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My good friend Abdullah Faliq sent me this photograph today. He is in Srebrenica with a group from London.
It shows the burial yesterday of the remains of over 600 men and boys at the Potocari cemetery.
Mourning the dead from 1995 at Srebrenica yesterday (photo Abdullah Faliq)
Around 8,000 Bosniacs (Muslim Bosnians) were killed when Serb forces overran a UN safe enclave during the civil war in 1995. It is the worst European atrocity to take place since WWII.
They are still discovering the remains of brothers, sons, uncles, husbands, grandfathers, nephews, fathers and friends – these are buried at a special service once a year.
Find the BBC report on yesterday’s events here and a post from my 2009 visit to Bosnia here.
One of the family is in Novi Sad at the mo, at the Exit Festival – I’ve been listening to the livestream.
At the same time there’s been a steady trickle of tweets reminding me of the commemoration later today of the Srebrenica genocide. A friend from the East London Mosque is leading a delegation and will be taking part.
I’m told 613 men & boys whose bodies have been identified over the past year will be buried at Potocari later today. Over 8,000 unarmed Bosniacs were taken up to the hills around Srebrenica (a UN designated safe area for Muslims) in July 1995 and shot by Serbian forces. General Ratko Mladić, who was in command, is now on trial for genocide. Bodies are still being recovered and identified.
Huge crowd at the Exit Festival 2011.
The Exit Festival was started in 2000 (100 days of it!) by three Serbian students under the slogan, “Exit out of ten years of madness”, a reference to the Milošević regime. Milošević resigned later that year and spent his last years on trial for war crimes. It’s great that the festival (now just 4 days) has become one of the best festivals-with-a-message in Europe.
Here are some more photos from my 2009 visit.
A man who survived the killings (second from right) tells our group what happened during the hot summer of 1995.
Myself, a Srebrenica mother who lost all her male family members in the massacre and a friend from our group at Potocari, where the dead are buried.
A couple of young campaigners, one wearing an Exit t-shirt (which I didn't recognise at the time).
Never again - the Srebrenica prayer inscribed in English at the Potocari cemetery.
The beautiful scenery in Bosnia-Hertzegovina - often similar to my own country, Scotland. Much of the countryside cannot be used - it's too expensive to clear all the land-mines.
Quick post before I catch the train to Vienna. I’ve just seen this news item about a photo exhibition (Nick Danziger & Rory MacLean) which will be travelling from London’s South Bank to the western Balkans (including Sarajevo), Brussels, Strasbourg, Ottowa & Bern – so not far from several friends who sometimes see this blog. More info from ICRC.
Stef O’ Driscoll (award-winning theatre director) and Mark Griffin (St Mary’s University College, London), friends I’ve made through my thespian daughter, are off to Sarajevo on Friday. They want to dramatise some of the wonderful stories in Miljenko Jergovic’s Sarajevo Marlboro, a collection of short stories on how the young people of Sarajevo from the different communities – Croats, Serbs and Bosniacs – helped each other to survive during the siege. They plan to stage performances in London and in Bosnia.
They’ll spend much of their time listening, I suspect, and it will be hard.
Amila and Niko at Blackburn Cathedral
We had a wonderful time in London this evening with some of the Bosnians who have been taking part in the Forgiveness Project exhibition at Blackburn Cathedral. They fly home tomorrow morning. Stef met Silva (a young woman from the Croat community), Amila (who teaches English in Tuzla and is connected to the beautiful madrassa there) and Niko (Deputy Bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the Tuzla area).
In a wholly uninspiring hotel lobby, conversation ranged from the dreadful and continuing pain of multiple and unexplainable bereavement, to justice denied, the thirst in Bosnia for creativity, beauty and the arts, the power of women’s stories and of the life-giving and transformative possibilities of carefully devised theatre. It’s impossible to have conversations like these with our Bosnian friends without a great deal of laughter, too – I love it.
I also caught sight of Chris and Anjum from Blackburn Cathedral, who worked hard to bring our Bosnian friends to the UK. We’re hoping that the final report of the original UK visit in October 2009 will be the kind of document that people will say, “If you’re going to Bosnia, read this”.
