acquire educational qualifications and white-collar jobs. I knew that the areawhere Hamida had grown up had been subject to attacks by Serbian Chetniks duringthe Second World War, and during my first fieldwork in the socialist s I occasion-ally asked her about those days. She was never very forthcoming and would only replythat her family had fled to the woods when the Chetniks came. Then she wouldchange the subject or fall silent. It did not seem right to persist since I was alreadystudying one topic that was potentially politically sensitive Islam and I didnot want to discomfort people by pursuing a second and even more politicallysensitive one.

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After my Ph.D. fieldwork, the taboo on public discussion of the atrocities of theSecond World War imposed by Yugoslav socialist brotherhood and unity (bratstvo ijedinstvo) gradually lifted.12 Although relevant statistical research had been publishedin London and Zagreb in the s (Ko ovi ; erjavi ), it was the pub-

lication of a volume entitled Genocid nad Muslimanima - (Genocide AgainstMuslims, i.e. Bosniacs in todays terminology) that brought the issue of Second WorldWar Bosniac suffering to public prominence in Sarajevo (Dedijer & Mileti ). Along annexe of this work listed the names of all the known Bosniac victims ofChetnikforces, including eight members of Hamidas village family. Other writing on the topicfollowed (see Imamovi ). During the - war the systematic killing and exilingof Bosniacs resulted in indictments for genocide and other crimes at the Hague-basedInternational Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).13 In this context, writ-ings about genocide and persecution of Muslims proliferated (see, e.g., Su eska ),culminating in the polemical thesis of the historical ten genocides against Balkan

Muslims (Spahi ).14

Despite this change to public discourse, Hamida recounted nothing of her SecondWorld War memories until , when, out of the blue as we sat together, she beganto tell me about what had happened in her village at that time. I can see it beforemy eyes now, she said of the burning tapers that had been applied to the roofof her familys house to burn it down. She told of family members who had escapedwhen the Chetniks were distracted from their task by the sight of a stash of goldducats, and of others who did not. Her narrative involved flight to the woods, amothers desperate thought of strangling a toddler whose cries might reveal their posi-tion, and eventual rescue by an Italian truck which drove them to the nearest town. A

baby sister had been left behind in the home of a sympathetic Serb who was later forcedby Chetniks to kill the baby. After the war Hamida and her remaining family hadreturned to live in the village and she told me also of the Serb neighbours grief andhis conviction that God had punished him for the killing by making his ownchildren sickly.

Why did Hamida tell me her recollections in and not before? Discussing thecase of a woman who revealed her rape during the Greek civil war fifty years after ittook place, Riki van Boeschoten () has suggested that the timing of the revelationwas partly the result of the political context surrounding the interview, whichincluded the increased international focus on human rights as a concept and value. In

contrast I want to suggest that far more private and personal reasons influenced thetiming of Hamidas narration, for I believe that she told me of her childhood experi-ence primarily because she felt older, closer to death, and more in the mood to reviewher life, and because it happened to be a quiet day with an atmosphere conducive toconfidence. She spoke for reasons which were personally strongly emotive.15 Such aninterpretation would also seem to apply to the case of Pashkalina, a citizen of Greecefrom Macedonia who vehemently and even litigiously denied any Bulgarian roots,only, in deep old age, to reveal that her natal village had been burned down by theGreek army in , and that her family had fled to the safety of a Bulgarian village inSerbia (Karakasidou : -). Both cases, of course, challenge Halbwachss viewthat what is not narrated is forgotten. In Hamidas case, political manipulation or socialpressure would surely have been expected to produce a narrative far sooner than ,given that the Second World War Chetnik atrocities had been a topic of public discus-sion for over a decade. It is of course possible that had socialism endured and the

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- war never occurred then Hamida might never have told this Second World Warstory. In this sense it can be said that the socio-political context affected the timing ofthe narration, but it needs to be emphasized that even this claim is a more modest onethan those frequently made or implied by the politics of memory genre.

Memories handed down?

I cannot exclude the possibility that Hamida had narrated parts of her story to herhusband, whose family came from the same region and would therefore have knownof the killings, but I am fairly sure that she had not told this tale to her children. Thedegree of Hamidas discretion towards them was made evident to me by a separateincident in when Hamida revealed to myself and one of her daughters that a scaron her leg was the result of flying debris from Second World War bombing (byGermans against Partisans, she thought). Hamidas daughter reacted angrily, com-plaining that Hamida had never explained the scar before. On a less painful topic,

Hamida also revealed to her surprised daughter that she had had a secret Shariawedding in the socialist era in addition to the secular state ceremony. A large part ofthe reason for Hamidas silence on the events of the Second World War seems to havebeen a desire to protect her children from distressing thoughts: a child what dochildren need with that? (dijete sta e im?), she replied when I asked her why shehad not told them. This is not to say, of course, that her children would not haveinferred anything from her silences. Describing the effect of silences, the psychologistDaniel Bar-On, citing Spence, offers the analogy of the young man trying to avoidlooking at the picture of a naked woman on the wall; in so doing he offers bodily evi-dence of his avoidance to onlookers (Bar-On : ). Perhaps Hamidas avoidance

of the topic, combined with socialist Bosnias periodic vilifications and purges ofpeople suspected of Serb, Croat, or Bosniac nationalism, had the effect for children ofa large finger pointing towards the unseen and unspoken horror.16

What I want to consider in conclusion is whether and how explicit, narrated mem-ories may be handed undiluted down the generations in the manner Simi suggestedin his Nationalism as a folk ideology article referred to in the opening section of thisarticle. Hamidas children did not, I believe, hear about the Second World War fromher, but they had not been completely shielded from tales of wartime violence.Hamidas mother-in-law used to tell stories in front of the children not only of the twoWorld Wars but also of the Balkan wars of and . In her village in the s I

encountered the only person I have ever met who might be used as evidence of a landdeeply divided and steeped for generations in tales of heroism and imbued with aquasi-religious ethos of revenge and retribution(Simi : ).Tarik was an elderlybut lively man whose wife, four children, parents, sisters, and several other relativeshad all been burned alive byChetniks in one of the village houses during the SecondWorld War. He did not speak of Serbs with venom, but freely claimed that it would bea mistake to trust them or differentiate between them: if you seated one Serb at yourtable and tied another in a sack and sat on him, both would think just the same of

you. He made no secret of this opinion to his son (he had remarried), to me, or to theneighbours. He told me of the past and of his views while walking through the verylandscape where the killings had occurred, and presumably this was also the majorcontext in which he had narrated events to his son.

Work by Maurice Bloch () on the process of memory transmission meritsdiscussion in the context of Southeastern Europe, where it might be read as lending

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support to claims that members of contemporary nations have the exact samememories of past wrongs as the memories of long-dead ancestors who actually expe-rienced those wrongs. Bloch considers a Zafiminary village in Madagascar which hadbeen burned down by the French army in response to the rebellion. Three vil-

lagers had died en route to a concentration camp, while the rest had fled to the forests,where they had hidden out for two and a half years. The terrible events were recountedto the anthropologist not only by a man who had personally witnessed them but alsoby Zafiminary children who had not been alive in but who had heard narrativesof the past. The children used the ambiguous pronoun we, making it unclear whetherthey wanted to convey that they themselves had been present in , or that familymembers had been, or that the whole moral community of we had been.

Did the children really have the same memories as their parents? Bloch suggests thiswas the case in the nature, if not the content (: ): Their memory of the periodof hiding was not of a fundamentally different kind to that of those who had lived

then (: ). Underlying his assertion is the argument that what psychologists callautobiographical or episodic memory (i.e. memory of episodes in ones own life) andwhat they call semantic memory (i.e. memory of learned facts) are not as different asis often thought. Bloch argues that the children did not learn about by remem-bering their elders narratives as narratives, in the way one might remember a phonenumber or the text of a poem. Rather, they listened to the narratives and then men-tally fleshed them out with inferences they themselves made on the basis of featuresof the landscape they knew so well the landscape in which they had listened to thenarratives and in which the traumatic events had originally occurred and with infer-ences based on the emotions they perceived as belonging to the elders from whom they

heard the tales. Bloch therefore argues that we should not imagine a gulf between eldersand offspring in which the former have an endless store of memories which they recallin their minds eye (autobiographical memory) while the latter have but a bare text(semantic memory), because the children in spite of the poverty of the original input can, when remembering, search an almost unlimited and vivid memory of theevents contained in the story in exactly the way that an individual can do this whenrecalling autobiographical memories (: ).

This argument initially appears to imply that, as Francesca Cappelletto has phrasedit in the context of the memory of the Second World War massacres in Tuscany, thereis no difference between the representations of autobiographical memory and those of

historical accounts (

:

, my emphasis). A close reading of Blochs argument,however, makes it clear that this implication does not hold. Blochs suggestion is notthat the content of the childrens memories is the same as that of the elders who livedthrough the events of but that the process by which they search their minds is thesame. Within those minds they have a rich store of images and emotions on which todraw when thinking about , just as their parents have. This argument does nothave the same implications as the same content argument.

Tarik recounted Second World War events to his son in the landscape where theyoccurred and, in this respect, the way in which he conveyed his memories was similarto that of the Zafiminary witnesses of the atrocities. Following Cappelletto, thereshould be no difference between the memories of Tarik and of his son. However,the cognitive evidence marshalled by Bloch does not suggest the possibility of identi-cal content of memories down the generations. While Tariks son may have beenable to imagine (or recall) the past events richly and without great deviation from

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factual accuracy, his imaginings or recollections would also have been partiallyconstructed from other images and ideas which formed part of his experience, and notof Tariks. His contemplation and relation of memories would have depended on hisown memory management techniques, not on Tariks. In practice Tariks son did not

appear to have what could be called the same memories as his father, and he certainlywas not imbued with a quasi-religious ethos of revenge and retribution. Like othervillagers, he seemed to understand why a man who had suffered such devastatinglosses might feel the way Tarik did about Serbs, but he also viewed his fathers con-victions and open expression of them with some amusement (see also Stoler & Strassler: ).

In conclusion: the possibility of reconciliation

One compelling question arising from this discussion is of whether a focus on indi-viduals can shed light on the prospects for reconciliation of some sort in Bosnia in

general, or in Sarajevo in particular?17

It is often thought that a major obstacle to rec-onciliation, however defined, lies in the fact that Bosnians now have fixed memoriesand generic, blanket interpretations of the nature of the enemy which tend to militateagainst reintegration. In earlier work (Sorabji ; ) I argued that the brutal, per-sonalized face-to-face atrocities inflicted by neighbours upon neighbours, particularlybut not exclusively in villages, served not only the immediate purpose of removingunwanted people from the territory to be cleansed, but also the longer-term purposeof impressing on victims (and perpetrators) a simple, hardened, flashbulb-typememory of a familiar place transformed into a wholly unfamiliar nightmare. Leavingexpellees with this final image so different from all their previous experiences of the

landscape and the neighbours could in some cases, I suggested, prompt a mental re-interpretation of the pre-war past. Thus, instead of concluding that we all used to livehappily together but then they changed, some would draw the conclusion that theyalways hated us, they were always waiting to be rid of us. I suggested that this sort ofre-evaluation of the pre-war past might pose even greater obstacles to subsequent re-integration than a they changed model.

A decade on, the Sarajevo material I have presented here highlights that interpre-tations are only one of the obstacles to reconciliation or re-integration. Parts of thecity like Grbavica, Stup, Dobrinja, and Ilid a did witness face-to-face ethnic cleansing,but the neighbourhoods where Amra, Omer, and Hamida lived were never under the

control of Serb forces and it is possible to speculate that this may make it slightly easierto re-assess and re-interpret the past over time. I think that there have indeed beengradual changes to common interpretations of the meaning, motivations, and portentsof the violence. For example, in the early days of the war many Sarajevo Bosniacs hadespoused a view of the conflict as one between urban civility and rural aggression(Sorabji : ). As the war progressed and in its immediate aftermath, more Sara-

jevo Bosniacs entertained theories about the innate or semi-innate aggression of Serbs,speculating, for example, that there could be something in Serb culture or child-rearingpatterns that made them prone to violence. Since I have witnessed a growingtendency to view Serbs, including even the wartime Serbian President SlobodanMilosevi , as mere dupes and instruments of greater global powers; prone to stupid-ity and greed but not necessarily to evil.

Despite changing interpretations there remains widespread popular reluctanceamong Sarajevo Bosniacs to see Serbs return to the city. The material I have presented

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in this article points to an additional, important reason for this reluctance which liesnot in fixed ideas or interpretations but in the simple unpleasantness of the memorymanagement process itself (Omer: You cant forget but you try to wipe it away). Atypical Sarajevo Bosniac response to returnees in the workplace or (less frequently) the

neighbourhood is to feel deeply uncomfortable, to make no overtly hostile gesture, andto keep interaction to a minimum. As one acquaintance, Mirsada, put it: I will tell myson that it is OK to talk to them but that they can never be household friends (ku niprijatelji). Mirsada, Amra, and others are aware that not all Serbs who were na njihovojstrani on their side were hostile to Bosniacs and believe that, in purely moral terms,every individual must be judged individually. However, in many individual cases theylack specific knowledge on which to base such judgements, and even thinking aboutthe Serbs who left raises such painful memory management issues that, like Amra, whowas relieved that Biljana would not be returning to Sarajevo (see above), many wouldrather avoid having to do so.

It is not uncommon to hear from a Sarajevo Bosniac the story (perhaps urbanlegend) of how, riding the tram or walking the street, they or an acquaintance spotteda Serb returnee known to have been an ardent wartime enemy of the city and itsinhabitants. In these narratives the witness breaks into a sweat, is frozen to the spot,or feels sick to the stomach. The prevalence of such stories helps illustrate that,from the perspective of many Sarajevo Bosniacs, the challenge posed by returningSerbs is not or is not only one of an interpretative scheme about what Serbs aresupposedly like as a group. It lies in the fact that it is often not possible to makean individual judgement about who might be guilty of what; behaving with socialwarmth towards a returnee whose wartime pedigree is unknown therefore risks giving

an unwitting welcome to a willing participant in sniping, shelling, looting, or worse.The returnee whom one Sarajevan treats with warmth could be the same returneewhose presence in the tram caused another Sarajevan to creep home trembling like aleaf. The possible implications of this fact for judicial, economic, or other measuresthat should be taken by local or international authorities lie beyond the scope of thisarticle.

NOTES

This article is based on fieldwork done before, during and after the war, from to . That work hasbeen supported, inter alia, by grants from the Economic & Social Research Council and the British Academy.I am grateful to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office for allowing me time to write up this material. The

views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the FCO. Three academic institutionshave hosted my efforts: the Centre for Policy Studies, Central European University; the Department of WarStudies, Kings College London; and the Anthropology Department of University College London.I owe debts to Xavier Bougarel, Christian Moe, Frances Pine, and Michael Stewart for conversations andcomments, as well as to theJRAIs editor and four anonymous reviewers and to Omer, Amra, and Hamida.I alone am responsible for the result.

1 The official name of the country is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, but this is unwieldy and I have usedplain Bosnia instead. In late a decision was made by the Congress of Bosnian Muslim/Bosniac Intel-lectuals to officially rename the former Muslim population Bosniac. This decision was internationallyreflected in the Washington Agreement in March , and later enshrined in the General Framework Agree-ment on Peace (GFAP, commonly known as Dayton after the place where the peace was negotiated). I useBosniac except in those cases where I am indicating specifically religious affiliation, but readers should bearin mind that prior to the war Muslim was the correct terminology and that even today it is common inordinary conversation.

2 For the May Training in Trauma Recovery slogan see the Bosnia/Munich website initiative (Psih.orgn.d.). Some psychological and psychiatric work has disputed the value of psycho-social aid programmes for

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victims of war (see, e.g., Summerfield a and contributions to Losi ). The proposition that war-provoked mental disorders may be transmitted down the generations is disputed in Summerfield (b).Stubbs () describes the rise and fall of the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) movement in Bosniaand Croatia in the s.

3 For further information on education see OHR (n.d), OSCE (n.d.), and Perry ().4

For a critique of this approach see Bougarel ().5 Mortality figure cited in Ajnadzi (: ). Some details of the genesis and operation of the ARBiH,and the relationships between its formative constituent parts, remain unknown or controversial.The questionof the relative contributions to defence made by the Patriotic League and by the Territorial Defence remainscontested.See Divjak (); Gow (: -);Halilovi (); Hoare (; ), Lu arevi ().

6 Many other phrases from Loizoss poignantly entitled The heart grown bitterring bells in Sarajevo. Loizossays that listening to Turkish television was another obsessive strand of their relationship with the enemy(: ) and notes the inner compulsion of DPs to talk of the past although it distressed them to do so(: ). The Cypriot view that Western powers have manipulated our differences (: ) was increas-ingly echoed by Bosniacs after .

7 Alija Izetbegovi was the founding leader of the Bosniac political party, SDA, and after the elec-tions became President of the Presidency of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Geneva was the site

of peace negotiations conducted by the EC- and UN-chaired International Conference on FormerYugoslavia (ICFY).8 In the Sarajevo context Serbs rather than Croats are viewed by Bosniacs as the major aggressors and

betrayers, but this view does not hold, for example, among Mostar Bosniacs.9 In a detailed study of wartime Sarajevo Ma ek outlines three coping modes those of soldier, civilian,

and deserter and presents the deserters as the morally astute who feel personally and morally responsi-ble for their acts (: -). This interpretation clashes with the Sarajevo Bosniac critique, which seesdeserters as having left others to carry responsibility for the protection of their homes and families.

10 Serb propaganda claims of a Bosniac- or Islamically inspired programme of ethnic cleansing ofSarajevo were not founded, but there were killings of a still unknown number of Sarajevo Serbs, mostnotably by members of the Tenth Mountain Brigade commanded by Mu an Topalovi Caco (see AIM[Alternative Information Network] of.. at AIM n.d.; Dani magazine, .. and ..).

11

In March Bosnias Constitutional Court declared unconstitutional the use of the prefix Serbattached to place names, including Sarajevo.12 See Denich () and Hayden () for accounts of how the and exhumations and re-burials

of Croat and Slovene victims of the Partisans and of Serb victims of the Croatian Ustashe provided grist toCroat, Slovene, and Serb nationalist mills.

13 On December Biljana Plav i , one of the leaders of the wartime Bosnian Serb polity, told theICTY that she had now come to the belief and accept the fact that many thousands of innocent people werethe victims of an organized, systematic effort to remove Muslims and Croats from the territories claimedby Serbs (see UNICTY : ; for a full English-language translation of her statement see Plavsi ).So far one indictee, Gen. Radislav Krsti , has been convicted by the ICTY for aiding and abetting genocide(see UNICTY ).

14 The first of Spahi s ten genocides is the period -, after the Ottoman defeat at Vienna. Not all of

the ten were perpetrated by Serbs or against specifically Bosniac Muslims, and most are not what mightwidely be termed genocide.15 Emotions other than those of contemplative old age may also be the catalyst for renewed narration of

memories after long silence. The emotion of fear, prompted by a new set of political circumstances, is high-lighted in Jennifer Coles examination of the Madagascan Betsimisaraka and their memories of the rebellion (: -) and in Michael Stewarts work on the re-evocation of Hungarian Roma memoriesof the Holocaust (: ).

16 The exact manner in which such finger-pointing might operate in the complete absence of any narra-tion remains something of a theoretically unelaborated black box. Michael Taussig has proposed the phraseimplicit social knowledge to denote a non-discursive, essentially inarticulable and imageric knowing(:; taken up by van der Port : ; , in the context of Serbia) while Valentin Volo inov () haswritten of an unofficial conscious (explored by Cole : - in the Betsimisiraka context), but in eachinstance the extent to which secondgenerations could be said to share in a consciousor knowledge withouthaving heard at least some scraps of narrative remains unclear.

17 A discussion of reconciliation lies beyond the scope of this article, but see Borneman (; ), Falk(), Nader (), Sampson (), and Wilson () for debates on the issue.

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Greek Civil War. History and Anthropology, -. P, M. . Gypsies, wars and other instances of the wild: civilization and its discontents in a

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Rsum

Aprs la guerre de 1992-5 en Bosnie, les anthropologues ont t nombreux se pencher sur le rle de lammoire dans la cration et lentretien de lhostilit dans les Balkans. Une premire cole de pense seconcentre sur lauthenticit et la puissance des souvenirs personnels de violences pendant la secondeGuerre Mondiale et sur la possibilit de les transmettre au fil des gnrations jusquaux annes 1990. Uneseconde sintresse moins la mmoire comme phnomne dterminant laction humaine qu la poli-tique de la mmoire , la dynamique politique agissant sur les souvenirs individuels et canalisant ceux-ci. partir de lexemple de trois Bosniaques de Sarajevo quelle connat depuis les annes ,avant-guerre, lauteur souhaite mettre en avant les mrites dune troisime approche complmentaire,centre sur lindividu en tant que gestionnaire actif de ses propres souvenirs. Elle aborde rapidement laquestion de savoir si les travaux de Maurice Bloch sur la nature de la mmoire smantique et autobi-ographique peuvent aller dans le sens dune version forte de la premire tendance interprtative ou si,comme elle le suggre, leurs conclusions laissent une marge dlaboration des souvenirs individuels et dechangement entre les gnrations.

Cornelia Sorabji did her Ph.D. fieldwork in socialist Bosnia in the mid-s and received her doctorate,supervised by the late Ernest Gellner, in . Her research interests include political ideologies, conflictand violence, religious belief, Islam, and the role of social sciences in policy-making. She is currently an hon-orary fellow at University College London and a research analyst at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

Department of Anthropology, University College London, Gower St, London WCEBT, UK. [email protected]

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J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) , -
http://www.un.org/icty/krstic/Appeal/judgement/krs-aj%EF%9C%B0%EF%9C%B4%EF%9C%B0%EF%9C%B4%EF%9C%B1%EF%9C%B9e.pdfhttp://www.un.org/icty/krstic/Appeal/judgement/krs-aj%EF%9C%B0%EF%9C%B4%EF%9C%B0%EF%9C%B4%EF%9C%B1%EF%9C%B9e.pdfhttp://www.un.org/icty/krstic/Appeal/judgement/krs-aj%EF%9C%B0%EF%9C%B4%EF%9C%B0%EF%9C%B4%EF%9C%B1%EF%9C%B9e.pdfhttp://www.un.org/icty/krstic/Appeal/judgement/krs-aj%EF%9C%B0%EF%9C%B4%EF%9C%B0%EF%9C%B4%EF%9C%B1%EF%9C%B9e.pdf

Documents

Managing Memories in Post War Sarajevo