Friends whom the Zajedno u Bosni group met in Tuzla, Bosnia, will be coming over to the UK for the launch of Blackburn Cathedral‘s hosting of the Forgiveness Project exhibition on 7th February.
Wonderful news! I’m hoping they may be able to visit London, too.
Alexandra Estate NW8
A great evening with old friends from Papua New Guinea days (now dividing their time between Timor and the US). Then TV news footage of the devastating earthquake in Haiti and a ‘phone call from someone with connections there.
Before turning off the television, surprised to find an Anthony Minghella film on BBC1, based in London (Alexandra Estate NW8), which includes characters (and a copper coffee ibrik) from Sarajevo – Breaking and Entering. Bit of a syrupy ending, but the distant and rather romantic view of Bosnia portrayed probably comes close to my own view before travelling there last year.
Glad to find Doreen Massey’s For Space mentioned in Stephen Greenblatt’s Cultural Mobility – a Manifesto, one of the books I shouldn’t really have bought from the London Review Bookshop the other day. Greenblatt reckons that cultures or patterns of meaning have rarely been stable or fixed. The kind of radical mobility that is taking place today is in fact an old, old story.
To grasp the shaping power of colonization, exile, emigration, wandering, contamination, and unexpected, random events, along with the fierce compulsions of greed, longing, and restlessness, cultural analysis needs to operate with a new set of principles.
It was good to mull over with friends how Papua New Guinea is doing nowadays, how Timor is getting along, how Bosnia is working its way to becoming part of the “international community” – and what our role is, as citizens of far more powerful nations. Although I associate the word ‘protectorate’ with days of empire, some small countries struggle to rise much above this status, even in the C21st, or perhaps particularly in the C21st.
SANA’s Paul Johns has been pulling together the report on our visit to Bosnia last month – heard from him yesterday, as well as from Anjum at Blackburn Cathedral which is hosting a visit from our Bosnian friends in February to launch the F-word Exhibition – sounds great & I’ll be there.
At the Women’s Interfaith Network today, I heard about a recent gathering in Birmingham of the European Women of Faith Network – part of Religions for Peace (if you’re involved, let me know) – but more significantly for Zajedno people, the EWFN started life in Sarajevo with a Bosnia-Kosovo women’s interfaith conference in 2003. We met the Interreligious Council in Sarajevo but I don’t remember hearing about the women’s network.
From Our Own Correspondent: report from Ed Stourton on the international talks in Bosnia which started while we were there. Is Bosnia a protectorate? The Bosnia report is 5′ 5″ into the programme.
Moral Maze (BBC Radio 4) on Karadzic and war crimes
The war crimes trial of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has opened at the UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He faces 11 counts of genocide, including complicity in the Srebrenica massacre in which 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed. It was one of the worst acts of atrocity in Europe since the Second World War. But is what we are about to see justice or revenge – A show trial organised by the victors, with TV coverage broadcast throughout the world, and eagerly viewed, especially in the Balkans. Can there ever be any morally certain and globally acceptable definition of what constitutes a war crime or will pragmatism and real politique always get in the way?
No podcast but listen again at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nfqzl
Heart & Soul (BBC World Service) Bosnia’s War Babies
One of the many charges faced by Radovan Karadžić at The Hague is that of organising the rape of 20,000 Bosnian Muslim women. Fourteen years after the conflict, many of these women remain traumatised, cast out from their communities, rejected by their husbands and families, and often ending up stigmatised and impoverished. Some had the additional humiliation of being raped in front of their parents or small children. Yet the psychological support that so many of them urgently need is inadequate and sporadic. Some women were kept for months and raped until they conceived. Those who became pregnant either abandoned their babies or had them adopted. Some decided to keep them, a constant reminder of their shame. These children – now in their teens – are beginning to ask questions about their fathers. The mothers now face a dilemma – should they tell the truth and risk damaging their child? Or keep their terrible secret?
Listen again and find the podcast at http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/2009/03/000000_heartandsoul.shtml
And BBC Newsnight followed up with its Srebrenica report tonight – catch it now through this link:
