Remembering Wartime Rape in Post-Conflict

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Sarah Quillinan

ORCHID ID: 0000-0002-5786-9829

A dissertation submitted in total fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

July 2019

School of Social and Political Sciences

University of Melbourne

i

THIS DISSERTATION IS DEDICATED TO THE WOMEN SURVIVORS OF WAR RAPE IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

WHOSE STRENGTH, FORTITUDE, AND SPIRIT ARE TRULY HUMBLING.

ii

Contents

Dedication / i

Declaration / iv

Acknowledgments / v

Abstract / vii

Note on Language and Pronunciation / viii

Abbreviations / ix

List of Illustrations / xi

I

PROLOGUE

Unclaimed History: Memoro-Politics and Survivor Silence in Places of Trauma / 1

II

INTRODUCTION

After Silence: War Rape, Trauma, and the Aesthetics of Social Remembrance / 10

Where Memory and Politics Meet: Remembering Rape in Post-War Bosnia / 11

Situating the Study: Fieldwork Locations / 22

Bosnia and Herzegovina: An Ethnographic Sketch / 22

The Village of Selo: Republika Srpska / 26

The Town of Gradić: Republika Srpska / 28 Silence and the Making of Ethnography: Methodological Framework / 30

Ethical Considerations: Principles and Practices of Research on Rape Trauma / 36

Organisation of Dissertation / 41

III

CHAPTER I

The Social Inheritance of War Trauma: Collective Memory, Gender, and War Rape / 45

On Collective Memory and Social Identity / 46

On Collective Memory and Gender / 53

On Collective Memory and the History of Wartime Rape / 58

Conclusion: The Living Legacy of Collective Memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina / 64

iii

IV

CHAPTER II

The Unmaking of the World: War, Rape, and the Legacies of Conflict / 66

Political Backdrop: A Prolegomena to the Bosnian War (1992-1995) / 67

Mass Rape and Sexual Violence during the Bosnian War (1992-1995) / 72

On the Battleground of Women’s Bodies: The Logic of Rape in War / 78

Conclusion: Women, War, and Rape / 83

V

CHAPTER III

Remembering to Forget: Public Secrecy and the Poetics of Rape

Remembrance in the Village of Selo / 85

The Masking and Unmasking of Public Secrecy / 87

‘Beware your Friend a Hundred-Fold’: War in the Village of Selo / 90

Srcolika Spomenik: The ‘Heart-shaped’ Monument and the Production of ‘Truth’ / 93

Transgressing the Secret: The Burden of ‘Survival’ / 98

Bodily Remembrances and the Politics of Defacement / 105

Conclusion: The Public Secrecy of Sexual Violence / 115

VI

CHAPTER IV

Beyond a Manichaean Aesthetics: Voices from the ‘Grey Zone’ / 118

La ‘Zona Grigia’: The ‘Grey Zone’ / 121

Prvo Traži Komšiju pa Izbij Kuću: War in the Town of Gradić / 124

Women’s Voices from Omarska: Between Victimhood and Agency / 128

Return and the Paradoxes of Rape Victimhood in Gradić / 137

Conclusion: Representing the Unrepresentable / 142

VII

CONCLUSIONS

Towards a Gendered Semiotics of Silence and Suffering in Memory Studies / 144

References / 155

iv

Declaration

This is to certify that:

(i) The dissertation comprises only my own original work towards the PhD;

(ii) Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other materials used; and

(iii) The dissertation is less than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps,

bibliographies, and appendices.

Sarah Quillinan

v

Acknowledgements

Remembering Wartime Rape is a project that has collected many debts throughout its

development. First among these are the many survivors of war rape, whose names are disguised

for obvious reasons, and without whose contributions and support, this research would not have

been possible. The willingness of so many women in the villages, towns, and cities throughout

Bosnia-Herzegovina to share their thoughts and experiences was truly humbling.

I am also profoundly grateful to the numerous community members in my two key fieldsites of

Selo and Gradić, many of whom generously welcomed me into their homes, workplaces, and

social worlds during the two-year period of my fieldwork. Over endless coffee visits, they tolerated

my curiosity and inspired my research by providing a window into the complicated experience of

living with the very raw and very recent memories of war trauma.

In conducting my research in Bosnia, I drew on the expertise and experience of many others

whose support and assistance contributed enormously to my own understandings of the most

recent war and its continued repercussions in the fractured post-conflict state. In particular, the

insights of two people I repeatedly refer to as my ‘companions’, Una Tokmačić and Aida Begić,

left a marked impression on my work and made the final dissertation far richer and more complex

for their support with interpretation and translation services.

A number of good friends have helped to ensure that both my doctoral work and I survived the

many years of student privation that inevitably accompanies postgraduate studies. I am

especially thankful to Emily Hill who provided me with valuable direction in the very early stages of

my research, a home in the final months of my fieldwork in Bosnia, and a lasting friendship in the

many years since. I am also deeply indebted to Eileen Archer without whose unfailing generosity,

support, curiosity, wit, and friendship I might have repeatedly abandoned this undertaking before

its completion.

My thanks are also due to the many fellow Balkan researchers whose paths crossed my own

during fieldwork and who each helped to make my time in Bosnia both intellectually stimulating

and personally rewarding. In particular, I am appreciative of the friendships of Jesse Hronešová,

Valerie Safir Hopkins, Julianne Funk, and Maria O’Reilly who were each important sources of

knowledge, advice, and constructive criticism.

The School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Melbourne provided a thoughtful

and creative environment in which to complete this research project. I am particularly thankful,

here, to my supervisor, Professor Andrew Dawson, for his expert guidance during the planning

and research phase, his constructive criticism and patience during the writing process, his loyalty

and friendship, and his generous donation of time throughout the years.

vi

Finally, my family has been crucial to the completion of this project at each and every step of the

process. In particular, I owe much to my parents, Jim and Mary Quillinan, for their guidance and

moral support as well as their practical assistance and ready company making the, oftentimes,

lonesome process of writing a far more bearable endeavour.

In writing about the deeply personal culture of war rape memories, I have endeavoured to piece

together the inevitably subjective and fragmentary narratives of survival to which I was witness,

and to portray the communities and the people with whom I worked with honesty, respect, and

sensitivity. I can only hope that my writing does justice to the intricate textures of their daily

experiences and to the rich complexity of the memories they saw fit to share with me; memories

that were neither easy to revisit nor simple to make sense of, but that were always and

everywhere an immense and humbling privilege to hear.

vii

Abstract

Remembering Wartime Rape explores the complicated history of rape during the Bosnian war

(1992-1995) and the collective efforts of local populations to (dis)remember the painful legacies of

violence over more than two decades since the close of conflict. The organised sexual assaults of

more than 20,000 women and girls was a defining characteristic in the history of Bosnia’s bloody

secession from the former Yugoslav federation and the memories of such violence continue to

influence the post-war recovery of communities throughout the small Balkan state. The research

draws on intimate accounts of women’s suffering over the four years of conflict as well as

personal stories of survival in the aftermath of the violence to provide a thick description of the

place of rape narratives in Bosnia’s post-conflict memoryscape. Ethnographic data was collected

over an extended period of 21 months in the two key fieldwork locations of Selo and Gradić in the

Republika Srpska. The distinctive political, economic, religious, and social contexts in each

community produced different dominant mnemonic threads as well as many and varied ways of

collectively managing the sensitive local histories of war rape. The public discourse on the

subject is, thus, explored through different notional frames as they emerged organically in each

site over the course of fieldwork. The dissertation specifically employs the theoretical schemata of

public secrecy (Taussig, 1999) and its relevance to the sensitive task of memory making in the

village of Selo, and the grey zone (Levi, 1989) and its bearing on the recollections of women

concentration camp survivors in the town of Gradić.

In adopting these two principal thematic frameworks, Remembering Wartime Rape focuses on the

discursive processes through which memories of sexual violence from the recent conflict are

selected, shaped, and institutionalised in each of the key communities. It questions the ways in

which women survivors are represented or erased in the crafting of official histories and the

consequences of such for fostering social solidarity and division among those with competing

versions of the ‘truth’. In doing so, the research considers which elements of women’s

experiences of rape are more easily remembered and which are excluded or deliberately

‘forgotten’, which are grieved, and which are valorised, what complex reality is simplified as a

result, and what broader purpose these interpretations serve. The research concludes with a

discussion of the importance of enhancing current methodologies to explore more thoroughly the

limits and the possibilities for both collective and personal mourning and for re-imagining social

worlds in the aftermath of an immense disruption such as war. In exploring the messiness of the

Bosnian memoryscape two decades after the close of conflict, the dissertation refrains from any

attempt to establish a singular metanarrative of war rape and, instead, seeks to evoke a sense of

the ineffable experience of living alongside memories of sexual violence in their countless

manifestations and of the meanings and creativity always inherent in both individual and collective

approaches to suffering, survival, and post-war reconstruction.

viii

A Note on Language and Pronunciation

Remembering Wartime Rape adopts the orthography of the official languages of Bosnia-

Herzegovina (BiH) in the spelling of local names, places, and other key terms throughout the

dissertation. The three languages of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian (BCS) recognised by

the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) at the close of the war in 1995 all derive from the same

pluricentric system known in the former Yugoslavia as Serbo-Croatian. The three languages

are mutually intelligible despite minor variations, spelling is phonetic, and may be written in

either Latin or Cyrillic alphabet, although the latter script is principally used in the Republika

Srpska (RS).

Following is a brief guide to pronunciation of words in Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian:

c as in cats

č as in cheese

ć as in jingle

dž as in judge

dj as in adjourn

j as in yawn

lj as in million

nj as in canyon

š as in shoe

ž as in leisure

ix

Abbreviations

BAM or KM Bosnian Convertible Mark

BCS Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian [language]

BiH Bosnia and Herzegovina

CPM Hrvatski Populacijski Pokret (Croatian Population Movement)

DPA Dayton Peace Agreement or Dayton Peace Accords

EC European Community

FBiH Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Final Report Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts (established

pursuant to Security Council resolution 780 (1992) (S/1994/674).

GDP Gross Domestic Product

GFAP General Framework Agreement for Peace (the ‘Dayton Agreement’ or

the ‘Dayton Accords’)

HVO Croatian Defence Council

ICC International Criminal Court

ICJ International Court of Justice

ICTR International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

ICTY International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

IDC Istraživački i Dokumentacijski Centar (Research and Documentation

Centre)

IDP Internally Displaced Persons

IEBL Inter-Entity Border Line

INGO International Non-Governmental Organisation

JNA Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija (Yugoslav People’s Army)

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

NGO Non-Governmental Organisation

OHR Office of the High Representative

x

POW Prisoner of War

RS Republika Srpska

RSK Republic of Serbian Krajina

SANU Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts

SAO Srpska Autonomna Oblast or the Serbian Autonomous Region

SDA Stranka Demokratske Akcije or the Party of Democratic Action

SDS Srpska Demokratska Stranka or the Serbian Democratic Party

SFRY Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

SS Schutzstaffel (Nazi Protection Squadron)

Sud BIH Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina

UN United Nations

UN – OCHA United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

UNPROFOR United Nations Protection Force

UNSC United Nations Security Council

VRS Vojska Republike Srpske (Army of Republika Srpska)

WCC War Crimes Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina

ŽŽR Žene Žrtve Rata ([Organisation of] Women Victims of War)

xi

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: Map of the former Yugoslavia / xii

Figure 2: Map of Bosnia and Herzegovina / xii

Figure 3: Bosnia and Herzegovina (Pre-War Ethnic Composition) / xiii

Figure 4: Bosnia and Herzegovina (Post-War Ethnic Composition) / xiii

Figure 5: Vilina Vlas in Višegradska Banja on Vilinske Gore / 8

Figure 6: Four major religious sites of worship in Baščaršija / 24

Figure 7: Detention Camp in Selo Village / 92

Figure 8: Srcolika Spomenik (Heart-Shaped Monument) in Selo Village / 94

Figure 9: Concentration Camp at the Omarska Iron Mine and Ore Processing Plant / 126

xii

Fig

ure

2:

Ma

p o

f B

osn

ia a

nd

Her

zeg

ov

ina

S

ou

rce:

Ge

og

rap

hic

Gu

ide

(M

ap

s o

f E

uro

pe

):

htt

p:/

/ww

w.g

eo

gra

ph

icg

uid

e.c

om

/eu

rop

e-m

ap

s/b

osn

ia.h

tm

Fig

ure

1:

Ma

p o

f th

e F

orm

er Y

ug

osl

av

ia

So

urc

e:

Wik

ime

dia

Com

mon

s:

htt

ps:/

/co

mm

ons.w

ikim

ed

ia.o

rg/w

iki/F

ile:F

orm

er_

Yu

gosla

via

_M

ap.p

ng

xiii

Fig

ure

4:

Bo

snia

an

d H

erzeg

ov

ina

P

ost

-Wa

r E

thn

ic C

om

po

siti

on

So

urc

e:

Ge

og

rap

hic

Guid

e (

Ma

ps o

f E

uro

pe

):

htt

p:/

/ww

w.g

eo

gra

ph

icg

uid

e.c

om

/eu

rop

e-m

ap

s/b

osn

ia.h

tm

Fig

ure

3:

Bo

snia

an

d H

erzeg

ov

ina

P

re-W

ar

Eth

nic

Co

mp

osi

tio

n

So

urc

e:

Rad

io F

ree

Eu

rop

e/R

ad

io L

ibe

rty:

htt

p:/

/ww

w.r

ferl

.org

/a/la

stin

g-e

thn

ic-d

ivis

ions-i

n-b

osn

ia/2

736

31

92

.htm

l

1

Prologue:

Unclaimed History: Memoro-Politics and Survivor

Silence in Places of Trauma

‘… those who saw and lived through it have lost the gift

of words and those who are dead can tell no tales.’

Ivo Andrić, Bridge Over The Drina, 1959, 265

The seven-kilometre route from the centre of Višegrad to the thermal springs of Vilina Vlas, or

‘Nymph’s Tresses’, in the woods above it has few markers to physically betray the unsettling

history of this small stretch of road in southeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereinafter referred

to as ‘Bosnia’).1 Aside from the blackened remains of one or two scattered houses, the route is

relatively unremarkable to the naïve and unsuspecting traveller as one leaves the centre of

Višegrad; first crossing the arches of the celebrated Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge and then

following the main path alongside the Drina River before taking a final detour leading into the

isolation of the mountain of Vilinske Gore. Indeed, one could be forgiven for supposing that the

significance of the area was merely its location at the southern edge of the Dinaric Alps, where

the mountains give way to a panorama of dramatic natural scenery of the kind so familiar to the

Bosnian landscape. Yugoslav writer and Nobel literature laureate Ivo Andrić (1959, 13) famously

wrote in elegy to this same rural vista in his novel, ‘Na Drini Ćuprija’ or ‘The Bridge Over The

Drina’. Describing Višegrad’s pastoral surrounds, Andrić remarked poetically that, on the one

side of the little enclave, the River flows, ‘... with the whole force of its green and foaming waters

from the apparently closed mass of the dark steep mountains’, while on the other, ‘... like from a

spring spreads the whole rolling valley of Višegrad and its surroundings with hamlets nestling in

the folds of the hills, covered with meadows, pastures and plum orchards, and criss-crossed with

walls and fences and dotted with shaws and occasional clumps of evergreens ...’.

Bosnia’s natural environment, as Andrić subtly reminds us in this same piece, however, is more

than just a physical landscape. It is, in other respects, an archive of stories, myths, legends, and

histories. In the various landscapes of the Balkan Peninsula – the centuries-old forests, the

mountainous valleys, the deep river canyons, and the sometimes verdant, other times arid,

pastures – lies the entangled history of a country that has, throughout its existence, straddled

some of the major ideological and political divisions on the European continent (Bringa, 1995). In

Bosnia’s heavy mountainous terrain, the early Illyrian tribes found protection from the Roman

1 The country’s official title is Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosna i Hercegovina in local language). For brevity’s

sake, I employ the terms ‘Bosnia’ and ‘Bosnian’ (as they appear in the English version of the Constitution) as

shorthand for the country and its citizens. I also apply, in places, the standard local abbreviation of ‘BiH’.

2

invasions of the first and second centuries BC. Those same formidable forests later slowed a

succession of expansionist incursions from the empires of the Charlemagne’s, the Ottomans, the

Venetians, and the Hapsburgs. An impenetrable natural terrain, strategically-placed in the

western Balkans, and riven through with once non-navigable waterways, Bosnia’s geography

rendered those who have lived within it hardy and self-reliant from as early as the pre-historic

times until the present day (Malcolm, 2002). Each historical epoch, both epic and slight, has left

in its wake cultural traces on the geography; fragments of lost human histories that stand as quiet

testament to a people, a place, and their interdependent relationship. Indeed, to understand the

politico-cultural history of Bosnia, author and activist Tim Clancy (2004: 5) writes, ‘... one must

have a sense of the immense geographical factors that have shaped the country since prehistoric

times’.

The brief stretch of road from Višegrad to Vilina Vlas – not more than a 20-minute journey by taxi

– is by no means an exception. From Višegrad’s main street, Ulica Užičkog Korpusa, traces of

the most recent war on Bosnian soil are quietly apparent.2 The scarred ruins of a few Bosniak

houses, barely visible from the main road, provide the first disturbing reminders of the conflict

when, in the spring of 1992, Bosnian Serb and Serbian forces carried out campaigns of ethnic

cleansing throughout the Podrinje region.3 Directly behind the main street, the settlements of

Bikavac and Pionirska stand; a handful of charred bricks and scrapings of mortar marking two of

the worst individual wartime atrocities in which 60 and 59 Bosniak civilians, respectively, were

detained and burnt alive in fires intentionally lit by Serb forces in the early months of the war

(ICTY, 2009, 209-239 and 184-208). To the left of the road, several bleached marble columns –

tombstones from the old Muslim Stražište Cemetery – are almost hidden; designating the final

resting place of just some of the 1661 Bosniak victims reported missing from the area at the war’s

end.4 From here, travelling eastward alongside the banks of the Drina River, where ‘Rijeko Drino

2 The main street of Ulica Užičkog Korpusa (trans: Corps of Užiče Street) was re-named in the post-war years

after the Serbian-led faction of the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) that crossed the border from Titovo Užiče in

Serbia and invaded Višegrad on Monday 13 April 1992 (Newell, 2012).

3 The category ‘Bosniak’ or ‘Bošnjak’ has a lengthy and politically-laden history in Bosnia. At different points in

time, the term has been used as a generic identifier for all inhabitants of Bosnia regardless of ethno-national

affiliation as well as separately and specifically for the Bosnian Muslim community (for a detailed discussion,

see: Bringa, 1995: 34-35). In late 1993, against the surge of Serbian and Croatian nationalism, a decision was

taken by the Congress of Bosnian Muslim Intellectuals to re-title the former ‘Muslim’ population as ‘Bosniak’ in

an effort to establish a secularised ethnonym with a more obvious continuous historical link to BiH as a state

and territory. The decision was internationally reflected in the ‘Washington Agreement’ in March of 1994 and

later enshrined in the ‘General Framework Agreement on Peace’ (GFAP or ‘Dayton Agreement’) (Jeffrey, 2013).

In respect to this, throughout the following dissertation, I use the term ‘Bosnian’ as a regional, rather than an

ethnic, designation in referring to Croats, Muslims, and Serbs from Bosnia. I use the classification ‘Bosniak’ to

denote Bosnian Muslims, except in those instances where I specifically indicate religious affiliation. In common

vernacular, however, ‘Bosnian Muslim’ and ‘Bosniak’ are frequently used interchangeably. Thus, direct quotes

from informants often use both terms in ordinary conversation to refer to ethno-national background as much as

to ancestral religion.

4 The figure of 1661 Bosniak victims reported killed and missing is the most extensively cited war statistic for the

Višegrad area and includes fatalities resulting from the Bridge murders (1992), Pionirska Street, and Bikavac

fires (1992), and the Paklenik and Barimo massacres (1992). The figure of 1661 Bosniak victims is held by the

3

vodo, čuvaj im grobove’,5 the waters are thought to ‘guard the graves’ of many hundreds more

who remain unaccounted for, the 11 monumental arches of the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge

loom in the distance. Once celebrated as a symbol of unity, and now mourned as a ritual site of

atrocity, the bridge marks the place at which scores more Bosniak civilians were slaughtered,

their bodies thrown over the parapets by Bosnian Serb forces.6

Now, crossing the old stone bridge with the heavy weight of its recent wartime history, a quiet

sense of unease in the journey’s destination and its purpose crept to the forefront in both my

companion’s thoughts and my own.7 Vilina Vlas, the tired old Yugo-style resort spa in the

emptiness of the mountains above Višegrad, has an ambiguous reputation in the modern Bosnian

state. Named for a small endemic fern peculiar to the mountainous area, Vilina Vlas is known to

a great many in the region of the former Yugoslavia as a natural healing and therapy institution

(Vilina Vlas, 2012). To a significant few from eastern Bosnia, however, it lays claim to the far

more sobering reputation as the site of one of the more notorious ‘rape camps’ from the conflict in

the mid-1990s (UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994: Volume IV, Annex VIII, ‘Prison

Camps’). This very recent, very dark moment in Vilina Vlas’ three-decades of history is one that

many in Višegrad know of and yet few dare, care, or perhaps even deign to acknowledge.

Indeed, the Serbian political entity of Republika Srpska (RS) re-appropriated the old resort

Istraživačko Dokumentacioni Centar (Research and Documentation Centre or IDC) in Sarajevo. The

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) alternatively refers to an upper estimate of

3,000 killed and missing, including 600 women and 119 children. As at January 2015, the IDC’s revised website

is still under reconstruction and the former website is no longer available where the above figure was originally

extracted in 2013: http://www.idc.org.ba/onama/izvjestaj_analize_po_centrima.html#podrinje

5 Quote from a WWII monument on Trsevinama (directly translated as: ‘Waters of the Drina, guard their graves’)

that was erected in memory of members of the Južnomoravska Brigada (First South Morava Brigade); a

Partisan unit who were captured and executed by a Serbian WWII Brigade above Dubovo village on the border

of BiH and Serbia after crossing the Drina River in 1943. Available at:

http://kurtalici.blogspot.com.au/p/razno.html

6 The Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge at the southeastern entrance to the city of Višegrad in eastern Bosnia was

built at the end of the sixteenth century by the renowned Turkish court architect and engineer Kodža Mimar

Sinan on the orders of the Ottoman Empire’s then-Grand Vizier Mehmed Paša Sokolović (1505-1579). The

Bosnian-born Grand Vizier commissioned the bridge as a tribute to his native region, envisioning it as a symbol

of trade, prosperity, and cultural exchange between the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire, and the Mediterranean

world and a nexus between their two major religions, Islam and Christianity. Since the first stone was laid in

1571, the bridge has become the site of several reported and fictional atrocities throughout centuries of

intermittent war and conflict. Otherwise known as the ‘Višegrad Bridge’, the edifice has most recently been

referenced in several judgements for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as the

scene of individual and mass homicides committed by the Bosnian Serb army and paramilitary against Bosniak

civilians during the war in the mid-1990s (ICTY, 2009). As the subject of Yugoslav novelist Ivo Andrić’s 1945

Nobel Prize-winning epic, ‘The Bridge Over The Drina’, the structure is one of the more celebrated of

architectural feats in Bosnia and was included on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2007 (UNESCO, 2013).

7 For the majority of my field visits, I travelled with one of two trusted Bosnian companions, of Bosniak and

Bosniak/Croat descent respectively, both of whom acted as interpreters in the early stages of my research and,

later, as research assistants and friends. My companions were both Masters candidates in English at the

University of Sarajevo and experienced in interpretation and translation services (see the methodological

section in the introductory chapter for further detail on their roles and contributions to the research phase).

4

facilities at the close of the war and, with it, the marketable fascination of its folklores and natural

practices (FIPA, 2008: 38; Srpska Nat. Review, 2013: 51).8 Borrowing from the centuries-long

traditions of belief in the curative properties of nature, the resort relies upon the renewed

patronage of convalescents from throughout the Balkan region. Demand peaks in the summer

months for tourists as well when partners and families reserve their lengthened stays in the grand

socialist tradition of the godišnji odmor or the annual summer holiday. Throughout the year, many

more local pilgrims continue to carry out perennial visits to the smaller springs at the foot of

Vilinske Gore, regularly rinsing their eyes in waters that are considered restorative for sight.

The most recent layer of Bosnian history has, nonetheless, stripped Vilina Vlas and its natural

environs of much symbolic affect. Requisitioned by the Užice Corps in the early months of the

war, Vilina Vlas operated for a time as a headquarters for Bosnian Serb militia and local

paramilitary groups variously known as the White Eagles, the Avengers, and the Wolves

(Ahmetašević et al, 2006). Inevitably, perhaps, for a military command post, unsettling

testimonies of a ‘pakao na zemlji’, or a ‘hell on earth’, surfaced almost immediately. Fragments of

survivor stories – punctuated with terms like ‘brothel’ and ‘rape camp’ (UN Security Council, ‘Final

Report’, 1994: Volume IV, Annex VIII, ‘Prison Camps’) – now quietly disrupt the hotel’s once

respectable and enigmatic history. Women held in locked rooms, handcuffed, and imprisoned for

months at a time. Women thrown bread to catch with their teeth. Women raped repeatedly by

local (para)military and police officers. Women taunted with the provocation that they, ‘... would

bear Serb children’, and women driven to suicide or executed to conceal the evidence

(Ahmetašević et al, 2006). In the years since the war’s end, the walls have been washed of

bloodstains, the bed sheets have been changed, the rooms aired, and the carpets vacuumed.

The hotel doors have re-opened as a municipal-owned establishment and the complex has

returned to its former function as a rehabilitation centre for convalescing patients and a health spa

for tourists (Vilina Vlas, 2012). Despite a fresh coat of paint, however, in Vilina Vlas the past

remains unforgiven, unforgotten, and unresolved.

As our local driver – a genial Bosnian Serb from Višegrad – exited the main road onto an

unformed path at the foot of the mountains of Vilinske Gore, that past felt as if it were everywhere.

The stories of ‘especially young’ Bosniak women and girls abducted from the Višegrad region –

most with endings that remain ‘unknown’ – were disturbingly close (UN Security Council, ‘Final

Report’, 1994: Volume V, Annex IX, ‘Rape and Sexual Assault’, para 252). Local reports suggest

almost 200 young women and girls were held at Vilina Vlas and, yet, fewer than ten survived the

systematic torture and rape. Many more were ‘disappeared’; most likely executed and buried in

mass gravesites throughout the mountains or disposed of in the Drina’s rapidly flowing waters

(woman activist, pers. comm., 26, Sept, 2011). The details are inevitably piecemeal – based on

rumour, comment, and hearsay – leaving imagination to substitute for the frequent gaps in

8 At the close of the war in 1995, Bosnia was essentially divided into two autonomous political entities,

established by the internationally brokered Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA). The territory of the Republika

Srpska (‘RS’) to the east and north of the country is populated by a majority Bosnian Serb citizenry, and the

Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (‘FBiH’ or the ‘Federation’) to the west is comprised of a larger Bosnian

Muslim-Croat alliance (Burg & Shoup, 1999) (see the field locations section in the introductory chapter for

further detail).

5

wartime history. Now, from the backseat of the taxi, it was difficult not to imagine those ‘gaps’

and the horror that this same journey held on this same road for so many women and girls almost

two decades earlier. Restrained in the back of a car, or a truck, or a bus driven by local police

and paramilitary, the roughness of that uneven road must have felt unusually jarring. The

thickening pine forests must have felt claustrophobic and the sparsely scattered houses at the

foothills must have seemed like a last futile – possibly even hostile – hope the further from the

highway they were driven. As the very last little stone house with its elderly residents occupying

themselves in small fields faded into the distance, the question that so many survivors of

detention sites had uttered crossed my mind, ‘Could they really not have known – not have heard

– what was happening?’

The journey into the mountains from Višegrad was part of a research trip; a brief but intimate

observation of a quiet and profoundly contentious struggle to piece together the shattered

fragments of local history. Memories of wartime rape in Bosnia are indelibly woven into the social

fabric in the stories and the rumours, even in the occasional silences, contradictions, and denials

always so conspicuous to local accounts of history. In Vilina Vlas, the story – and, even more so,

its re-telling – seemed especially present, especially grim; and this, despite the barely disguised

efforts of many in Višegrad and the Republika Srpska to deny it. The perversity of the hotel’s two

functions now entangled in the one narrative – a rape camp and a wellness centre – had an

incongruous feel and that discomfort was rendered even more blatant by other unnatural-seeming

details. That the healing waters surrounding the old resort spa were generally known for their

influence on women’s fertility made the location and the Serb militia’s use of it markedly

distasteful. Equally, that the list of alternative therapies offered at the renewed spa facilities

included treatments associated with gynaecological conditions and fertility issues seemed more

than a little insensitive. And, that these functions were so apparently sought after by women

throughout the former Yugoslavia felt more than a little disloyal. So, when finally our taxi came

upon the resort spa, the reception signage seemed faintly and unpleasantly ironic. Written in the

Cyrillic script of the Serbian political entity of Republika Srpska, the reception signage at the gates

read: ‘Rehabilitation Centre, Vilina Vlas’ – and then, simply – ‘Welcome’.

The spring was a simple stone’s throw from the spa’s reception. Water holds an especial place in

Bosnian affections, and faith in its remedial properties is a centuries-old tradition. Bosnia, itself, is

eponymous with the River Bosna, one of its seven major tributaries and which translates to mean

a country of ‘running water’ (Malcolm, 2002). The rivers, oftentimes, provide a point of affective,

as much as geographic, navigation for many in Bosnia – particularly so, the displaced – who

commonly speak of a comforting sense of home at the sight of ‘their’ rivers. The discovery of

thermal springs in the pine forests above Višegrad in the late sixteenth century has, likewise,

found a place in this larger affinity. Indeed, Turkish workers quarrying for stone to build the

historic Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge happened upon the warm mineral springs (McAdam et

al, 2009, 147-148). According to oral history, a workhorse fell into the nearby waters after

breaking a leg while carting stones for the bridge. Unable to climb the banks again, the injured

horse remained in the shallow waters for several weeks with pitying workers bringing the animal

food daily. Inexplicably, the horse recovered from the injury and climbed the banks of the spring

itself (Vilina Vlas chef, pers. comm., 25 Sept, 2011). Recognising the waters’ healing properties,

6

the Turks erected a lonely little bathhouse nearby, which remains three centuries on as part of the

Vilina Vlas resort. The facility now draws on these same thermo-mineral springs as the basis for

its alternative treatments. The belief in these healing qualities and its place in local efforts to belie

the unpalatable aspects of recent history was the particular research appeal for the few days

ahead.

The reception at the old resort spa towards my companion and I seemed cordial, reserved, even

faintly hostile. Indeed, the hotel had a less than hospitable reputation. Staff, wary of the

strankinja – the stranger, the foreigner – her intentions, and what she potentially knew of the

building’s history, followed that same uneasy tone. Our address was without warmth or welcome,

the replies to our queries were without detail, and the little attentions expected of a resort spa

were left wanting. Curt. Chary. Distant. Or, perhaps it was those persistent little rumours that

made our reception appear affected. Fragments of idle gossip held that wartime staff were still in

the hotel’s employ and soldiers who had once met at the spa for their military orders now met at

its kafana for coffee (woman activist, pers. comm., 26, Sept, 2011). In fact, it was difficult to

eschew the ever-present questions of what roles were played and by whom during the war; what

acts the receptionists may have witnessed, what violence the therapists may have abetted, what

transgressions the chef may have been part of, and the cleaning staff privy to. So persistent was

that dull sense of suspicion that we – both of us – instinctively sought to deflect even the most

banal and routine of interactions. The ordering of meals, the pouring of tea, the requests for

directions; all felt involuntarily strained and always intentionally brief – on both our behalves and

theirs. The reception barely thawed throughout the few days of our stay.

Nonetheless, we had agreed to the journey. Now, sitting gingerly on the very edge of the bed in

the little room, that history again seemed uncomfortably heavy; almost like another presence.

The bedroom’s austerity – bare, aside from two single beds, a table, and a chair – lent an even

more unnerving feel to the space. Wordlessly, both my companion and I scanned the room for

hints of wartime evidence that local rumour suggested had been overlooked in the light

refurbishment and hasty re-opening of the resort complex – bullet holes in the walls and window

frames, graffiti carved into the wooden bed heads, and furniture reading ‘Mladen ‘92’ and other

names, possibly of women victims and their accused (Bećirević, 2012). Nothing. The few

fragments of idle gossip our taxi driver had disclosed in conversation earlier only added more of a

sense of gravity to the room’s unspoken history. His revelation that the resort’s interior remained

almost unchanged since the early 1990s was a detail mentioned only in passing. Yet, the

awareness that the beds on which we would sleep were those self-same beds by which women

were handcuffed and the carpeted floor – threadbare in places – was that same floor across

which the boots of soldiers strode each night to select a next victim was so stiflingly present that

to use it felt disrespectful. The notion of the routine was acutely unsettling; unpacking our

suitcases, hanging our clothes in the closet, and placing our toiletries in the simple little ensuite

that was quite possibly where women had bathed their wounds and washed away blood stains

from the latest violation in the moments before they were once again tied to the bed frames.

Almost tentatively, my companion stood to break the reverie. Shrugging off her autumn jacket,

she reached forward to open the nearest wardrobe. The thin, grey etching carved into the cheap

7

interior of the door was jarring, despite it perhaps being the ‘evidence’ we were expecting to find

only moments earlier. The rudimentary drawing of a naked woman in the act of being raped by a

faceless man was still distastefully stark. Simple – prosaic, even – the etching in lead pencil

could easily have been scrawled anywhere, so few were the identifiable markings. No qualifying

text or any symbolic or ethnic signifiers accompanied the basic shapes. Had it been drawn

somewhere else, the etching may have raised no more than an eyebrow, a passing comment,

distasteful at most. Yet, the hastily outlined little figures were not drawn just anywhere, they were

here. A woman; her face registering shock, her legs spread, her vagina represented by a large,

open circle, and the ‘act’ of rape implied by a crudely-drawn and strategically-placed penis, was

here, inside the wardrobe door of a guestroom in the eastern Bosnian health spa of Vilina Vlas.

Perhaps the act depicted in the naive sample of graffiti was not one of rape. Perhaps it was

scrawled with a more pornographic intent. Perhaps it was a satirical attempt at challenging a

contentious wartime history or perhaps – even optimistically – it was envisaged as a

communication from one of the many victims; an attempt at leaving some form of lasting evidence

as to the nature of the crimes that took place in the small room barely two decades earlier.

The uneasiness produced by the rough little sketch had company for the keeping in the peeling

paint and thinning carpets of the old building. The space felt burdened by ‘hauntings’ – not

‘haunted’, per se – but ‘hauntings’ of an unspoken past. The spaces that Avery Gordon (1997: 8)

refers to as ‘dense site[s]’ were every place in the otherwise nondescript little room; interstices

where history and subjectivity vie between what was visible and what was simply just known. It

was not that the place was haunted; more that the physical edifice gave an unnervingly real

context to those few months of war history. The partial stories and quiet rumours found

materiality in the place of their making and it was difficult not to imagine another tacit presence in

the room. My companion and I could not glance at the bedframes without picturing the hands that

may once have been tied there. We could not see our own reflections in the bathroom mirror

without imagining the other faces it may once have seen in very different states. We could not

open the wardrobe doors without wondering if the shadows inside were once hiding places. And,

our bodies responded instinctively. Every movement felt like a quiet trespass. Every slight noise

sounded irreverent and out of place. Every angle in the room appeared sharper, every corner

darker with shadows, every object heavy with that always unspoken history. Every thought was

voiced in involuntary whispers as if there really were some ‘other’ in the room to overhear. There

was nowhere a sense of peace in the tired old building.

The old balcony door left slightly ajar barely lifted the atmosphere or cleansed the room of its

faintly musty odour. The red railings on the balcony ushered their own hauntings into the little

room through the slender crack in the door; more little fragments of hearsay and rumours, more

‘dense sites’. Few of the women victims in these stories have names or faces. Most remain

subsumed in the reported figures of one, two, three hundred victims, or under the pseudonyms of

‘Witness A, B, C’ (SUD BiH, 2008; SUD BiH, 2009). The story of Bosniak woman Jasmina

Ahmetspahić stands as one of a very few from Vilina Vlas with an identity. The then 24-year old

Jasmina was abducted in the early months of the war by local members of the Army of Republika

Srpska (VRS) from her hometown of Višegrad and driven those same seven kilometres through

the woods to the old hotel spa. Forcibly confined in any one of the little rooms, Jasmina was

8

repeatedly subjected to rape and sexual assaults. To witnesses she cowered, ‘… in a corner’

and, ‘… looked miserable’ (SUD BiH, 2009, 17). Jasmina ended her own life, her body thrown

over the red railings of one of the spa’s balconies and left for soldiers to dispose of anonymously

in the Drina River (SUD BIH, 2009). Eighteen years later, Jasmina’s remains have been

recovered in the catchment area of Lake Perućac alongside some 396 other sets of complete and

partial bodies belonging to an estimated 97 individuals, most from the Višegrad massacres

(Orlović, 2011: 105). Familiar with the story, I could not see the balcony or its old red railings

without seeing the woman, without wondering if it were from this room, if this were the place.

Figure 5: Vilina Vlas in Višegradska Banja on Vilinske Gore

9

Judith Okely (2007) writes on the embodiment of learning in the field; of knowledge absorbed

through the skin and sensed in the bones, of remembered observations and mnemonic triggers.

Simon Ottenberg (1990: 147), in a similar vein, refers to these multi-sensory ways of ‘knowing’ as

‘headnotes’, or as, ‘… puzzles felt in the bones and flesh …’ of the researcher. In the bland

spaces of Vilina Vlas – the cramped little bedrooms, the lengthened hallways, the darkened old

kafana, and musty-scented refectory – every sense and every nerve felt strained. The faint

awareness of another history, an unnerving past buried in the walls and hidden behind the doors,

was stifling; uncomfortably so. We, both of us, felt it as some intangible ‘other’ presence, as

restlessness in the body, as crawling sensations on the skin, as dread in the pit of the stomach. It

9 Photograph a (left): Graffiti etching in grey lead pencil of the rape of a woman discovered on the inner door of a

wardrobe in a guest room inside the health spa. Photo taken by author. Photograph b (right, upper): View of

Vilina Vlas from the walking paths behind the establishment. Photo courtesy of ‘BiH Tourism’ website:

http://www.visitmycountry.net/bosnia_herzegovina/bh/ Photograph c (right, lower): One of the guest rooms

inside Vilina Vlas. Photo taken by author.

This image has been removed by the author of

this dissertation for copyright reasons.

9

was history in a different guise; a corporeal response to that most inarticulate and aporetic of

relationships balancing what we see with what we know. It was telling, then, that our suitcases

remained fully packed and our shoes placed neatly by the door for the length of our stay, as if,

instinctively, we felt the space were already occupied. We were visitors, and perhaps unwelcome

ones, and that sense of having trespassed was difficult to escape in the end. After three nights of

broken sleep and anxious waking, my companion and I cancelled our final night at the old resort

spa and relocated the seven kilometres back to a little pansion in the centre of Višegrad.

The decision to leave was uncomplicated; the decision of ‘how’ to leave was less so. Carefully,

we debated what traces of our presence – if any at all – should remain behind in the room.

Should we depart as if it were any other room in any other hotel with bed sheets ruffled and

rubbish in the bins in a small act of defiance as if to reclaim the space by asserting that ‘we were

here and we knew’? Would that seem disrespectful by a different standard? Would it appear as

if we had used the place thoughtlessly? Casually? As though the hotel really were something

other than a memorial, or a gravesite, or a scene of mass atrocities? Should we, instead, depart

quietly, leaving behind no mark, no trace of our brief stay? Or, would that mirror too closely the

established pattern of post-war history making in the eastern corner of Bosnia; master narratives

marked by silence, denial, and the will to forget? Could our presence in the old spa – the foreign

researcher and the companion – be interpreted as silent acquiescence to the everyday state-of-

affairs; to local politics that marginalised victims and bowdlerised history? For no definable logic,

we – both of us – settled on the latter option and, like the very recent past and the women before

us, we removed all traces of our stay from the room. Wordlessly, my companion and I packed

our suitcases with a slight sense of relief and carefully re-made the beds, wiped clean the few

sparse amenities, and drew closed the curtains against the afternoon shadows. A final glance

around the room and the door closed quietly behind us, leaving the small space seemingly

undisturbed – as if we had never been there.

10

Introduction:

After Silence: War Rape, Trauma, and the Aesthetics

of Social Remembrance

‘… Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; its after image

imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera

obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their

souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation.’

Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides, 1986, 483

The narrative account of my brief sojourn to the old resort spa of Vilina Vlas encompasses much

of the tenuous and disorderly tangle of historical consciousness and collective memory that

everywhere accompanies the public representation of war rape in the post-conflict state of

Bosnia. The history of the tired old health spa on the southeastern mountain of Vilinske Gore

reflects the complexity of memory making in all its varied guises and multiple layers, especially in

relation to the ‘slippery’ (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2004, 1; Taussig, 1987) concept of sexual

violence. Indeed, Vilina Vlas is very much a part of a worn and wearied landscape with the

violence of the most recent conflict on Bosnian soil inscribed in its material spaces in both

remarkable and unremarkable ways. The rumours of military infractions and unmarked

gravesites, as well as the bullet holes spattered over restaurant walls, and the spray of shell

marks across pathways continue to serve as a resonant and living ‘memoryscape’ for those who

exist in and around these everyday spaces. Shared and individual memories of violence,

likewise, serve to animate the very cracks and fissures of this otherwise mundane place; the five

floors that once served as sites of detention and the public and private facilities that operated as

locations for irregular interrogations are now immutably troubled by stories of the past. The

multiple guest rooms that provided makeshift quarters for the execution of rape, torture, and

killings during the Bosnian war and the crude graffiti etched in grey pencil inside wardrobe doors

and ingrained on wooden bedheads, similarly, call upon the restless ‘ghosts’ of the many women

victims, ‘…who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told’ (Herman, 1992, 1).

Remembering Wartime Rape explores the messiness of this ‘memoryscape’ in Bosnia,

particularly where it concerns the complicated history of rape during the Bosnian war (1992-1995)

and the collective efforts of various local populations to (dis)remember the painful legacies of

violence over the more than two decades since the close of conflict. Indeed, the organised

sexual assaults of more than 20,000 women and girls was a defining characteristic in the history

of Bosnia’s bloody secession from the former Yugoslav federation and the memories of such

violence continue to influence the post-war recovery of communities throughout the small Balkan

state. The research on which this dissertation is based draws on intimate accounts of women’s

11

suffering throughout the four years of conflict as well as the personal stories of survival in the

afterlife of such violence, as articulated against a social context that ordinarily encourages the

suppression of rape narratives in both public and private spaces. Focusing on the discursive

processes through which such memories are selected, shaped, and institutionalised, the research

questions the ways in which women are represented or erased in the crafting of official histories

and the consequences of such for fostering social solidarity and division among those with

competing versions of the ‘truth’. In doing so, the study considers which elements of women’s

experiences of rape are more easily remembered and which are excluded or deliberately

‘forgotten’, which are grieved, and which are valorised, what complex reality is simplified as a

result, and what broader purpose these interpretations serve. Finally, the research turns to a

discussion of the importance of enhancing current methodologies to explore more thoroughly the

limits and the possibilities for both collective and personal mourning and for re-imagining social

worlds in the aftermath of an immense disruption such as war.

In exploring the ‘ghosts’ of rape victims who refuse to rest in their graves and the stories of

survivors whose voices sit uncomfortably in the complex workings of social memory, I refrain from

any attempt to establish a singular metanarrative of war rape or from reducing the myriad

complications and contradictions of survival into a catalogue of common psychosocial effects.

The research that follows, instead, seeks to evoke a sense of the ineffable experience of living

alongside memories of sexual violence in their countless manifestations and of the meanings and

creativity always inherent in both individual and collective approaches to suffering, survival, and

post-war reconstruction. Indeed, warfare is, as Margaret Mead (1964) has argued, ‘… only an

invention’, and the acts of violence that so define it are, likewise, cultural and social constructions

(Nordstrom & Robben, 1995). Violence, in this sense, is a complex and multidimensional

phenomenon with no fixed form; defining it is a highly contested domain and the many and varied

responses to it are as heterogeneous as the people and the populations who construct it,

negotiate it, shape it, employ it, suffer it, confront it, and resolve it (Moser & McIlwaine, 2004).

The dissertation that follows, then, provides a comparative analysis of the public construction of

memories of war rape in two specific communities in Bosnia, each of which develops from, and

responds to, the distinctive political, economic, religious, and social contexts particular to the

individual locales. The two ethnographic studies each follow a different dominant mnemonic

thread as they organically emerged during fieldwork around the respective histories of war rape in

the individual communities and their productive and creative redefinitions by local populations.

Where Memory and Politics Meet: Remembering Rape in Post-War Bosnia

The ‘traumascapes’ (Tumarkin, 2005) of Bosnia are certainly provocative places from which to

explore the public remembrance of rape following the most recent wars of Yugoslav succession.

Indeed, Bosnia is a place in which the layers of trauma and suffering are ‘thick’ and, ‘… the past

is still unfinished business’ (Tumarkin, 2005, 12). The thorny issues of ethnic division, corruption,

and the distortion of state politics have marked the post-war decades alongside widespread

poverty, destitution, and persistent social inequality. The matter of war rape remains an open

wound in this context; a site of active political struggle in which a diversity of ‘agents’ or

‘entrepreneurs’ (Pollak, 1993) of memory debate which ‘facts’ are worthy of remembrance and

12

what versions of the ‘truth’ are acceptable for the task of public mourning. The figure of the raped

woman has emerged as a particularly evocative victim identity in many such public discussions;

her vulnerable and helpless form repeatedly invoked as a metonym for the trauma of war and the

mass suffering of victim groups across various religious, nationalist, and ethno-political strata.

Her presence frequently represents a limit case, of sorts, for the violence of war and her

memories have often been summoned to serve as a symbolic marker representing the extent of

the bloodshed and the cruelty of the ethnic other during the Bosnian conflict. Certainly, as

Cynthia Enloe (1994, 228) has argued elsewhere, the complex politics that surround the practice

of rape in war do not come to a close at the moment of the conflict’s ending when, ‘… the guns

grow cold’ but, instead, the matter:

‘… may look different, less visible, less outrageous, but [the politics] still continue to play

themselves out. This is because the politics of rape do not end when the assault itself

ends; they do not end when the woman, if she has survived, manages to reach a safe

refuge. The politics of rape extend for as long as that woman sees herself in part as a

rape survivor, as long as others – friends, brothers, mothers, police officials, social

workers, nationalist politicians, lovers – see her through the lens of rape; they extend for as

long as the power relations between this woman and others are in any way shaped by their

respective ideas about men as rapists and women as potential and actual rape victims. In

these tricky postwar months and years some of those women who have suffered at the

hands of wartime rapists will be pressured to marry; others will be pressured to give up the

idea of marrying. After the war the politics of rape likely will be played out in such a way

that some women will be rewarded for staying silent; others, perhaps, will find themselves

in postwar situations in which they will be rewarded for telling their stories – or for telling

only sanitized versions of their full stories’.

The bitter memories of war rape certainly sit uncomfortably in the blighted landscape of Bosnia

and the politics of violence continue to shape practices, representations, and identities. Indeed,

the paradigmatic figure of the rape survivor has found unusually sustained form in the post-war

politicking of the small Balkan state, principally through public imagination and the mainstream

channels of survivor testimony, the attention of the global media, the international court system,

and other formal mechanisms designed to voice the crimes of the past in a public manner

(Skjelsbæk, 2012). In the legal realm, the troubling memories of women survivors from the

Bosnian war have been summoned to provide a rich historico-theoretical context for the

emergence of international criminal jurisprudence concerning sexual violence in conflict and the

protection of women’s human rights. The voices of those same survivors, moreover, have figured

prominently at certain key moments in the ongoing trials relating to the events of the former

Yugoslavia, and their words have contributed greatly to the growing demands for criminal

sanctions against states, militaries, and individuals who commit, encourage, or condone such

acts of violence in war (Askin, 2003). Rape, and other forms of sexual violence, have since been

explicitly characterised, codified, and tried as instruments of genocide, as war crimes, and as

crimes against humanity, in part, on the basis of the evidence and the testimonies of women

survivors. As Simon Chesterman (1997, 340) has argued, Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia

have been remarkable in that they have, ‘… given unprecedented prominence to the crime of

rape – both in the clear recognition of its status as a crime against humanity, and in the indictment

of men charged exclusively with crimes against women’.

13

The concerted effort to establish an international criminal prosecution system has, in turn,

generated widespread public sympathy for the survivors of war rape. Religious leadership

responded particularly early in the conflict with doctrinal guidance intended to facilitate the

acknowledgment, acceptance, and integration of women and children affected by rape (Daniel-

Wrabetz, 2007).10 Islamic authorities issued a series of decrees on the status and rights of

survivors under Sharia Law, most notably including the ‘Fatwa on Children Born by Raped

Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina’.11 Authored by the highest authority in Islamic thought, the

sheikh of Al-Azhar in Egypt, Ali D’adulhakk, the fatwa concluded that women survivors of the

Bosnian war should not be regarded as ‘unchaste’ as a result of rape.12 Employing the language

of heroism, the fatwa defined rape survivors as ‘martyrs’ or ‘heroines’ of Islam who had sacrificed

through the, ‘… loss of the most precious thing that they possess, which is their virginity’ (Lee,

2017, 159). The fatwa further ruled that abortion was permissible up until the fourth month of

gestation for women impregnated through rape and designated the community as responsible for

any children born to mothers who were unable to cope with the trauma of their birth (Omerdić,

2002). The Muslim cleric Derviš Ahmed Nuruddin, similarly, published an open letter entitled,

‘Message of the Raped Women’ in March of 1993, which specifically addressed men of the

religious community. The statement urged husbands of survivors to, ‘… be sufficiently strong and

to embrace their wives both in the literal and figurative sense of the word’. He further appealed to

unwed men:

‘… not to accept this tragedy as shortcomings of their future wives, because they were not

able to defend themselves from the violence committed against them – they were victims.

In other words, future husbands should feel proud to marry these girls in order to help them

overcome their life’s tragedy easier within the valid and honest Islamic marriage’.

(Cited in Oskam, 2009, 21)

10 The Catholic community in both Bosnia and Croatia responded in a similar manner, appealing to the general

public to find ‘solidarity’ with the survivors of war rape and embrace the traumatic consequences of these

‘barbarous acts of hatred and racism’ (Rittner, 2009, 299). In a controversial letter to the then-Archbishop Vinko

Puljić of Sarajevo dated 2 February 1993 and entitled, ‘Change Violence into Acceptance’, Pope John Paul II

called for the entire Catholic community to, ‘… be close to these women who have been so tragically offended

and to their families, in order to help them transform the act of violence into an act of love and acceptance’

(cited in Rittner, 2009, 299-300; Salzman, 1998, 369). While the terms ‘rape’ and ‘abortion’ were noticeably

absent from the Pope’s letter, his words nevertheless called for ‘understanding’ and support to assist women to

accept the lives growing within their wombs and transform their unborn children into, ‘flesh of their flesh’ by

carrying the pregnancies to term (Daniel-Wrabetz, 2007, 30). The letter further stated that, ‘… as the image of

God, these new creatures should be respected and loved no differently than any other member of the human

family … since the unborn child is in no way responsible for the disgraceful acts accomplished, he or she is

innocent and therefore cannot be treated as the aggressor’ (Daniel-Wrabetz, 2007, 30). As Carol Rittner (2009)

writes, the primary emphasis of the papal missive was neither the suffering of the women survivors nor the

actions of the perpetrators, but rather the life of any unborn children who might result from the violence of war.

11 Sharia law refers to a broad range of moral and ethical principles in the Islamic tradition that are drawn from the

teachings of the Qur’an and the practices and sayings (hadith) of the Prophet Mohammed. The principles are

interpreted and explained by recognised legal experts as specific juridical rulings and moral ordinances, which

then form part of Islamic law or ‘fiqh’ (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2017).

12 In the Islamic faith, a fatwa is a non-binding, but authoritative, legal opinion or learned interpretation on a point

of Islamic law offered by a recognised authority, including a mufti or qualified jurist (Oxford Dictionary, 2017).

14

The work of feminist and women’s activist organisations in the region in the decade following the

conflict shifted public opinion even further towards a greater compassion for survivors of war

rape, particularly within the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and throughout many Bosniak-

dominated areas in the Republika Srpska (Andrić-Ružičić, 2003). Indeed, an alliance formed

between several key women’s rights groups in early 2006 brought renewed visibility to the matter

of war rape and the continued suffering of survivors with the campaign, ‘Za Dostojanstvo

Preživjelih’, or, ‘For the Dignity of Survivors’.13 The campaign sought to bring about official

recognition of rape survivors as civilian victims of war, entitling women [and, where applicable,

men] to a small state pension, access to psychological and legal aid, health care provisions, and

other socio-economic benefits.14 An amendment to the ‘Law on Social Protection, Protection of

Civilian Victims of War and Protection of Families with Children’ was subsequently passed in the

spring of 2006 in the Federation to include survivors of rape and sexual violence as a special

category of victims eligible for welfare payments (Jones et al, 2012). 15 The reforms had

13 The provision of social assistance to civilians who suffered rape and sexual assault during the recent war has

had substantive influence on the manner in which many survivors experience and understand their position in

post-war Bosnia, both individually and collectively, and in productive and unproductive ways. A comprehensive

discussion of the material and symbolic consequences of the 2006 amendment to the ‘Law on Social Protection,

Protection of Civilian Victims of War and Protection of Families with Children’ is, however, beyond the scope of

this dissertation. For a detailed history of the ‘For the Dignity of Survivors’ campaign and the politics of its

implementation, see the following key publications:

1) Helms, Elissa. 2013. Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women’s Activism in Post-War

Bosnia. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.

2) Jenichen, Anne. 2010. Women and Peace in a Divided Society: Peace-Building Potentials of Feminist

Struggles and Reform Processes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Chandler, Robin M; Fuller, Linda K & Wang,

Lihua (Eds). Women, War, and Violence: Personal Perspectives and Global Activism. New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, pp 137-154.

3) Jones, Briony; Jeffrey, Alex; & Jakala, Michaelina. 2012. The ‘Transitional Citizen’: Civil Society, Political

Agency and Hopes for Transitional Justice in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Simić, Olivera & Volčič, Zala (Eds).

Transitional Justice and Civil Society in the Balkans. New York: Springer Science & Business Media.

14 The amended law currently entitles those who have been officially registered as civilian victims of war under the

special category of survivors of war rape and sexual violence to: ‘… a personal disability allowance or a

personal monthly allowance’ of 70 per cent of the maximum war veterans allowance of 550KM (513KM or

approximately US$335), in addition to, ‘… a supplement for aid and assistance by another person; an allowance

for orthopaedic supports; a family disability allowance; financial support for the cost of medical treatment and

purchase of orthopaedic supports; the right to professional training (skills and competencies training and

professional development); the right to worker employment priority; the right to housing priority; and the right to

psychological assistance and legal aid’ (ICMP et al., Guide for Civilian Victims of War, 2007).

15 Bosnia is comprised of two separate entities and one special administrative district, including the Federation of

Bosnia and Herzegovina (the ‘Federation’), the Republika Srpska (the ‘RS’), and the District of Brčko (see: the

sub-section, ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina: An Ethnographic Sketch’, in this introductory chapter for further details).

The inclusion of rape survivors under the laws protecting civilian victims of war is differently regulated under the

domestic criminal legislation throughout each of these three political divisions. Indeed, similar legislation has

existed in the Republika Srpska since 1993 that nominally includes survivors of war rape and sexual violence

within its purview. The ‘Law on Protection of Civilian Victims of War in Republika Srpska’ entitles survivors to a

small state pension where there is evidence of at least 60 per cent disability as a result of crimes committed

during war including abuse, rape, and/or psychological trauma, but only applies to those who submitted their

15

substantial material consequences for many women survivors and, even further, for their political

and social reintegration into Bosnia’s post-war society.16 Ustinia Dolgopol (1997) writes of the

significance of political recognition for the reintegration of survivors following grievous violations of

physical and mental integrity. Dolgopol suggests that the collective and individual sense of

belonging to a newly formed and recently peaceful nation state is a sentiment fostered only in a

context in which the needs of citizens have not been ignored by the government or delegated to

an international authority. As one woman camp survivor argued:

‘… we camp detainees, especially women who went through these things, should have

some privileges and some other things, have certain things secured – either medical

treatments or visits, have someone visit us in order for us to be able to unburden ourselves

from the sorrow we feel inside. First and foremost, the Bosnian government should take

care of us’.

(S.T., pers. comm., August, 2011)

applications for victim status prior to the statute of limitations on 31 January 2007 (Jones et al, 2012). In the

special District of Brčko, the ‘Decision on Civilian Victims of War’ has recognised survivors of rape and sexual

violence as a special category of victim since 2012. Unlike the laws of the Republika Srpska, the criminal

legislation covering the Brčko District does not require survivors to provide evidence of 60 per cent physical

disability or psychological damage (Husić et al, 2014).

16 The benefits deriving from the passage of legal amendments expanding the framework for the protection of

civilian victims of war have been somewhat inconsistent and, at times, contradictory for survivors of rape in

Bosnia. While formal access to the unique status of ‘civilian victim of war’ and the welfare benefits it implies has

had certain symbolic implications for the social acknowledgment of rape survivors in post-war Bosnia, the

practical consequences have been more variable. Indeed, Sabiha Husić et al (2014, 41) write that over the

eight-year period between the implementation of the amendment in 2006 and their research on coping

strategies among war rape survivors in 2013, a mere 779 women have succeeded in attaining the status of

‘civilian victim of war’ in the Federation. Statistics on the number of rape survivors receiving welfare assistance

in the Republika Srpska and in the District of Brčko remain unknown. The social welfare payments to those who

have qualified for assistance, moreover, have been irregular and the state government in the Federation has a

growing debt towards its established beneficiaries, many of whom depend on the remittances as their sole

source of income (Jones et al, 2012).

The logistical barriers that disrupt the process of qualifying for and receiving social assistance as a rape survivor

are manifold. Indeed, the application procedures for the special status of ‘civilian victim of war’ in the Federation

have been beleaguered by repeated rumours of political manipulation, a lack of transparency, personal

coercion, and financial exaction since the very outset. The process requires that survivors provide the Centre

for Social Work [or relevant municipal office for social protection services] with identification documents, medical

records, and a certificate issued by a recognised local organisation confirming the veracity of their claims to the

status of rape victim (Husić et al, 2014). The latter requirement has been effectively managed by a single

organisation, Žene Žrtve Rata (ŽŽR), or Women Victims of War, in Sarajevo, since the passing of the

amendments in 2006. Survivors have frequently reported pressure from the president of ŽŽR, Bakira Hašečić,

to speak publicly about their experiences and stand as witnesses in war crimes trials in exchange for

certification, while other rumours persist to the extent that certificates were obtainable on payment of large sums

of money to the staff of ŽŽR (Amnesty International, 2009; Mischkowski & Milinarević, 2009; Jones et al, 2012;

Helms, 2013). The discriminatory practices in the application procedures may have excluded many survivors of

sexual violence from the social benefits attached to the special status of a civilian victim of war and discouraged

many more from even applying for it.

16

The history of rape in post-war Bosnia has, in this sense, amassed a, ‘… certain weight of

historical images and representations’ (Nora, 1997, ix), which has created new spaces for women

survivors in Bosnia to name and make sense of their trauma. Indeed, Inger Skjelsbæk (2006b)

argues that the religious and political interventions made on behalf of rape survivors have

produced powerful interpretive repertoires through which women might understand and articulate

their wartime experiences in familial, communal, and state-level discourses. The

conceptualisation of rape survivors as heroines and their trauma as partially commensurate with

that of war veterans, in particular, has removed some measure of the social stigma commonly

ascribed to experiences of sexual violence. Elissa Helms (2013, 198) writes to this effect that, ‘…

[a]s a group, women rape survivors were mostly spared the moral suspicions often cast upon

victims of ‘normal, everyday’ rape and many people professed sympathy for the victims when the

subject was raised’. Accounts of husbands embracing their wives and communities exercising

protection over survivors have challenged even further the familiar perception that women almost

invariably face censure and isolation if the knowledge of their wartime experiences becomes

public (Brownmiller, 1994; MacKinnon, 1994; Seifert, 1994; Allen, 1996; Card, 1996). Certain

women have sought to engage actively with the new discursive spaces that this politicisation of

rape has produced, establishing public identities as rape survivors and using their voices to shape

the social character of knowledge on the subject. Others have more readily accepted the sense

of obscurity that the presence of these figures in the public sphere seems to afford them and

willingly consented to the collective representation of a ‘Bosnian rape story’.

Bosnia, however, is a place of extremes, and the new modes of expression and the sense of

protection they yield have reflected unevenly across different areas of the state. Indeed, as Srila

Roy (2012) has suggested elsewhere, the alternative discourses and culturally available

frameworks for narrating personal accounts of rape survival each still impose their own particular

silences. The language of public acknowledgement, in all its many forms, validates only certain

types of stories and experiences, ‘… while marginalising or rendering unspeakable others’

(Redman, 1999, 312). Veena Das (2007), too, draws attention to the weakness of language for

conceptualising violence, particularly of a sexual nature, and to the frequent impotence of the

spoken word for capturing the ‘inexpressibility’ of pain. Das (2007, 8) writes of the ‘voicelessness’

of the survivor; when the words one chooses to convey an impression of violence witnessed or

violence endured become ‘frozen, numb, without life’. The language employed to construct

stories of survival often lapses into rhetorical speech patterns that serve to elide especially

distressing experiences through strategically imposed silences, pauses, denials, secrecy, and

embodied gestures. Other survivors retreat into highly metaphoric depictions of traumatic events

that possess a distinctly rehearsed and distant quality to them and, even more again, choose

silence as a strategy for memory work, intentionally withdrawing their voices so as to protect

themselves and their stories from public scrutiny (Das & Kleinman, 2001). Das (2007, 6) argues

that neither these frequent failures in speech, nor the especially stylised narratives particular to

rape trauma, can ever fully encapsulate the many subtle complexities involved in first surviving a

brutal encounter with violence and then piecing together the fragments left behind to continue to,

‘… live on in the very place of devastation’.

17

The claims to rape victimhood are, thus, just as constraining as they are compelling. The

totalising narrative of war rape often contains silences that function to limit, distort, or suppress

the complexity of women’s experiences in public narrative. The common language of victimhood

renders only certain stories ‘tellable’ (Plummer, 1995, 58), while marginalising, obscuring, and

denying other experiences that fail to conform to accepted interpretations of the past or that seem

unpalatable or too complex. As Rose Lindsey (2002, 63) argues, ‘… the testimony of the

informant is cut off and edited, out of context, and thus only partial, so that the voice of the

survivor is never entirely heard’. In the 1996 documentary Prozivanje Duhova, or Calling the

Ghosts, one of the more public survivors in Bosnia, Nusreta Sivac, articulates her own discomfort

with the rawness of the term ‘raped women’ as an identifier and the restrictions that such an

attributive places on the narration of experience. A former civil judge in the Municipality Court of

Prijedor, Sivac was one of 37 women prisoners held in the Serb-run concentration camp in the

mining town of Omarska in the north western region of the country. Speaking in response to the

use among international media of the well-worn phrase, ‘… any women here who were raped and

speak English?’, Sivac states, ‘… as if one could divide between those who were raped and those

who weren’t! … Generally, it bothers me when someone says, “raped women” … [instead say],

“abused women”, “women victims of war”; find some other appropriate term. But, “raped women”;

that hurts a person; to be marked as a raped woman as if you had no other characteristic, as if

that were your sole identity’ (Jacobson et al, Calling the Ghosts, 1996).

Stigma of this nature remains the most prevalent schema through which war rape survivors are

routinely conceptualised, in spite of the unexpected support from religious and political

leadership. Susan Harris Rimmer (2010, 124) suggests that the troubling imputation proceeds

from an, ‘… unwarranted or misunderstood association with prostitution, which is deeply

stigmatized …’. Indeed, rape during the Bosnian war produced various, contradictory and,

oftentimes, adverse responses. Individual women frequently reported different forms and varying

levels of suspicion, stigma, and exclusion from within the intimate boundaries of their own familial

and community relationships (Stiglmayer, 1994; Salzman, 1998; Fisher, 1996). Many

experienced social ostracism as a result of the shame associated with sexual assaults; others

suffered recriminations, divorce, and the threat of further violence from embittered husbands and

fathers and, more again, were perceived as ‘tainted’ for marriage and unworthy to bear the next

generation (Salzman, 1998; Hansen, 2001). Joshua Goldstein (2001, 365) argues that societal

shame of this nature commonly engenders some form of self-castigation given that survivors of

rape are often, ‘… connected with cultural traditions in which family honor is stained by any

violation of sexual property norms’ (original emphasis). In explaining her neighbour’s reluctance

to disclose her own rape at the hands of soldiers from the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) during

the war in the city of Mostar, one female witness remembered the ways in which silence shaped

relationships, ‘… she [her neighbour] said, “I was afraid to tell you because of my husband and

children”. She was probably afraid because of the way she was raised and of how her husband

and children would react. She said to me, “… we were raised in the wrong way. How could I face

everyone if I said something like that?”’ (Field Notes, Prosecutor vs. Velibor Bogdanović,

Sarajevo War Crimes Chamber, 15 February 2011).

18

The act of rape certainly casts a long shadow over the virtue of women survivors and their claims

to victimhood. As Kjersti Ericsson (2011, 73) writes, in contradistinction to Helms’ (2013) findings,

‘… not even war victims in Bosnia-Herzegovina could escape the suspicion that they might have

been implicated in their own violation’. Indeed, my own passing encounter with security

personnel in Bratunac in the Republika Srpska exposed the deep internalisation of damaging

myths and stereotypes particularly concerning sexual violence. In a casual conversation, one of

several Bosnian Serb police officers described his understanding of an authentic victim subject of

rape. Formerly part of the sexual crimes squad in Banja Luka, the officer maintained that

assessing the veracity of any allegation of rape was a relatively ‘easy’ task if one based the

evaluation on the logic implicit in any given story. The officer stated that a young woman alleging

that she had attended a party during which she was seized by a strange man or men, dragged

into nearby bushes, and assaulted could reasonably be trusted as having submitted a truthful

claim. She is innocent, legitimate, and deserving, given that her youth and her sexual appeal

made her easy prey for men whose inhibitions were lowered under the influence of alcohol. An

elderly grandmother living alone, by contrast, could scarcely be taken at her word when claiming

that the young man whom she had hired to tend to her garden had raped her in her home. The

old woman, isolated and past her sexual prime, had more than likely offered herself to the young

man out of loneliness and had later felt angry, bitter, and resentful at his rejection of her.

Nicholas Argenti and Katharina Schramm (2012, 21) observe, in this respect, that, ‘… one cannot

speak of a straightforward or linear narrative of violence’. Memories of traumatic pasts and brutal

histories are, instead, organised in a myriad of complicated ways; they are told and heard and

known and felt through material traces as much as by way of incorporeal knowledge – secrets,

rumours, hauntings, happenings, and the uncanny sense of déjà vu. The traces of Bosnia’s dark

local history with war rape – or ratnog silovanja – from the most recent conflict and, even more,

from the bloodshed of World War II can, thus, be found everywhere throughout the small Balkan

state in both expected and unexpected locations. The memories of such violence – even where

repressed or denied – remain raw and sometimes distorted, but hardly entirely silenced. Indeed,

as Veena Das (2006, 1) has argued, memories of violence are far from interruptions of the

ordinary; they are, rather, ‘folded’ into the everyday, woven into the routines of social

relationships, and a part of newly imagined cultural worlds. Degung Santikarma and Leslie Dwyer

(2000), similarly, write that, ‘… [t]he past, or historical memory, is not just a matter of active,

intentional remembering or forgetting. The past soaks into the ground of the present, saturating it

with meaning and shifting the landscape with its cultural and emotional weight. It can be buried or

even burned, but its ashes change the composition of the soil’. In this sense, the ways in which

people engage with a violent past and their implications for the present are certainly multiform,

and the moments of silence in this memory work have as much of an ‘affecting presence’

(Hetherington, 2004, 159) as verbal recollections in the complicated social world of post-war

Bosnia.

The old resort spa of Vilina Vlas was certainly one of the many overlapping and intersecting

traumascapes in which local wartime history had been translated through diverse measures and

means. The stories of mass rape and sexual enslavement that haunt the tired old building are

known by most and, at the same time, knowingly not known by just as many. My own research

19

trip to Vilina Vlas was part of a general ethnographic undertaking to understand the ‘postscripts’

or the ‘afterlives’ of these sites of atrocity. I had followed the loose threads of public narratives

about ‘rape camps’ and ‘military brothels’ along the seven-kilometre route to the old health spa in

the mountains above Višegrad. Fragments of the grim history of Vilina Vlas have been variously

documented in the ICTY court records, in the work of humanitarian agencies, and in popular

media, both local and global. The resort spa’s dark past equally exists in the more elusory forms

of rumours, insinuations, and anecdotal asides. In unravelling the narrative strands in preparation

for my field visit, I had developed a mild sense of apprehension, one that presented most vividly

as a persistent, gnawing sensation in the pit of my stomach and which was sharpened only

further by the faintly hostile reception from hotel staff on arrival. Exploring the guest facilities did

little to allay the troubling mood. The restaurant with its rumours of bullet marks in the walls, the

Turkish bathhouse with its lauded curative functions, and the little walking track leading to the

nearby Orthodox church of St Jovan all felt steeped in wartime history. It was the therapy pool,

however, that was most deeply jarring.

My own body stiffened inadvertently and almost immediately at the entrance to the indoor facility.

One of the many narrative threads that had influenced the course of my research in the direction

of Vilina Vlas was the second-hand anecdotal account of a woman survivor’s return to the resort

spa several years after the close of conflict and her visceral response to her initial sighting of the

thermal water pool. The woman had recounted her arrest and imprisonment at the hotel as she

walked through the rooms and down the hallways but had become suddenly and visibly

distressed when the first glimpse of the pool triggered intimate memories of the rapes that had

taken place there at the hands of several soldiers.17 In recalling the woman’s story, the humid

atmosphere inside the facility felt suddenly oppressive and I recoiled instantly from the light film of

moisture that appeared on the surface of my skin as I stood quietly to the side of the pool

observing a small group of convalescing guests in a hydrotherapy session. Derek Hook (2005)

introduces the provocative concept of a ‘subjectivity of place’ to explain the existence of such

lived, affective, and sensory experiences. Hook, drawing on Sigmund Freud’s (1919) notion of

the ‘uncanny’, argues that such disturbing resonances in situ are a function of the intersubjectivity

of the individual political actor and her or his own intimate and deeply personalised engagement

with the imagined consciousness of a place. The quickenings described by survivors at places

marked by their own trauma and the moments of ontological dissonance occasionally felt by

myself as researcher at these same sites of atrocity represent a ‘dialogue of identification’

17 The woman survivor’s personal memories of imprisonment and rape at Vilina Vlas during the war were originally

disclosed to a former journalist at the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) in Bosnia. The journalist

had accompanied the woman through the resort spa facility as she recounted her personal wartime memories of

suffering and survival as part of the background research for a special report on the social, economic, and legal

plight of rape victims in the south-eastern region of Bosnia. The journalist later recounted the experience of

escorting the woman through Vilina Vlas in a conversation with me, making particular note of the woman’s

response to her first sighting of the pool.

For a background report on Vilina Vlas, see: Ahmetsević, Niđzara; Jelačić, Nerma; and Boračić, Selma. 2006.

Investigation: Višegrad rape victims say their cries go unheard. BIRN Justice Report, 18 October, 2006.

Available at: http://www.justice-report.com/en/articles/investigation-visegrad-rape-victimes-say-their-crie-go-

unherd

20

between subject and site and point to the creative capacities of individuals as interpreters of the

past.

The unsettled spaces of Vilina Vlas readily arouse a dialogue of identification between the

individual political actor and the imagined consciousness of the place. The sense of uncanniness

– however cursory or easily overlooked, however imagined or instinctual – reflect the dynamic

and multi-sensory process of ‘re-membering’ (Bartlett, 1932) a traumatic past. Indeed, the

process of memory making is not the mere temporal organisation of historical episodes in

narrative form; it does not resemble, to borrow from Walter Benjamin (1969 [1940], 263), ‘…

telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary’. The (re)construction of memories is,

rather, a lived process of meaning making from the present position of ‘now, here’ (Bartlett, 1932),

and is influenced by a plurality of public and private narratives, by that which is known and that

which is silenced, and by the ‘ghosts’ that are understood to occupy the otherwise inanimate

spaces that constitute landscapes of violence (Bell, 1997). The unnamed woman’s story of

suffering and survival at Vilina Vlas was certainly part of my own psychic involvement with the old

resort spa and its sobering history. In meditating on her wartime history as I stood by the edge of

the pool, I felt an instinctive and urgent need to scrub the moisture from the surface of my skin

before the tiny beads seeped any further into my pores, to clean that first sweaty layer until the

earthy redolence of the pool’s thermo-mineral waters no longer intruded so sharply on the

senses. The moment was sudden and intensely unnerving. It was highly subjective, highly

specific, and highly irreplicable, and it existed, at the same time, alongside the public knowledge

of the site and the rumours of its wartime history.18

18 The personal account of my experience with affective interpellation, or with a sense of the ‘uncanny’, as I stood

beside the therapy pool at Vilina Vlas is a compelling illustration of the confluence of visual, textual, and oral

representations and their influence on the creative (re)production of memories. I recognise, however, that the

inclusion of an auto-ethnographical narrative of this nature might raise concerning questions regarding personal

subjectivity and countertransference, or the over-identification with victims and survivors. In incorporating my

own ‘remembered impression[s]’ (Clifford, 1990, 64) as part of this dissertation, I follow Simon Ottenberg’s

(1990) claim that ethnography is a product of both fieldnotes and ‘headnotes’ and each respective mode of

recording experiences is valuable, interdependent, and mutually reinforcing.

My personal experience recalling one unnamed woman’s story of rape survival at Vilina Vlas was an especially

visceral ‘headnote’ in my own field research and remains a significant impression for certain reasons.

Researching sexual violence within an ethnographic framework is a weighty and formidable endeavour,

particularly where the enormity of the events is such that they threaten normative reality for the survivors and

unsettle the very foundations of both self and social existence. The work demands considerable physical and

emotional endurance on the part of the researcher, as well as the researched, and requires the development of

robust self-preservation strategies that allow one to respond to traumatic narratives with empathy whilst

maintaining appropriate emotional distance and composure.

The ‘moments of discomposure’ (Dawson, 1994) during fieldwork were rare, when the emotional force of an

event unexpectedly intruded on the present and ruptured my own conscientious strategies of self-care. In that

moment beside the therapy pool at Vilina Vlas, the sense of abhorrence at the building’s wartime history merged

with my own confusion of guilt and complicity in maintaining the silence to render the woman’s reported memory

with an immediate feeling of tangibility. Mahua Sarkar (2012, 593) writes that these discordant moments, ‘…

represent particularly fecund points that afford a glimpse of the uneasy relations between private reminiscences

and public discourse or official histories and between recollection and narration’. In critically working through

21

The brief moment of subjective ‘discomposure’ (Summerfield, 1998; Dawson, 1994; Thomson,

1994) beside the pool at Vilina Vlas points to the myriad of fragmented communicative influences

that structure memories of trauma, both spoken and unspoken. In exploring some of these

complex imbrications, this dissertation seeks to question the trope of ‘unspeakable atrocities’

(Blanchot, 1986; Friedlander, 1992) and to disrupt the pervasive assumption that the voices of

survivors ‘run dry’ when confronted with the limits of the spoken word (Virginia Woolf, cited in

Scarry, 1985, 4). Dominant scholarly and popular representations commonly depict war rape as

‘history’s greatest silence’ (Eriksson, 2010, 3). The lived experience is often conceptualised as a

traumatic encounter situated somewhere beyond words – inexplicable, inexpressible, and

unspeakable (Caruth, 1996). Certainly, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (2004, 1)

interpret rape as a form of ‘social death’, as a many-sided assault on the body, personhood,

dignity, and worth of survivors who, ‘… often become living-dead people, refusing to speak of the

unspeakable’. Monique Gasengayire (2005, 143-5), likewise, has referred to the conceptual

dissonance between trauma and language as ‘un témoignage (im)possible’, or as ‘an (im)possible

testimony’. The sporadic remnants, fragments, and splinters of speech that so characterise

testimonies of suffering are regularly interspersed with silences that reflect the ‘incapacity’ of

those who have survived to articulate their stories publicly and with any genuine sense of

narrative coherence or logical succession (Herman, 1992). Traumatic memory, then, is often

discursively framed as a mode of ‘unfinished mourning’ (Dasberg, 1992, 45) in which the grief and

sorrow that follow the event resist representation in language and manifest, instead, in unspoken,

intersubjective, embodied, and material forms.

Remembering Wartime Rape departs from commonplace assumptions that suggest the

prevalence of an historical silence and accept as inevitable the idea that rape trauma and

language are irreconcilable (Scarry, 1985). In navigating such a challenging terrain, I argue

alongside other feminist scholars who reason against existing perceptions that rape survivors are

unable or unwilling to express themselves adequately within normative verbal frameworks and

contend, instead, that existing theoretical paradigms are often insufficient for the project of

reading and interpreting the ‘messiness’ of gendered memories of war (DeVault, 1999, 78; Henry,

2010; McKenzie-Mohr & Lafrance, 2011; Klungel, 2012; Theidon, 2015). I further emphasise the

need for an extension of existing explanatory frameworks that are capable of attending to silence

as a ‘frame of narration’ (Attarian, 2016), of listening around and beyond words, and of focusing

on the incompletely articulated aspects of women’s wartime experiences to reveal fuller and more

complex meanings. As Marjorie DeVault (1990, 97) has argued, the project of attending to

‘submerged stories’ and of inviting their telling requires particular attention to the ways in which

women ‘translate’ their experiences, express ‘things that are not quite right’, and employ

‘language in non-standard ways’. Over the chapters that follow, I draw on two key concepts to

interpret the public discourse surrounding the conflict in Bosnia and the parallel presence of

this particular headnote and its relationship to memory making, the personal experience of responding to one

woman’s story through the body and via the senses shifted from an example of potential ‘vicarious trauma’ or

‘compassion fatigue’ to one of ‘empathetic unsettlement’ (LaCapra, 2001) in which I could still bear witness to

the traumatic narratives of rape survival while continuing to maintain distance and perspective on the disturbing,

unfinished elements of survivor stories.

22

‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott, 1990) in the everyday life worlds of women survivors of war rape.

Public memories and the narratives of resistance in communities across Bosnia are specifically

explored through the notional frames of public secrecy (Taussig, 1999) in the village of Selo and

the grey zone (Levi, 1989) in the town of Gradić.

Situating the Study: Fieldwork Locations

The following dissertation takes a multi-sited (Marcus, 1995) ethnographic approach with a focus

on polymorphous engagement (Guterson, 1997) to the study of collective memory and the recent

history of war rape in Bosnia. Data collection was conducted over multiple sites of observation

and participation, including the two key case study locations of Selo and Gradić in the Republika

Srpska where my relationships with informants developed most thoroughly and the memories of

war rape emerged naturally. General research was also regularly undertaken in several other

cities and towns, typically with local political, advocacy, legal, and psychosocial organisations

concerned with the issue of wartime rape. In other locations, again, data was obtained through

attendance at various memorial and ancillary events related to the war and its aftermath, mostly

in the capacity of participant observer. I refer to each of these subsidiary locations throughout the

dissertation, both directly through fieldwork stories and interview material and indirectly through

the contributions that each place made to my general understanding of the history of wartime

rape in the region. The additional locations included the state capital of Sarajevo, and the towns

of Srebrenica, Foča, and Višegrad in the Republika Srpska, the cities of Tuzla and Zenica in the

Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the special neutral District of Brčko.19 Following

George E. Marcus (1995), the practice of extending the scope of data collection across multiple

and dispersed field locations recognises memories of war rape as complex objects of study that

cross over, and are influenced by, diffuse temporal, spatial, and socio-political realities. The

following sub-section provides a brief ethnographic overview of the Bosnian state and the two key

fieldwork locations of Selo and Gradić, outlining the ethno-historical, socio-economic, and

demographic characteristics under which war rape memories are constructed, performed, and

circulated.

Bosnia and Herzegovina: An Ethnographic Sketch

Bosnia and Herzegovina is one of several small sovereign states to emerge from the collapse of

the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in the 1990s (see figures 1, 2, 3, and 4).20

The tiny country occupies a territory of little more than 51,129 kilometres squared (Nurković &

Mirić, 2006). Nevertheless, it also lays claim to some of the more politically complex and fragile

borders in the western Balkans, certainly relative to its small size. Indeed, Bosnia is currently

comprised of six layers of borders; all of which represent tenuous combinations of history, politics,

patriotism, and geography, and all of which weigh heavily on the nature of ethnic division and

19 The town of Brčko in northern Bosnia is the only officially recognised multi-ethnic community in the country and

operates as a neutral, self-governing district with the stated purpose of realising political and social integration of

the three constituent national groups (Moore, 2013).

20 Refer to Chapter II for a brief synopsis of the demise of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY)

and the war on Bosnian soil.

23

post-war reconstruction (Burg & Shoup, 1999).21 The country inherited its external perimeters

from the multi-ethnic former Yugoslav republic; positioned, as it is, uneasily, between the

Republic of Croatia to the north and west and Serbia and Montenegro to the south and east.

Internally, Bosnia’s main provincial boundaries result directly from the contentious peace

negotiations of the mid-1990s, which effectively partitioned the state into two discrete ethno-

territorial entities separated by an internal ‘inter-entity boundary line’ (IEBL) and a third multi-

ethnic district. The ‘Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina’ (the ‘Federation’ or ‘FBiH’), and the

‘Republika Srpska’ (the ‘RS’), as they are entitled, were established by the 1994 Washington

Agreement and the 1995 Dayton Peace negotiations, providing 51 and 49 per cent of state

territory respectively to each autonomous province. The later-established District of Brčko on a

disputed portion of the IEBL is formally part of both BiH entities but operates as a neutral, self-

governing administrative unit currently under the international supervision of the Office of the High

Representative (OHR) (Waters, 2004).

The demographic composition of the Bosnian state is as complicated and politically sensitive as

its multi-layered system of borders. Bosnia is easily the most diverse of the former Yugoslav

republics. The small state is, even now, regularly referred to as a Yugoslavia in ‘miniature’ and as

a ‘metonym’ for the multi-national, multi-ethnic, and multi-confessional former socialist federation

(Rogel, 1998; Burić, 2010). Bosnia is composed of neither a titular national group, nor a majority

religious community. In the early 1990s, the country accommodated a population of little more

than 4.3 million of whom 43.7 per cent identified as Muslim, 31.3 per cent as Serb, and 17.3 per

cent as Croat. The remaining minority population of 7.7 per cent identified as Yugoslav, Roma,

Jewish, or of other ethnic descent (Snyder et al, 2006, 184).22 The legacies of such a complex

21 The six layers of borders that comprise the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina are: (1) International border of the

federal state; (2) International and internal borders of the District of Brčko; (3) Inter-Entity Border Line (IEBL)

separating the Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina; (4) Provincial borders within

the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (cantonal division); (5) Provincial borders within the Republika

Srpska (regional division); and (6) Borders of municipalities in both autonomous entities of the states (Burg &

Shoup, 1999).

22 The current demographic ‘mosaic’ within Bosnia remains unclear. The first official post-war census was

undertaken in late 2013 as part of the country’s longer-term aspirations for European Union membership. A

conclusive portrait of the country’s present boundaries and ethnic distributions has yet to be finalised and

released. Indeed, the census preparations, discharge, and enumeration have been politically charged and, at

each stage, concerned with the likely reinvigoration of debates regarding ethnic cleansing and arguments for

national self-determination and eventual secession throughout Bosnia (Perry, 2013). Preliminary data released

in early 2014, however, has pre-emptively confirmed the commonly held post-war consensus on demographics.

The wartime practice of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and the complex internal boundaries produced through the Dayton

Peace Agreement (DPA) reorganised the formerly multi-ethnic republic into a landscape now sharply divided

along ethno-territorial lines (KIPRED, 2014). At present, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the

Republika Srpska are effectively recognised as ethnically homogenous statelets, despite the central right of the

displaced to return to their pre-war homes as preserved in Annex VII of the DPA (Dahlman & Ó Tuathail, 2005).

Indeed, Bosniak and Croat communities accounted for a mere 2.19 per cent and 1.02 per cent of the estimated

1,437,000 resident in the Republika Srpska immediately after the war. The distribution of the Serb community

concomitantly increased from 54.3 per cent to 96.79 per cent in those same areas during the seven years

between 1991 and 1997 (ICG, 2011, 1). Every indication suggests that the regions now enclosed within the

24

and syncretic heritage are evident in the diverse architecture of Baščaršija, the old commercial

district of Sarajevo. The Ottoman-built central mahala (quarter) is distinguished by a most

unusual concentration of national, ethnic, and confessional traditions in the old market squares

and cobbled laneways. Indeed, until the latter half of the twentieth century, Sarajevo remained

the only European city of significance to host the architecture of four major monotheistic faiths

within intimate proximity of the city walls (Malcolm, 2002). The neo-Gothic spires of the Roman

Catholic cathedral have coexisted for centuries a mere stone’s throw from the baroque-style

cupolas of the nineteenth century Orthodox cathedral, and the minarets of the Ottoman-built

mosques have survived in the same neighbourhood alongside the stone façade of the old Jewish

synagogue. Certainly, Baščaršija has long been referred to, affectionately and informally, as the

‘Jerusalem of Europe’ for its multiplicity of competing, coexisting, and intertwined histories

(Markowitz, 2010).

Figure 6: Four major religious sites of worship in Baščaršija

23

boundaries of the Federation experienced comparable demographic changes over a similar period. Census

data from 1991 indicated that the area then was occupied by a population comprised of 52.3 per cent Muslim,

21.9 per cent Croat, 17.6 per cent Serb, 5.9 per cent Yugoslav, and 2.3 per cent ‘Other’. Estimates in 2010

suggest the Bosniak population now constitutes more than 70 per cent of the Federation’s 2.7 million

inhabitants, while Croats and Serbs account for around 25 per cent and 1-2 per cent respectively (ICG, 2010,

1).

23 Photograph a (left): The largest historical mosque and Ottoman-style complex in Bosnia and the main

congregational džamija (mosque) in Sarajevo, the ‘Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque’ located in Baščaršija. Photo

taken by author. Photograph b (centre upper): The largest cathedral in Bosnia and the centre for Catholic

worship in Sarajevo, the ‘Katedrala Srca Isusova’ (‘Jesus’ Sacred Heart Cathedral’), or ‘Sarajevska Katedrala’

(‘Sarajevo Cathedral’), located in Baščaršija. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Photograph c (centre

lower): The first Sephardi temple in Bosnia, and now the Jewish Museum of Bosnia, the ‘Stari Hram’, or ‘Old

Synagogue’ located in Baščaršija. Photo courtesy of Muzej Sarajeva. Photograph d (right): The largest Serbian

Orthodox Church in Sarajevo and one of the largest in the Balkans, the ‘Saborna Crkva Rođenja Presvete

Bogorodice’ (‘Cathedral Church of the Nativity of the Theotokos’) located in Baščaršija Photo taken by author.

These two images have been

removed by the author of this

dissertation for copyright

purposes.

25

Bosnia’s demographic mosaic has a long, complicated, and contested history. As Charles Ingrao

(2013, 4) has observed, any discussion of the recent war, of territorial arrangements, and

cartographic aspirations in the small Balkan state can be traced back as far as 1389 or, even

further, to the medieval lineage of people in the region.24 Bosnia has historically been positioned,

centrally and precariously, across some of the principal ideological and political divides on the

European continent and it has gained immensely and suffered exceedingly for its geographic

position at such a restless byroad (Bringa, 1995). Over more than five centuries, Bosnia has

belonged to the Ottoman Empire (1463-1878), the Austrian Habsburg monarchy (1878-1918),

and two incarnations of Balkan federated states; the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes

(1918-1941), later renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929, and the Socialist Federal

Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) (1945-1992). By the end of the nineteenth century, Bosnia had

straddled the Byzantine and the Roman worlds, Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, the

Turkish and Danubian imperial powers, and two Cold War blocs in Europe (Donia & Fine, 1994).

Bosnia, as a consequence, has nurtured a distinct culture and a pluralistic national identity that

reconciles the diverse and sometimes divisive qualities of its many peoples and its different

historical influences. Bosnians themselves speak of a common ethos of tolerancija (tolerance)

and harmonija (harmony) particular to the region, only interrupted by the sudden onset of conflict

during World War II and the Bosnian war in the mid-1990s. Bosniaks often recall painting hard-

boiled eggs with Serb Orthodox children during Easter celebrations, and delivering meat and

sweets to those same Christian neighbours on the Islamic religious holidays of Ramadan and

Kurban Bajram (pers. comm., [various], 2011, 2012).

Bosnia is, indeed, ‘… distinctive without being exceptional’ (Toal & Dahlman, 2011, 48). The tiny

country certainly held particular significance for the more than six decades-long project of creating

a viable, multiethnic Yugoslavia, or ‘Land of the South Slavs’ (Donia & Fine, 1994; Bringa, 2004;

Burić, 2010). Of the six federated states and two provinces that comprised Yugoslavia, Bosnia

represented the only true multiethnic country without a singular titular national majority. 25

Geographically positioned between the two powerful nationalising projects of Serbia and Croatia,

the small polity served as a gauge, of sorts, to measure the state of ethno-religious allegiances,

nationalist tensions, and the relative success or failure of the Yugoslav federation. Certainly,

Bosnia prospered for several decades under the authoritarian leadership of Maršhal Josip Broz

Tito and the SFRY (1945-1992), which emphasised first the development of a broader pan-

Yugoslav identity and, later, the promotion of inviolable national territories, but still with a

commitment to the founding ethos of bratsvo i jedinstvo (brotherhood and unity) (Donia & Fine,

1994).26 Tito’s decentralised federal, political, and economic system of governance ensured that

24 Refer to Chapter I for further detail on the Battle of Kosovo in the year 1389 and the significance of this event in

Serbian historical consciousness, in particular, and for the later federated states of Yugoslavia by extension.

25 The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was comprised of six republics, including: Serbia, Croatia,

Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and the two autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina (Burg &

Shoup, 1999).

26 The central tenet undergirding the post-World War II state of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

(SFRY) was the pan-Slavic ideology of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’. Originally adopted as a guiding principle during

the Yugoslav People’s War (1941-1945), the military credo evolved into a broad supranational, inter-ethnic

26

no one ethnic group dominated the federation and the competing histories of wars and violence

that marked the transitions between empires and political orders were actively suppressed. The

legacies of two Balkan wars (1912, 1913), World War I (1914-1918), and World War II (1939-

1945), and the more recent wars of Yugoslav secession (1991-1995) were, nonetheless, writ

large in Bosnian historical consciousness. Following Tito’s death in 1980, those same repressed

memories of wartime collaboration, inter-ethnic vengeance, and post-war massacres resurfaced,

leading to the ethnic bloodshed of the mid-1990s.

Bosnia emerged from the long shadow of the war as a broken, but independent, state for the first

time since the early medieval period. The small Balkan country has long been recognised as one

of the least developed of the former Yugoslav republics and four years of armed conflict only

complicated the fragile socio-economic context even further (Cousens & Cater, 2001). Indeed,

Bosnia endured, not only physical and social devastation within its own borders, but also the

dissolution of Yugoslav socialism and the disappearance of an entire socio-economic system. A

complicated, weak, and ambiguous institutional framework established by the Dayton Peace

Agreement (DPA), moreover, has replaced the once relatively stable Yugoslav federal structure.

The subsequent transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy, and from socialist self-

management to free-market capitalism and liberal democracy, has been entangled with the

personal and collective damage wrought by conflict and the injury, trauma, fear, and grief left in its

wake (Jansen, 2006). Remembrance, thus, takes different shapes in different contexts.

Bosnians of all ethnicities struggle to reconcile their memories of war and displacement in

personal and collective contexts of prolonged precariousness in which concerns about safety,

socio-economic security, unemployment, personal health, and ethnic and nationalist tensions are

always present and everywhere meaningful. Certainly, Bosnia has been frequently and ruefully

described by many of its own nationals as, ‘... a very small country with very large problems’ in a

self-deprecating turn on the familiar local phrase, ‘... a little country with a big heart’ (pers. comm.,

[various], 2011, 2012).

The Village of Selo, Republika Srpska

The small settlement of Selo is one of a cluster of little hillside villages in the lower valley region of

the river Drina in the Republika Srpska. Prior to the conflict of the mid-1990s, the village formed

part of a rich mosaic of different ethno-religious identities scattered in little collectives on one of

the low mountain ranges in northeastern Bosnia. In the years before the war, Muslim, Serb,

Croat, and Yugoslav lived in that most familiar of Bosnian vistas; rolling green slopes interrupted

by a scattering of the characteristic white slate frames and red gable roofs of Bosnia’s little

Dinaric houses and punctuated with the occasional Islamic minaret, Orthodox steeple, or Catholic

policy under the later President of the SFRY and Chairman of the League of Communists, Marshall Josip Broz

Tito. The policy emphasised centuries of shared history, common cultural roots, and peaceful cooperation

between the six constituent nations and minimised the distinct ethnic nationalisms at the centre of several

intermittent periods of conflict and animosity. The policy of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ was enshrined in the two

federal constitutions of 1963 and 1974 and supported by an extensive program of patriotic education and rituals

designed to foster a collective sense of Yugoslav consciousness beyond any separate ethno-national identities

(Perica, 2002).

27

campanile.27 Selo villagers often speak with nostalgia of ‘koje vrijeme prije rata’ (‘that time before

the war’) when the values of pluralism, religious tolerance, and komšiluk, or good

neighbourliness, were remembered as having defined the settlement and surrounding areas. As

one elderly female villager, who fled in the early months of the conflict and chose not to return to

Selo at the war’s end, observed, ‘… in Tito’s time, when he ruled, there was such fraternity and

equality. When he died, we cried so much that it seemed we would die too. Muslims, Serbs,

Croats, we all cried together. That is how it was, and it was really good then. It was good. If you

had lain down in the middle of a forest or park, no one would have touched you. And, now, it is

not even safe to sleep in your own house. I lock the door even in broad daylight’ (H.S, pers.

comm., Sept, 2011).

Certainly, in the late 1980s, the village of Selo was remembered as a thriving locus despite its

small size. A wholly rural hamlet, Selo is as near to a pastoral society as is likely found in Bosnia

and the community readily interprets itself as such. The village is situated at the very foot of a

mountain range and is easily accessed from an exit off one of the country’s main roads. As such,

it was, and still is, a transit point between the outlying hillside villages and nearby major

townships, easily accessible to transport, schools, shops, and public offices. Prior to the war,

men in the village frequently earned small, yet regular, incomes through waged labour at local

companies or further afield in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, but land was also a stable source

of household income and semi-subsistence, particularly for wives and mothers. Women of all

ethnicities often gathered in Selo from the more remote areas on local market days with home

grown produce for sale amongst themselves – seasonal fruit and vegetables, homemade cheese,

pastries, and sweets. Indeed, though people of different confessions rarely intermarried in rural

areas, religio-ethnic groups, nevertheless, co-existed side-by-side and were invariably connected

through the minutiae of everyday life. A network of coffee visits and conversations, debts owed or

expected through personal veze or connections, shared observation of religious celebrations, and

the offering of comfort and condolences through major life events linked the patchwork of hillside

villages.

Selo today occupies both a physical place and a symbolic space between some of the most

egregious massacres in the northeastern region of Bosnia and in close proximity to several

established United Nations Safe Areas. The occasional bullet hole and fragment of mortar spray

still mars the sides of buildings but, for the most part, the little village is largely reconstructed and

27 According to 1991 census data, the district that encompassed the village of Selo, had a population of 81,295

residents, of which 48,102 (59.16 per cent) identified as Bosnian Muslim, 30,863 (37.96 per cent) as Serb

nationals, 1,248 (1.53 per cent) as Yugoslav, 122 (0.15 per cent) as Croats, and 960 (1.2 per cent) as Other

(Dahlman & Ó Tuathail, 2005, 646). Pre-war census records from 1991 placed the Selo population at 744

persons of mostly Bosnian Muslim descent (Republika Srpska Institute of Statistics, 2009), while preliminary

data from the most recent census in September 2013 indicate a diminished post-war figure of 318 residents

(Republika Srpska Institute of Statistics, 2009).

For more comprehensive pre-war socio-demographic information, refer to the Statistički Godišnjak Republike

Bosne i Hercegovine 1991 (Statistical Yearbook of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1991). Sarajevo: Državni Zavod za

Statistiku (National Institute for Statistics). Formerly Socijalistička Republika Bosna i Hercegovina: Republički

Zavod za Statistiku (Republican Institute for Statistics) (1945-1991).

28

the few returnees to the area are more than partway resettled. Selo is composed of little more

than a primary schoolhouse and the domu culture, or house of culture, that serves for most

religious and community happenings. The village has no local kafana, or coffee house, no

trgovina, or corner store and no mosque for the ritual midday gathering of men for the Friday

Jumu’ah prayer.28 The closest tekija is a further two kilometres uphill in one of the neighbouring

Bosniak villages.29 Selo remains indelibly haunted by the post-war marks of an absence of

presence. The empty spaces left by lives lost to the war, some still missing, weigh heavily on

each waking moment for those left behind. The loss of surviving neighbours who chose to

resettle elsewhere has produced sharp vicissitudes in the ebb and flow of everyday rural life. The

sociality that once connected the matrix of nearby village communities has since been replaced

by suspicion and fear, apparent in the interruptions to daily activities, in the dearth of visitors, and

in the silent spaces in local gossip. A scene of quiet and collective grief very often underlies the

Selo of today as returnees lament the deterioration of a village community and the attendant loss

of its ‘folkways’ and traditional life.

The Town of Gradić, Republika Srpska

The town of Gradić is located on a relatively empty stretch of main road between the cities of

Banja Luka and Prijedor in the Republika Srpska. The relatively nondescript settlement is part of

a collection of small towns and villages in the Bosanska Krajina region of northeastern Bosnia,

but is known to its own residents as a little town with a big heart. The self-styled appellation

refers to the widespread scattering of the local population during the Bosnian war and to the

persistence of the returnee community in rebuilding the town ruins at the conflict’s end (Vulliamy,

2012). Gradić was a small, though relatively prosperous, community in the interwar period. The

8,028 residents registered at the time of the 1991 census predominantly identified as Bosniak,

although small Serbian and Croatian populations also lived within the borders of the town and in

the surrounding villages (Statistical Yearbook of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1991).30 Residents in

28 Salat al-Jumu’ah, also known as džuma in Bosnian language, is an Islamic congregational prayer performed on

a Friday at 12 noon and which typically consists of a condensed variant of the diurnal midday Dhuhr (or podne

namaz) prayer, followed by a sermon, or khutba, and two raka’āt (prescribed movements in conjunction with

prayer recital) led by an imam. The Jumu’ah is incumbent upon all adult Muslim men, but is not considered a

similar duty on women or girls who may attend, or alternatively perform, the obligatory ritual midday Dhuhr

prayer in their homes or workplaces (Ibrahimpasić, 2012, 23).

For further detail on Islamic practices in Bosnia see: Ibrahimpasić, Emira. 2012. Women Living Islam in Post-

War and Post-Socialist Bosnia and Herzegovina (PhD Dissertation), Department of Anthropology, University of

New Mexico. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/1928/21042

29 A Muslim Dervish Monastery.

30 According to 1991 census data, the town of Gradić in the municipality of Prijedor had a population of 4,045

residents, of which 7,334 (91.36 per cent) identified as Bosnian Muslim, 385 (4.80 per cent) as Serb nationals,

89 (1.11 per cent) as Croats, 114 (1.42 per cent) as Yugoslavs, and 106 (1.32 per cent) as Other, including

Roma (Statistical Yearbook of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1991). Preliminary data from the most recent census in

September 2013 indicate a marginal increase in the local population of 4,818 residents. The more regularly

cited figures of 25-27,000 inhabitants refer to Gradić and the surrounding area, including several nearby villages

(Republika Srpska Institute of Statistics, 2014).

29

the area secured regular and stable livelihoods in iron ore production, the lumber industry, and

tourism, profiting especially from the steady flow of visitors to the nearby memorial centre at

Mrakovica on the Kozara Mountains dedicated to the victims of the Yugoslav Partisan resistance

and people’s uprisings during World War II. The regular remittances that circulated in the ‘home’

community from men working abroad in Germany and Austria as part of the gastarbeiter (guest

worker) programs also provided solid economic support and stability for several decades prior to

the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia (Lieberman, 2013).

Gradić today is widely known for its successful post-war return and reconstruction. A small and

permanent community of non-Serb survivors has firmly re-established itself in the period since the

first tentative returns in 1999, two years after the close of the war. The townscape that was

methodically destroyed by local Serb forces at the time of the conflict has become the focus of a

long process of material, political, and social reconstruction (Vandiver, 2001; Sivac-Bryant, 2016).

The returned population has, nonetheless, been visibly marked by the experience of exile. The

countries in which people sought refuge during the war, and from which many have chosen not to

repatriate on a permanent basis, have left distinctive traces on the community. The changed

sociality is reflected in the varied architecture of reconstructed buildings, and the satellite dishes

that now line the roofs of expatriates’ houses, in the assembly of second-hand cars that have

replaced the old socialist era Zastava, and in the foreign overtones to the names of the collection

of new bars, cafés and, more recently, European fast food franchises (Vulliamy, 2012). The local

population swells considerably over the summer months with the seasonal return of the non-Serb

diaspora and the press of visitors that attend the series of annual memorial events in the region.

The town’s two large swimming pools re-open during these few months and the sidewalk cafés

spill over onto the pavement as the main street of Maršala Tita becomes a thoroughfare of

constant enterprise and activity.

Gradić is certainly a prosperous town in appearance. Below the surface, however, a very

different reality exists. Indeed, outside of the welcome disorder of the summer months, the town

of Gradić remains a minority population in a hostile political environment. Discrimination against

returnee groups persists in various forms, from partial access to health care and social security

pensions to biased employment practices, limited representation in local administration, and

restrictive educational systems that favour certain histories, traditions, and languages (Ó Tuathail

& Dahlman, 2004). For those who live in Gradić year-round, the roads are poorly maintained and

water supplies into the town are operational for little more than an hour each day, despite no

shortage of sources in the district (Sivac-Bryant, 2008). Gradić, moreover, is haunted by the

post-war absence of presence. The ethnic cleansing of non-Serb residents from Prijedor and

surrounds during the early months of the war left the community considerably smaller in size,

greatly marginalised, and without an entire generation of leaders, intellectuals, professionals, and

politicians, all of whom were among the first to have been targeted by military forces. In the more

For more comprehensive pre-war socio-demographic information, refer to the Statistički Godišnjak Republike

Bosne i Hercegovine 1991 (Statistical Yearbook of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1991). Sarajevo: Državni Zavod za

Statistiku (National Institute for Statistics). Formerly Socijalistička Republika Bosna i Hercegovina: Republički

Zavod za Statistiku (Republican Institute for Statistics) (1945-1991).

30

than two decades since the close of conflict, some 70 mass grave sites have been unearthed and

marked near Gradić and in the municipality of Prijedor. Many more non-Serb victims in the area

remain missing (Begić, 2015, as cited in Sivac-Bryant, 2016). A circular stone structure now

stands at the foot of Maršala Tita inscribed with the names of the 1,226 killed and missing citizens

of Gradić, a permanent reminder of the empty spaces left by lives lost to the war, each of whose

memory continues to weigh heavily on the returned and reconstructed little community.

Silence and the Making of Ethnography: Methodological Framework

In an exploration of methodological techniques, Valerie Janesick (2000) draws on both imagery

and argument from the world of classical dance to illustrate the complexity of qualitative research

design. The skilled choreographer, like the practiced researcher, studies and masters first the

rules of technique. Where one professional trains in and observes faithfully those prescribed sets

of movements for a given dance piece, the other learns the rigorous and tested procedures that

form the basis of empirical study. The respective techniques then practised, sharpened, and

applied – to a stage, or to a field site – form the basis for the dance or study and, once in motion,

both works are seldom the result of solo enterprises. The choreographer, working often with

multiple dancers and a miscellany of styles, adjusts and refines the movements until the individual

bodies move in unison, collaborating in the singular project of articulating one central story. In a

similar vein, the researcher engages in ongoing dialogue with participants, adapting, changing,

and refining studies in response to an evolving consciousness of the lived realities under enquiry

(Janesick, 2001). The ‘artist’ in both the choreographer and the researcher, however, rests in

their ability to move beyond the formality of design and method; to modify those definite turns,

steps, and patterns and to find new perspectives or adapt to altered conditions in familiar social

settings; to improvise. The result is a creative act in which the choreographer or researcher crafts

a final dance or story, interpreting the lived experiences of individuals through movement or

narrative in all their peculiar complexities, textures, and contexts (Janesick, 2000).

In contrast to Janesick’s elegant and organised composition, my own fieldwork for the most part

felt somewhat more metaphorically akin to an improvised techno dance set to amateur DJ mash-

ups at a rave party. A fieldwork ‘ensemble’ consisting of rapid beats, conflicting rhythms, and

frequent interruptions, my research in practice resembled only slightly the logic and balance of its

initial design. Indeed, exploring social memories on the historically taboo theme of wartime rape

in the characteristically patriarchal culture of post-war Bosnia was, to borrow from Janesick’s

allegory, a chorographical challenge. My extended time in the field was heavily wrought with

complications, upsets, and missteps that regularly necessitated impromptu variations to both

methodology and practice as well as reflections on the ethics of research in sensitive fieldsites.

Whereas I came to the field in full expectation of the ‘silence’ and delicate complexity that attends

such a personal theme, I was, nevertheless, overwhelmed, at times, by the difficulties of working

in what has become an excessively over-researched field location. Data collection in Bosnia was

always and everywhere accompanied by a sense of participant fatigue, expert and institutional

reluctance, political manipulation, competing agendas, vicarious trauma, and the weighty burden

of a multitude of poor reputations that many a foregoing researcher, journalist, or international

humanitarian worker had forged – sometimes inadvertently – on all our behalves over the past 20

31

years. Combined with the inherent difficulties of exploring a ‘taboo’, my own 20 months of

fieldwork, on reflection, seemed to have a mere singular quality in common with the

choreographed dance, that being a requisite for the flexibility, endurance, and stamina demanded

of the artist/performer (Janesick, 2001).

The practice of anthropological fieldwork was certainly a thoroughgoing endeavour. The research

for this study was chiefly grounded in data obtained during a field-based ethnography in Bosnia

with women survivors of rape from the wars of Yugoslav secession in the mid-1990s. Given the

sensitivity of the research focus and the very particular ‘chorographic’ challenges involved in

gaining sustained access to communities of victim-survivors, the formal research phase spanned

an extended period of 20 months, between June 2010 and February 2012. The period of data

collection also included a short return visit in May and June of 2012 at the invitation of the village

community of Selo for the twentieth anniversary of local wartime events at the beginning of the

conflict. For the majority of the fieldwork phase, I remained based in the capital of Sarajevo; a

city with a concentration of aid and development agencies and a central locus for much of the

conversation regarding rape victimology and the construction of associated processes and

policies. Sarajevo provided the platform from which to conduct multi-sited, comparative inquiries

in two key locations. The principal research localities included the town of Gradić in the northwest

and the village of Selo in the northeast of the Republika Srpska. The thorough ethnographic

attention paid to a plurality of fieldwork sites provides for a comparison of the ways in which

individual and collective responses to local histories of rape are shaped and constrained by

shifting cultural complexities, socio-economic inequalities, and the dynamics of entity-level

politics.

The deep divisions on the politics of identity and allegiance certainly played a significant role in

setting the limits and possibilities of the research context at even the most seemingly innocuous

of levels. Indeed, newly resident my first week in the multi-ethnic town of Brčko in the northeast

of Bosnia and seated at my local ćevabžinica, the café owner – an otherwise genial middle-aged

man – obstinately refused my every attempt at ordering a simple coffee. 31 The brew is a

commonplace symbol of hospitality in Bosnia and prepared with near uniformity in most regions,

whether by Muslim, Croat, or Serb. Dark ground beans are brought to the boil in a copper-plated

džezva (coffeepot) on the stovetop and served demitasse in fildžani (small cups) with cubes of

sugar to cut the richness. On this occasion, however, the razgalica (first coffee of the day)

appeared bound to identity politics and subject more to variation than to rule. Mogu li dobiti bijelu

kafu? (May I have a white coffee?). Ne. Bosansku kafu? (Bosnian coffee?) Ne. Domaće kafu?

(Domestic coffee?) Ne. Tursku kafu? (Turkish coffee?) Ne. Espreso? (Espresso?) Ne.

Capućino? (Cappucino?) Ne. And, finally, despairingly, Kafu? (Bosnian variant). Ne. Kahvu?

(Turkish variant). Ne. Kavu? (Croatian or Serbian variant). Da. Dobro. Podrazumijeva.

Understood. The corner ćevabžinica nearest the main promenade was evidently under the

proprietorship of a local Bosnian Serb and served only ‘kava’, and certainly not ‘kafa’ or ‘kahva’ or

31 A traditional, local fast food restaurant serving mostly ćevapčići (a popular southeastern European dish of small

rolled patties of ground beef eaten with flatbread, raw onion, and yoghurt), and other basic grilled dishes.

32

any other decoctive alternative therewith. The café owner’s small act of resistance was doubtless

intended to mark his ethno-national difference in the multi-ethnic district of Brčko.32

The ritual of coffee and food preparation was certainly indicative, at times, of the micro-politics

between ethnic groups in Bosnia but, at other moments, it was a marker of genuine hospitality

and social inclusion. In the small village of Selo in northeastern Bosnia, my companion and I

learned early in our field excursions to prepare for daily visits from village leaders at all hours and

regular invitations to neighbours' homes that could scarcely be refused. In particular, when

staying at the village teacher's home above the school building, we were not infrequent recipients

of late night phone calls from neighbours with varied summonses to the extent of, 'Hey you girls

staying in teacher's house, you're invited for coffee. Come now', usually with the presumption

that we 'girls' were implicitly aware of whom and from where the good-natured summons had

been issued. In the town of Gradić, too, in the northeast of the country, the sharing of food with

visitors was a familiar symbol of Bosnian warmth and hospitality. Our sojourns to the town were

always accompanied by the requisite round of coffee visits, lunchtime excursions, and the overly

sweet cakes and baklava that followed an evening promenade down the main pedestrian street of

Maršala Tita. Certainly, evidence of weight gain was considered a marker of good hospitality and

friendship; one that reflected well on my hosts. On one occasion while participating in a memorial

walk from the war monument at the centre of town to the šehidsko mezarje, or the martyr's

cemetery, at its outskirts, a close contact leaned forward, patted my backside, and declared with

more than a hint of satisfaction, '... see, now you've got a Bosnian bottom!'

The process of data collection in this multi-sited and politically sensitive ethnography, as such,

has involved ‘polymorphous engagement’ (Guterson, 1997), or a diverse selection of research

approaches and interactions with participants in the two key fieldsites. Over the course of 20

months, I drew on a varied repertoire of analytical techniques central to the study of memory

work, chief among these was the combination of biographic, narrative, and semi-guided

interviews with women survivors of rape in the two key fieldsites of Selo and Gradić, and

throughout other areas of Bosnia. Interviews were also undertaken with family, community, and

religious members, as well as (international) non-governmental organisations, women’s health

and support services, feminist initiatives, and local community groups to develop a fuller

impression of the ways in which survivors’ experiences are shaped within personal, cultural,

32 The everyday acts of ethno-national resistance were evident throughout both entities in Bosnia, but were

perhaps most visible in the cities, towns, and villages of the Republika Srpska where I was regularly chided by

interested Bosnian Serb bystanders on small, specific matters of ethnic or national interest. On one occasion, I

found myself gently admonished by a clerk at the Eastern Sarajevo Bus Station located in the section of the city

that falls within the boundaries of the Republika Srpska. The clerk’s point of contention had been my use of the

word ‘marka’ in the course of purchasing a bus ticket from Sarajevo to Belgrade in Serbia. Bosnian

Konvertibilna Marka (BAM), or the Bosnian Convertible Mark, is the standard legal currency in Bosnia and is

frequently shortened to either ‘KM’ or ‘marka’ in general speech. The clerk, however, advised me that the

recognised currency in the Republika Srpska was the ‘Srpski marka’, or the ‘Serbian mark’, which, incidentally,

was not a separate legal tender but simply an unofficial designation that still utilised the same notes and coins

as the BAM. Interestingly, the ticket receipt referenced a transaction made in ‘Srpski marka’, despite the

currency neither materially nor formally or legally existing. Moreover, it was not cited in any other purchases

made throughout the Republika Srpska during my fieldwork years.

33

historical, and social worlds. The process of negotiating access to women survivors of rape was

an extended and a sensitive endeavour, one that only developed in earnest during the second

year of research once a certain level of familiarity, rapport, and trust had been established.

Recruitment followed a snowball sampling technique, with the earliest introductions mediated in

varied ways. In certain communities where victimhood is greatly politicised and public attention is

valued, I allowed survivors to seek me out. In other locations, initial contact was arranged

through key personnel from local women’s services and (I)NGOs who served as supportive

gatekeepers. In other places, again, I joined women’s therapy sewing groups, volunteered with

survivor organisations, and taught regular language lessons. One of two trusted Bosniak and

Bosniak/Croat companions accompanied me on the majority of extended field visits of several

weeks at a time and attended the greater share of interviews with survivors of war rape and their

families. My companions initially provided support with interpretation and transcription during the

earlier phases of fieldwork and, later, with cultural mediation when my own language facility had

improved, but we continued to work together, more so, because we had become identified

affectionately in certain key research communities as ‘the girls’.

The particular approach to the interviews undertaken in each of the two key research

communities followed closely Steinar Kvale’s (1996) concept of the interviewer as a ‘traveller’, as

a partner wandering together in conversation with her subjects. 33 In an exploration of

methodological techniques, Kvale (1996) draws on the contrasting imagery of the ‘miner’ and the

‘traveller’ to illustrate two divergent approaches to qualitative interviewing as a process of

knowledge collection, as opposed to a process of knowledge construction. Kvale writes that the

miner is an approach grounded in the presumption that knowledge already exists as a resource to

be identified, unearthed, and collected. The interview, therefore, becomes a site of self-narration

in which the subject’s pure experience is uncovered and translated into explicit text. The traveller

metaphor, by contrast, considers knowledge as matter yet to exist, a concept or impression that is

negotiated and constructed within the creative space of the interview by the subject and

researcher together. The fluid manner of the researcher as traveller approach is particularly

appropriate to the study of memory work given that it provides space to explore the storied nature

of the self (Skjelsbæk, 2006(b), 376) and the embodied dimensions associated with any retelling

of women’s wartime experiences. Interviews generally adopted a semi-structured and open-

ended format, allowing participants the discretion to interpret questions, volunteer themes, and

33 I am grateful to Dr Inger Skjelsbæk, Deputy Director of the Peace Research institute Oslo (PRIO), who I had the

opportunity to meet during my period of fieldwork in Bosnia (2010-2012) for an informal discussion on data

collection techniques and ethical considerations in research on sexual violence in war. Dr Skjelsbæk drew my

attention to the utility of Steiner Kvale’s (1996) comparative metaphors of the miner and the traveller for

conceptualising and designing qualitative interviews. The interview methodology is further explored in Dr

Skjelsbæk’s own work on the political psychology of war rape among survivors in Bosnia. For further details,

see the following key works:

1) Skjelsbæk, Inger. 2012. The Political Psychology of War Rape: Studies from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

London & New York: Routledge.

2) Skjelsbæk, Inger. 2007. Sexual Violence in Time of War: Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Gender Diversity in the

War in Bosnia-Herzegovina. PhD Thesis. Institute for Psychology, University of Trondheim (NTNU),

Norway.

34

choose the manner in which to discuss them. The collection of individual and group interviews

encompassed conversations between women and men collectively, and with women and men

exclusively, and provides the central material on which the dissertation is based.

The primary research phase also relied substantially on participant observation as a method of

ethnographic enquiry. Barbara Tedlock (1991, 69) defines this approach, perhaps more

appropriately, as the ‘observation of participation’ during which anthropologists, ‘… both

experience and observe their own and others’ coparticipation within the ethnographic encounter’.

The observation of participation affords the potential for a deeper and more nuanced

understanding of the everyday social lives of post-war memories and the role of individuals,

collectives, and the researcher in constructing, circulating, and maintaining them. Survivor words

and narrative, testimonial knowledge, and public history provide only fragmentary understandings

of the very intimate phenomenological experience of trauma. Indeed, in as much as the memory

of violence is concerned with the different layers of interpretation of historical events, it is also

involved with the many and diverse forms of ‘spoken’ and ‘unspoken’ silences, embodied

responses to traumatic recollections, and other performative and affective elements that are

expressed in both ritual and routine forms. As Joan Sangster (1995, 11) has written, ‘…

[e]xpression, intonation, asides, metaphors, even silences and omissions, offer clues to the

construction of historical memory’. In addition to the schedule of semi-formal interviews, the data

collection phase, therefore, entailed multiple return visits and extended periods in each

community to participate in and observe specific commemorative events as well as the everyday

social worlds of my research participants. To this end, I attended and, at times, participated in,

various annual memorial and ancillary events related to the war in each community, engaged in

regular women’s groups, returned for social or ‘coffee’ visits, and boarded with local residents for

lengthier research sojourns.

The research also draws on the growing reserve of textual materials addressing the war and its

many consequences to enable the phenomenon of war rape to be explored in greater complexity.

In this regard, I consult the comprehensive body of court records catalogued online by the

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), including official transcripts and

judgements rendered in the trials in a small selection of significant cases that established

important legal precedents in the evolving jurisprudence of rape under international law.34 I also

regularly attended the War Crimes Chamber (WCC) of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina in

Sarajevo as a member of the public in open session cases explicitly involving the prosecution of

crimes of sexual violence. In particular, I followed the specific criminal proceedings of two cases,

keeping informal transcripts of each session and taking observations on the manner in which the

law selects and shapes women’s stories, as well as the interactions between legal

34 Case of The Prosecutor of the Tribunal vs. Duško Tadić, 1995-2008 (Case No: IT-94-1-T). Details available at:

http://www.icty.org/case/tadic/4

Case of The Prosecutor of the Tribunal vs. Anto Furundžija, 1995-2008 (Case No: IT-95-17/1-T). Details

available at: http://www.icty.org/case/furundzija/4

35

representatives, witnesses, the accused, and the public.35 The two key trials commenced around

the time I first arrived in Sarajevo and both had relatively open access, allowing for ongoing and

unimpeded observation. I further refer to reports produced by the range of local, state, and

international organisations engaged in working with survivors of war rape and in monitoring

judicial and legal reform, human rights, and social justice issues in post-conflict Bosnia. Finally, I

utilise media archives as a source of background information, including media releases, news

reports, and independent reviews produced both during and after the war from a selection of

local, state, and international publications. In making reference to these wider contextual

materials, I seek to situate the study within a larger framework; for, as Theodore Sarbin (1986)

has argued elsewhere, ‘… we are [not only] the stories we tell [but also those] that are told by

others’.

In recognising that both ‘speech’ and ‘silence’, and the many distinctions in between, represent

legitimate discourses in the study of gendered violence and social remembrance, the dissertation

assumes a solid grounding in haptic sensibilities as part of its methodological approach. The shift

towards haptic attentiveness within memory studies reflects Carolyn Nordstrom’s (2010)

understanding of the term as a mode of ‘research through the senses’ in which the ‘self’ and its

entire sensorium is critically invested in understanding the world. The body as well as the ‘self’ is,

likewise, very much considered an entity that is both touched on, and touched by, the cultural,

historical, and social spaces that each one inhabits (Bruno, 2002; Verrips, 2006). The combined

focus on both memory work and haptic enquiry opens space for an exploration into alternate

forms of knowing that are unmasked as part of the ‘researcher as traveller’ method for

conceptualising qualitative interviews and the particularly fluid approach to participant observation

that considers bodily movements, sensations, affectivity, and emotions as objects of reflection

alongside the visual, semantic, and narrative parameters of the memorial landscape in post-war

Bosnia. The more sensory ways of enunciating personal histories materialised frequently in the

formal space of the interviews as well as in the diversity of everyday conversations that I

participated in, or was privy to, throughout the duration of my data collection. The indirect

expressions of a troubled past were also made evident in the many banal moments of fieldwork –

in the long periods of waiting at bus terminals and in train stations, in the moments before the

beginning of a trial, and in the quiet days following a commemoration or memorial service.

Finally, the dissertation adopts a narrative approach, recognising that memories are made and

maintained through acts of storytelling (Van Der Kolk & Van Der Hart, 1995). The personal

accounts of women survivors, therefore, represent the central object of enquiry. Indeed,

throughout the dissertation, I draw on the aesthetic techniques of storytelling as much as on the

35 Case of Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. The Accused Saša Baričanin (First Instance

Verdict), 9 December, 2011 (Case No: S11 K004648 11 Kri [X-KR-05/111]). Details available at:

www.sudbih.gov.ba/files/docs/presude/2012/4648_1K_BS_drugostupanjska_28_03_2012_ENG%20(3).pdf

Case of Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. The Accused Velibor Bogdanović (Second Instance

Verdict), 21 June, 2012 (Case No: S1 1 K 003336 11 Krž 3). Details available at:

www.sudbih.gov.ba/.../14806740441K_3336_15_Krz_Bogdanovic_Velibor_Appellate_verdict_revised_18_09_2

015_eng%20(1).pdf

36

interpretive qualities of anthropological analysis to parallel, as mindfully as possible, the

processes of memory making, and to more accurately represent the many ‘strategic imprecisions’

(DeVault, 1990; 1999) in women’s reconstructions of their personal histories. On such a sensitive

theme, the art and the act of telling a story best captures, constructs, and otherwise mediates the

intimate experiences of survivors, ‘… in a way that doesn’t destroy [them]’ (Highmore, 2002, 39).

The narrative approach taken is multilayered. I focus on the haptic elements of fieldwork

interviews and ethnographic observations alongside the spoken word in an effort to provide a

fuller understanding of the many and overlapping registers of anger, sadness, frustration,

disappointment, pride, and expectation that are invested within each personal account. In

attending to these visceral and sensory qualities, I seek to, ‘… hail the body of the reader’

(Farquhar, 2002, 290), to provoke within them similar vivid, imaginative, and affective responses

to those that are reflected in the narratives of violence and survival. In this endeavour, I follow the

method proposed by Marjorie DeVault (1990, 111) who argues that, as feminist ethnographers,

‘… we should make our talk richer and more complex – we should use many words, and put them

together in ways that force readers to imagine the reality we’re describing in a new way – to taste

it, try it out, turn it over, take it apart’.

Ethical Considerations: Principles and Practices of Research on Rape Trauma

The study of rape and sexual violence is an especially sensitive and morally charged theme. The

demanding nature of the subject and the particular vulnerability of survivors pose distinct ethical

challenges that extend beyond any routine considerations that might be raised over the course of

most traditional ethnographic projects. Indeed, research on the subject of sexual violence is

frequently accompanied by matters that are positioned over and above those of power and

informed consent, confidentiality and trust, intervention and accountability, and the appropriate

dissemination of findings. Issues of protection for vulnerable participants, re-traumatisation and

countertransference, beneficence for those involved, and appropriate vocational training further

complicate the inherent difficulties of exploring a subject that is often considered ‘taboo’. Such a

complex range of ethical concerns demands a reflective approach to fieldwork and a constant re-

evaluation of perspectives, skills, subject positions, approaches, and outcomes. My own 20

months of fieldwork in Bosnia required ongoing dialogue with participants to adapt, change, and

refine the focus of the research and the methods of data collection in response to an evolving

consciousness of the lived realities under enquiry and a commitment to representing the voices of

women survivors of wartime sexual violence with integrity and veracity. The following sub-section

reflects on some of the principal ethical considerations that remained of concern during the period

of direct fieldwork as well as throughout the latter phases of data consolidation, analysis, and

writing. The key issues discussed include the use of interviews with survivors, questions of

representation and authorship in academic writing, asymmetrical power relations between

researcher and participant, and the issue of mutual beneficence or distributive justice.

The use of oral testimony as a primary source of data is especially fraught with ethical and moral

concerns. The practice of life history and narrative interviews in ethnographic research creates

both the space for gathering rich, complex, and comprehensive data as well as the potential to

provoke retraumatisation and distress in participants (Birch & Miller, 2000; Campbell, 2002;

37

Etherington, 2007). Indeed, interviews with survivors of war rape and sexual violence are often

highly emotionally engaged, sensitive and, sometimes, intrusive encounters that, on occasion,

involve repeated exposure to painful experiences (Dickson-Swift et al, 2009; Henke, 1998).

Participation in trauma-focused conversations that involve a degree of re-exposure to distressing

experiences may risk exacerbating symptoms of ‘complicated grief’ (Neimeyer et al, 2002),

including depression, anxiety, nervousness, sleep disturbances, intrusive thoughts, and

flashbacks in rape survivors (Hlavka et al, 2007). Gathering oral testimony in the disorderliness

of transitional and post-conflict settings necessarily magnifies the particular ethical, moral, and

personal challenges implicated in conducting interviews as a research technique by embedding

the fieldwork process in, ‘… an atmosphere of hate’ (Chaitin, 2003, 1153). Certainly, in the

context of a multi-sited ethnography in the fractured state of Bosnia, the circulation, witnessing,

and recitation of narratives of wartime rape are accompanied by the likelihood of victim-blaming,

stigma-laden responses, and social ostracism in certain communities, especially among women

survivors who have chosen not to disclose to family, friends, or neighbours. Participation in

formal research interviews may also be misconstrued as involvement in criminal investigations for

the ICTY or local war crimes courts, raising the threat of retaliatory violence from perpetrators and

their relatives, wartime accomplices, or other supporters (Sullivan & Cain, 2004).36

The ever-present sense of fear, suspicion, and insecurity, moreover, were all ‘experience-near’

(Geertz, 1974) concepts for many of my own participants in each of the two key fieldsites.

Indeed, the marks of four long years of war assumed intimate social, material, and aesthetic

forms in everyday life among the two communities of survivors in Selo and Gradić. The

immediate memories of conflict and the real or imagined threat of further violence fostered an

exceptional state of vigilance and caution, so much so that my own presence as a researcher was

sometimes received with heightened apprehension despite the careful organisation behind each

visit and every introduction. The culture of mistrust was especially phenomenal in the village of

Selo, where rumours circulated among returnees to the small Muslim community that my arrival in

2011 was part of an organised collusion with local administration in the nearby town of Zvornik

and the surrounding Serbian hamlets. My earliest attempts to establish relationships were

interpreted as the behaviour of a ‘spy’ (Sluka, 1990; 1995; 2007) and, for several months, the

gossip and hearsay of my supposed ulterior motives preceded my coffee visits to neighbours and

scheduled interviews with camp survivors. The imaginaries of danger and the fear of retaliation

were not without foundation, however. Villagers spoke often of feeling ‘surrounded’ by the

neighbouring Serb hamlets on the mountainside and of the structural discrimination experienced

by minority ethnic communities in the Republika Srpska. The villagers who agreed to provide

personal testimonies to international researchers to support early research into war crimes in the

Zvornik municipality, the paperwork for which later ‘disappeared’, seemed to provide further

legitimacy to the long-standing fear of outsiders.

36 The two principal research communities, Selo and Gradić, and the key participants from each location have

been provided with pseudonyms in the final draft of the dissertation to protect their identities. Minor participants

have been referred to by initials. In certain instances, the names of psychologists, human rights activists, and

other professionals have also been changed in order to ensure the anonymity and privacy of key participants

and the communities in which they live.

38

The conduct of qualitative interviews was, therefore, crucial to both data collection and to the

management of ethical considerations during the fieldwork phase. I chose to base the range of

biographic, narrative, and semi-guided interviews on life history (Chamberlayne et al, 2000) and

narrative (White & Epston, 1990) methodologies to ensure the interview encounter was a safe

and non-threatening environment for survivor participants. The relatively fluid and unstructured

frameworks central to both approaches encouraged women to accept control over the interview

itself and over the scope of their own answers without restriction and in a sensitive and

unobtrusive format. Survivors were never directly questioned on traumatic experiences, including

rape and other sexual assaults but were, instead, provided with the space to explore, reorder, and

reflect on the personal meanings given to specific moments chosen by the participants

themselves. The management of interviews, however, required a flexible response in navigating

local interpersonal and community dynamics, which were not always conducive to predetermined

research schema and standard principles of conduct with vulnerable participants. In one small

village, for example, rumours that ‘the girls’ were conducting interviews resulted in continual,

largely good-natured, interruptions from friends and neighbours interested in knowing, and

contributing to, the content of discussions. A growing entourage of resident women typically

accompanied us between interviews on each of these visits, limiting our ability, in many ways, to

ensure privacy and confidentiality in the local sphere for some participants and altering the

general nature of the dialogue. In a second location, by comparison, meetings with survivors

were arranged at the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

(UNHCR) to provide participants with an alternate pretext for the visit outside of research on

sexual violence, which carried particular stigma in the township. The approach to interviews in

each and every location was, therefore, an ‘unfolding process’ (Etherington, 2007, 85) that

remained sensitive to the context and respectful of the circumstances.

Questions of representation have also troubled the research throughout each phase, especially

so during the final stages of writing where the matter of survivor testimony assumed a marked

significance. The appropriation of first-hand expressions of the personal and social dimensions of

trauma in scholarly writing is always and everywhere a problematic practice, particularly in

reference to discussions of war rape and other forms of sexual violence. Indeed, Rose Lindsey

(2002, 71) argues that the use of ‘borrowed’ testimony from those who suffered war rape in the

former Yugoslavia has an unusually unsettling, and even degrading, effect on the words and

stories of survivors. Lindsey suggests that the subject of war rape is a very separate and distinct

object of research and representation, one that possesses a simultaneous ambivalence of both

attraction and revulsion that does not necessarily affect many other issues to such an extent. The

inclusion of graphic rape testimony in scholarly endeavours risks becoming voyeuristic by

appealing to prurient interests and indulging a certain fascination with violence in a manner that

E. Valentine Daniel (1996, 4) has characterised as the ‘pornography of violence’. The

indiscriminate focus on only the most horrific and violent fragments of survival stories, moreover,

serves to reduce the rich visual, discursive, experiential, and representational complexity of

women’s lives into a familiar, passive, and totalising construction of female victimhood. The

repeated use and consumption of detailed textual illustrations of human suffering also has the

reverse potential to minimise, or even ‘belittle’, the enormity of the events by desensitising

39

audiences to the nature of the violence and its impacts on survivors (Mandel, 2003).

The feminist discussions over such representational dilemmas have a long and unresolved

history (Stacey, 1988; Abu-Lughod, 1990; Menon & Bhasin, 1998; Butalia, 2000; D’Costa, 2006).

I have certainly struggled with the many conflicts and contradictions of this ongoing debate and

the substantive implications for my own work with the personal narratives of women survivors of

war rape in Bosnia. While I acknowledge the potential for the commodification of individual

experiences and for an ‘excess’ of representation, I have, nonetheless, chosen to draw on

‘fragments’ of survivor testimonies in the process of writing this dissertation. I argue that the

practice of translating the multiple layers of pain and vulnerability in women’s wartime

experiences into textual description without losing any of the rich nuances may be equally

enhanced by the inclusion of firsthand accounts, rather than degraded or sensationalised by the

possible overuse of graphic vignettes. The exclusion of survivor voices from scholarly critiques

might instead serve to reinforce the deeply entrenched silence that has historically surrounded

the subject of sexual violence and to reproduce paternalistic traditions that would otherwise

censor and suppress women’s experiences from prevalent discourses on war. Certainly, the

documentation of women’s stories of sexual violence in conflict in academic realms over the past

two decades – however controversial – has contributed to greater recognition of the private pain

of wartime rape and its place in the making of history. The decision to include partial accounts of

violence has, thus, been fraught with uncertainty but, as Uma Narayan (1997, 37) writes, ‘… there

are [no] methodological guarantees that can ensure that feminist politics do not create their own

misrepresentation and marginalization’ irrespective of the logics that inform them.

The practice of fieldwork and the writing of ethnography in any post-conflict state also inevitably

entail an imbalance of power between researcher and participant, between observer and

observed. Certainly, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) has argued that there is no neutral or privileged

position from which to represent the thoughts and language of another, and the length of time

spent in the field does not necessarily mitigate these asymmetrical relationships but, instead,

shifts and changes the associated issues of power. My own extended 20-month period of

fieldwork in Bosnia among two research communities served to establish relationships largely

based on mutual trust, common rapport, and collaboration. Longer-term connections with key

participants provided the space necessary to manage ongoing informed consent and voluntary

involvement and to negotiate the complicated web of ethical considerations particular to each

individual’s personal circumstances. The closer relationships did not necessarily alter the

positionality of either researcher or participant, or the dynamics of exchange between them,

however, and the latter often remained vulnerable – both financially and socially – and, at times,

hopeful of the presumed support that any engagement with a member of the international

community might have the potential to bring. The imbalance, though mostly unvoiced, surfaced

on occasion with a quiet request for assistance or a comment on the financial difficulties faced by

survivors or an appeal to raise a situation with authorities in Sarajevo. Urvashi Butalia (2000, 21)

has observed that this imbalance of power extends well beyond the period of fieldwork and data

collection. The voices of survivors frequently continue to figure in work long after their initial

engagement even as the, ‘… subjects themselves recede further and further into the background’.

40

Participation in an ethnographic project, nonetheless, has certain reciprocal benefits. Two

cursory and easily overlooked moments during my second year of fieldwork serve as valuable

representations of the unspoken and, sometimes, unnoticed compensations associated with

engagement in ethnographic research. In April of 2011, my companion and I visited the small

village of Ahmići in central Bosnia for an annual memorial observing the wartime massacre of 116

Bosnian Muslim women, men, and children at the hands of the local Croatian Defence Council

(HVO) (Silber & Little, 1997). The Ahmići commemoration is the first in an annual calendar of

memorial events remembering specific wartime violations throughout Bosnia but, even so, it

remains a modest service that is relatively neglected by anyone outside of the local population.

As such, our unexpected presence at the memorial was met with genuine warmth and

enthusiasm by village and religious leaders who cleared a space in the community hall and

prepared a small meal for my companion and I while they attended a service at the nearby

mosque. As the small crowd emptied at the familiar sound of the ezan, an elderly woman and her

young granddaughter quietly sat down opposite us at the table.37 With little hesitation, the woman

introduced herself and exhorted us to set about eating as she began recounting her memories of

the day the village was besieged. The small child at her side grimaced good naturedly and rolled

her eyes with the air of someone who had heard that same story many times before. She

described her fear at the sound of gunfire and explosions in the distance and her terror when

armed men appeared at her door. She remembered her eldest son’s courage at confronting the

assailants and her horror as they executed him and severed his limbs before her eyes. Finally,

she recalled gathering his body pieces and burying them in a single grave on the same day of his

death.38 It was, she claimed, her final act as a mother towards her eldest son (pers. comm., April

2011).

The chance encounter with the elderly woman and her long-suffering young granddaughter in

Ahmići was followed a little more than 12 months later by a second passing moment at another

commemoration in a separate village in north-eastern Bosnia. In May of 2012, my companion

and I returned to Selo for the twentieth anniversary of the liberation of a rape and death camp that

existed within the village borders for nine days during the early months of the war.39 I had worked

closely with the community for an extended period of time over the course of several research

visits and had developed strong local relationships that resulted in an invitation from community

leaders to speak at the commemoration and the opening of a modest memorial centre. As a

researcher working at the intersection of social memory and trauma, I chose to speak about the

importance of conserving individual stories of survival for the benefit of future generations and the

impact of these individual accounts on people learning the history of the war. I spoke of the

varied responses that different audiences exhibited at the disclosure of their personal stories; at

37 The ezan is the traditional Islamic call to prayer summoning Muslims for ritual worship five times daily, just

before sunrise (Fajr), just after noon (Zuhr), during mid-afternoon (Asr), just after sunset (Maghrib), and at night

(Isha).

38 Islamic funeral and mourning rites require that the body of the deceased be buried as soon as possible after the

time of death (Hadžišehović, 2003).

39 Refer to Chapter III, for background on the war in Selo and an ethnographic exploration of the long-term

consequences for the village community.

41

times, the revelations occasioned a sense of sorrow and grief and, at other times, feelings of

inspiration and encouragement. As the memorial service came to a close and the small circle of

congregants departed, one elderly woman held back from the crowd and approached me

discreetly at a moment when no one else stood nearby. She placed one hand gently on my

forearm and asked quietly if I had shared her story with anyone beyond the village borders. I

assured her that I had done so; she waited another moment and, with an almost imperceptible

nod of her head, turned to leave again in silence.

The two brief ethnographic encounters are each independently revealing of the indirect value of

participation in exploratory and descriptive research. Indeed, Charles F. Cannell and Morris

Axelrod (1956) as well as Theodore Caplow (1956) observe that the qualitative research setting

produces an unusual form of sociality in which the participant is the exclusive focus of any and all

interactions and is always ultimately in command of the conversational turns. The subject of

qualitative research is, thus, able to engage in a process of self-reflection and scrutiny and to

articulate and have validated a narrative that might otherwise remain unheard (Rowling, 1999;

Dickson-Swift et al, 2009). In this sense, the elderly woman’s unscripted disclosure following the

memorial service in Ahmići could easily be read as a moment of catharsis; a spontaneous

revelation made to a nameless visitor with a sympathetic ear. In many small communities in

Bosnia where the onset of conflict was sudden, ruthless, and devastating, there is often minimal

space to remember the intimate and personal losses outside the larger narrative of war. The

scope to share grief and seek consolation is sometimes made even more limited when family,

friends, and neighbours are preoccupied with their own sorrows. The brief exchange with the

elderly woman in Selo following the formalities of the commemoration and the opening of the

memorial centre may, likewise, be interpreted as a solitary moment of comfort. In Bosnia, the

post-war reality that many individuals lost multiple relatives, and are themselves sometimes the

sole surviving family member, weighs heavily on the women and men left behind. The wives and

husbands, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, whose responsibility it is to remember for

those who did not survive may sometimes find solace in the knowledge that their intimate

memories might be known and communicated beyond their own social worlds. The presence of a

researcher, and the opportunity to contribute to a qualitative study, then, arguably provided

certain participants with a level of comfort, validation, and empowerment.

Organisation of the Dissertation

The following dissertation is arranged in two key sections comprising a total of four chapters that

consider the intricate dynamics of remembrance work in Bosnia in the years following the conflict.

Part I (Chapters I and II) provides a general discussion on the intersection of gender and the

memory of wartime violence, establishing both the conceptual and the historical frameworks for

the study. The introductory chapter opens the dissertation with a critical examination of the key

theoretical foundations that inform the research and its writing. The chapter begins with an

examination of the concept of ‘memory’ and, more specifically, of ‘collective memory’, or the many

and varied ways in which the historical past is retrieved, (re)constructed, and manipulated in the

service of various identity projects. The role of trauma and its formative influence on cultures of

memory is then explored with particular consideration for the tensions that have commonly beset

42

historical constructions of women as subjects of suffering, torture, atrocities, and death. The

trauma of rape is identified here as a gendered motif especially fraught with contradictions and

ambiguities in both personal and commemorative retellings of war, emphasising the ways in

which dominant traditions of remembering produce, clarify, obscure, or distort narratives of sexual

violence. The discussion in this initial chapter draws attention to certain conceptual

inconsistencies in broader feminist theorisations that consider the position of rape in collective

memory and historical consciousness as one beleaguered by an enduring silence. The chapter

argues against this common and deeply resonant assumption, suggesting instead that stories of

rape are oftentimes present in forms that challenge conventional methodologies and conceptual

frameworks accessible for interpreting public memories and institutionalised histories.

Chapter II situates the study in its specific historical, social, and cultural contexts, which

collectively provide a fundamental framework for understanding the complex interactions between

the public and private processes involved in making and recalling memories of the recent conflicts

in the former Yugoslavia. The chapter traces the historical trajectory of the war in Bosnia and the

place of rape within the narrative of the most brutal conflict on European soil since the Second

World War. The systematic practice of rape during the wars of Yugoslav secession, and in Bosnia

in particular, cannot be understood without reference to the specific historical and political contexts

in which the mass violations occurred, which were conflicts with strong ethnic, nationalist, and

gendered dimensions. The chapter begins with a brief historical chronology of the armed conflict

in Bosnia from its outset in April of 1992 until the brokering of the final ceasefire and the signing of

the Dayton Peace Agreement in December of 1995. It then explores the specific dynamics of

mass rape and sexual violence as it occurred within this broader wartime context, drawing

particular attention to the distinctive patterns and motifs that served to define the practice as an

integral component of military strategy, especially of the Bosnian Serb and Serbian forces against

local Muslim and Croat populations. The chapter follows with a discussion of the ways in which

war transforms the political uses of rape, emphasising its entanglement in the deeply gendered,

ethnic, and political economies of the Balkan conflicts.

Part II (Chapters III and IV) draws on ethnographic content to explore the distinct ways in which

two separate communities in Bosnia perform the complicated work of interpreting, remembering,

and (re)constructing meaning around the intimate stories of war rape at both the individual and the

collective levels. Chapter III draws on the Taussigian metalogism of the ‘public secret’ (Taussig,

1999) to explore the ways in which the village of Selo in the Republika Srpska remembers and

negotiates its complicated past, arguing that the history of war rape in the region is knowledge that

is generally known but cannot be openly articulated.40 The chapter centres on the local politics

40 In employing Taussig’s (1999) theory of public secrecy as an explanatory framework, I engage with the

complicated relationship between secrecy and silence to demonstrate the intricate connections between the two

phenomena. The interplay is most apparent in the restrictions placed on the public articulation of women’s

memories but also in their simultaneous and skillful manipulation of the architectures of secrecy to communicate

victimhood and survival in other less palpable ways. The conventions of this secrecy and the different

dimensions of silence they embody, however, are neither interdependent nor mutually interchangeable.

Secrecy is not inevitably concerned with silence in each and every context, and silence, likewise, is not

necessarily an axiomatic quality of secrecy. Indeed, secrets are communicative practices through which

43

particular to a small heart-shaped monument erected on the grounds of a former Serb-controlled

detention site in the village and dedicated to the raped and martyred women of Selo. The

monument represents a key site at which the abstractions of the public secret of wartime sexual

violence are figured, transfigured, and narrated for the public sphere. Local histories of sexual

violence are given voice by way of very circumscribed narratives and the valorisation of specific

figures, including ‘raped’ and martyred female šehidi and elderly women whose stories of

detention specifically exclude experiences of rape. The two strategic identities are both

symbolically embodied in the monument, either visibly in the inscription to raped and martyred

women, or invisibly through their careful textual omission. Discourses of wartime rape in the little

village are situated within these very ambiguous terrains of concealment and revelation; whereby

the disclosure of stories and details outside these narrowly defined boundaries is considered

transgressive and in defiance of local prohibitions to secrecy.

Chapter IV explores the tensions between the experiences of sexual violence in the former Serb-

run camp of Omarska in the northern region of Bosnia and their public representations among the

survivor community in the town of Gradić in the Republika Srpska. The collective discussions

around memories of war rape in custodial settings are specifically considered through Primo

Levi’s (1989) concept of the ‘grey zone’ and his analysis of the impossible nature of ethical

dilemmas faced by victims in extremis that, at times, result in moral compromises, collaborations,

and complicity between the oppressed and their oppressors. Through a detailed depiction of one

woman’s memories of the sudden outbreak of war in Gradić, the chapter examines certain

strategies of survival inside the grey zone of one of the most notorious camps of the Bosnian war

established in the nearby mining complex of Omarska. The various reflections on the grey zones

in war raise the question of a state of impotentia judicandi, or of the impossibility of passing moral

judgments on the confusing range of anti-redemptive behaviours that surface in the face of

incomprehensible misery and suffering. The redefinition of morality suggested by the existence of

a grey zone, moreover, demands new conceptualisations of traditional categories of

representation and standards of judgment in order to analyse, describe, and explain traumatic

memories with thoughtful responsibility.

The following dissertation is, thus, concerned with the deeply personal relationship between

memory and trauma in the aftermath of violence. The central analysis is grounded in the

personal testimonies of women in two communities in Bosnia and the shape of their stories of

rape survival, of witnessing sexual violence during the wars of secession, and of the continuing

work of repair and recovery in its wake. The intimate narratives are balanced against broader

specific memories are animated, expressed, and made known, rather than the means by which information is

deliberately withheld, suppressed, or forgotten (White, 2000). Silence, as an instrument of secrecy, ascribes

value to selected memories and regulates access to knowledge that might be considered morally threatening,

unpalatable, or of greatest significance to individuals and collectives. Rather than signifying the absence of

speech, the social and cultural construction of silence in relation to secrecy represents, instead, a medium of

expression in its own right and an alternative form of knowing the past (Kidron, 2009). Secrecy and silence,

then, are both cultural and social phenomena and, as I demonstrate in Chapter III, the relationship between the

two is more complex than simply consisting of two synonymic categories.

44

cultural repertoires that form and structure the figure of the ‘rape victim’ in Bosnian society in

diverse ways; as symbolic of the extreme brutality of the ethnic ‘other’, of post-conflict anxieties

surrounding sexuality, nationality, gender, and violence, and of the necessity of the ‘unspeakable’

nature of trauma for political, religious, and social institutions. The manner in which particular

stories of rape survival have emerged in each of the two communities intersects closely with

locally specific networks of power relations, gendered orders, cultural imaginaries, and complex

moral economies. The collective and personal memories of rape in each key location, then, are

negotiated through different modes of remembering; some through patterns of secrecy, others

through dominant frameworks of victimhood, and more again through schema provided by

political, religious, and social institutions. As Iwona Irwin-Zarecka (1994, 7) has argued, ‘… [t]o

understand how collective memory works, we cannot restrict our inquiries to tracing the

vicissitudes of historical knowledge or narratives. We must also, and I believe foremost, attend to

the construction of our emotional and moral engagement with the past. When looking at public

discourse, this translates into questions about how the past is made to matter‘.

45

Chapter I:

The Social Inheritance of War Trauma: Collective

Memory, Gender, and War Rape

‘… Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection. It is a

painful remembering, a putting together of the dismembered

past to make sense of the trauma of the present.’

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2004, 123

Bosnia is a place where the ‘wounds and scars of memory’ (Ricoeur, 1999, 6) are conspicuous.

Indeed, memory issues played a central role in the demise of the Yugoslav federation and, even

more so, in fuelling the subsequent war in Bosnia and some of its most violent expressions,

including rape and other forms of sexual assault (Duijzings, 2003; Bougarel, 2007; Grandits,

2007). Certainly, since the collapse of communist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe in

1989, Bosnia and the Yugoslav successor states have experienced an intense ‘revival of memory’

(Biondich, 2006), with each republic engaged in a clear revision of their individual national pasts.

The recovery of memories either suppressed or manipulated under almost five decades of

communist rule became a means of fostering separate ethnic and national identities, just as the

sense of a singular and homogenised past once contributed to the legitimation and maintenance

of a common, federated state during the Yugoslav era. Memories of past atrocities, particularly of

World War II, were revived, reinterpreted, and reinstated as part of a concerted effort by post-

Yugoslav nationalist leadership to recast centuries of multicultural coexistence into long and

divergent histories of national victimisation and suffering (Jansen, 2002). The ‘possession’ of

particular histories regularly became the grounds for collective mobilisation and a source of

justification for political and military actions throughout the Yugoslav wars of secession, including

acts of territorial expansion, ethnic cleansing, and the brutal campaign of rape and sexual

violence. As Ger Duijzings (2007, 142) has argued in reference to the conflict on Bosnian soil, ‘…

[o]ne cannot fully understand the war or specific events [within it] if one ignores the role that

perceptions of the past played in people’s interpretation of events’.

The following chapter, thus, explores the interrelated concepts of memory, gender, and rape

remembrance to provide a theoretical framework for understanding the different socio-historical

perceptions of the war in Bosnia and of the place of rape within it. It begins with an examination

of the concept of ‘collective memory’, or the many and varied ways in which the historical past is

retrieved, (re)constructed, and manipulated in the service of various identity projects. Of

particular concern is the important role of historical narratives in grounding ethnic and national

identities and the relationship of these collective frameworks to the work of personal

remembrance, especially in confronting a traumatised past. The chapter then follows with an

46

exploration of the role of gender and its formative influence on cultures of memory with particular

consideration for the tensions that have commonly beset historical constructions of women as

subjects of suffering, torture, atrocities, and death. The trauma of rape is identified as a gendered

motif especially fraught with contradictions and ambiguities in both personal and commemorative

retellings of war, emphasising the ways in which dominant traditions of remembering produce,

clarify, obscure, or distort narratives of sexual violence. The discussion in this opening chapter

draws attention to certain conceptual inconsistencies in broader feminist theorisations that

consider the position of rape in collective memory and historical consciousness as one

beleaguered by an enduring silence. It argues against these common and deeply resonant

assumptions, suggesting instead that stories of rape are oftentimes present in forms that

challenge conventional anthropological methodologies and conceptual frameworks accessible for

interpreting both public memories and institutionalised histories.

On Collective Memory and Social Identity

Collective memory and social identity are inextricably entangled, especially so in the aftermath of

communal violence.41 As Benedict Anderson (1983) has demonstrated in relation to nationalist

ideologies, ethnic and national groups are ‘imagined communities’ as much as they are

substantive ones, descriptive in nature as much as normative, and dynamic more so than static

and unchanging. The stories, legends, myths, and teachings that are constructed, shared, and

41 Collective memory is a concept that resists easy definition. As Alon Confino (2010, 78) has written, the still-

relatively nascent field of memory studies remains ‘more practiced than theorized’ and is widely dispersed

across a variety of disciplines, each with their own specific vocabularies, methodologies, and traditions. The

multidisciplinary nature of the field has developed a rich conceptual foundation at the same time as it has

fostered a certain level of ambiguity and disconnection in regards to terminology (Eril & Nünning, 2008).

Indeed, the field of memory studies is variously referred to by a diversity of terms including ‘collective memory’

(Halbwachs, 1992), ‘cultural memory’ (Assmann, 1995), ‘social memory’ (Fentress & Wickham, 1992), ‘shared

memory’, ‘public memory’ (Bodnar, 1992), and ‘historical memory’, which are sometimes used interchangeably

and, at other times, defined as separate concepts in an attempt to establish methodological rigour.

The current research seeks to explore the memory of wartime rape as it emerged in its many and varied forms,

with different social groups, and in diverse contexts throughout Bosnia. The dissertation, as such, is based on a

broad understanding of the concept of collective memory to allow for the inclusion of a wide profile of mnemonic

habits, routines, and practices. I employ a variety of terms, rather than remaining within the descriptive

constraints of one or two definitions, in an effort to encompass individual acts of remembering within social

contexts as well as the physical spaces of lieux de memoire (Nora, 1989), and the political symbols and

‘invented traditions’ (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1992) of national memory.

A discussion on the evolution of the multi-disciplinary field of memory studies, and the conceptual and

theoretical debates it has provoked, is beyond the scope of the present literature review. For a critique on the

genealogy of memory scholarship and a review of the diversity of works on the subject, see the following key

articles:

(1) Berliner, David. 2005. ‘The Abuses of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology’,

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol 78(1), pp 197-211.

(2) French, Brigittine M. 2012. ‘The Semiotics of Collective Memories’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol 41,

pp 337-353.

(3) Olick, Jeffrey K. & Robbins, Joyce. 1998. ‘Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the

Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices’, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol 24 (1998), pp 105-140.

47

passed down between members of a defined group serve to shape a sense of a collective

consciousness and sustain a distinctive identity (Connerton, 1989). Collective memory is an

‘inventive social practice’ (Sturken, 1997), an ‘instrument of reconfiguration’ rather than an act of

mimesis (Halbwachs, 1992, 33), and a cultural process through which individuals and groups

reflect upon, interpret, and understand the past and establish their specific place within it. Shared

memories are not simple and unmediated representations of the past but are, instead, careful and

creative reconstructions, ‘ethically constitutive stories’ that provide groups and their common

histories with some form of emotional and moral impact (Smith, 2003). In this sense, it is not

merely that individuals reminisce as members of a particular group but, rather, that groups and

their members are simultaneously constituted during acts of recollection (Olick, 1999). Certainly,

Robert Bellah (1985, 153) and his colleagues speak of ‘genuine communities’ as ‘communities of

memory’ who are continuously engaged in the telling and retelling of those selected and shared

narratives that embody and exemplify the imagined core ethos of the group.

Collective remembering, then, is very much dependent upon the same social frameworks that

provide the foundation for group identities. Maurice Halbwachs (1992, 22) has argued that

individual memory is a ‘social fact’ and does not exist as anything more than an ‘abstraction

almost devoid of meaning’ in the absence of any social frameworks. Halbwachs writes that it is

only within the context of a group that individuals are able to ‘reconstruct a body of

remembrances’ and more vividly and accurately describe past events and experiences. It is only

through interaction with others and in dialogue with different social groups that individuals develop

a sense of ‘otherness’ and an assurance of the ‘accuracy’ of their own memories; and it is only

through shared language, ideas, and concepts drawn from familiar cultural surroundings that

personal recollections find objectification, form, and definition (Halbwachs, 1992). Collective

memory is not an homogenous body of stories, however, and neither are those who remember

them constant in their reconstruction of events; each and every individual recollection represents,

instead, a different perspective on the body of memories shared by a single community. Memory

is multiple and diverse, as a result; there exist as many collective memories as there are

individuals within a social group, and their remembrances shift and change in keeping with the

evolving connections, belongings, and positions of each member (Halbwachs, 1992). As Jeffrey

Olick (2007, 19) writes, memories are, ‘… as much products of the symbols and narratives

available publicly – and of the social means for storing and transmitting them – as they are the

possessions of individuals’.

The present historical consciousness of any particular group is defined by a past that is both

constructed and contested. As Maurice Halbwachs (1992) has argued, following a Durkheimian

tradition, any reconstruction of the past is selective in nature and places certain historical

moments in the service of the needs and considerations of the present. James Wertsch (2009,

123), likewise, characterises memory as a collective effort intended to create a ‘useable past’,

one that might legitimise contemporary identity claims, beliefs, attitudes, and actions. The

collective (re)creation of a ‘useable past’ is, in this sense, a political act and one that is

fundamental to the struggle for power between various social forces. Certainly, Jacques Le Goff

(1992, 98) has written that collective memory is, ‘… not only a conquest, it is also an instrument

and an objective of power’. Indeed, the authority to influence and to shape the narratives that are

48

permitted to emerge in the public realm invariably serves to reinforce and reify existing political

ideologies and, in doing so, displaces other ‘counter-narratives’ that might be considered

oppositional, or simply marginal, to the dominant social order (Harris, 2002; Lentin, 2006). Yael

Zerubavel (1995) suggests that such distortions and manipulations of the historical record are

deeply embedded in the ways in which communities remember. In her work on the nationalist

recasting of historic events, Zerubavel (1995, 8) contends that, ‘… [t]he power of collective

memory does not lie in its accurate, systematic or sophisticated mapping of the past, but in

establishing basic images that articulate and reinforce a particular ideological stance’.

The making of memory is also the making of silence (Stern, 2004; Assmann, 2006; Connerton,

2008). As Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995, 27) has compellingly argued, any historical narrative

might be regarded as a ‘particular bundle of silences’. In the politics and poetics of

remembrance, he observed, not all events are themselves recorded, not all records are then

included in state archives, not all archives are selected in the telling of stories, and not all stories

are drawn on in the production of history. Indeed, memory is a social process that, not only

elaborates and enlarges historical events, but also abridges, marginalises, denies, and conflates

stories of the past. Memory, in this sense, validates certain narratives as ‘tellable’, while

rendering other stories as suppressed, silenced and, eventually, forgotten. Remembering and

forgetting do not necessarily exist in direct opposition to one another but are, instead, mutually

dependent practices that remain entangled in a dynamic and constantly shifting relationship

(Assmann, 2006). Thomas Laqueur (2002), recalling Michel Foucault (1970; 1972), likewise,

argues that for each history, there is a counter-history and, for each memory, there is also a

counter-memory. For Laqueur, it is the tension between these myriad different representations of

the past that generates the most productive spaces for analysing the many ambiguities present in

any historical narrative. Michael Schudson (1997, 348), too, describes the paradoxical

relationship between remembering and forgetting as a ‘distortion’, ‘… since memory is invariably

and inevitably selective. A way of seeing is a way of not seeing, a way of remembering is a way

of forgetting too’.

Collective silence serves multiple functions, particularly in a post-war context. Memory, according

to Friedrich Nietzsche (1969, 320), is a ‘festering wound’ that fosters ressentiment, frustration,

and hostility; forgetting, by contrast, provides, ‘… a little quietness, a little tabula rasa of

consciousness, to make room for new things …’ (Nietzsche, 1969, 57). Indeed, Nietzsche

conceptualises forgetting as a form of affirmation rather than as a loss or an absence of memory;

as an active process in which the burdens of the past are repressed and disruptive memories are

discarded in pursuit of happiness, calm, and order. Marc Augé (2004, 57), similarly, considers

the act of forgetting as a ‘rebeginning’, a ‘new birth’, of sorts, that, ‘… aspires to find the future

again by forgetting the past …’. Without forgetting, he argues, there would be no shape and

definition to the future. Following Nietzsche and Augé, Stanley Cohen (2001, 138) introduces the

term ‘social amnesia’ to refer to the practices by which, ‘… a whole society [consciously]

separates itself from a discreditable past’ and translates such knowledge into ‘open secrets’ or

into that which is known by all and knowingly not known at the same time. Social amnesia, for

Cohen, becomes an especially compelling strategy of survival after war, a collective approach

adopted to (re)establish some level of coherence between members of a group who are, at once,

49

perpetrators and protectors, victims and survivors, bystanders and witnesses. Primo Levi (1989,

27) persuasively articulates the logic behind active forgetting, cultural repression, and social

amnesia in his penetrating commentary on the ‘memory of the offense’:

‘… [t]here are those who lie consciously, coldly falsifying reality itself, but more numerous

are those who weigh anchor, move off, momentarily or forever, from genuine memories,

and fabricate for themselves a convenient reality. The past is a burden to them; they feel

repugnance for things done or suffered and tend to replace them with others. The

substitution may begin in full awareness, with an invented scenario, mendacious, restored,

but less painful than the real one; they repeat the description to others but also to

themselves, and the distinction between true and false progressively loses its contours,

and man ends by fully believing the story he has told so many times and continues to tell,

polishing and retouching here and there the details which are least credible or incongruous

or incompatible with the acquired picture of historically accepted events: initial bad faith

has become good faith’.

Not all silences, however, are mnemonically equal. Indeed, George Steiner (1967) argues that

silence is, at once, a ‘wall’ and a ‘window’, an impediment to communication, and an opening into

the hidden depths of knowledge, both its limits and its possibilities. Jay Winter (2010, 4) develops

the signification even further, defining silence as a rich and complex ‘socially constructed space’,

positioned somewhere between memory and forgetting. Winter distinguishes between several

registers of silence, including both overt and covert moments of ‘liturgical’, ‘essentialist’, and

‘political’ or ‘strategic’ quiescence. His analytical categories draw attention to the many and

varied dimensions of silence in public mourning and commemoration, to matters of privilege and

authority in remembrance, and questions of who remembers, how those memories are

communicated, with what entitlement, and to whom. Silences, then, are more than simple,

shapeless expressions of emptiness; they are, instead, performative and aesthetic acts that imply

the ‘presence of absence’ in verbal repertoires (Bille, Hastrup & Sørensen, 2010). Silences are

made, and heard, and known, and felt; they are understood or not, accepted or discarded, carried

forward or abandoned. The meanings and moral dimensions in which silence is interpreted,

moreover, are influenced by social and political context (Winter, 2010). Small hesitations,

erasures, distortions, and omissions that may appear repressive, defiant, or even steeped in fear

in one situation, may seem well intentioned, discreet, or respectful in others. Certainly, as Marc

Augé (2004, 15) writes, ‘… [t]he definition of oblivion as loss of remembrance takes on another

meaning as soon as one perceives it as part of memory itself’.

The intersections between collective memory and social identity are nowhere more evident than

in the post-conflict milieu. Wars, Carolyn Nordstrom (1995, 131) remarks, ‘unmake worlds’, both

real and conceptual, and leave in their place a torn and tattered cultural, social, and political

fabric. As Jeffrey Alexander (2004) and his colleagues have argued, collective trauma is

epiphenomenal; it emerges in the wake of shattering, and oftentimes violent, episodes or other

critical events that produce dramatic shifts in the accepted spatial and temporal understandings of

the world and the place of the self within it. Kai Erikson (1995, 187), likewise, maintains that

trauma involves ‘a blow to the basic tissues of social life’ and damages the connections between

people, their familiar patterns of bonding, simple daily rituals, and guiding symbols. The

experience of trauma, then, often engenders a sense of alienation, isolation, abandonment, and

exclusion, both among individual survivors and their familiar ways of being, and between the

50

social groups with which they identify (Herman, 1992; Caruth, 1996; Edkins, 2003). Indeed,

collective trauma affects the whole of society and its symptoms are lived and transmitted from the

first generation of survivors through to second and later generations; it is ‘psychocultural’, as well

as ‘psychological’, a cultural trope as well as a clinical concept (Farrell, 1998). In this manner, the

collective experience of communal violence ruptures the linear narratives through which the

everyday is experienced and understood by members of a particular social group at a particular

cultural moment and produces a crisis of meaning and identity (Alexander, et al, 2004).

Trauma has centripetal as much as centrifugal tendencies, however, and victim communities

often cohere around memories of historical suffering. Indeed, as Kai Erikson (1995, 194) argues,

those same traumatic ‘blows’ to the fabric of a community that rupture the bonds between people

and communities can also serve to create a social mood, an ethos, a group culture focused on an

acute perception of collective victimisation. Trauma cultivates a ‘sense of being apart’ and of

being ‘made special’ for having survived an exceptional, unforgettable, and grievous experience.

Cultural trauma becomes a part of collective memory and group consciousness through a

process of social construction. Marita Sturken (1997, 17) suggests that the (re)performance of a

traumatic memory can help create strong bonds between those who participate in its various

enactments and may become an important ‘healing device’ and a ‘tool for redemption’. Jeffrey

Alexander (2004, 11), similarly, contends that the cultural construction of trauma begins with, ‘…

a claim to some fundamental injury, an exclamation of the terrifying profanation of some sacred

value, a narrative about a horribly destructive social process, and a demand for emotional,

institutional, and symbolic reparation and reconstitution’. The traditions and rituals that develop in

the afterwards of a traumatic event seem to furnish the experience with meaning and value and

enable some communities to establish a sense of resilience, strength, and re-integration. As

Erikson (1995, 190) writes, … [t]he point to be made here is not that calamity serves to

strengthen bonds linking people together – it does not, most of the time – but that shared

experience becomes almost like a common culture, a source of kinship’.

Unresolved trauma may be suffered, remembered, and transmitted through generations and

across communities and its legacies, at times, come to form the basis of the historical stories,

myths, legends, and traditions at the centre of collective identities. The myth surrounding the

Battle of Kosovo fought six centuries earlier is an epic expression of selective historical memory,

of remembrance, forgetting, and elaboration that has evolved to become a touchstone of Serbian

cultural identity. The revivification of the myth in the early 1990s provided the basis for a renewed

nationalistic vision as well as powerful legitimation for the extreme irredentist policies that

eventuated during the Yugoslav wars of secession (Judah, 2002). The historic battle fought by

the Serbian army against the invading Ottoman Turkish forces in the fourteenth century on the

Plain of Gazimestan, or the ‘Field of Blackbirds’, at Kosovo Polje near the capital of Priština is,

however, surrounded by a dearth of accurate historical accounts. The story commemorated each

year on Vidovdan, the religious feast day of St Vitus, is shaped and structured around only the

barest of recorded historical facts (Cohen, 2014). The limited evidence that does exist suggests

that the battle commenced on the morning of 28 June 1389 between the allied armies of the

Serbian Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović and the Ottoman Turkish forces of Sultan Murad

Hudavendigâr Han (Murad I). The outcome of the conquest was somewhat inconclusive; both

51

imperial commanders perished on the field and their armies suffered heavy casualties and, in

consequence, the battle may in fact have culminated in a draw. Certainly, a vassal Ottoman state

survived for a further 70 years in the form of the Serbian Despotate and it was not until as late as

1459 that the remains of the declining medieval Serbian state finally surrendered in full to the

Turkish Empire (Djokić, 2009).

The story of the Battle of Kosovo has, nonetheless, evolved into a foundational myth of Serbian

ethno-national identity despite the apparent paucity of historical evidence. The myth, in the

manner of other storied traditions, consists of a small seed of truth alongside a great many more

exaggerations and falsehoods (Sell, 2002). The most prevalent of readings asserts that the holy

prophet Elijah appeared on the eve of conflict in the form of a grey falcon to Prince Lazar, who

was preparing to lead a small legion of soldiery and noblemen into battle at first light. The

prophet offered Lazar a choice between assured victory against the Ottoman forces in their

territorial conquest and an empire on earth or certain defeat and an eternal kingdom in heaven for

himself and the Serbian nation. Lazar chose the eternal kingdom, claiming that, ‘… it is better for

us to die by an heroic act than to live in shame’ (cited in Cohen, 2014, 14). The two opposing

regiments met in bloody confrontation the following morning; one, in defence of the small Serbian

principality and, the other, in pursuit of further territorial advances on the Balkan Peninsula. Lazar

was betrayed, however, by his own son-in-law, Vuk Branković, a fellow nobleman whose

intentions were to sacrifice the Prince to the battle and succeed him as the supreme ruler of

Serbia. Branković turned from the battle at a moment of confusion, followed by the contingent of

men in his charge. The nobleman’s act of treason shifted the fortunes of the Serbian army,

leading to the capture of Prince Lazar by Ottoman forces and his execution alongside his son as

a final deed of patriotism before the dying Sultan Murad I (Bieber, 2002).

The mythologic (re)interpretations of the Battle of Kosovo are widely suffused with strong biblical

undertones, which have proven instrumental in defining a distinct concept of a Serbian nation.

Indeed, the legend that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries alongside a

growing Serbian nationalist rhetoric was represented as both a military defeat and a moral victory.

In the many hagiographic works and epic eulogies dedicated to the battle, the medieval Prince

Lazar and his Serbian subjects offered their lives willingly for the Christian faith and for the nation;

their defeat at the hands of a ‘heathen’ enemy ushered in four centuries of Islamic rule and their

martyrdom earned them the protection of a god who would one day restore his loyal followers

from their subjection (Emmert, 1990). In these portrayals, Prince Lazar was frequently depicted

as a Christ-like figure, the traitorous Vuk Branković as the Judas among his knight disciples, and

the death of the imperial ruler at Kosovo Polje as the ‘Serbian Golgotha’ (Sells, 2001). Hans

Kohn (1945, 36) refers to such mytho-historical readings as ‘covenantal myths’ in that the

martyrdom of Lazar and the sacrifice of his nation on earth served to elevate the population of

Serbia to the status of a holy, divine, and ‘chosen’ people. The story of Lazar’s struggle between

Christianity and Islam, and his victory of the sacred over the secular, moreover, provided the

Serbian people with a collective ideal to aspire to and a ‘consciousness’ of their own place in

history as a nation of victims perpetually in wait of reward and resurrection (Judah, 1997;

Anzulović, 1999; Dawson, 2009).

52

Tim Judah (1997, 43) writes that the, ‘… use and abuse of [such] historical memory was [the

linchpin that] prepared the Serbs for war in 1991’. Indeed, the self-perceived collective sense of

victimhood central to Serbian historical consciousness provided compelling motivation for the

Yugoslav wars of secession. The former President of Serbia (1989-1997), Slobodan Milošević,

drew heavily on the themes of suffering and heroism associated with the myth of Kosovo in

establishing his authority and legitimating the brutal conduct of regular and paramilitary forces

loyal to the cause of a ‘Greater Serbia’. In a spectacular inaugural address on the 600th

anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Kosovo on 28 June 1989 at the very site of the

historical conquest, Milošević enjoined the assembled crowd of patriots to unite under the

common cause of territorial sovereignty. Positioning himself as the symbolic heir to Prince Lazar,

Milošević encouraged the Serbian people to forswear the actions of the traitorous Vuk Branković,

and mould themselves instead in the image of the Serbian knight Miloš Obilić who demonstrated

the extent of his loyalty to leader and country by taking the life of the invading Ottoman Sultan

Murad I with a poisoned dagger, losing his own life in return (Klile & Laustsen, 2006). In so doing,

Milošević declared the potential for war and furnished the Serbian people with implicit permission

to seek recourse in violence to avenge the collective wounds of Kosovo (Duijzings, 2000).

Drawing parallels with the historic battle between Christianity and Islam of 1389 and the

contemporary Serbian movement towards separatist irredentism, Milošević proclaimed, ‘… [s]ix

centuries later, now, we are again being engaged in battles and facing war. They are not armed

battles, although such things cannot be excluded’ (cited in: Klile & Laustsen, 2006, 25-26).

The astute manipulation of the narrative of the Battle of Kosovo and its elevation to the stature of

‘Serbian Golgotha’ (Emmert, 1990) during the immediate pre-war years reflects the power-laden

dynamics of collective memory. Indeed, Richard Werbner (1988) describes the particular

patterns of remembrance as an expression of ‘elite memorialism’ in which the discursive spaces

available for the articulation of shared memories are shaped by those in control of the current

socio-political landscape. The new President’s symbolic call to arms at the first public celebration

of Vidovdan since the communist era followed 12 months of concerted revivification of the mythic

battle in Serbian public imaginary. In a revival of the old Orthodox custom, the holy remains of

the Prince Lazar were carried from the Patriarchate in Belgrade to various monasteries

throughout Serbia and in parts of Croatia and Bosnia before their eventual return to Gračanica in

Kosovo for reburial. The ritual journey that accompanied the reliquary marked the extent of

Milošević’s territorial aspirations and the symbolic boundaries of a proposed new Serbian state

that aligned closely with the nationalist rhetoric embodied in the common refrain that, ‘…

[w]herever Serb blood is spilt, and wherever Serbian bones are buried, this must be Serbian

territory’ (Power, 2002, 43). The central narrative of treachery, sacrifice, and resurrection

resonated powerfully with the putative concept of the Serb people as a unique and martyred

community, and Milošević’s sagacious appropriation of the story encouraged the national

population to, ‘imagine itself as an “endangered species”’ in urgent need of its own state to

protect itself (Pešić, 1996, 11). As Patrick Hutton (1988, 314) has observed, collective memory is

a tool, ‘…not of retrieval but of reconfiguration [that] colonizes the past by obliging it to conform to

present configurations’.

53

On Collective Memory and Gender

Gender is central to the constitution of a collective identity and to the construction of a shared

consciousness of the past. Indeed, social identity markers, including that of gender and its

associated relations of power, are deeply implicated in memories that are referenced both in and

by the collective. Selma Leydesdorff, Luisa Passerini, and Paul Thompson (2005) observe that

the sharply differentiated life experiences of women and men across most cultures and

throughout many generations are inevitably reflected in the different forms and qualities of

memory. The familiar tendency for women’s life trajectories to pivot chiefly on the family and

domestic spheres and for men to predominate in public realms has material consequences for

shaping the dynamics of who remembers, how those memories are communicated, with what

authority, and to whom. In national memory, then, men are often constituted as citizens by virtue

of their public presence, political influence, and perceived strength in arms. Women, by contrast,

are defined more frequently in relation to men as private, apolitical, and familial subjects. The

established social conventions that have endowed the two sexes with different roles,

responsibilities, knowledge, and expertise inevitably produce differently gendered memories and

noticeably divergent discourses on historical realities. The many ways in which women and men

are positioned in, and variously encounter, any event necessarily affects the forms in which each

remember, recount, and meditate on the memories of such experiences (Bos, 2006). Michelle

Perrot (1992) argues, even further, that gender and memory are mutually constitutive; the

architecture, aesthetics, and discourses of public remembrance, not only ‘reflect the symbolics of

sexual roles’, but also serve to legitimate them as part of a normative social order.

The gendered nature of memory has resulted in the uneven development of history in different

forms and across different cultural settings. Rachel Adler (1991) observes that memorial

landscapes often possess a male orientation despite any claims to universality and inclusiveness;

they are, instead, routinely grounded in master narratives that construct the male voice, the male

experience, and the male memory as normative. Men commonly appear in dominant memory

discourses as active, heroic, resourceful, and courageous leaders; their words and deeds

foregrounded in the public realm as worthy of collective emulation through the circulation of

monuments, texts, practices, customs, and performances. Women appear more often as

supporting symbols. The female actor remains scarce in public iconography, her agency,

experiences, perceptions, and words systematically marginalised and excluded from collective

historical records. Rey Chow (1992, 105) cogently argues that this framing of both women and

men through gendered and essentialist imagery naturalises the myth of masculine power and

feminine passivity. Women, in particular, remain ‘confined to visuality’ and are rendered

vulnerable and helpless, especially when read through the masculine schemata of national

memory. Mnemonic representations that tend to support the maintenance of these existing

power structures and that easily reconcile with preconceived gender ideals and patterns of

acceptable behaviour have generally found greater social space and wider cultural reception

throughout most historical moments. The familiar pattern of gendered remembrance inevitably

works to obscure a diversity of other experiences and multiple layers of meaning in past events,

not least women and the consideration of gender (Paletschek & Schraut, 2008). Certainly, in the

54

‘theater’ of memory, Cristina Scheibe Wolff, Joana Maria Pedro, and Janine Gomes da Silva

(2016, 59) write, ‘… women are faint shadows’.42

The social construction of gendered memories is very much a contested political terrain in this

regard; it is a, ‘… field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in

history’ (Sturken, 1997, 1). Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith (2002) argue that women’s

stories, in particular, represent a narrative realm situated beyond that of ‘history and myth’ and in

the, ‘… sometimes dangerous terrain of counter-memory’ (Lipsitz, 1990, 213). The testimonies of

women that have been marginalised and excluded from the public record, as well as the many

experiences that take place ‘offstage’, concealed beneath the surface, and beyond direct

observation, suggest the existence of other realities; counter perspectives that surface as

contrary to dominant memorial cultures and through which alternate political and social structures

might be imagined. The recovery and reinscription of these memories, ‘… challenges the making

of national identities, mythologies, and historical periodization by reinserting forgotten stories or

exposing unacknowledged assumptions’ (Hirsch & Smith, 2002, 13). The analytical focus on

counter-memories requires more than the creation of space in the historical record, however, or

the assimilation of submerged themes into existing theories and assumptions. Alejandra Oberti

(2006, cited in Wolff et al, 2016, 60) observes that attending to women’s testimonies demands

new perspectives when the material accentuates details that are commonly neglected by a male

framing of events and reveals, instead, ‘… new connections between the public and the private,

the personal and the political’, and involves recovering the, ‘… most subtle gestures, what cannot

be so easily represented’. Altinay and Pető (2016, 11), likewise, argue that the feminist project of

‘unsilencing’ women’s words requires critical engagement with silence itself given that:

42 The dissertation focuses specifically on women’s remembrances of the Bosnian war and on the role that

prevalent ideals of femininity have in shaping collective memory practices among survivors of wartime rape.

The distinctive influence of men and masculinity as dynamics in the construction, mediation, and articulation of

those same historical events is also referred to, where relevant, throughout the dissertation, however, a critical

engagement with both genders remains largely beyond the scope of the present discussion. Nonetheless, in

exploring the particular subject positions of women survivors, I acknowledge that gender is a relational

construct; it is formed and reformed with reference to, and through interactions with, other individuals and within

the prevailing social, cultural, political, and historical frameworks (Butler, 1990). The relationship between the

genders is often sharpened further over the course of war and conflict and, as Anna Reading (2002, 74)

suggests, both women and men are, ‘… part of the same shattered and shattering genocidal jigsaw’.

Mainstream paradigms, however, still frequently conflate ‘gender’ with ’women’. Men and masculinity as a

category of analysis have seldom been subject to critical thought in the scholarship on memory, despite the

ubiquity of men’s experiences across historical records (Chedgzoy, 2007). Although my own work concentrates

predominantly on female experiences, I recognise that the challenge of (re)constructing a gendered history of

war requires a more nuanced reading of both women’s and men’s voices as victims and as survivors, as

aggressors and as perpetrators. Indeed, Sara Horowitz (1998, 375) suggests that future scholarship can make

good the lack of analytical attention paid to the distinctive role of masculinity in shaping cultures of memory

through an exploration of, ‘… women not only as objects of particular abuses, as developers of particular

survival strategies, or even as thinkers about their own experiences. We must examine the place of gender in

accounts of men as well as women’.

55

‘… [s]ilences – especially silences in the histories and memories of wars that shape

contemporary lives – are deeply gendered and deeply political, and unsilencing can be a

form of radical, transformative political intervention’.

Gendered representations of women and men acquire particular form and meaning in the context

of war. Discourses of femininity and masculinity contribute to the manner in which both sexes are

perceived during conflict and to the particular experiences and responses of each as gendered

subjects and as victims. War, in turn, produces gender-specific harms (Wilmer, 2002). Indeed,

episodes of mass conflict have traditionally been constructed as masculine enterprises and

violence as an essentially masculine characteristic. Joshua Goldstein (2001, 278) writes that war

as a ‘test of manhood’ and an expression of innate masculinity are two constantly recurring

themes across most cultures, in many places, and throughout various moments in history. The

portrayal of conflict in such a distinctly gendered frame imposes certain roles and responsibilities

on men – as soldiers, aggressors, leaders in war, brokers in peace, and figures of victory or

defeat. Adam Jones (2004) suggests that, as a consequence, battle-aged men are more

frequently the focus of mass killings, genocidal slaughters, and state oppression. The

‘uncomfortable connections’ (Altınay & Pető, 2016) between women and war are similarly based

on culturally proscribed understandings of female roles and identities. Ronit Lentin (1999)

observes that women in war are frequently constructed as the pacific ‘other’ to the bellicose male

and are targeted on the basis of their traditional responsibilities as mothers, chattels, sexual

objects, repositories of familial honour, and allegories of the nation. Women are, thus, routinely

targeted in war as victims of sexual violence, forced prostitution, interpersonal violence, general

harassment, and forced migration alongside children and the elderly. Certainly, as Raul Hilberg

(1992) concludes, the experience of war specifically affects men as men and women as women,

men for their relation with women, and women for their relation with men.

The collective remembrance of war is also remarkably gendered. Gender not only influences the

experience of conflict for both women and men, but also frames the ways in which these

divergent realities are inscribed in national histories and the nature and scope of the audiences

that each cultural representation engages. Indeed, the commemorative traces of war are often

predominantly male and the surrounding public discourse defines the related ideals of heroism,

sacrifice, patriotism, and camaraderie as almost exclusively masculine (Wingfield & Bucur, 2006).

The figures of men in battle and in the acts of marching, fighting, protecting, and martyrdom, have

come to dominate the official memories of modern warfare writ large alongside the widely

celebrated ‘cult of the fallen soldier’ (Mosse, 1990). Joan Wallach Scott (1988) argues that the

battlefront is not the only theatre of war, however, and the study of women’s experiences provides

an especially valuable means for exploring the processes through which cultural memories are

formed. Scott observes that women’s memories of war seldom appear as part of official ethno-

national histories; their recollections of sieges and survival, assaults and bombardments, loss and

grief, and the everyday exigencies associated with family, safe shelter, food shortages, and fuel

deficiencies are less likely than men’s to find space in the public sanctification of war. Nancy

Wingfield and Maria Bucur (2006) maintain, even further, that women’s own writings are unlikely

to engage broad audiences given that the central focus of their recollections is often on survival

rather than on direct conflict or combat. Thus, ‘… [e]ven in memory,’ Michelle Perrot writes in

56

reference to the memorial landscape in post-World War I France, ‘… there are unequal shares’

(cited in Sherman, 1996, 83).

The gendered rhetoric has narrowed the representational scope of feminine and masculine

wartime roles. Women, as a category of national remembrance, are commonly depicted through

certain narrowly defined themes, which inevitably circumscribe the representation of agency and

diversity of experience in public memory and narrative. Indeed, Jean Bethke Elshtain (1987)

argues that western historical discourses on war are grounded in three fundamental and deeply

rooted gender archetypes that reinforce the valorised nationalist ideals of heroism, morality, and

nobility; specifically, through the figures of the ‘Just Warrior’, the ‘Beautiful Soul’, and the ‘Spartan

Mother’. The dichotomous construction of man as warrior prepared to rise in defence of an

honourable cause, and woman as beautiful soul, innocent, vulnerable, and self-sacrificing, in

particular, reproduce dominant cultural assumptions concerning the roles of men and women in

the modern state. He embodies the duties of defender of the public realm, the people, the power,

and the state and, she, as his collective other, continues the long tradition of women as mourners,

as justifications for war, and as keepers of hearth and home. To this binary model, Elshtain

further proposes a second collective representation of the female habitus in the model of the

Spartan mother; a complementary, if opposing, figure whose identity is inextricably bound to the

individual honour and valour of her husbands and sons in war. The Spartan Mother is the civic

militant whose fidelity to the nation is chiefly demonstrated in her willingness to rear sons as

future soldier-citizens who will die for the polity, ‘… in a manner worthy of herself, [their] country,

and [their] ancestors’, rather than living, ‘…for all time a coward’ (Plutarch, 1931, 459).

The archetypal constructions of the ‘Just Warrior’, the ‘Beautiful Soul’, and the ‘Spartan Mother’

have been appropriated and employed in many historic variants and for diverse political

purposes. Indeed, in a study of Holocaust memorials, Judith Tydor Baumel (1998) identifies four

similarly pervasive themes through which women’s experiences of trauma and atrocity in war

have been recalled and represented in national memory cultures; specifically, as mothers, virgins,

warriors, and weeping or elderly victims. Among these categories, Baumel identifies the

maternal motif as an especially consistent visual frame through which Jewish female suffering

has been mediated in post-Holocaust iconography; images of women heavily pregnant, carrying

infants, nursing children, and protecting toddlers figure prominently in historical records and at

important sites of cultural memory throughout Europe. The gendered stereotypes of women as

mothers, nurturers, and caretakers serve as powerful symbols of the innocence, vulnerability, and

fragility of victimhood. In this sense, Lucy Dawidowicz (1975) observes that the use of such

objectifying imagery symbolically lays bare the unparalleled brutality of a genocidal policy that

targeted women and children. Sara Horowitz (1998, 367) argues further that women’s unique

gendered experiences of victimhood and survival during the Holocaust have often been

interpreted and understood through the testimonies of their male counterparts. A gendered

historiography has remained marginal to the construction of a master narrative of the Nazi

genocide and the particular experiences of daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers have, instead,

been refracted through a patriarchal logic in which women appear as, ‘… peripheral, helpless,

and fragile; as morally deficient; or as erotic in their victimization’.

57

The gendered representations of women were especially evident across the constituent republics

of the former Yugoslavia immediately prior to the outbreak of war in the mid-1990s. The gradual

demise of the state socialist regime following the death of ‘president for life’ Josip Broz Tito and

the corresponding intensification of nationalist sentiments brought about significant adjustments in

the concept of patriotic womanhood. The exemplar of the loyal and dutiful woman shifted during

this period of transition from the dominant Yugoslav ideology of gender equality and the

responsibility to contribute to the socialist regime through personal labour to nationalist ideals

based on serving the state as wife and mother (Bracewell, 1996). The return to an emphasis on

traditional and patriarchal gender roles in national politics was partly grounded in local traditions

that inspired a connection between the modern woman and select devoted heroines from folk

imagery and epic poetry. In particular, the mythic tale of ‘Majka Jugović’, or ‘Mother Jugović’,

derived from the long-established practice of epic poetry commemorating the medieval Battle of

Kosovo, captivated the collective Serbian public imagination in the two decades prior to the war.

In the melancholic saga, Majka Jugović, the stoic mother of the nine Jugović brothers, willingly

offered her children up to death on the battlefield in the tragic, but heroic, defeat against the

invading Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth century. The grieving woman died of a broken heart,

however, after two ravens delivered the arm of her youngest boy from the front, thereby signalling

the death of her nine sons and soldiers and leaving her bereft of all but her one remaining

daughter (Batinić, 2015).

In Bosnia, too, the rhetoric of traditional and nationalist gender roles found meaningful expression

in a repertoire of local allegories, songs, jokes, and other folkloric idioms (Olujić, 1998; Vucetić,

2004). During the prelude to the dissolution of the Yugoslav federation and the resulting wars of

secession, the motif of the female warrior stood alongside maternal imagery as a compelling pillar

of ideal womanhood. Sarajevan-based journalist and freelance writer Azra Zalihić-Kaurin (1994),

writing of the evolving status of Muslim women in Bosnia, details the familiar story of a young

Bosniak woman, ‘Emina’, whose death revealed the ever-present anxieties of honour, shame,

and sexuality. Emina lived in the municipality of Sjenica in the southwestern Sandžak region of

Serbia at the time of the Second World War. The area was the subject of territorial aspirations in

the mid-twentieth century for its political, military, and strategic significance and weathered a

series of intense conflicts between various expansionist forces. The most referenced among

these armed exchanges was the Battle of Sjenica in 1941 between the aggressor forces of

Yugoslav Partisans and the defending forces of Sandžak Muslim militia and the town’s militsiya

comprised of local Muslim and Serbian communities (Todorović, 2012). As the story goes, Emina

stood beside her fellow villagers and, armed with a gun, the young woman fought –

unsuccessfully – to hold back the invading Serbian Četnik detachments of the Yugoslav army.43

43 Četniks (pron: Chetniks) refers to the royalist, conservative, and Serbian nationalist movement that operated as

an illegal paramilitary resistance force during the nineteenth century. First established as part of the Serbian

liberation struggle against Ottoman rule, the Četnik movement functioned as an anti-communist force during the

Second World War and was resurrected again during the wars of Yugoslav succession to fight for a ‘Greater

Serbia’ (Sindbæk, 2009). The title of ‘Četnik’ in everyday contemporary vernacular most often refers collectively

and pejoratively to all Serb and Bosnian Serb veterans and produces stereotypic representations of World War

58

When the little village fell into the hands of its aggressors, Emina pleaded of one conquering

soldier, ‘… only leave me my honor; I will forgive you my death’ (Zalihić-Kaurin, 1994, 173).

Joshua Goldstein (2001) writes that these gendered representations often shape women, men,

and children to respond to the interests of nationalist regimes and the shifting needs and

demands of the war system. Indeed, the telling and re-telling of particular aphorisms through the

use of such oral traditions serves to reinforce, even further, the definition and maintenance of

social and political relations and, similar to the concept of invented traditions, acts to, ‘… socialize

or inculcate beliefs, values, or behaviors’ (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1992, 9). The central motifs of

the heroic self-sacrificing mother and of the victimised female warrior not only represented the

voices of collective grief and martyrdom in the emerging ethnic and national narratives of the

former Yugoslavia, but also the gendered expectations of womanhood in a transitional social,

political, and pre-war context. The maternal figure of ‘Majka Jugović’ and the martial icon of

‘Emina’ embodied the emotive-driven values of courage, honour, altruism, self-sacrifice, strength,

endurance and, most importantly, fertility. Jelena Batinić (2015) argues that the appropriation of

such specific imagery invites women to emulate similar principles through their own participation

in the intervolved projects of nation building and war in multiple ways; as mothers who raise future

soldiers, as wives who feed, clothe, and nurse the military, and as sisters who seek to serve the

cause themselves. The two central motifs of motherhood and womanhood, even today, continue

to hold relevance. The Serbian Orthodox Church through the Patriarch’s fund for the continuity of

the nation still confers the honour of the Order of ‘Majka Jugović’ in silver and gold on women

who give birth to four and five children, respectively (Mayer, 2000). The Muslim community in

Bosnia, likewise, sought to publicly commemorate the qualities embodied by the figure of the

female warrior in a pre-war campaign to dedicate International Women’s Day on March 8 each

year to ‘Emina’s Day’ (Zalihić-Kaurin, 1994).

On Collective Memory and the History of Wartime Rape

The rape of women and girls in armed conflict has often been framed as ‘one of history’s great

silences’ (Ward & Marsh, 2006, 1; Eriksson, 2010, 11), even across many gendered readings of

various wartime pasts (Boose, 2002; Nikolić-Ristanović, 2002; Bos, 2006; Theidon, 2007). The

positioning of women’s narratives at the margins of official wartime histories, outside the realms of

public memory, and on the edges of collective identity projects is, in part, a reflection of the

pervasive, trans-historical, and enduring tolerance of rape as an unfortunate, yet inevitable,

corollary of war (Seifert, 1994). Indeed, the mainstream discourses available for recognising,

interpreting, and representing rape in war have historically depicted instances of mass violence

against women as manifestations of a biologically driven aggression in male soldiers during

conflict. The collapse of a social order and the civilising restraints of society accompanied by a

deterioration into war produce the degraded conditions necessary for militarised men to descend

into a natural state of violence and virility in which sexual aggression is inexorably entrenched

(Seifert, 1996; Gottschall, 2004; Stern & Zalewski, 2009). Under this dominant framework, rape

has been largely overlooked in history as little more than the private and opportunistic excesses

II guerrilla forces bearing the military iconography of black flags carrying the symbol of the skull and crossbones,

bandoliers and combat knives, fur hats and full beards (Danner, 1997).

59

of a few renegade soldiers, as a ‘reward’ for military service, and as an unfortunate reaction to the

constant threat of violence (Johnson, 2009). Certainly, Ingrid Schmidt-Harzbach (1992, 43) has

observed that the suffering of women in war has been attended to in a markedly different tradition

to that of combatants, or even of male civilians. She writes that the, ‘…victims of rape are not

included in the public rite of mourning over the lost war, they are not admired as ‘heroines’ and do

not receive any compensation’.

Rape and sexual enslavement have, indeed, remained a persistent legacy of violent conflict

throughout many centuries. Historical accounts of the brutality and the systematic organisation of

mass violence against women have surfaced with disturbing frequency in the global history of

wars and rebellions. Indeed, thousands of women faced assault by knights and pilgrims on the

medieval march to Constantinople during the first Crusade (1095-1099). French soldiers were,

likewise, responsible for the rape of English women during the Hundred Years War (1337-1453)

in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Gottschall, 2004). In a similar manner, rape became a

‘weapon of terror’ during the German army’s invasion of Belgium in the First World War in 1914,

and a ‘weapon of revenge’ as Soviet forces advanced towards Berlin in the final months of the

Second World War in 1945 (Brownmiller, 1975). In the latter part of the twentieth century, rape in

war has been no less pervasive. Sexual violence was an extraordinarily widespread form of

aggression perpetrated by the U.S. army and their allies against civilian women, Prisoners of War

(POW), and fellow female soldiers during the Vietnam War (1955-1975) (Weaver, 2010).

Strategic rape also played an important role during the Rwandan civil war (1990-1993) and

various conflicts in Uganda, Liberia, Haiti, and Iraq with victims numbering into the hundreds of

thousands. Thousands more women again suffered a similar fate during the decade-long war in

Sierra Leone (1991- 2001), the armed conflict in Kosovo (1998-1999), and the East Timorese

crisis (1999). Despite its apparent ubiquity in both ancient and contemporary conflicts, however,

Susan Brownmiller (1975, 40) argues that, ‘… [a] casual reader of history quickly learns that rape

remains unmentionable, even in war. Serious historians have rarely bothered to document

specific acts of rape in warfare’.

The cultural construction of rape narratives, however, is a far more complex terrain than a simple

absence or suppression of rape narratives from public discussions. Rape in war is a story that

has been variously recalled, appropriated, and effaced at specific historical moments and is

otherwise frequently captured in artistic, pictorial, mythical, and religious interpretations. Indeed,

the rape and mass violation of women in times of uncertainty is a recurrent motif that has

appeared in such diverse representations as early accounts of the Torah, in the Homeric epics of

ancient Greek literature, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of the ninth century, and in the

mythological anecdote of the Sabine women (Gottschall, 2004; Henry, 2014). In this sense, Ken

Plummer (1995, 63) writes that rape has a long and classical history of ‘being told’ in the form of a

tale, as an allegorical story that often provides a founding myth for nationhood and serves to forge

a common purpose and association between peoples. Certainly, the story of the rape of the

noblewoman, Lucretia, is one such fabled anecdote that has been extensively recalled, repeated,

and re-presented as the motivation for the final overthrow of the Roman monarchy and the

founding of the republic. Raped at knifepoint by the son of the seventh and final king of Rome,

Lucretia called upon her menfolk to avenge her violation before taking her own life in a final act of

60

self-sacrifice and redemption (Joshel, 1992). In the story of Lucretia, the female body represents

a battleground; a metaphor for the nation, and a symbol of patriarchal alliances and oppositions,

and, as Lynda Boose (2002, 73) has written, traditionally, ‘… [c]ulture has authorized only one

narrative for a woman raped by the enemy – the one of the Roman, Lucrece, that concludes with

her suicide’.

Narratives of rape have frequently, and purposefully, been appropriated and woven into broader

discourses on national victimisation since Lucretia’s plight and the political transformation of

Rome in the sixth century BC. Susan Brownmiller (1975, 37-38) writes that, ‘… aggressor

nation[s] rarely [admit] to rape. Documentation of rape in warfare is something the other side

totals up, analyzes and propagandizes when the smoke has cleared after defeat’. In a similar

vein, Atina Grossmann (1995) argues that the endless stories of the mass rape of civilian women

at the hands of Soviet soldiers in the spring and early summer of 1945 became central to

particular strands of post-war German thought and to the development of a new national identity

following the fall of the Third Reich. The many and varied retellings of rape experiences in the

final few months of the Second World War came to symbolise the universal suffering of the

German Volk rather than the very personal traumas of individual women and, together with

stories of soldiers’ travails on the eastern front, served to deflect attention away from other

troubling moral questions concerning the recent Nazi past. In this way, the rape of women in

Germany became the rape of Germany and personal memories of sexual violation provided the

raw material for many popular accounts of history to recast the German people as ‘victims’, rather

than as ‘agents’, of National Socialism and war. Robert Moeller (2001, 67), similarly, observes

that mass rape became a powerful metaphor illustrating the honour and virtue of one nation in

opposition to the extreme brutality of another as, ‘… women’s violated bodies took on an

enormous emotional value, and women’s suffering came to symbolize the victimization of all

Germans’.

The attention paid to rape narratives in nationalist discourses may perform other functions beyond

those that serve to underscore universal suffering in the collective imaginary. In other contexts,

the solicitation of rape memories functions as part of official attempts to rearticulate group identity

in the aftermath of war, shifting historiographical discussions away from ‘victim’ and towards

‘victor’ narratives. Nayanika Mookherjee (2002; 2006; 2008; 2012) writes of the very public

invocation of the history of rape during the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971 and its symbolic

value as a metaphor for the dynamism of the newly sovereign state. Official figures suggest an

estimated 200,000 women and girls were raped over the nine-month struggle by both members of

the Pakistani army and Razakars, their local Bengali collaborators. Immediately following

liberation, the new government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh conferred the honorific of

‘birangona’ on survivors of war rape; a title that variously translates to mean ‘brave’ or

‘courageous’ woman and, in this context, ‘war heroine’ (Mookherjee, 2012). The proclamation

was part of a deliberate state policy to rehabilitate the ‘dishonoured’ women and facilitate their

acceptance in a conservative, Muslim-majority society in which a woman’s social worth was firmly

invested in her virtue and chastity. Mookherjee argues that this ‘eulogization’ of women survivors

as birangonas and the associated state rehabilitation program was grounded in a modernist

agenda. The positive conceptual formulation of the memory of raped women through state

61

rehabilitation policies became symbolic of the evolution of the new nation and its emancipation

from the conservative traditions of Muslim society (Mookherjee, 2006).

While the memory of war rape is vividly apparent in certain recollections of the past, those same

narratives provoke indignation and denial at other historical moments. The contested memory

spaces occupied by survivors of the Japanese system of military prostitution during the Asia-

Pacific War (1931-1945) reflect the strength of resistance of cultural narratives when challenged

with the weight of undesirable histories. Indeed, the testimonies of the euphemiously-named

‘comfort women’ have only recently emerged in state discourses concerning Japan’s wartime

history after more than 50 years of suppression and denial (Tanaka, 2002). The accounts of an

untold number of women forced into prostitution throughout Japanese-occupied territories during

World War II disrupt the heroic narratives of survival implied in official historical discussions. The

complicity of the imperial army in the forced recruitment of colonised women and their

enslavement, rape, and abuse at the hands of Japanese soldiers in ‘comfort stations’, likewise,

disturbs the metanarratives of national victimisation. The survivors themselves, moreover, have

failed to find footing amid the hierarchy of war victims, warranting little state compensation or

government assistance despite the stigma, ostracism, poverty, suicides, and other injustices they

have faced (Soh, 2008). Even with the open existence of soldiers’ memoirs and the discovery of

government documents referencing military-controlled brothels, the issue of ‘comfort women’ has

remained marginal to official wartime histories and subject to highly sensitive revisionist claims

from right wing conservative and neo-nationalist elements in Japanese society. The Japanese

government itself has largely continued to define the existence of the ‘comfort women’ system as

a military version of licenced prostitution, which was both a legal and socially tolerated practice

prior to the war (Norma, 2016).

Nicola Henry (2011, 20) argues that, ‘… the issue here is that the role of women and their

memory of sexual violence play a subsidiary part in these competing, conflicting versions of

collective memory’. Indeed, the history of rape has largely been discussed as an unfortunate

corollary of warfare; often referred to as a minor, tangential storyline or, even more frequently,

excluded from public conversations for its perceived irrelevance to the master narratives of most

major conflicts. The individual voices of women lose their distinctive qualities in these contexts,

and the very intimate stories of their survival are transformed, suppressed, concealed, and made

to speak for larger metanarratives of war. As a consequence, the dominant frameworks for

understanding rape in times of war produce limited registers through which to experience,

acknowledge, hear, feel, and attend to the suffering of survivors. As Ann Cvetkovich (2003, 16)

contends, ‘… the nation [is] a space of struggle … [in which particular] forms of violence [are]

forgotten or covered over by the amnesiac powers of national culture, which are adept at using

one trauma story to suppress another’. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and his influential

conceptualisation of political power, Kali Tal (1996, 6-7) argues, similarly, that, ‘… traumatic

events are written and rewritten until they become codified and narrative form gradually replaces

contents as the focus of attention’. In the codification of certain popular representations of the

past, the individual voices of survivors are displaced, dismissed, and silenced at the same time as

they become institutionalised in the complex of historical, legal, medical, and political discourses.

Tal continues:

62

‘… [o]nce codified, the traumatic experience becomes a weapon in another battle, the

struggle for political power … The speech of survivors, then, is highly politicized. If ‘telling

it like it was’ threatens the status quo, powerful political, economic, and social forces will

pressure survivors either to keep their silence or to revise their stories. If the survivor

community is a marginal one, their voices will be drowned out by those with the influence

and resources to silence them, and to trumpet a revised version of their trauma’.

The subsidiary position of rape narratives in public conversations has often been interpreted as a

measure of the traumatic silence of women on the matter of their wartime suffering. This

particular reading has contributed to the commonplace assumption that memories of sexual

violence are ‘unspeakable’, ‘unrepresentable’, and ‘severed from articulation’ (Graham, 2003,

439). As Janine Klungel (2012, 43) argues, however, traumatic events may be experienced,

recalled, expressed, and transmitted in many diverse ways other than, or in addition to, discursive

modes of communication. Klungel writes that women’s intimate accounts of sexual violence in

the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe have been ‘passionately perform[ed]’ and ‘devotedly

transmit[ted]’ throughout generations in varied and various ways. Indeed, the pervasive threat of

rape has been an endemic part of political and social relations on the island since the earliest

years of French occupation in 1635 and well beyond the end of its history with the African slave

trade in 1848. The violent legacies of this threat have been heard, felt, and attended to through

certain culturally specific channels of remembrance, particularly by way of religious and spiritual

idioms that have enabled the articulation of rape stories. Klungel suggests that the ongoing

trauma of past rape experiences continues to intrude on the present through the predatory figures

of incubi; rape spirits who appear to women in their dreams and are then provided with shape and

form as the visions are recounted, often through spirit mediums. Rape remembrance has also

inevitably penetrated the intimate social milieu of familial relations in the embodied practice of

‘virginity testing’ through which mothers regularly reassure themselves of their daughters’

maidenhood in a distressing attempt at ‘desperate control’. The circulation of rape memories in

this context serve as cautionary tales; as warnings intended to preserve and protect women and

girls in an environment in which sexual violence forms a frighteningly oppressive and routine

presence.

Women’s memories of violence in collective representations of the past, therefore, often embody

alternative modes of knowing; other mediums of expression and communication that give shape

and form to those particular narratives that are especially unlikely to find space in public narrative.

Leslie Dwyer (2004) writes that Balinese women’s recollections of the ‘Gestok’ period of 1965-

1966 were especially subject to ambivalent articulation and reception within official state

discourses. Over the course of several months, women in Bali were targeted for particularly

brutal treatment during the military-backed communist purges in which entire communities were

marked by mass murders, torture, sexual assault, imprisonment, and exile. Thousands of women

associated with the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), or the Communist Party of Indonesia, were

publicly denounced as ‘savage monsters’ (Thaler, 2012, 209) and ‘immoral whores’ (Bagus, 2006,

100). In many more cases, women were summarily arrested and removed to government offices

where military personnel performed bodily ‘examinations’ for evidence of alleged communist

affiliations, which were frequently accompanied by rape. Despite the widespread practice of

sexual assault over many months of civil unrest, the stories of women who suffered and survived

63

such violence have remained marginal to the recent movements calling for pelurusan sejarah or

the straightening of history in post-Suharto Indonesia and even more peripheral to the work of

truth and reconciliation commissions. The gendered experiences of sexual violence have failed

to conform to the linear narrative structures favoured in most mainstream public representations

of the massacre and were, instead, simply implied through muted gestures, indirect references,

genteelism, and cautious elliptical speech (Dwyer, 2004).

Sexual violence in armed conflict has only recently received sustained attention in public

consciousness, however, in spite of its prevalence throughout the history of warfare. Since

Newsday correspondent Roy Gutman first exposed the practice of rape and other atrocities that

had taken place behind the wired fences of Serbian-held camps in eastern Bosnia in July of 1992,

sexual violence has been broadly, and consistently, explored within international populist,

scholarly, and legal realms. Gutman’s series of accounts over the early months of the Bosnian

war spoke of mass rapes carried out under (para)military command as part of an organised

campaign of ethnic cleansing across the eastern corridor of the Drina Valley (Gutman, 1993, 64-

76; 144-9; 157-67). While the rape of women as a strategy of warfare detailed in these early

media reports was far from exceptional, the public attention dedicated to the scale and scope of

the matter during the Bosnian war was certainly unprecedented. A surge of analyses in the

intervening period has produced a comprehensive body of reports and testimonies detailing the

personal stories of survivors, including those who had been raped or who had witnessed the

sexual assaults perpetrated against their own mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters often at the

hands of their former friends, colleagues, neighbours, and family members (Skjelsbæk, 2012).

The debates that have stemmed from this concentrated attention have produced more

sophisticated understandings of gendered violence in war, as military strategy, as instrument of

genocide, as tool of propaganda, and as ethno-cultural boundary marker. This new awareness

has, in turn, enabled, and even obligated, the disclosure and inclusion of narratives of mass rape

and sexual violation within analytical frameworks in which they would normally be denied or

excluded.

The consolidation of rape and other forms of sexual violence as acts of grave magnitude in war,

thus, emerged dramatically into historical consciousness during the mid-1990s and the period

immediately following the Bosnian war (Henry, 2011). Indeed, war rape, and many of its most

horrific dimensions, has been thoroughly explored and memorialised in a diversity of official and

unofficial mnemonic forms throughout the intervening years. The vivid portrayals of rape in legal,

scholarly, psychological, literary, and artistic representations have each contributed to the

significant shifts in conceptual understandings of gendered experiences of war that evolved in the

final decade of the twentieth century and to the construction of a global archive of women’s

stories of suffering after the close of conflict. As a result, rape has now been recognised and

successfully prosecuted as a war crime, a crime against humanity, and an instrument of genocide

for the first time in international history. Women survivors of war rape have subsequently

appeared before international courts as victims and witnesses and their testimonies have

influenced the ways in which the events to which they refer, and the historical periods in which

they are situated, are collectively remembered. Mass media has documented many of the horrific

dimensions of sexual violence, revealing the prevalence, extent, and gravity of the practice as

64

used in geographically diverse and culturally distinct wars and a proliferation of what Alon Confino

(1997, 1386) refers to as ‘vehicles of memory’ – books, memoirs, documentaries, and films – has

further captured public imagination and contributed to the rise of ‘testimonial cultures’ (Ahmed &

Stacey, 2001) through which survivors’ stories have become a part of the memorial landscape of

recovering nations.

The use of sexual violence as a fundamental tactic of armed conflict has been interpreted and

memorialised as a central element of warfare and yet, at the same time, it remains subject to

different modes of forgetting and forms of moderation and, even, aestheticisation. The frames of

remembrance that dominate master narratives currently emerging in post-conflict Bosnia to

explain the most recent war still privilege men’s experiences of suffering over stories of survival

that recall gender-specific forms of violence, particularly those that encompass memories of mass

rape and sexual exploitation. As Teodora Todorova (2011, 3) writes, the collective response to

mass rape in Bosnia has been marked by, ‘… a conflicting paradox between international legal

institutions … which have sought to prosecute perpetrators, and a societal response

characterised by silence, the marginalisation of individual victims, and the pronounced desire to

“forget” about certain aspects of wartime victimisation’. In considering women’s memories of war

rape and their place in historical consciousness, then, the most critical questions do not

necessarily revolve around those that are limited to an exploration of how the past has been

represented or the ways in which it has been crafted into shared cultural knowledge. Instead,

they engage more directly with the politics of why certain events have been selected for public

commemoration, or the reasons why other experiences have not, and how these social

(re)constructions of the past have come to motivate people, to guide their emotions, and to

provoke both collective and individual action (Confino, 1997).

Conclusion: The Living Legacy of Collective Memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Ilana Bet-El (2002, 206) writes that the, ‘… [w]ords of the past became weapons of war’ in the

final decades of the twentieth century across the multiethnic republics of the former Yugoslavia.

The complicated politics of collective memory contributed significantly to the collapse of the

socialist federation and to its subsequent disintegration into a sequence of wars among the

successor states. As Monika Palmberger (2006) has written, however, it was neither the long

history of ethnic conflicts nor the memories of ancient grievances themselves that contributed to

the recent instability and violence on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. It was, rather, the

misuse of those shared histories that fuelled the development of exclusionary nationalist identities

in the immediate post-communist era and fostered a deepening fear and mistrust between the

key ethno-national groups of Bosniaks, Croatians, and Serbians. The stories of the past – both

the centuries-old foundational myths that sharpened the distinctions between groups and the

living memories of more recent ethnic animosities – were frequently reinterpreted and evoked by

nationalists as legitimate grounds for the fratricidal violence and mass killings that unfolded during

the mid-1990s (Rogel, 1998). The growing atmosphere of ressentiment – real or imagined – was

readily exploited to cultivate the sense that each national collective might be under imminent

threat as the focus of another group’s aggression. Certainly, Glenn Bowman (1994, 150) argues

that the manipulation of historical and ethno-religious memories produced a ‘discursive shift’ from

65

the tenuous communist ethos of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ and their mobilisation by nationalist

leaders, ‘… allowed peripheralized and muted memories to become the central point of new

definitions of identities’.

Gender has been a central influence in the (re)construction of victim identities and the memories

that ground them across the former Yugoslavia in both the contentious pre- and post-conflict

political milieux. Certain patterns of gendered memory were evident in the narratives that were

specifically invoked in the prelude to war and in the stories that were formed in its aftermath as

expressions of the exceptional trauma and suffering experienced by each particular ethno-

national group. The representation of both women and men in national cultures of memory during

the post-communist transition not only reinforced the prevailing gender order, but also defined the

shifting roles and responsibilities of each sex as the reality of conflict drew nearer. Public

discourse in the six constituent republics concerning the impending wars commonly framed

heroism as a predominantly male construct and paved the way to celebrate the figure of the ‘Just

Warrior’ (Elshtain, 1987) and to mourn the martyrs who fought for, and sacrificed their lives in

defence of, their countries and communities. Women, by contrast, were recalled more frequently

through the many, varied, and culturally specific renderings of the ‘Beautiful Soul’ (Elshtain,

1987), exemplified most often in the symbolic ideals of the suffering mother, the female warrior,

and as the sexual possession of ethno-national and religious collectives (Salvatici, 2008; Helms,

2012; Jacobs, 2016). The stories of wartime victimhood and survival, and especially those that

reconciled with preconceived gender ideals and patterns of acceptable behaviour, often worked to

obscure a diversity of other experiences and multiple layers of meaning in past events.

War rape is an especially gendered motif across most national histories and is necessarily beset

by the many contradictions and ambiguities of remembering in the post-conflict Bosnian state.

Similar to the commonplace representations of rape in other warscapes, memories of the very

particular forms of violence perpetrated against women and girls during the Bosnian conflict have

been characterised – sometimes unproblematically – as silenced, suppressed, or censored. The

discursive framings of women’s wartime suffering across dominant memorial cultures are,

however, far more complex than a simple absence of rape narratives from public discussions. In

Bosnia, the figure of the woman raped has come to represent the brutality of the ethnic other in

their wartime assault on the collective ideals of dignity, honour, innocence, and nurturing care

embodied in her persona. She is recalled as a symbol of the tragic plight of her nation in war and

the continued suffering of her ethno-religious group in the long afterlife of violence. The frequent

invocation of the figure of the raped woman and of the history of mass sexual assaults, both real

and exaggerated, created new spaces for survivors to disclose their experiences as part of public

discussions concerning the recent war. The appropriation of her presence by those from a

diverse range of political orientations – mainstream political actors, conservative religious

nationalists, anti-nationalists, feminists, and media – simultaneously circumscribed the frames

through which she might interpret those memories. Narratives of war rape are, thus, framed in

many, various, and complicated ways that speak as much to the particular audiences involved as

to the individual and collective motives behind their retellings.

66

Chapter II:

The Unmaking of the World: War, Rape, and the

Legacies of Conflict

‘… The union of 1 December 1918 was a shotgun wedding; the

honeymoon was as short as the hangover was long’.

Mark Wheeler, Britain and the War for Yugoslavia, 1940-43, 1980, 112

The bloody wars of secession of the mid-1990s that resulted in the dissolution of the Socialist

Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) were instrumental moments in the longstanding feminist

project of establishing gendered violence as a matter of serious international public debate and

concern. Indeed, Aryeh Neier (1998, 172) writes that, ‘… [f]or a time, the war in Bosnia became

virtually synonymous with rape, acquiring a reputation for uncommon ugliness in the process and

helping to create unprecedented awareness of rape as a common method of warfare and political

repression worldwide’. The later findings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former

Yugoslavia (ICTY), together with its counterpart in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

(ICTR), reconceptualised and established rape, sexual assault, and sexual enslavement as war

crimes, crimes against humanity, constituents of genocide, and grave breaches of the Geneva

Conventions (Reid-Cunningham, 2008). A small number of men of all ethnicities from the former

Yugoslav republics have since been tried for, and found guilty of, rape and other forms of sexual

assault, serving to validate the significance of these historic legal developments (Lindsey, 2002:

59). As a consequence of the precedents set by both the Bosnian and Rwandan conflicts, and

their respective tribunals, the previously ‘taboo’ subject of wartime rape has experienced

unprecedented and sustained academic and popular scrutiny. The resultant surge in analyses

has produced more sophisticated understandings of gendered wartime violence as military

strategy, as instrument of genocide, as tool of propaganda, and as ethno-cultural boundary

marker. Indeed, as Rhonda Copelon (1994, 213) has argued, ‘… rape takes many forms, occurs

in many contexts, and has different repercussions for different victims. Every rape is

multidimensional, but not incomparable’.

The following chapter situates the study within the specific historical, social, and cultural

frameworks that have contributed to the production of personal and collective memories of war

rape. Indeed, the systematic practice of rape during the wars of Yugoslav secession, and in

Bosnia, in particular, cannot be understood without explicit reference to the historical and political

contexts in which the mass violations occurred, which were conflicts with strong ethnic,

nationalist, and gendered dimensions. The chapter begins by tracing a brief trajectory of the war

in Bosnia from its outset in April of 1992 until the brokering of the final ceasefire and the signing of

the Dayton Peace Agreement in December of 1995. It then explores the specific dynamics of

67

mass rape and sexual violence as it occurred within this broader wartime context. In mapping a

chronology of the Bosnian war and the place of rape within it, the chapter draws particular

attention to the influence of gender and ethnicity on the patterns of violence that emerged during

the four years of conflict. In doing so, it attends to a discussion of the ways in which war

transformed the political uses of rape during the Bosnian conflict such that mass sexual violence

ultimately came to be understood as a part of military strategy. A discussion of the macro-level

influences of the Bosnian war and its predominant critiques is imperative in exploring the

everyday, prosaic processes of memory making for, as Michael Herzfeld (1997, 25) has argued, it

is important to relate the, ‘… little poetics of everyday interaction with the grand dramas of official

pomp and historiography in order to break down illusions of scale’.

Political Backdrop: A Prolegomena to the Bosnian War (1992-1995)

The bloody dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was the grim

denouement to a multinational, multiethnic ‘experiment’ (Unkovski-Korica, 2015) that spanned the

course of seven decades and the greater part of the twentieth century. The violent transition from

a federation of republics to six individual sovereign states in the wake of the Cold War and the

‘year of revolutions’ in 1989 was a complex process with multiple and overlapping causes

(Glenny, 1992). Indeed, the death of Yugoslavia’s emblematic president, Marshal Josip Broz

Tito, in 1980 following a dictatorial rule of close to four decades left behind a clear political

vacuum and triggered the beginning of the federation’s steady demise. The fourth and final

constitution of Yugoslavia, adopted in 1974 in anticipation of Tito’s eventual passing, was often

described as a ‘blueprint for secession’ (Jović, 2009), but ultimately proved incapable of retaining

the polycentric unity denotative of the socialist regime under the charismatic leadership of its

‘president for life’. The implementation of the constitution in the decade prior to the series of

secessionist movements, instead, created a ‘loose confederation’ (Sell, 2002, 45) and the

effective devolution of any substantive economic, political, and cultural power away from the

federal government and towards the republics and autonomous provinces. A rotating federal

presidency intended to distribute the balance of power between the eight provincial

representatives produced a system of ‘combative federalism’ (Samardžić, 1990), exacerbating

underlying tensions among the constituent ethnic groups and minority peoples and ensuring that

most key decisions of ethno-national importance were regularly ‘held hostage’ by federal units

(Hayden, 2012, 380).

The structural complications that emerged in the wake of Tito’s passing produced the conditions

necessary for the re-emergence of strident, ethnocentric, religious nationalism in the Balkans,

particularly in the republics of Serbia and Croatia. The centralist aspirations of the Serbian

government, who began pressing for the maintenance of a common Yugoslav federation under its

command soon after the economy deteriorated in the 1980s, conflicted violently with the

separatist and oppositional demands of the Croatian state, which supported a gradual devolution

of power. The burden of such radical nationalist sentiment was given authoritative expression in

the renowned Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU), otherwise

known as the ‘SANU Memorandum’. The draft document written by a 16-member committee and

signed by 216 prominent nationalist intellectuals in January 1986 contributed significantly to the

68

ideological transition in Serbia from a communist agenda to one of radical nationalism (Stallaerts,

2002). The Memorandum claimed that the Serbian people had been economically and culturally

subordinated under the Titoist regime and warned of an impending genocide at the hands of

Kosovar Albanians, and in Metohija, and Croatia. In response, its authors called for a

fundamental reorganisation of the state and the creation of a Greater Serbia (Morus, 2007). The

unofficial publication of key excerpts in the Serbian newspaper Večernje Novosti in September of

1986 is widely considered a critical moment in the demise of the socialist federation and a

principal contributory factor in the Yugoslav wars. Indeed, Louis Sell (2002, 46) argued that, ‘…

[t]he SANU Memorandum constituted the intellectual underpinning for Serbia’s destruction of

Yugoslavia’.

The delegitimisation of communism and the renaissance of aggressive nationalist aspirations

among the six constitutive states produced an atmosphere of collective paranoia that has been

referred to, by some, as the ‘generation of fears of domination’ (Paković, 2000, 98). In this

increasingly militant climate, the republics of Slovenia and Croatia unilaterally declared their

independence from Yugoslavia on 25 June 1991, following an almost unanimous vote in their

respective parliaments. The secessionist actions effectively ended the validity of the 1974

constitution within each territory, provoking an immediate response from Belgrade. Supported by

a progressively Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army (JNA), then-Serbian president Slobodan

Milošević ordered forces to invade Slovenia resulting in a brief period of hostilities known as the

‘Ten-Day War’ (Parker, 2008). Whereas the withdrawal of Slovenia from the Federation was a

relatively bloodless undertaking, the Croatian movement for independence was far more

ferocious and protracted. The resultant war of independence (1992-1995), or the ‘Greater-

Serbian Aggression, was fought between forces loyal to the government of Croatia, led by Franjo

Tuđman, and the JNA, supported by local ethnic Serb militia seeking to establish a break-away

state inside Croatian borders, entitled the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK). The war ended in

1995 with a Croatian victory and the preservation of its original borders but resulted in the deaths

of 20,000 people and a severely damaged economy (Parker, 2008). Macedonia declared

independence in December of 1991 and seceded peacefully shortly thereafter with none of the

inter-ethnic violence of its predecessor states. Montenegro formed a loose state union with

Serbia in 1992 but eventually seceded formally in May of 2006, following a narrowly successful

referendum. Vojvodina remains an autonomous province of Serbia (Pešić, 1996).

The route to independence was of a more forced and protracted nature for the multi-ethnic

‘microcosm’ (Nizich, 1992, 13) of Bosnia. The central Yugoslav republic declared independence

from the federation in March of 1992, following a successful referendum several months earlier,

which was strongly supported by Bosniak and Bosnian Croat voters but largely boycotted by pan-

Serbian nationalists. Formal diplomatic recognition of Bosnia as an independent state shortly

thereafter and acceptance as a member of the United Nations triggered an immediate response

from Serb forces intent on remaining part of a rump Yugoslavia and uniting all descendant

citizens under the banner of a Greater Serbian state (Fuller, 1997). Bosnian Serb (para)military

forces, supported by the Yugoslav army (JNA) and Serbia, launched a full-scale artillery assault

on the capital, Sarajevo, beginning the longest siege in modern European history. Over the

months that followed, then-President of Serbia Slobodan Milošević ordered a series of concurrent

69

offensives focused on the cities and towns of Prijedor, Zvornik, Bijelina, Foča, Višegrad, and other

population centres along the so-named ‘Corridor of Life’, seizing over 60 per cent of territory in

northern and eastern Bosnia (Murray, 2015). In a campaign of terror that became known as

‘ethnic cleansing’, Serbian forces proceeded to expel much of the non-Serbian population from

these areas through a combination of, ‘… torture, murder, arbitrary arrest and detention, extra-

judicial executions, rape and sexual assaults, confinement of civilian population in ghetto areas,

forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilian population, deliberate military attacks or

threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, and wanton destruction of property’ (UN Security

Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994, para 129).

The depredations of almost four years of armed conflict on Bosnian soil severely crippled the

already fragile and newly independent republic. The war resulted in close to 100,000 people

registered as either dead or missing and over half the pre-war population forcibly displaced from

their homes; more than one million as refugees and slightly fewer than one million as internally

displaced persons (IDP), often in dire conditions (Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees,

2003).44 The enormous toll included tens of thousands of the most professionally mobile and well

educated on whose backs’ sustainable development in the post-war environment depends

(Tzifakis & Tsardanidis, 2006). The war, moreover, severely damaged the results of five decades

of material and economic development, destroying vital physical infrastructure and industrial

bases critical to productive economic growth, including roads, railways, bridges, factories, and

schools. In frontline regions, electrical grids, telephone lines, and water systems were also

severed or entirely destroyed. Bosnian industry, which had accounted for 51 per cent of GDP in

1990, was operating at 20 per cent of its capacity by war’s end as a result of the destruction of

assets and disrupted trade routes (Cousens & Cater, 2001). Hostilities also left the country

littered with unexploded mines and ordnance, leaving some 40 per cent of Bosnian terrain

unusable. A further 30-to-60 per cent of the state’s housing stock was either severely damaged

44 The official figures of war-related deaths and missing persons in Bosnia are still a matter of serious contention

20 years on from the close of the conflict. Political actors on all sides continue to manipulate and misrepresent

death toll statistics, pandering to residually nationalist sentiments in their individual constituencies. The full

range of reported estimates is both broad and inconsistent, spanning between 25,000 to 350,000 victims (Calic,

2009, 138-139; Nettlefield, 2010, 96-98; Zwierzchowski & Tabeau, 2010, 5-6). The most widely held estimates

of between 200,000 and 250,000 first began circulating during the war and have since become consistently

cited in international and local media and by government, non-government, and human rights bodies, and other

official sources. The figure includes the total aggregate of war-related deaths, missing persons, and the higher

mortality rate as an indirect result of conflict-based hardships on the civilian population, including restricted

access to medical care, starvation, inadequate shelter, and inclement weather (Burg & Shoup, 1999, 169-170).

The Research and Documentation Center (IDC) in Sarajevo, together with the Humanitarian Law Center of

Serbia, have undertaken the most comprehensive and systematic review of wartime atrocities in recent years in

a project entitled, ‘Human Losses in Bosnia and Herzegovina 1991-95’, also referred to as the, ‘Bosnian Book of

the Dead’. The data was released in early 2013 and presented the final figure of 95,940 war-related deaths, of

which 62,013 were Bosniaks, 24,953 were Serbs, 8,403 were Croats, and 571 were registered as ‘Other’. Of

the 38,239 civilians who lost their lives, Bosniaks accounted for 31,107 of the total deaths, Serbs for 4,178,

Croats for 2,484, and other ethnicities for 470 (Morus, 2014, 191-193). The mortal remains of several thousand

of these victims have yet to be located. Most remain buried in the estimated 320 mass gravesites hidden in

undisclosed locations throughout the country (Priesner et al, 2006, 122).

70

or razed to the ground, oftentimes the result of a deliberate strategy to hinder the return of the

displaced (Housing Sector Task Force, 1999; Gough, 2002). Despite a contribution of over US$7

million in international aid over two decades of post-war recovery, Bosnia remains one of the least

developed of the former Yugoslav republics and many survivors continue to live in isolation, fear,

and poverty.

After four long years of armed conflict, the final chapter of the Bosnian war drew to a close quickly

and with immense brutality in mid-July of 1995. A brazen and well-coordinated military action

concentrated on the town of Srebrenica signalled the grim culmination of the campaign of ethnic

cleansing targeting the Bosniak population in the eastern and northwest regions of the country.

Bosnian Serb forces, supported by a handful of Serbian units and local police reserves, easily

overwhelmed the poorly equipped Dutch contingent of UN peacekeeping forces stationed in the

area and assumed control of the 40,000 mostly Bosniak people who had sought refuge in the

enclave (Wagner, 2008). Over a mass and concerted six-day operation, Bosnian Serb and Serb

military systematically executed more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys, deported tens of

thousands of women and children, and subjected many more to torture, rape, and other forms of

sexual assault. The mass atrocity in the former United Nations designated ‘safe haven’ is widely

regarded as the single worst atrocity in Europe since the Second World War and was later

recognised as an act of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

(ICTY) (Bećirević, 2014). News of the massacre galvanised international opinion and, within

months, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), together with Bosnian and Croatian

forces, intensified airstrikes against Bosnian Serb strongholds, forcing a financially crippled and

severely weakened Serbia into negotiations that led to an eventual ceasefire and formal peace

agreement.

The Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) brought the war in Bosnia to a close but left the country

broken and divided (Dahlman & Ó Tuathail, 2005). The constitutional framework developed

under Dayton established a complicated consociational model based on the principles of power

sharing between the various sectors of a hostile and ethnically divided society (Bose, 2002).

Under the precept, ‘One State, Two Entities, and three Nations’, Bosnia exists as a single, but

strongly decentralised, state with a rotating tripartite presidency and federal decision-making

subject to democratic consensus between the nation’s three constituent peoples (Burg & Shoup,

1999). The Federation and the Republika Srpska are further divided into ten cantons and 142

opštine or municipalities, respectively, and both also maintain their own individual presidents,

separate governments, armed forces, police reserves, and systems of education.45 The entire

state remains under the patronage of the Office of the High Representative (OHR), an

45 The complex and highly decentralised administrative structure imposed by the Dayton Peace Agreement has

had material repercussions for survivors of rape and other victims of war. War crimes, for example, may be

prosecuted before any one of ten cantonal courts in the Federation, five district courts in the Republika Srpska,

in addition to the Basic Court of the Brčko District, and the specialised War Crimes Chamber (WCC) in the State

Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The fragmented system is dispersed over 13 separate jurisdictions and has

contributed to the development of differing juridical conceptualisations of the crimes of sexual violence, as well

as contradictory prosecutorial and procedural practices, and sanctions for perpetrators within the same country

(Amnesty International, 2009, 18; Skjelsbæk, 2012, 6; Spahić-Šiljak, 2014, 7).

71

international authority invested with the extraordinary powers to impose decisions unilaterally and

dismiss any member of the presidency for obstructionist politics (Knaus & Martin, 2003). The

already complex and unwieldy political structure operates against a background of ongoing

dissonant nationalist aspirations. Bosniak parties have largely advocated for a more centrally

governed state, whilst Croatian communities have more recently sought the establishment of a

third separate entity, and the Republika Srpska has continued to pursue its desire for greater self-

determination (O’Brien, 2010). Perhaps it is no exaggeration, then, to paraphrase Carl von

Clausewitz in claiming that politics in Bosnia remains a continuation of war by other means, even

as the relatively new state exhibits the contours of a functioning democracy (Clausewitz, 1976).

The DPA has been met with barely concealed derision in many parts of the country. As one

Bosniak woman living in the Republika Srpska observed:

‘… was there not a single wise person present while they were signing the Dayton

Agreement? … They might be politicians; they might be holders of a college degree, they

might be graduates, they might be whatever you like … [but] the way their mind works and

what they did to people makes them worse than shepherds, people who tend sheep …

When they take their sheep to graze, they think and then say, “Well, here is a pasture, and

the sheep can graze here. Let them graze while there is grass” … To divide Bosnia is

difficult. There should have been only one Bosnia, one Bosnia, where we would all live

together. It is not that Serbs live here, Muslims there, and Croats over there … They are

splitting us as if we were a piece of paper – tear it up and then put it back together, take

some glue and glue it back together, and then tear it up again … and there will always be

trouble [if this continues to happen] … There should be one house, one roof, one master.

If there is not one roof, then there is no Bosnia, no’.

(S.T, pers. comm., May, 2010)

The contested and complicated nature of the post-Dayton social order is articulated most vividly

at the level of the everyday. The routine gestures, rituals, and practices of individuals in their

daily lives are revealing of a culture of resistance that challenges the troubled and tentative post-

war coexistence, even in the most quotidian modes of expression (Dawson, 2015; 2017).

Sarajevan-based artist and local businessman ‘Adnan’ articulates the ambivalent position of many

Bosniaks, in particular, in regards to the post-war territorial divisions within Bosnia’s borders and

the ethnic splintering such boundaries continue to engender. The comment, delivered most

casually one afternoon during a conversation on nearby vikender (weekender) sites, speaks to

the very personal, very individual strategies adopted by some in the divided country to preserve a

sense of agency, however slight, against the disempowerment effected by the ‘performance’ of

post-war politics. Referring to the urban political boundary line separating the main Bosniak and

Croat precincts from ‘East Sarajevo’ (‘Istočno Sarajevo’), or the Serb suburbs, Adnan remarked,

‘…I haven’t crossed that line [IEBL] since the war ended and I won’t cross it while it exists to

divide Bosnia into two halves instead of one whole. While that line exists, the war hasn’t ended,

and the genocide still continues sanctioned by the international community … When I was a child,

I used to visit Jahorina regularly with my family; I can see the mountain from my home in

Sarajevo, but I won’t go there now. I won’t go there until there is no longer a line to cross and no

Republika Srpska to enter’ (pers. comm., August 2011).46

46 The mountains of Jahorina and nearby Bjelašnica in Republika Srpska are locally renowned as the sites of the

women and men’s alpine skiing events during the 14th Winter Olympic Games in 1984. Located 30 kilometres

72

Mass Rape and Sexual Violence during the Bosnian War (1992-1995)

Sexual violence, and particularly acts of rape, was a defining characteristic of the Bosnian

conflict. As early as April 1993, the United Nations (UN) Security Council described the use of

rape in its Resolution 820 as, ‘… massive, organized and systematic’ (UN General Assembly,

‘Report of the Secretary General’, 1996, para 19). A later report of the UN Commission of

Experts appointed to investigate grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions noted that rape was

committed by all parties to the conflict; but overwhelmingly so and in identifiable patterns, by Serb

(ir)regular forces against the Bosniak [Muslim] population. Indeed, the Commission concluded

that rape appeared so systematically in areas ethnically ‘cleansed’ by Serb (para)military as to

appear the ‘product of policy’ (UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994, 313). Official figures on

the prevalence and extent of the violence routinely differ by source. Moderate estimates regularly

cite the medial figure of 20,000 victims, predominantly women and girls (UN – OCHA, 2008; UN

Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994; Warburton Mission II Report, 1993). Across a broader

range of literature, however, statistics vary between early figures of 14,000 through to the upper

limits of 50-60,000 victims (Mežnarić, 1994: 92; Olujić, 1998: 40; Nikolić-Ristanović, 2000: 43).47

The majority of accessible data, however, derives from research in the first year of aggression.

Indeed, a bulk of cases was reported between the latter half of 1991 through to the end of 1993,

with a concentration of incidents between April and November of 1992 when villages in the rural

border areas were first attacked. Sexual violence, however, continued systematically until the

close of the war in December 1995 and well into the peacekeeping years (Dawson, 2008).

Despite its general rawness, patterns of sexual violence were, nonetheless, apparent in this early

from the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, Jahorina is accessed via the road to Pale exiting from the eastern suburbs

of Srpsko (Serb) Sarajevo. The area was of strategic importance during World War II and a stronghold during

the siege of Sarajevo in the recent Bosnian conflict.

47 For example: official BiH government estimates in the early years of the Bosnian war placed the number of rape

victims at 50-60,000; an approximation widely criticised as politically motivated and unreliable (TRIAL, 2012: 8).

The Bosnian Ministry of Interior, likewise, set the figure at 50,000 victims (Olujić, 1998: 40); an assessment also

reached by the Sarajevo State Commission for Investigation of War Crimes (Drakulić, 1993: 270) and referred

to in the later 2006 report of the United Nations Secretary General on violence against women (UN Security

Council, Report of the Secretary General, 2006: 144-146). In a special report released in January of 1993, the

Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe cited the more conservative total of 20,000 victims (Drakulić,

1993: 270), which was later reiterated by the European Community (Nikolić-Ristanović, 2000: 43). The

Commission for War Crimes, established in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, responded with claims that 800

Serbian women had been raped in Muslim detention sites (Nikolić-Ristanović, 2000: 43). The report of the

Coordinative Group of Women’s Organizations of Bosnia-Herzegovina referenced the inconclusive nature of

data on rape and cited a non-determinative figure of between 20,000 and 50,000 victims (Mežnarić, 1994: 92).

The Final Report produced by a special UN Commission of Experts in 1994 also concluded that reliable

estimates of rape victims were difficult to measure but, nonetheless, reinforced earlier conclusions arguing that

the majority of rapes were committed as part of a larger Serbian strategy of ethnic cleansing (Nikolić-Ristanović,

2000: 43-44). Briony Jones, Alex Jeffrey, and Michaelina Jakala (2012) observe, however, that any statistics

concerning war rape in Bosnia routinely fail to account for male rape survivors (see also: Zawati, 2007), non-

Muslim victims, and those who were killed during the conflict, or who have been unable to reconcile with their

experiences and have chosen not to report the crimes. Rape statistics also rarely provide an accurate reflection

of the number of rapes suffered by a single victim or by how many perpetrators.

73

data. Indeed, the first months of conflict yielded a bulk of evidence to substantiate assertions that

mass rape was employed as a ‘deliberate pattern of abuse’ and a ‘prolonged form of terror’ in the

Bosnian war, particularly by Bosnian Serb forces (Warburton Mission II Report, 1993). In

consequence, in October of 1992, the United Nations (UN) Security Council empanelled a

Commission of Experts tasked with the responsibility of identifying atrocities committed on the

territory of the former Yugoslavia. The investigation paid particular attention to reports of sexual

violence and evidence of their possible strategic dimensions (UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’,

1994). To this end, the Final Report48 submitted to the General Assembly in May of 1994

identified five key patterns particular to the use of rape in the Bosnian conflict, irrespective of the

ethnicities of the perpetrators and victims:49 (1) individual and gang rapes in conjunction with

looting and intimidation of the target ethnic group; (2) individual and gang rapes in conjunction

with fighting, including rapes in public followed by the rounding-up of populations in towns or

villages for deportation to camps; (3) rape in detention facilities or camps, involving women

selected by soldiers, camp guards, paramilitaries, and civilians for both individual and gang rapes,

beatings, and killings; (4) women detained for the purpose of rape and impregnation in detention

facilities in order to carry out a policy of ethnic cleansing; and (5) captivity of women in hotels and

similar facilities for the purpose of providing sexual entertainment for soldiers (UN Security

Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994).

The work of the Commission of Experts further distinguished between patterns of rape committed

outside detention centres from those carried out in custodial settings. The available data on ‘non-

custodial’ rapes certainly yielded evidence to suggest possible intention. Rapes were carried out

in communities across the width and breadth of Bosnia in non-contiguous sections of the state

48 The ‘Final Report of the Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 to

Investigate Violations of International Humanitarian Law in the Former Yugoslavia’ was submitted to the United

Nations Security Council on 24 May 1994, following an 18-month investigation. As part of its work over 35 field

missions, the Commission documented one of the most comprehensive war rape investigations to date,

detailing some 1,100 cases of sexual assault from close to 800 identifiable victims and drawn from a database

of some tens of thousands of allegations (UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994: Volume V, Annex IX, ‘Rape

and Sexual Assault’, 6). The report remains one of the most authoritative accounts of the systematic patterns of

rape and other forms of sexual violence that took place during the Yugoslav wars of succession, despite

significant limitations in terms of funding, resources, time and, particularly, political resistance and the ongoing

war (see: Bassiouni, 2013, 566-568).

49 The vast majority of early reports indicate that all parties to the Bosnian conflict were responsible for the

perpetration of rape and other forms of sexual assault against a diversity of victim groups, including, among

others, Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, Croatian Serbs, and Croatian Muslims (Nizich, 1992;

UN Economic & Social Council, 1993). Indeed, Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Muslim forces adopted similar

practices in pursuit of their respective military and political objectives, albeit on a smaller scale than Bosnian

Serb and Serbian (para)militaries. Most commentators are careful to acknowledge that the complicity of all

sides in acts of sexual violence does not suggest any sense of moral equivalency between warring factions,

given that the bulk of available evidence indicates that the majority of crimes were committed by Serb (ir)regular

forces as part of the process of cleansing of non-Serb populations from areas targeted for territorial expansion

(see, for example, Nizich, 1994; Stephens, 1993). As Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić (1993) argued at the

time, ‘… [o]f course, Croats and Muslims have raped Serbian women in Bosnia too, but the Serbs are the

aggressors, bent on taking over two-thirds of the territory. This does not justify Croat and Muslim offences, but

they are in a defensive war and do not practice systematic and organised rape’.

74

concurrently and with apparent similarity. Reports of rape traced the same paths as armed

assaults on cities, towns, and villages across the northern and northwestern corridors of Bosnia

and down the Drina valley towards the besieged capital of Sarajevo (UN Security Council, ‘Final

Report’, 1994). The totality of victims spanned those as young as seven through to elderly

women of 65 years. Women of childbearing age and girls of even younger years were frequently

victimised, especially so between the ages of 13 and 35. In the larger regional towns, women

intellectuals, medical professionals, lawyers, and academics were individually and specifically

targeted (UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994). Soldiers and paramilitary, local police, and

civilians alike were indiscriminate in their use of rape in patterns that were intentional as much as

random, orchestrated as much as opportunistic. The brutality, moreover, was often personalised,

sometimes committed by former neighbours and acquaintances of victims now cloaked in the

livery and insignia of their respective [para]militaries (UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994).

Indeed, the red berets of the Sivi Vukovi, or the Grey Wolves, the white shoulder patches of the

Beli Orlovi, or the White Eagles, and the army fatigues of the Žute Ose, or the Yellow Wasps,

instilled terror among civilian women as much as they did inspiration among their own militias

(see: Silber & Little, 1997).

The Commission made distinct these assaults from other rapes of a random or opportunistic

nature for their very public execution and capacity to provoke mass exodus. Indeed, the violent

‘performance’ of rape was considered part of an apparent pattern of conquest and ‘cleansing’

integral to Serbian expansionist policy (UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994; Nizich, 1992).

The rapes that occurred alongside military strikes formed part of a collection of tactics referred to

as ‘demonstrative atrocities’, including summary executions, arbitrary arrests, and torture. Sexual

assaults, together with other violent attacks, were regularly performed in public as well as ‘private’

places as a spectacle to terrorise local populations into evacuating areas targeted to become part

of ‘Greater Serbia’. The spread of fear and rumour in the wake of these atrocities functioned as a

particularly effective trigger of flight and a future barrier to return (Danner, 2009). Certainly, the

number of non-Serb residents forcibly removed or compelled to flee from towns and villages in

the Drina valley reportedly reached as many as several thousand in the first succession of

lightning strikes in the spring of 1992 (Silber & Little, 1997). During these systematic attacks,

wives and mothers were raped in the presence of their husbands and children, and daughters

with their parents as witnesses. The victims frequently suffered multiple and gang rapes; or, at

least, rapes that involved the participation of other men in some measure, if not directly or

personally. The physical brutality of rapes enforced by specialised paramilitary units, moreover,

often resulted in death or permanent harm for victims under the age of 15 years (Nizich, 1992). It

was rape as warning, as Catharine A. MacKinnon writes, ‘… rape to be seen and heard and

watched and told to others; rape as spectacle’ (MacKinnon, 1994, 11-12).

The ‘recognizable pattern[s]’ identified in early reports of mass rape, however, are most clearly

evidenced in the documentation of survivor accounts referencing sexual assault in custodial

settings (Warburton Mission II, 1993, para 13). Close to 80 per cent of rape cases reported in the

first year of aggression occurred in concentration camps and collective centres that followed the

same strategic corridor connecting the territory of the now-Republika Srpska with Serbia and

Croatia proper (UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994, 236). Indeed, women and girls

75

interned in all detention sites were frequently segregated in specially designated areas and

subjected to repeated acts of sexual violence by soldiers, paramilitary officers, camp guards, and

even civilians (UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994). Early testimonies, moreover, speak to

the existence of ‘specialized’ facilities, later recognised as dedicated ‘rape camps’, with the

explicit purpose of forced impregnation and maternity. At these sites, women and girls, mostly of

childbearing age, were forcibly confined; many repeatedly and regularly assaulted by multiple

perpetrators for up to weeks or months at a time until impregnated (Fisher, 1996; Snyder et al,

2006; Sofos, 1996). Survivor accounts suggest that, once pregnant, women were segregated

from other captives and provided with special privileges, including regular meals, more adequate

sleeping arrangements, and medical attention. Women who failed to conceive were regularly

beaten and sometimes executed; and those who did were often detained until their pregnancies

were sufficiently advanced to ensure that abortion was no longer a viable medical possibility, and

then either permitted to escape or transported across borders to deliver ‘Serbian’ children on

Serbian territory (Stiglmayer, 1994; Mežnarić, 1994; Salzman, 1998). Certainly, hospitals in

Tuzla, Zenica, and Sarajevo reported a sharp increase in the number of women seeking abortions

during 1992 and 1993, although many pregnancies were far too advanced to safely undergo the

procedure (UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994: Volume V, Annex IX, ‘Rape and Sexual

Assault’, para 15).

The Final Report also speaks to the presence of a considerable number of ‘public houses’,

military brothels, and bordellos established specifically for the purpose of sexual exploitation

(Warburton Mission II Report, 1993). Many and varied accounts of the rape of women in such

detention sites routinely include stories of soldiers returning from the frontlines or stationed

nearby who frequented the makeshift establishments at all times of day and night, sometimes

drunk and cursing, to select women at random with a cursory, ‘… you, you, and you’. Other

reports suggest a less arbitrary process of selection, with certain privileged soldiers provided with

regular access to their ‘favourites’ and occasions to ‘rent’, ‘buy’, and ‘sell’ women and girls at will

(Nizich, 1992; Stiglmayer, 1994). The imprisoned women and girls were treated with little

ceremony. Soldiers often referred to their victims by derogatory ethnic or religious epithets;

‘Ustaša whore’, ‘Balija’, and ‘Bula’, implying that the repeated acts of violence were warranted

punishments for their ethnic origins. Others forced women to ‘confess’ their enjoyment or willing

participation in the violence before fellow detainees or other soldiers who witnessed or

participated in the assaults (Nizich, 1992; Stiglmayer, 1994). The ‘public houses’, military

brothels, and bordellos were widely regarded as the more dangerous of custodial settings for

women and girls. The Commission of Experts observed that women held in sexual enslavement

were, ‘… reportedly more often killed than exchanged, unlike women in most camps’ (UN Security

Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994). Certainly, many victims whose last known locations were

suspected brothels failed to return and, even today, they remain part of Bosnia’s significant

category of nestali osobe or ‘missing persons’.

The Commission of Experts categorised the presence of ‘rape camps’, ‘public houses’, and

bordellos as explicit evidence of a clear ‘policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’, particularly by Bosnian Serb

forces against the non-Serb population (UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994). A series of

characteristics were identified as common to all such sites of detention, regardless of the locale or

76

supervising (para)military company, over an extended period of time, and across more than 1,000

kilometres of borders. Detention sites of this nature operated predominantly under Bosnian Serb

and Serbian military command and were reportedly located in regions where pre-war

demographics were defined by a minority Bosnian Serb population living alongside a relative

majority of Muslim or Croat residents (Warburton Mission II Report, 1993). Camps were

established with almost identical arrangements, including layout and operation, functioning from

public facilities that formerly served as schools and hotels, restaurants, and kafane, or cafes

(Nizich, 1992; Warburton Mission II Report, 1993). The recognisable patterns in custodial cases

throughout Bosnia indicated some level of organisation and coordination in the commission of

rape and other sexual assaults on such a scale; if not an official policy, at least a deliberate failure

of camp authorities to exercise control over personnel under their command (UN Security

Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994: Volume V, Annex IX, ‘Rape and Sexual Assault’). Physical

evidence of the existence of ‘rape camps’, ‘public houses’, and bordellos, however, remains

fragmented and largely limited to survivor reports and witness testimony as the facilities were

often dissolved once identified and relocated elsewhere in more remote areas, largely

inaccessible from the regulatory purview of the international community (Skjelsbæk, 2001).

Civilian men and boys of all ethnicities were also exposed to sexual violence during the war in

Bosnia.50 The 1994 Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts on the Former

Yugoslavia detailed accounts, although not as common, of forced sexual atrocities among male

civilians and prisoners. Sexual torture including rape, full or partial castration, genital beatings

and electroshock, forced nudity, fellatio, masturbation, and the insertion of objects into the anus

have been documented among survivors of death and concentration camps in Bosnia (UN

Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994). Particularly prevalent were reports of forced sexual

relations between male relatives, notably oral sex among siblings and between fathers and sons

(UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994; Olujić, 1998; Stener Carlson 2006). Other testimonies

50 An analysis of the incidence and prevalence of rape and other forms of sexual assault perpetrated against men

and boys during the war in Bosnia is, for practical purposes, beyond the scope of this dissertation. It is,

nonetheless, important to acknowledge that the rape of men in war involves many similar and interrelated

dimensions to the assault of women Future scholarship can make good the lack of critical attention paid to the

subject by offering more comprehensive and inclusive discussions on the nature of gendered and ethnicised

violence in conflict. Indeed, concepts of power, emasculation, feminisation, homo-sexualisation, prevention of

procreation, and individual and collective domination are equally manifest in the logic of sexual violence

targeting men, albeit in different patterns and on different scales (Sivakumaran, 2007). The male body as a

metaphoric representation of the ethnic and national collective often becomes magnified in situations of

uncertainty and conflict in a similar manner to that of the female figure. Men and the masculinised body

represent the virility, strength, and power of the family, the community, and the nation such that rape in war may

serve as a weapon that functions to ‘emasculate’ and to ‘feminise’ enemy men and, by extension, the national,

ethnic, religious, and political identities to which they belong (Weitsman, 2008). As Dubravka Žarkov (2001, 73)

argues, ‘… [s]exual humiliation of a man from another ethnicity is ... proof not only that he is a lesser man, but

also that his ethnicity is a lesser ethnicity’. Certainly, the inability to fulfil the patriotic role of male defender of

the ‘mother’ nation during the Bosnian war suggested failure, not only as individual men, but also, more

symbolically, as ‘Bosniaks’, ‘Croatians’, ‘Serbians’, and ‘Yugoslavs’ (Bracewell, 2000). The wartime assault on

the collective, in this sense, takes place through the bodies of men as well as those of women (Sivakumaran,

2007).

77

refer to fathers and brothers forced to rape their female relatives on pain of death (Robson, 1993

cited in Carpenter, 2006). Equally as common were accounts of prisoners coerced into

performing sexual acts on camp guards or other internees, particularly involving masturbation

and, at times, genital mutilation (Carpenter, 2006). The 1993 Report of the Special Rapporteur

on Human Rights in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia specifically noted the recurrence of

crude methods of castration in the camps with Muslim prisoners, at times, forced to bite one

another’s testicles off and guards severing the penises of some detainees as a ‘warning’ to others

(Sivakumaran, 2007). Nonetheless, the extent of men’s vulnerability to wartime sexual violence

has scarcely been assessed in any systematic manner and the documentation of such abuses

has been far from exhaustive.

In a move proximate to the growing body of evidence on rape and other serious human rights

violations, the United Nations Security Council authorised the creation of an ad hoc court of law,

the first since the Nuremburg and Tokyo charters post World War II. The International Criminal

Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established in 1993 in The Hague and vested with

the authority to prosecute matters of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes

committed in each of the former territories since 1991 (Morris & Scharf, 1995).51 Unlike the

Nuremburg and Tokyo charters, the crime of rape was explicitly included in the ICTY’s statute;

placing sexual violence within the international lexicon of serious violations of international

humanitarian law for the first time (Engle, 2005). Over more than two decades, the ICTY has

considerably expanded the limits of international humanitarian law and significantly contributed to

the development of gender-sensitive standards in legal proceedings (Henry, 2011). Indeed, the

court brought and entered some of the first convictions for explicit charges of wartime sexual

violence, although, even now, it remains the least condemned act of other expressly enumerated

war crimes (Brunet & Rousseau, 1998).52 The court, moreover, has been recognised as unique

51 The city of ‘The Hague’, or ‘Den Haag’, in the western Netherlands has the special status of an ‘international city

of peace and justice’ (Hulleman & Govers, 2011). The city is the fourth major centre for the United Nations and

the seat of several international judicial bodies, including the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the

International Criminal Court (ICC), the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

(ICTR), and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which closed on 31 December 2017.

In Bosnia, individuals arrested, indicted, and held on charges of violations of international humanitarian law

committed in the former Yugoslavia since 1991 were often referred to as being ‘in The Hague’ or on trial ‘at The

Hague’ (pers. comm., [various], 2011, 2012).

52 As at April 2011, 161 individuals have been indicted for war crimes under Article 5 of the Statute of the

International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International

Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991 (ICTY) (UN Security Council,

S/RES/827, 1993). Of these individuals, 78 have been indicted on charges including sexual violence and 25

convicted of the crimes. A further six individuals indicted for sexual violence have been referred to, and

convicted in, national courts in the republics of the former Yugoslavia (Sexual Violence and the Triumph of

Justice, 2011). The former supreme commander of the armed forces and president of the Republika Srpska

(1992-1996), Radovan Karadžić, and the former chief of Bosnian Serb forces (1991-1996), Ratko Mladić, were

found guilty in 2016 and 2017 respectively of multiple charges, including for widespread attacks on civilian

populations that included sexual violence. In its 20 years of operations, the ICTY has contributed significantly to

the development of jurisprudence in the area across several landmark judgments, including Prosecutor vs.

Kunarac, Kovač and Vuković (Case No. IT-96-23-T & 23/1-T) in which rape was defined as a form of sexual

78

for its special consideration of the rights of victims and witnesses, especially in regards to the

prosecution of wartime sexual violence (Jarvis, 2016). As the late Rhonda Copelon (1994, 247)

noted at the time of the establishment of the ICTY, ‘… [t]he situation presents an historic

opportunity, as well as an historical imperative, to insist on justice for the women of Bosnia and to

press for a feminist reconceptualization of the role and legal status of rape under humanitarian as

well as human rights law’.

On the Battleground of Women’s Bodies: The Logic of Rape in War

War transforms the political uses of rape (Olujić, 1998). In the former Yugoslavia, the ‘meaning’

of rape acquired several complex and ambiguous dimensions that furthered the process of ethnic

cleansing. The larger intention behind the use of mass sexual violence as a military strategy

during the Bosnian war was to terrorise, humiliate, and stigmatise primarily non-Serbian

populations into permanently evacuating entire areas (Barkan, 2002). Direct contact with, or

rumours of, sexual violence functioned as a particularly effective trigger for forced migration (Van

Boeschoten, 2003). The dissemination of fear and trauma among civilian populations was an

immense source of intimidation for survivors and witnesses, many of whom felt compelled to flee

from designated territories and who now live with a sense of hesitancy in regard to returning to

the scene of such events. The reluctance to return from exile was frequently reinforced by the

very intimate trauma of many of the rapes; oftentimes perpetrated by neighbours of other

backgrounds from the same or nearby villages and regions (Skjelsbæk, 2006a). The recruitment

of community members as aggressors was a conscious tactic intended, in part, to sharpen the

edges between ethno-national populations and reduce the ability of different groups to co-exist in

close proximity in the future (Salzman, 1998).

Mass rape is, in this sense, acutely symbolic in nature (Hayden, 2000). Indeed, a rich body of

literature has emerged in the wake of the Yugoslavian wars and the Rwandan genocide that

explores the salience of sexual violence as a weapon of war and, particularly, its efficiency in

realising the destruction of both individual and group identity though the ‘[decimation of] cultural

and social bonds’ (Card, 1996, 180; Copelon, 1994; Seifert, 1994). In consequence, wartime

rape is no longer considered exclusively as an attack on the individual body; it is also

conceptualised as an assault on the ‘body-politic’. Mass rape in conflict is understood to exploit

the fundamental socio-cultural values that underpin the fabric of a community – honour, shame,

family, and identity. The objective, as Carolyn Nordstrom (1996, 152) writes, is not to harm the

individual, but to, ‘control an entire socio-political process by crippling it’ – to conquer the enemy,

to sabotage resistance, and to undermine collective identity and cultural integrity. Sexual

violence, moreover, has more recently been discussed as a means of inciting troops to genocidal

enslavement and prosecuted as a crime against humanity for the first time, and Prosecutor vs. Mucić (aka

‘Pavo’), Delić, Landžo (aka ‘Zenga’) and Delalić (Case No. IT-96-21-T) in which rape was defined as torture

under international humanitarian law. In its adjudication of Prosecutor vs. Tadić (Case No. IT-94-1-T), the ICTY

recognised the use of sexual violence as an element of torture against men and boys. The court also

established links between sexual violence and ethnic cleansing in Prosecutor vs. Krstić (Case No. IT-98-33) and

Prosecutor vs. Furundžija (Case No. IT-95-17/1-T) in which charges of sexual violence was also the sole focus

of the trial. Finally, the ICTY has explicitly recognised that forced marriage, forced pregnancy, and forced

abortions may constitute international crimes (Solis, 2010, 313).

79

causes and initiating those reluctant to participate into a ‘brotherhood of guilt’ (Diken & Bagge

Laustsen, 2005, 112). The aetiology of rape, then, and the meanings ascribed to it, are both

intricate and multidimensional. More than an unfortunate by-product of war, or the act of a few

renegade soldiers, sexual-based violence in conflict is motivated by a complex mix of individual

and collective, as well as premeditated and circumstantial, rationales.

Women, in particular, have a distinct place in this logic of destruction. As Robert Hayden (2000,

32) suggests, the efficacy of sexual violence in the context of war rests with the ‘basic meaning[s]

of rape as a communicative act’, especially in terms of the symbolic value attached to the social

and cultural roles of its primary victims; women and girls. Indeed, female honour remains at the

core of social organisation, particularly within the conservative, patriarchal traditions central to

most Balkan cultures (Hardy, 2001). Ethnic culture is predominantly organised around norms and

practices relating to sexuality, marriage, and the family, in which women are centrally positioned

in their roles as mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. The figure of the ‘mother’ occupies an

important symbolic function, not only as bearer of the collective’s future generations, but also as

emblem of the national hearth and home. As wives and daughters, moreover, women are

perceived as embodying familial and cultural honour. The purity of the family and of the

community is, in this sense, theirs to preserve or theirs to lose. Women’s shame is the family’s

shame, the collective’s disgrace, and the nation’s dishonour (Munn, 2008). In the traditional

patriarchal order, then, women’s bodies become the site on which ethno-religious honour is

maintained or transgressed – an icon of purity or a symbol of pollution of communal identity

(Hashmi, 2005). As one Bosniak woman in the south east of Bosnia explained:

‘… before the war, village girls gave birth to children out of wedlock and the father was the

one who decided whether the family would accept or reject her. He was the one to decide!

If he decided she would be accepted, he would restore her dignity. Men were always

angry about things that were disgraceful, things that disgraced them … A father in a

patriarchal community can be disgraced if his daughter gives birth to a child out of

wedlock. If he believed she was a virgin, she did not indulge in sexual intercourse, and

then it turns out she gives birth or returns home with a baby in her hands, it makes him feel

like he was not good enough. It makes him feel like a bad father because he did not raise

his children properly … To me, patriarchy is connected to raising, to the relationship, to the

awe. There is no awe if a girl is not afraid of her father and if she is grounded but,

nevertheless, manages to have sexual intercourse and even gets pregnant. It does not fit’.

(T.I., pers. comm., July, 2011)

At the level of the state, too, the figure of the ‘woman’ is highly valued in nationalist thought and

practice. The nation has often been understood in allegory to the family; led by a masculine

household in which both men and women have natural roles to play (Munn, 2008). As Nira

Yuval-Davis (1997) writes, constructions of nationhood involve specific and, oftentimes, very

conservative concepts of both ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’. Just as the ‘patriotic man’, ‘defender

of the family’, and ‘hegemonic male soldier’ are each commonly accepted icons of national

survival, the exalted ‘childbearing mother’, reproducer of the nation’s culture, is emblematic of the

ideal of womanhood. The child learning tradition ‘at [the] mother’s knee’ or seeking safety in the

maternal lap are familiar metaphors across much nationalist discourse, often invoked in times of

crisis to symbolise the ‘spirit of the nation’ (Cockburn, 1998: 43). Indeed, under the threat of

conflict, men are commonly entreated to wage war in the name of the nation’s womenfolk who

80

remain at the centre of the hearth and home. The more the imagined safety of the nation’s

borders is endangered, the more the state appeals to reproductive and familial imagery in its

rendering of the national community and the nationalist project (Cockburn, 1998). In this way,

women’s bodies become the terrain on which national boundaries are drawn and contested. As

Anne McClintock (1995, 354) explains:

‘… All too often in male nationalisms, gender difference between women and men serves

to symbolically define the limits of national difference and power between men. Excluded

from direct action as national citizens, women are subsumed symbolically into the national

body politic as its boundary and metaphoric limit.’

The female body, then, is, ‘a symbolic representation of the body politic’ such that the wartime

rape of women can be conceptualised as, ‘the symbolic rape of the body of [the] community’

(Seifert, 1994: 101). In Bosnia, the mass rape of women was considered a violation of territorial

integrity, an act of war, and a means of establishing jurisdiction and conquest over the ‘enemy’.

In striking at women – a group with high socio-cultural value – rape, at once, re-established

distinctions between the previously assimilated groups of Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, and

Bosnian Croats, defining perpetrators from victims and the superior, invading culture from the

inferior and polluted one (Askin, 1997). Not only did rape, or the threat thereof, induce Bosniaks

to flee their national boundaries during the war years, perpetrators and survivors in its aftermath

have also found it difficult to face one another in their resettlement in new areas and their return

to formerly multi-ethnic communities (Askin, 1997). Indeed, Susan Brownmiller (1975) argues

that rape is generally regarded as the act of a conqueror and it is through such assaults that

victims and their communities are seen to submit. Women’s bodies, thus, are regarded as

territories to be conquered, claimed, and marked by the assailant; a medium through which

communities attack one another and expand, both literally and figuratively, the borders of their

own provinces (Mostov, 1995). As Brownmiller (1975, 31) writes:

‘… [t]he body of a raped woman becomes a ceremonial battlefield, a parade ground for the

victor’s trooping of the colors. The act that is played out upon her is a message passed

between men – vivid proof of victory for one and loss and defeat for the other’.

A particularly unique characteristic of the Serbian use of rape as genocidal warfare was the

element of forced impregnation and maternity that reportedly occurred in selected rape camps.

Many women of childbearing age were held in specialised rape and death camps and

continuously assaulted until a doctor or gynaecologist established pregnancy and, then, further

detained until abortion was no longer a possibility (Fisher, 1996; Sofos, 1996; Salzman, 1998).

Women who failed to conceive were regularly beaten and executed; those who survived to the

latter stages of pregnancy were either permitted to escape or transported to Serbia to deliver

‘Serbian children’ (Stiglmayer, 1994; Mežnarić, 1994; Salzman, 1998). Survivors’ accounts

further substantiate the allegations, with reports that many perpetrators repeatedly informed their

victims they were acting on their superiors’ orders to, ‘plant the seed of Serbs in Bosnia’ and, for

Muslim women, to give birth to little ‘chetniks’ (Weitsman, 2008). From a Balkan cultural ideology,

the perception that male genealogy determines a child’s ethnic identity is both cross-cultural and

common (Salzman, 1998). Children conceived as a result of the rapes were commonly

considered to have assumed the nationality of the aggressors and were perceived as supplanting

the group and its ethnic continuity. From a genocidal perspective, the unwanted or ‘enemy’ group

81

was, effectively, reproduced out of existence and a population with the desired ethnicity created in

its place (Seifert, 1994).

The marked ethnic and racialised sentiments that reinforced the genocidal logic of rape were

most clearly reflected in the nationalist rhetoric of several prominent Serb politicians and

members of the intelligentsia, particularly during the early years of war. The public commentary

of Biljana Plavšić was especially resonant with the discourse on racial purity and her polarising

remarks have frequently been employed as evidence of an official genocidal rape strategy.

Indeed, the former leader of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) and vice president of the

breakaway Republic of Serbia in Bosnia was later accused of genocide, crimes against humanity,

and war crimes, and stood trial at the ICTY on a series of charges, including acts of rape

committed by the political, government, and military authorities under her command (Askin,

2003). During the war, Plavšić relied on her authority as a geneticist and her former position as

dean of natural science and mathematics at the University of Sarajevo to lend credibility to her

claims that the Muslim population of Bosnia were descended from ‘genetically inferior’ lineage.

She argued that those Slavic ancestors who had converted to Islam under four centuries of

Turkish rule were ‘spoiled’ and that the practice of ‘ethnic cleansing’ was, in this sense, a ‘natural

phenomenon’, a logical historical progression made necessary by the biological imperative to rid

the population of the threat of ‘defective genes’ (Lilly & Irvine, 2002, 141). Speaking to the

Belgrade newspaper Politika at the height of the war on 10 September 1993, Plavšić stated:

‘… [Muslims are] a genetically deformed material that embraced Islam. And now, of

course, with each successive generation, this gene simply becomes concentrated. It

becomes worse and worse, it simply manifests itself and dictates their manner of thinking

and behaviour, which is deeply rooted in their genes’.

(cited in Inic, undated)

The mainstream logic has deeply penetrated local understandings of women’s wartime

experiences. The prevailing feminist and international discourses on the subject have shaped

and influenced local politics of speaking, subjectivities, and narrative retellings of both personal

and collective histories of war rape in even the most remote and the most removed of places.

Indeed, official representations of a ‘campaign’ of sexual violence in Bosnia continue to share a

marked kinship with the international framings of rape as an instrument of military aggression.

The dominant language of female victimhood embedded in these interpretations readily position

the multiple and heterogeneous experiences of rape, particularly of Bosnian Muslim women, as a

part of the systematic and ethnically driven attacks central to Serbian ‘cleansing’ operations

during the war. The shared rhetoric provides a framework in which women might recall and

represent their wartime suffering through linear and representational narratives that underline the

collective reasoning for such violence, thereby, alleviating a part of the burden of individual

responsibility placed on mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters to preserve the honour of their

communities. One Bosniak survivor originally from the city of Prijedor articulates, simply and

succinctly, the logic that defined debates concerning the construction of a legal interpretation of

wartime rape in the mid-1990s in her personal analysis of the events that befell her hometown in

the north-western region of the country. The survivor was one of 37 women prisoners held in the

82

Bosnian Serb-run concentration camp in the mining town of Omarska. Speaking from her post-

war home in a small town 30 kilometres outside of Prijedor, she stated:

‘… what happened to Muslim women in Bosnia was planned. It was not done accidentally.

The Serbs had a plan to ethnically cleanse the area of non-Serb citizens and sexual

violence was part of that goal. The aim was to humiliate those women, to destroy their

spirit, and to make them realise they can no longer live there. It was all planned; none of it

was coincidental. It was genocide; all along the goal was genocide.’

(N.S. pers. comm., November, 2010)

The work of remembering in smaller and less-politicised landscapes of memory has also

resonated comfortably with the homogenising international discourses of rape victimhood. The

master narratives that privilege shared leitmotifs of women’s honour and men’s pride have found

firm purchase among the many village communities and townships situated outside mainstream

memorial culture in Bosnia. Indeed, the trope of the tragic feminised victim and her impugned

male protectors at the hands of the [mostly Bosnian Serb] aggressors has marked the personal

biographies of women in these more remote areas too, even for those survivors who have

purposely sought to remain separate, or have been deliberately excluded, from the larger legal,

political, and social processes related to the war years. Women in more remote areas still

frequently draw on vivid pictures of rape as a planned, systematic, and ethnically driven ‘weapon’

of warfare, interweaving the general principles of universal discourses with local dynamics,

realities, languages, and practices in their narration of personal and familial histories of sexual

violence. In this manner, women could imagine their experiences as part of a larger collective,

and their many, varied, and diverse narrations of past violence could be translated into a form of

‘cultural property’ for the benefit of the wider community. As one Bosniak woman survivor in a

small hillside village in the eastern province explained, ‘Žene su tri stupa porodice a muškarac

samo jedan', or, ‘women are the three pillars of a home and men are only one’. The woman

continued:

‘… women have always had a special place in Islam. The woman; she makes the home,

she raises the babies, and she is the morals of the household for her husband and for her

children. The men; they are only the one pillar. They provide for the family. That is a

man’s role … so, if you attack the husband – and one pillar falls – the house will still stand.

But, if you attack the wife and three corners of the home are destroyed; the structure is

ruined and the house will fall. The Serbs; they knew this.’

(R.I, pers. comm., September, 2011)

In elaborating further on the collective logic behind the use of sexual violence against the Muslim

population in Bosnia, a second woman survivor from the town of Foča demonstrated the close

intersection of global regimes of knowledge with local ethno-religious forms of expression, stating:

‘… this is only one part of what we went through in the rape camps and the house rape

camps and everywhere they detained us. They thought they could do whatever they

wanted to Muslim women in all places where they were held. I have to say that their target

was Muslim women because they were trying to destroy their spirit and humiliate them in

front of their families and society. They were trying to kill their wish to continue to live as

well as their belief in humanity and human goodness. I have to say they were targeting the

dignity and morality of the Muslim women. They didn’t use the bullets for the Muslim

women; they used rape to kill the spirit’.

(E.S, pers. comm., January, 2012)

83

Wartime rape is an especially effective instrument of genocide in patriarchal cultures that

ordinarily cast shame on the survivors of rape, rather than on the rapists themselves. In this

sense, the rape survivor suffers twofold; primarily in enduring the assault/s themselves but,

further, in the subsequent experiences of ‘secondary victimisation’, particularly the condemnation

from intimates and members of their own ethnic community (Kesić, 2002). In the aftermath of

rape in Bosnia, many women and girls experienced exclusion and, at times, physical violence

from family, friends, and neighbours who were aware of, or suspected, their wartime experiences.

The humiliation experienced by husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons is widely considered

especially intense in the Balkans where the honour/shame complex is particularly strong and

female chastity is central to communal and familial reputation (Olujić, 1995). A number of Muslim

religious leaders, in acknowledging this ostracism as problematic, encouraged unmarried men to

marry single women and girls who had survived sexual assault during the conflict years. Few,

however, did (Drakulić, 1994). Moreover, since women as much as men commonly believe in,

and valorise, their role as bearers of the collective’s honour, the rape victim also frequently

perceived herself as an abject, ‘dirty’, morally inferior person (Diken & Bagge Laustsen, 2005:

113).

Conclusion: Women, War, and Rape

The collective (re)presentation of war rape is a cultural and political process (Nordstrom, 1996;

Reid-Cunningham, 2008). In the former Yugoslavia, the systematic assault of women and girls

during the war was a highly contextualised practice, an organised military act that cannot be

understood outside the specific historical and political conditions under which the mass violations

occurred. Indeed, the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and its escalation into a succession of

independence wars in the mid-1990s, was marked by extreme violence that assumed strong

ethnic, nationalist, and gendered dimensions. The bloodiest and most protracted chapter in the

Federation’s demise was that of the Bosnian war, involving the nation’s three constituent ethnic

groups of Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, and Bosnian Muslims. Over the course of four years,

the Serbian and Croatian governments sought to mobilise their respective ethnic diaspora in

Bosnia to fight alongside national armed forces in two separate irredentist movements intended to

annex significant stretches of the small state for the mother countries (Ambrosio, 2001). Armed

insurgencies were carried out by means of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in strategically important areas, and

included the practices and policies of, ‘… murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extra-

judicial executions, rape and sexual assaults, confinement of civilian populations in ghetto areas,

forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilian populations, deliberate military attacks

or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, and wanton destruction of property’

(Ramcharan, 2011, 46). At the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement on 14 December 1995,

the new nation of Bosnia was faced with an estimated 100,000 people registered as either dead

or missing and more than two million forcibly displaced in often appalling conditions.

The war was marked by the systematic and mass rape of more than 20,000 women and girls of

all ethnicities, but of Bosnian Muslim descent in particular. Indeed, charges of sexual violence

have been made by, and against, all three warring factions in the Bosnian conflict, however,

allegations that Serbian (ir)regular forces employed rape as an explicit military strategy targeting

84

the Bosnian Muslim community were especially prolific (Filice et al, 1994; Hayden, 2000).

European Community investigators concluded at the time that rape formed part of a systematic

policy of ethnic cleansing, ‘… perpetrated with the conscious intention of terrorising entire

communities, driving them from their home regions and demonstrating the power of invading

forces’ (Warburton Mission II Report, 1993, para 20). Rape and other forms of sexual violence

occurred throughout the length and breadth of the state, particularly in frontline areas, but also in

regions where one ethnicity lived in relative or absolute majority in comparison to another

(Mežnarić, 1994). Separate camps were designed specifically for the purpose of rape, but

assaults were also carried out at detention sites and people’s homes, schools, and hotels as well

as other facilities made to appear as brothels (Nizich, 1992). Women of childbearing age and

younger were frequently victimised and many suffered multiple rapes, especially in custodial

settings. In several landmark rulings at the later established International Criminal Tribunal for

the former Yugoslavia, rape and other forms of sexual violence were explicitly recognised and

redefined as instruments of genocide, as war crimes, and as crimes against humanity (Henry,

2011).

The dominant understandings of war rape as an instrument of military aggression that have

framed international legal proceedings have become a central part of the mainstream political

imaginary in the post-conflict state of Bosnia (Lindsey, 2002). Established feminist and

international discourses on the subject have provided a basic ‘schemata of interpretation’

(Goffman, 1974) for collectively organising, interpreting, and articulating narratives of mass sexual

violence from the recent war and contributed to the ways in which both individual survivors and

the communities to which they belong make sense of their wartime experiences. Indeed, war

transforms the political uses of rape. The mass violence directed predominantly at non-Serb

populations during the Bosnian conflict acquired several complex and symbolic dimensions, each

of which furthered the process of ethnic cleansing. Rape was understood foremost as a means of

terrorising victims into flight from occupied territories and as a method for sharpening the edges

between ethnic groups to reduce any likelihood of future return (Salzman, 1998). The mass

violation of women and girls, however, was even more widely interpreted as part of a strategy that

anticipated lasting devastation to community bonds and social cohesion through the disruption of

kinship ties, the destruction of parent-child and spousal relationships, and the ‘pollution’ of a

considerable proportion of the childbearing population (Van Boeschoten, 2003). The particular

representations of violence, as Eric Stover (2005, 143) has observed, have had implications for

the articulation of women’s experiences given that, ‘… [m]emories of wartime atrocities, like all

memories, are local; they are embedded in the psyche of individual victims and witnesses and,

through the process of retelling and memorialization, they are deposited in the collective memory

of the community’.

85

Chapter III:

Remembering to Forget: Public Secrecy and the

Poetics of Rape Remembrance in the Village of Selo

Logor Smrti Selo:

Na ovom mjestu 25.05.’92 od Četničke ruke

ugasiše se mnogi životi silovanih majki i sestara

Mučeno je oko 400 Stanovnika okolnih naselja

svanulah je rujna zora 02.06.92 patriote

ovog kraja oslobodiše logor

i spase mnoge živote53

On 1 June 2007 in a small village in eastern Bosnia, a modest heart-shaped monument was

unveiled outside one of the many nondescript, war-damaged, and semi-abandoned houses

populating the hillside. Marking local wartime events of 15 years earlier, the commemorative

headstone at the site of what was a temporary rape and death camp in the early months of

Bosnia’s independence conflict read simply, ‘On this place on 25 May 1992 many lives of raped

mothers and sisters and locals from neighbouring villages were extinguished at the hands of

Četniks’. The modest granite headstone is easily lost in the larger memorial culture and politics of

post-war Bosnia. It neither marks a seminal moment in the official state articulations of war

history, nor is it readily happened upon by way of the unformed roads that lead from the main

highway towards the village. Indeed, the monument, and the brief but violent events it speaks to,

are overshadowed by the historical immensity of the wartime massacres in nearby Zvornik and

Srebrenica.54 Few outside the little village are aware of its presence and fewer still would

53 Death Camp Selo / On this place on 25.05.92 at the hands of Četniks / many lives of raped mothers and sisters

were extinguished / Around 400 inhabitants / of the neighbouring villages had been tortured here / The mighty

dawn of 02.06.92 dawned and the patriots of the area liberated the camp and / saved many lives.

54 The village of Selo occupies both a physical place and a symbolic space between the northeastern towns of

Zvornik and Srebrenica in the valley of the Drina River. The village is settled between the massacre to its north

at Zvornik and the genocide to its southeast at Srebrenica, between events that effectively opened the war on

Bosnian soil and those that ultimately drew the armed hostilities to a close. The massacre in Zvornik and the

surrounding municipality began on 8 April 1992 and represented only the second armed assault and annexation

of a city in Bosnia by Serb paramilitary forces. The initial campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ lasted until early June

and resulted in the death of several hundred Bosnian Muslims and other non-Serb citizens and the expulsion of

tens of thousands from the area (BIM, 1994, 1998). The massacre in the town of Srebrenica, by comparison,

occurred at the very end of the war in Bosnia and is recognised as the single worst atrocity in Europe since the

close of the Second World War. The events in Srebrenica increased pressure on the international community to

expedite peace negotiations when units of the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), under the

command of General Ratko Mladić, overwhelmed the small enclave, then-a UN-designated ‘safe area’, on 11

July 1995. Over the days that followed, a total of 8,732 Bosnian Muslims, predominantly men and boys, were

86

perhaps want for anything other than the security that this quiet anonymity affords. Certainly, for

all but one or two weeks of each year, the monument is paid barely any heed by all those for

whose experiences it stands. Only towards the end of May are the unruly weeds removed and

the muddied stains of the late disappearing snow cleansed from the granite frontispiece in

readiness for the smallest of annual commemorative gatherings. Even so, the significance of the

little heart-shaped headstone by the roadside above Selo proper is intimately revealing.

The following chapter explores the intimate ways in which the village of Selo in the Republika

Srpska remembers and negotiates its history of rape during the Bosnian conflict, especially

through the Taussigian lens of ‘public secrecy’. Michael Taussig (1999, 5) has elsewhere defined

the concept of public secrecy as simply, ‘… that which is generally known, but cannot be

articulated’ and maintains, even further, that such repressed and restricted knowledge is

fundamental to the operations of power. Indeed, public secrets are oftentimes structured around

social knowledge that is considered politically unsettling or morally unpalatable. The power

behind these ‘unknown knowns’, then, lies in the imagined harm that the exposure of a particular

version of events might have on the everyday social and political order. One of the more closely

defended and yet poorly preserved of secrets in the village of Selo concerns the knowledge that

women and girls held captive in the camp were not only raped and martyred, as the monument

makes evident in its inscription; but were also raped and survived. In Selo, wives and daughters

as well as sisters and mothers occupy the problematic position of ‘rape survivor’. Women move

within and between the shifting margins of this lived victimhood, ‘knowing’ in certain contexts and

among certain persons, ‘what not to know’, and in certain other contexts and among certain other

persons, how ‘not to know it’ (Taussig, 1999). Husbands and sons as well as brothers and

fathers, in turn, commonly choose to invest in such a persuasive verisimilitude in which the

honour of their kith and kin remains unharmed.

The chapter takes the heart-shaped monument as the site at which the abstractions of the village

memories of wartime sexual violence are figured, transfigured, and narrated for the public sphere.

It begins by tracing the historical contours of the little monument, the process of its material

creation, and the enframing of a local rape legacy as a secret that is generally known but rarely

openly articulated. In the village of Selo, memories of war rape are given public voice by way of

very circumscribed narratives and the valorisation of specific subject positions, including that of

the female ‘šehidi’ and the ‘chaste survivor’. The two strategic identities are both symbolically

embodied in the monument, either visibly in the inscription to raped and martyred women or

invisibly through their careful textual omission. The chapter then considers the consequences for

disclosure outside these narrowly defined boundaries, exploring the problematic identity of ‘rape

survivor’ and the effects of occupying this position on everyday interpersonal relationships within

the village. The local strategies employed by certain community members to render silent or

‘untellable’ these painful memories and, yet again, by others to leverage the perceived risk in

voicing such testimonies for their own personal gain are considered in some detail here. Finally,

the chapter turns to the discreet disclosures of rape made through survivor responses to

systematically executed and buried in mass gravesites, and thousands more elderly, women, and children were

forcibly deported (Wagner, 2008).

87

embodied suffering, which are analysed through the iconoclastic language of ‘defacement’. Local

interpretations of bodily pain provide idioms through which experiences of war rape come to be

apprehended and articulated in distinctive ways, challenging codes of silence in the village and

informal sanctions against public expression.

The Masking and Unmasking of Public Secrecy

‘He comes often enough and not always alone,’ Merjem remarked, ‘He passes through half the

village with his cockade on; they all laugh at us, they continue torturing us’ (pers. comm., Sept.

2011). Widowed several years before the war was even a rumour among neighbours, the

grandmother-of-two lives mostly alone on the proceeds of a small pension by a patch of land in

the house nearest the monument and the former detention site in Selo village. In such close

proximity, the elderly, by Bosnian standards, Merjem was well positioned to comment on the

frequency of visitors to the little heart-shaped monument and, most especially, of those uninvited

tarriances of Serb neighbours, ex-paramilitary, and former camp guards. On this occasion in late

September of 2011, Merjem recounted the most recent visit paid to the monument by one of

these unwelcome figures, alone and somewhere past midnight. A dull pain behind the joints of

the elderly woman’s knees had kept her from sleep two nights earlier. The strain was evident in

the dark skin under her eyes and the short shrift with which she dealt the six-year old

granddaughter in her care. The joint pain had come and gone sporadically since the war; an

occasional somatic reminder of her initial arrest by Serb paramilitaries who forced the woman

from her home at gunpoint and pressed her, stumbling and falling, the short distance to her

neighbour’s house and the then-makeshift detention site. ‘They were beating me there,’ Merjem

recalled, ‘I fell down exactly where the monument stands. I fell down. I think that is where they

broke this here [points to her knees]. I fell down on that spot’ (pers. comm., September, 2011).

When the ache in her joints left her restless two nights earlier, Merjem sat on her front steps in

the darkness sometime past midnight and watched in silence as the unnervingly familiar shape of

a man emerged from a nearby car. The evening shadows swallowed most details of the man’s

clothing, his facial features, and expressions, but the silhouette was easily recognisable to a

camp survivor in Selo, even as it grew changed and thicker with age. Vlajko Jankovac was a

local, a Serb man from a neighbouring village who was known – informally and among locals at

least – as one of the former camp commanders. Never officially indicted for his role in the crimes

committed in Zvornik district, Jankovac has been known to publicly protest the arrest of former

Serb military officers, appealing, at times, for a renewed show of force among his fellow Serbs.

Indeed, at a 2001 demonstration in Zvornik objecting to the arrest of a senior JNA officer and

VRS commander, Jankovac called for collective action, stating, ‘… we’ve [Bosnian Serbs] had

enough of being taken peacefully to The Hague. Let’s wake up, take up arms and defend our

heroes’ (CNN, 2001). Jankovac’ irregular visits to Selo, sometimes in his former military regalia,

at other times on commemorative days and, yet again, in the company of Serb neighbours, are

steeped with no less threatening a resonance. On this most recent visit, he came alone and at an

hour unlikely to bear any witnesses. Crossing to the site now occupied by the monument, he

stood over its heart-shaped structure for the length of a single cigarette before crushing the used

butt into the ground and departing again almost without notice.

88

The ex-commander’s nocturnal visit to the little monument could, of course, be read in multiple

ways. At its most disturbing, Jankovac’ attendance at such a solitary hour, and almost without

audience, could have been conceived as a tacit act of self-aggrandizement. His imposing frame

brooding silently over the monument in an expression of resigned defiance; almost as if the one-

time senior combatant was returning to his former territory nearly 20 years on, reminiscing over

past victories and lost glories. For, the locale could be considered a memory-space for Jankovac,

a place in which to situate his own wartime contribution to the larger cause of purging non-Serbs

from Bosnian soil and realising the larger objective of a Greater Serbia within the territory of the

former Yugoslavia. The man’s contempt for his neighbours’ victimhood is suggested in the

discarded cigarette butt at the monument’s foot, a small act of defilement on the same ground

that once lay briefly under his command. Or, at best, Jankovac’ visit could equally be understood

as a private expiation of guilt; an act of atonement for the wrongs of the past or a silent plea for

absolution for sins committed. In all likelihood, however, Jankovac’ own personal motivations in

frequenting the monument, and the village of Selo, will never be known. Regardless, his visits

are illustrative of the complex and multilayered levels of silence that are indelibly woven into the

post-war fabric of the little community. The midnight visits bear witness to the uneasy tension that

exists between what ‘really happened’ at the site of the little wartime monument, and the

‘epistemic murk’ of historical memory, or what Michael Taussig himself might refer to as ‘public

secrecy’ (Taussig, 1999).

Taussig (1999, 6), in his thematic preoccupation with this ‘epistemic murk’, or that complex

interplay of rumour, interpretation, and conjecture that constitutes cultural knowledge, writes that

there is, ‘… no such thing as a secret’. The concept of a ‘secret’ as something private and hidden

is, rather, a socially contrived illusion intended to conceal those ‘unknown knowns’ and ‘fictitious

realities’ that threaten the self-preservation and identity of a social collective. Real and pure

secrecy is scarce, if not a chimera. Indeed, as Georg Simmel (1950) posited in his classic

exegesis, secrecy entails a paradox most often represented as a central aporia; that for the secret

to be realised, someone must not only conceal something, but someone else must also know of

its concealment. The secret, in other words, has an audience. Beryl Bellman (1984), too, has

argued that secrets are meant to be ‘told’ and ‘heard’ and ‘known’. In a discussion on the

language of symbolism and metaphor in ritual, Bellman establishes secrecy as a cultural

performance embedded in specific political and historical milieux and with particular permutations

of truth telling, suppression, and disclosure. Secrecy is everywhere constitutive of social life,

defining who speaks to whom, what is said, what is withheld, and how it is communicated

(Bellman, 1981; Beidelman, 1993; Simmel, 1950). The secret, then, is qua ‘public’ secret. It is

that corpus of social knowledge that is readily – and even, at times, explicitly – available and

despite which retains the status of ‘clandestine’ and ‘concealed’ by all those engaged in

sustaining the fiction that there is ‘something’ still worthy of hiding. Taussig (1999, 50) has

defined this cultural performance as simply that which is, ‘… generally known, but is left

unspoken’.

Power relations remain central to the practice of such secrecy. Indeed, public secrecy is

everywhere facilitated by an Hegelian labour of the negative, whereby everyone knows that

others know that they know and, even then, no one speaks openly about what they know others

89

know (González, 2011). Eviatar Zerubavel (2006), too, in a manner similar to Taussig, writes of

the silence that arises on such occasions as when a known and familiar matter remains

purposefully unacknowledged. He characterises the sensation as a kind of weighted quiet that

brings forth the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’, an obtrusive presence of which everyone is

aware and of which no one will speak. The invisible spectres of the ‘elephant’ and the public

secret both operate as social ‘prohibitions’. As Kenneth Surin (2001) argues, public secrecy

marks the boundaries between those who have the right to ‘know’ and those who ‘know what not

to know’ and enjoins both groups to think and act as if the hidden knowledge cannot be revealed

but for a fulminous and destructive outcome. Such a structuring of power relations is ably

demonstrated in Hans Christian Anderson’s classic tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, in which

the sovereign subjects of a fictional kingdom all profess a collective ignorance of a reality clearly

evident to those within its purview. The emperor’s body has not been clothed in garments sewn

from a weave visible only to those of honest intelligence, as the sly tailors would have it known.

Instead, the figure of the monarch is exposed most starkly in his own nakedness. Temperance,

moreover, is sustained by the implication that to acknowledge the Emperor’s disrobement would

expose one’s own idiocy or, worse still, the folly of all for their mindless belief in such an illusion

(Taussig, 2003).

Public secrecy is intimately related to the act of defacement as a mode of revelation. Secrets and

secrecy remain insignificant without the potential for disclosure. The public secret, however, is

always and everywhere already known and so demands a particular mode of telling beyond the

routine disclosures through small hints, indiscretions, and verbal articulations. It requires an

unmasking, instead; one that recalls Walter Benjamin’s (1979) distinction between exposures that

destroy the secret and ‘just’ revelations that illuminate hidden knowledge. For Taussig, it is

through the act of defacement that the public secret makes itself apparent in recusant deeds such

as graffiti, vandalism, and the despoiling of revered images. Defacement is part of that same

labour of the negative in which the public secret itself is most firmly entangled. As a form of

‘unmasking’, defacement contains both destructive and productive potentials, engaging the

deleterious forces of iconoclasm in the assault itself and the generative energies of ‘profane

illumination’ (Benjamin, 1979) in the complicated emotions that such political actions arouse in

their intended audiences (Freedberg, 1985). Certainly, defacement as an iconoclastic gesture

realises more than the simple surface marring of an image or disfigurement of an object. The

illicit bespattering of paint across public spaces, the burning of nationalist symbols, and the

mutilation of artefacts are, instead, strategic acts that harness the social power of sacrilege to

efface, impair, and spoil an object and, in the process, to draw out and make apparent precisely

that which society holds as sacred. The destruction contained in such defacement often

provokes outrage, indignation, and despair, as an act of ‘profane illumination’ might liberate the

‘revolutionary energies’ embodied in the taboo or as a ritual unmasking might release the ‘social

magic’ that lies beneath the mask (Taussig, 2003).

Taussig (1999, 52) argues that this act of defacement is already ‘hidden’ or ‘inscribed’ as a

‘tabooed possibility’ in the object itself as an appeal, even a demand, to transgress the very

matter for which the secret prohibits. András Zempléni (1984, 103) describes a similar

phenomenon, also in relation to the production and performance of secrecy, in which he suggests

90

that in the making of a secret it becomes, ‘… oppressed, restricted, restrained, that is, loaded with

tension’ (original emphasis). The tension is that ‘incoercible tendency’ to verge towards exposure

with hints and fragments and slips of the tongue in ways that serve to encompass those in an

audience that might otherwise have been excluded from within the secret’s reach (Zempléni,

1984, 103). The act of defacement, moreover, leads, not to the collapse or negation of the public

secret, but to its reinforcement as it reinvests the object concerned with a renewed meaning or a

‘semantic twist’ (Peffer, 2005, 59). Thus, the impulsive exclamation of one young subject, ‘… but

he isn’t wearing anything at all!’, as the Emperor himself passes before his liege in a state of

undress, does not so much expose the ‘truth’ of the secret to the public gaze nor wrest it of social

power. For the royal court and the vassals, each and everyone, already ‘know’ the Emperor is

unclothed and in public. The naïve and childish interjection, instead, serves to further extend the

mystery in the public secret by exposing, not the ‘fact’ of nakedness, but the significance of

secrecy in social organisation, the extent of mutual collusion necessary for its existence, and just

how heavily the truth itself is reliant upon such an illusion (Taussig, 2003).

The layers of public secrecy are multiple and overlapping in the village of Selo. Indeed, secrecy

is a very real presence in the small hillside community, structuring the ways in which villagers

interact with one another and with those around them. The covert visits of the then-camp

commander made under the cover of darkness could certainly be read as part of the dynamics of

public secrecy that permeate everyday life in post-war Selo. Jankovac’ passing visits to the

village monument reflect the visibility and invisibility of experiences of war. His presence, alone

and at a most unusual hour, was surely intended to afford some measure of dissimulation to his

movements; and, yet, the visitor’s military dress suggests that he was also aware that his person

might very well be descried; and, well he was. The unease in the elderly neighbour’s demeanour

as she observed the scene from the shadows of her front entrance speaks to a code of secrecy

steeped in intimidation and fear. If either one was conscious of the other’s presence, then neither

one gave any indication that might reveal it. The only trace of the momentary encounter was a

burnt roach strewn at the foot of the monument, a small act of defacement that assured the

former commander and his secret visit of an audience and, therefore, of a social existence.

Nevertheless, the clandestine actions and reactions of both persons bind the two figures in a

labour of secrecy in which both are engaged in the power-laden process of simultaneously

knowing and ‘not-knowing’ the local history inhered at the site of the little monument.

‘Beware Your Friend a Hundred-Fold’: War in the Village of Selo55

The monument marks nine days in the late spring of 1992 when the Bosniak village of Selo fell to

Serbian (para)military forces occupying Zvornik municipality; suddenly, ruthlessly, and without

resistance.56 From the early hours after dawn on 25 May, villagers report the sound of nearby

55 Quote from the Qur’an: ‘Beware your enemy, but beware your friend a hundred-fold. Because if your friend

becomes your enemy he can hurt you all the more, because he knows the tunnels to your heart’ (Verse from the

Qur’an, cited in: Silber & Little, 1997, 43).

56 At the time of writing, a comprehensive history of the war in the village of Selo did not exist. The following

record of events is predominantly compiled from the personal accounts of survivors and supported by the

relatively brief references made to the village in research materials and human rights documents.

91

gunshots and the arrival of ‘Četniks’ in small groups who apprehended any and every non-Serb

civilian in sight; some as they crept in from hiding places in the woods in search of provisions,

others as they hurriedly tended to the few remaining livestock, and more again by men patrolling

the roads between settlements (pers. comm., [various], 2011, 2012). The few reserve forces that

had policed the area with barely concealed hubris up to then asserting their moral duty to ‘guard’

the Drina valley on behalf of their Serb superiors were dwarfed by the sudden incursion of armed

reinforcements. The rapid mobilisation included the uniforms of the notorious Arkanovi Tigrovi

(Arkan’s Tigers) and Beli Orlovi (White Eagles) as well as contingents bearing the insignia of

special operations units, the Red Berets, the Valjevo Corps, and Serb territorial defence units

(TOs) (pers. comm., [various], 2011, 2012). More than 400 villagers were marshalled at gunpoint

by both regular and irregular forces in camouflage uniforms; opportunistic recruits seeking to

profiteer from the wartime disorder. Women and men, arbitrarily detained, were separated and

systematically interrogated, stripped of their valuables, and removed to three neighbouring

houses on the path above the little school; those who resisted were routinely beaten and killed.

At the hands of Serb neighbours and strangers alike, villagers from Selo, Planivica, Naselje,

Snagini, and surrounds were detained in cramped conditions and subjected to debilitating

physical and psychological torture, forced labour, severe deprivation, and continual threats to kill.

Early reports suggest that all women and girls held at the detention site were raped and sexually

assaulted, bar a very few elderly (UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994, Volume IV, Annex

VIII, ‘Prison Camps’, 349). One former detainee recalled of camp conditions, ‘… It seemed to me

that there was not a single woman that was not raped, not a single woman that was not hurt, from

the youngest to the oldest. They would just send one woman back and take another with them;

send one back and take another one’ (Emina, pers. comm., Sept. 2011). The UN Commission of

Experts investigation noted that 50 to 60 teenage girls were interned at the Selo site, all of whom

were raped immediately (UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994: Volume IV, Annex VIII,

‘Prison Camps’, 348). Other women were escorted from the camp to their village properties by

armed captors; beaten, deprived of hidden savings, stripped naked, and subjected to multiple

rapes within the intimate space of their family homes. More women again were forced to perform

domestic labour for camp soldiers, including acts of a specifically sexual nature (pers. comm.,

[various], 2011, 2012). Emina’s childhood friend from the neighbouring village of Brdo

remembered, ‘… It was not merely rape. They did not simply take women, did not simply rape

women, and then let them go. It was torture. They would bring women back beaten black and

blue, chewed-up, and devoured’ (Ajša, pers. comm., Sept. 2011). Were it not for one young

woman’s escape in a single unguarded moment and her chance crossing with a small volunteer

BiH Army unit in the woods above Selo, the war history of the little village may have read

otherwise.

The liberation of the camp in Selo is a small distinction, but a distinction nonetheless, particularly

given that the little unit of volunteer recruits, local men, mostly from that same network of villages

on the lower mountain slopes, considered first an assault that would level the camp; captors,

captives, and all. Armed with almost no weaponry or supplies, one ex-soldier remembers, ‘… we

thought, at first, it would have been better if we [the BiH Army] shot them [the detainees] between

the eyes instead of allowing the Četniks to continue stroking them with fear. Let them be shot to

92

death in order that they are not tortured, not tormented any longer‘ (Emir, pers. comm.,

September, 2011). As it was, at first light on the morning of 2 June, the little unit surrounded the

camp from higher ground and opened fire on the Bosnian Serb and Serb soldiers. Under a

hailstorm of bullets, the villagers fled the camp and Selo, making their way across the mountains

to the safe haven of Tuzla, where many remained until the war’s end. The life of the camp was all

of nine days; nine short days in the course of a war that spanned almost four years. Nine days

from first arrest to final liberation. Nine days to disturb irreparably the collective anima of the

village and nine days to inflict lasting harm on the social and moral fabric of the little community.

As one elderly woman noted:

‘… You know what? We were not there for long. We were not there for long. Nine days.

It was nine days. It was nine days and, to me, it seemed like nine years.’

(Š.R, pers. comm., September, 2011)

Figure 7: Detention Camp in Selo Village

57

Selo certainly still bears the deep scars of war two decades after the close of conflict. The small

village appears largely reconstructed and resettled on the surface; most houses have been

repaired and the minimum of services restored, many households are now occupied, and the

main school building and domu kulture (house of culture) are both operational, bringing extended

community in from the surrounding hillside settlements. The life of the village is, nevertheless,

accompanied everywhere by a quiet sense of mourning for what the elder generation, in

particular, perceive as the post-war deterioration of their pastoral community and the associated

loss of its local folkways and traditions. The population that returned to the lower mountainside

communities at the war’s end was much changed; smaller in size and altered in social

composition. The empty spaces left by lives lost to the war still weigh heavily on the few who

returned to live among the places of death and disappearance; missing wives and husbands,

mothers and fathers, children and siblings remain an absent presence that marks the greater

majority of homes. The loss of surviving neighbours who chose to resettle elsewhere has re-

57 The triad of houses on the roadside above Selo proper that together formed the wartime detention camp in the

village for nine days during May and June of 1992. Photos taken by author.

93

ordered, even further, the social rhythms and the ritual relations between people that defined rural

life in the years before the war. The intimate network of social relations that once connected the

nearby villages has been replaced by suspicion and fear and, sometimes, despite appearances, a

longing to retreat from, rather than to rebuild, the ‘community’. In the words of one erstwhile

resident, the little village no longer represents ‘home’ but, instead, bears a great many ‘other’

memories; continual reminders of the violence, terror, and suffering of those nine days in May:

‘… I am telling you, I am scared. I would never come here if it were not for my husband. I

manage to stay here with him. But, I do not stay here for long … I come here, plant some

potatoes, corn, and onion. My children come here with me sometimes and I go back there

again [to her natal village]. I am registered there. I do not dare visit a doctor here; I would

rather die. I would rather die than fall into their hands again. Never. Never. If someone

offered me 10,000 marks to spend a single night here [alone], I would not do it.’

(Lejla, pers. comm., February, 2012)

Srcolika Spomenik: The ‘Heart-shaped’ Monument and the Production of ‘Truth’58

Srcolika spomenik, or the ‘heart-shaped’ monument, was the sole memorial commemorating nine

days of war in the village of Selo until only very recently. 59 The little monument seems

progressive, even radical, at first glance. The memorial stone stands as if in challenge to the

historical imperative that would relegate the wartime experiences of the village women and girls

and the impugned pride of their men to the footnotes of history. Certainly, it is one of only two

known public memorials of this nature within Bosnia, devoted explicitly to women who

experienced rape during the recent war.60 The carefully selected wording carved into the stone

frontispiece appears as if to publicly and permanently call attention to acts of wartime sexual

violation perpetrated on the women and girls of the little village and its surrounds; a subject widely

58 The memorial marking the site of the Selo camp is colloquially referred to as ‘srcolika spomenik’ or the ‘heart-

shaped monument’ among the village communities in the purlieu of Zvornik municipality. A first attempt at

locating both the village and its monument during an initial field visit to the area in August of 2011 proved

challenging given the reticence of villagers to speak with uninvited interlopers as well as the unformed,

circuitous mountain roads and the unmarked or infrequently signposted boundaries between settlements.

Enquiries into the whereabouts of the ‘Selo monument’, and the ‘monument to raped women’, and the

‘monument raised by men’, returned almost no information from the few villagers prepared to offer assistance

until a chance conversation with a local farmer raised the descriptive of the ‘heart-shaped monument’. The

simple sobriquet turned out to be familiar to most in the nearby village communities who were aware of its

presence and location and painfully mindful of its local politics.

59 A second larger memorial stone dedicated to the local šehidi (martyrs of the faith), and specifically to the fallen

Bosniak soldiers responsible for the liberation of the camp and the civilian victims who did not survive

imprisonment or the final armed struggle prior to release, is planned for erection near the domu kulture (house

of culture) at the entrance to Selo proper. The artistic and architectural plans for the monument have been

completed since early 2012, however, funding for the project remains outstanding.

60 A second commemorative plaque has been raised in the city of Tuzla in the Republika Srpska, however, at the

time of writing, the background to the small bronze panel remains unknown. The plaque has been mounted to a

nondescript corner wall in the historical centre of Tuzla and appears to dedicate the nearby Solni Trg, or Salt

Square, to Žene Žrtve Rata, or the ‘Women Victims of War’. Inquiries with the Government of Tuzla Canton and

multiple women’s support organisations in the municipality yielded no information with regards to who was

responsible for the plaque’s presence in the old town square, when it was erected, and for what purpose.

94

considered historically and socially taboo. Even the subtlest of details on the lone village

monument reads as defiant: to the, ‘… silovanih majki i sestara’ – the ‘raped mothers and sisters’

– in place of the more euphemistic terminology, ‘žene žrtve rata’, or ‘women victims of war’,

ordinarily preferred elsewhere in Bosnia when referring to survivors of sexual violence. The very

existence of the monument, moreover, seems as if to make painfully visible the failure of the

seljaci, of the village men. For, in the ‘dishonour’ of a woman raped lies also the ‘unspeakable

shame’ of those fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons invested with her protection. Yet, the little

monument was erected by those same seljaci to Selo’s women victims; those same men who,

elsewhere and otherwise, might be considered failed patriarchs, failed protectors, and disgraced

family, religious, and community heads for their inability to ensure their wives’ and daughters’

protection.

Figure 8: Srcolika Spomenik (Heart-Shaped Monument) in Selo Village

61

As always, however, such symbolism conceals as much as it reveals about the realities of war

and its aftermath. More than a passing glance reveals that the simple monument speaks to a

painfully complex process of (re)construction of those living memories that threaten to expose

what Émile Durkheim (1954) has elsewhere referred to as ‘tears’ in the social fabric. The

monument, in this sense, is part of an intimate discursive response to the sharp vicissitudes of the

everyday produced by a brief, yet violent, encounter with war that threatened to undermine village

collective identity. A closer reflection of the symbolic figurations of the monument and its politics

61 Photograph a (left): The heart-shaped monument in Selo village following the annual commemoration

ceremonies on 1 June 2012. Photo taken by author. Photograph b (right upper): A local crowd gathers on the

roadside outside the three houses that formed the makeshift camp during the war in preparation for the annual

commemoration ceremonies on 1 June 2012. Photo taken by author. Photograph c (right lower): Village women

wait outside the Domu Kulture (House of Culture) for men to finish the Jumu’ah, or the midday prayer, during

the annual commemoration ceremonies on 1 June 2012. Photo taken by author.

95

exposes deeply viscerous moral anxieties over disgraced female sexuality and the impugned

valour of male protectors. Indeed, the architect of the little memorial, Fikret, alludes to the veiled

and very sensitive meanings implicit in the monument’s carefully worded inscription. One

afternoon, in conversation with Fikret, the question of the monument’s lettering arose. In

response to comments raised that the text founded the impression that all women raped in the

little village had also lost their lives, Fikret remarked simply, ‘… now, you know very well how

these things go here’ and fell into an obstinate silence on the matter, refusing to be drawn further

into discussions around local memorial politics. Fikret’s wife Nura, however, overhearing the

exchange as she attended nearby to the making of three large tureens of homemade pekmez

(jam), interjected with interest, ‘… Yes, raped and killed. The wording makes it sound as if none

of them is alive, right? … But, some of them were raped, and others were raped and killed’ (pers.

comm., August, 2011).

Fikret and Nura’s exchange is revealing. The brusque conversation between husband and wife

alludes to the central aporia of one of the most closely guarded, and yet poorly preserved, of

public secrets in the village. The revelation that women were raped and executed by their military

captors functioned to conceal the broader reality that many more women were similarly raped and

survived. The stories of both are unavoidably intertwined. The more visible the memories of the

martyred women were made in the circulation of oral histories and the observance of

commemorative activities at the site of the monument, the more apparent the sense of those

other ‘invisible’ stories of survival became. Indeed, the matter is rarely so candidly acknowledged

as in the conversation between Fikret and Nura, the architect and his wife. The woman’s

forthright comments were perhaps more so a reflection of the couple’s circumstances; she was

not an internee of the camp, he was not the husband of a rape survivor, and neither one had ever

lived in the village. Certainly, local accounts of war rape circulate with somewhat less discretion

in the presence of outsiders. Yet, with male observers or kith and kin in attendance, those same

stories hastily lose their shape and texture, marking the information as the object of a taboo

observance within village boundaries. The secret of survival, instead, acquires representation

through the habitual gaps and silences, denials and erasures, lies and distortions, and slips of the

tongue that punctuate everyday conversation in the village communities. For, as Taussig (1999,

273) has eloquently argued, public secrecy is a social strategy, the distinction of which, ‘… lies

not in skilled concealment but in the skilled revelation of skilled concealment’.

The monument and its careful inscription, thus, exercise a disciplinary function in policing the

boundaries of acceptable public knowledge vis-à-vis the wartime rapes of local women. Indeed,

monuments everywhere constitute serious cultural authority. In their varied forms and structures

are material self-definitions, of sorts; eclectic, selective reconstructions of the past that

encompass a particular group consciousness at a particular moment in history. The significance

of the monument is that it organises a chaotic bricolage of voices, individual memories, and

contested moral claims into a singular, compelling narrative and then imposes that ideal on the

public landscape that orders social life (Young, 1993). As Charles Griswold and Stephen

Griswold (1986, 689) suggest, monuments are a, ‘… species of pedagogy’ that instruct on

historical values, persons, events, and behaviours worthy of emulation. In this vein, the heart-

shaped monument in the village of Selo is inextricably tied to the central narrative of war rape and

96

to the cultural sanctions that surround its exposure. The simple epitaph etched into the stone

façade gives rise to two very specific subject positions through which women in the village could

voice their experiences in the public sphere. The figure of the female ‘šehidi’ and the spectre of

the ‘chaste survivor’ are both symbolically embodied in the monument, either visibly in the

inscription to raped and martyred women or invisibly through their careful textual omission. The

two circumscribed identities create limited space for any disclosures outside these narrowly

defined boundaries; a woman might be raped and murdered, but never raped and survived. In

this manner, the monument mimetically reproduces the conservative discourse on rape in which

only certain categories of women are considered beyond suspicion while others remain marked

with stigma and shame.

The two subject positions are both symbolically and materially significant. Indeed, the women

and girls who were raped and killed in the village camp were characterised through a rhetoric of

heroism. The mothers and sisters identified in the monument’s inscription were acknowledged as

war heroines, as female šehidi, who had fought and sacrificed for the Bosnian Muslim faith with

their bodies through violent encounters with rape. The deaths of these same women were

accepted as metaphorical acts of purification that cleansed their individual bodies of the stain of

sexual impurity and purged the social collective of their liminal presence as living reminders of the

patriarchal failure of village men to protect their ‘property’ and preserve the honour of their

bloodlines (Diken & Bagge Laustsen, 2005). The deaths of these women are considered noble

passings in this sense; wartime ‘sacrifices’ aligned with those of Bosniak soldiers fallen in the line

of duty. The memory of the youngest camp victim is often invoked as the embodiment of the

raped and martyred female. The rape and death of the young girl less than a day prior to the

liberation of the camp is a narrative told and retold as both evidence of the brutality of Bosnian

Serb soldiers and as a symbol of victimhood. The then-12-year old Alma had been imprisoned

alongside her elder sister Edina and their mother for the full nine days of the camp. As Edina

recalled, ‘… my mother told me the story. She told me they raped her; she was raped two times

by some older men after they took her away. Older men raped her two times and they plugged in

a device and that is how they killed her. She had no scars’ (Edina, pers. comm., June, 2012).

The survival of women in the camp, however, necessitated the existence of an alternative subject

position. The figure of the ‘chaste’ survivor stands alongside the female šehidi as a second

legitimate subject position for women in the village to occupy following the war. The symbolism in

this very constrained identity far exceeds the immediate significance that it holds for the few,

mostly elderly, women who were known to have endured internment in the camp without

experiencing the torture of rape. The very presence of the ‘chaste survivor’ produced an

ambiguous space, a mask of secrecy behind which others might conceal their own rape

experiences. Indeed, if rape was a pervasive, but not a universal, method of interrogation, then

all women could lay claim to this alternate identity and deny their own experiences of sexual

violence, in public, if not in private. Menfolk, too, could invest in this more persuasive social

‘reality’, one in which husbands might return to their wives, fathers might resume paternal

authority over their daughters, and brothers might defend their sisters without the very public

mark of rape on their character. The public secret is, thus, a shared one. Rape was a familiar

theme in village conversations. Wartime remembrances between neighbours, friends, and kin

97

were regularly punctuated with references to sexual violence in the camp, if only as a measure of

the brutality of their Bosnian Serb captors. The stories of rape were often recounted from a

distance, however: as rumour, as hearsay, as secondary accounts, or as abstract events known

to have occurred, but never witnessed. Rarely was a story of rape repeated as a narrative in the

first-person.

The patriarchal gaze invested in the little monument, and in the two symbolic subject positions it

has given rise to, is made even more apparent by the conspicuous absence of other female social

figures. The eulogised inscription to the ‘silovanih majki i sestara’, the raped mothers and sisters,

visibly excludes other primary familial roles occupied by women in the village – most notably,

wives and daughters. The appropriation of ‘mother’ and ‘sister’ figurations as the principal

signifiers of the body politic, and the simultaneous elision of wives and daughters, invokes certain

patriarchal ideals of womanhood while suppressing others, thus, mobilising their value as a

medium for ethnic, cultural, and gendered community-building. Unlike the absent forms of wife

and daughter, the maternal and sororal images emphasise first the motherly kinship with children

and the sisterly relationship with siblings before any affinity with husbands, fathers, and other

male ‘protectors’. The figure of the woman raped, in this context, becomes desexualised through

the carefully constructed representations of mother and sister and her violation implies, less the

failure of her own patriots to defend her, and more the brutality of the ethnic other in their assault

on the collective ideals of innocence, chastity, morality, and nurturing care embodied in her

persona. In this way, the honour of the community and the virtue of its male members are never

in question; the presence of the woman raped does not draw attention to the painful ruptures

between wife and husband, or daughter and father, nor does she engender any crisis of

masculinity among those same men invested with, and unable to preserve, her safety.

The small heart-shaped monument is, thus, ‘… made to do ideological work in the everyday

sphere’ (Jayawardena & de Alwis, 1996, xxiii). The presence of the memorial stone on the village

outskirts, and its modest inscription to the 13 raped and murdered women, contributes to the

rehabilitation of traditional gender hierarchies through the aestheticisation of the ‘Other’ within;

both the raped woman and her aberrant sexuality and the failed patriarch and his impugned

valour. The ‘mothers’ and ‘sisters’ referenced in the simple epitaph, moreover, remind villagers of

the sanctions against voicing stories of rape survival. Indeed, the stain of rape is symbolically

expunged only in death when the collective memory of the female victim may be adopted as an

icon of the violated, injured, and invaded community and as a pillar of the future regeneration of

social bonds. The limits of such a restricted historical narrative produce scant discursive space

for the stories of the mothers and sisters and, indeed, the wives and daughters, who endured the

gendered depredations of the village camp and survived. The memories that diverge from the

collective ideal of rape and murder are, then, consigned to the communal strictures of public

secrecy and to the practices of concealment, revelation, revelation of concealment, and

concealment of revelation that are such a familiar part of the culture of everyday life and its socio-

political ordering. Certainly, Michael Lambek (1996, 239) has described memory – and, in the

case of the village of Selo, the secrecy surrounding memory – as a ‘moral practice’ and as a form

of ‘practical wisdom’, suggesting 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’.

98

Transgressing the Secret: The Burden of ‘Survival’

Public secrecy and the burden of rape survival are, thus, deeply entrenched in the village

socialscape such that any direct transgression has marked consequences. Indeed, as early as

1950, Georg Simmel (1950, 330) observed that secrets provide protection to those invested with

their guardianship in that they produce an, ’… immense enlargement of life’, offering, ‘a second

world [in which to immerse oneself] alongside the manifest world’. Revelations, in turn, unsettle

this sense of security. The exposure of secrets affects the stature and reputation of those whose

unmentionable histories have been unmasked in circumstances that violate the ethics of what

might be asked and told and revealed and observed. In Selo, the knowledge of women’s rape

survival was an especially sensitive secret, particularly in the early years after the close of the war

when the return of displaced villagers and the reconstitution of the small community was at its

most political and immediate. Women in the village speak often of the various, contradictory and,

at times, hostile responses to disclosures of rape survival from diverse members of the local

community. Many women experienced some level of social ostracism as a result of the sense of

stigma and shame associated with wartime sexual assaults; some wives endured blame for the

attacks and were abandoned or divorced by their husbands, some mothers encountered

pressure, and even direct censure, from their children, and some unmarried daughters feared

they might be viewed as ‘tainted’ or could risk their marital prospects should the experience

become public knowledge. As one village woman remarked of the burden of living with rape

survival and the pressure to remain silent in the face of the public secrecy that surrounds such

knowledge:

‘… there was much humiliation at the beginning when it was revealed that women were

raped. There are women who, until this day, have not dared to say they were raped. Well,

I did not dare say it until recently; I did not dare because of him [points to her husband].

He would not let me; he did not allow me to say it. I did not dare … I was only 30 back

then and he told me, “If you say a word … If I hear you said a word about it or gave a

statement, know that I will divorce you”. I was barely able to persuade him to change his

mind. And, I spoke out recently, a year ago perhaps. He was a little angry. I said, “I

decided to say it, and what happens will happen”. And, I do not have any problems now.

He does not scold me, or … I tell him, “For God’s sake, man, you know it was done by

force. It was done by force”. I told him exactly that. I could no longer be silent. It must be

said, and one cannot be silent about it; it must be known. Do you know what a devastating

blow it was for us?’

(Lejla, pers. comm., June 2012)

The threat of transgression, however, may also represent a mode of social resistance and an

unexpected source of power for the victims of war rape. As Jonathan Goldberg (1985, 130)

notes, ‘… it is not necessarily a sign of power to have a voice, [and] not necessarily a sign of

subjection to lose it’. In the village of Selo, the secret of rape survival was a burden that was

chiefly shouldered by women and policed by men; it was women who were typically enjoined to

maintain their silence on the matter of rape and men who policed the limits of what could be told

and heard and known and felt about those experiences. For certain survivors and in certain

circumstances, however, the secret could be understood as a compelling part of a local culture of

resistance waged against the stigma and social marginalisation that many were now subject to in

the post-war environment. The secret of rape survival was a collective humiliation for the Selo

99

community. The drama of exposure had the capacity to simultaneously harm the reputations of

the village men as much as it did the village women. The labour of secrecy binds husbands and

wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, and produces forms of speech and frames of

social action that are established and maintained by collective effort and complicity. The secret of

rape survival is, thus, a performance that entails, as Taussig (1999, 132) argues, a, ‘…

magnificent deceit in whose making all members of a society, so it would seem, conspire’.

Sumeja’s narrative of rape survival

Sumeja and her husband Nedim had both lived quiet, unassuming lives up until the onset of the

war; first, as neighbours in the village of Selo and, later, as kin. Nedim, for the most part, had

laboured as a contractor for almost three decades in the Serbian capital of Belgrade and in the

nearby city of Novi Sad, returning to the village and his young family for a few weeks at a time in

between projects. Sumeja remained behind in the marital home, occupied by the everyday

responsibilities of raising three children and managing the few family assets – one cow, one

sheep, and a few dunum of land.62 The husband’s basic income and the wife’s prudent handling

of resources made for a basic life; enough to provide their three daughters with an education, to

furnish the pantry in the sparser months, to remunerate a neighbour for the odd task, and to put

away a little in savings on the side. The couple were content enough with their simple lot and

certainly had no designs outside of Selo village; save for Nedim’s work and any prospects for

their daughters’ marriages and future grandchildren. As Sumeja recalled, her life before the war

had rarely spilled beyond the borders of her natal village, ‘… I was born and I was married here. I

was born a little further up there, less than a hundred metres away … I married here too. As

people say, I literally, simply, hopped over the fence into their yard [of her husband’s family]’

(pers. comm., June, 2012).

The arrival of uniforms in Selo in the spring of 1992 produced sharp vicissitudes in the modest

fortunes of Sumeja and her young family. The soldiers appeared in the village, gradually at first

and then with greater and more hardened resolve. Over several grim months leading into the

war, the military and paramilitary forces in the village requisitioned the few public buildings – the

schoolhouse as a temporary headquarters, the domu kulture (house of culture) as a gathering

point, and the mining infrastructure around the old limestone quarries for arbitrary detentions,

mostly of the seljaci, the most unfortunate of village men. One by one, villager after villager, both

men and women, were taken to the schoolhouse and systematically interrogated, registered, and

then deprived of their valuable possessions. The smallest of cash reserves were uncovered from

inside kitchen canisters, and underneath mattresses; stores of gold and silver jewellery were

retrieved from crude backyard hiding places beneath rose bushes and šeftelija (peach) trees.

The sense of unease became more and more pervasive as the war drew closer and neighbours,

especially women and children, took to spending evenings in one another’s homes. When

soldiers eventually appeared at her doorway, a small and frightened posse had been sleeping in

the cellar for almost three months; Sumeja and her two elder daughters, together with a sister-in-

62 A dunum (also referred to as dunam, or dulam) is a unit of land measurement especially prevalent in areas

formerly under the influence of the Ottoman Empire. In Bosnia, the unit is equivalent to a standard decare

(1,000m²).

100

law, and an elderly widowed neighbour.63 As Sumeja remarked ruefully, ‘… even then, they said

no one would kill or even touch anyone. They said not a hair off our heads would be touched, but

our heads were touched indeed’ (pers. comm., June, 2012).

The camp experiences of Sumeja and her children might have faded into obscurity amidst the

larger collective framework of events were it not for the eldest daughter, Nejra. Indeed, the

family’s narratives of camp survival through those nine short days followed a familiar and

disturbing pattern. Detention. Interrogation. Robbery. Beating. Deprivation. Rape. Nejra,

however, is remembered especially for the moment of her escape and for her part in securing the

armed support that resulted in the camp’s liberation by Bosniak forces. Nejra herself has rarely

spoken of her experiences despite their significance to the trajectory of camp events and her

mother certainly appears as a fiercely protective figure by her daughter’s side on the infrequent

occasions of her visits to the village from her present-day home in France. The story,

nonetheless, circulates in varied and various forms through other villagers’ formal testimonies,

informal recollections, rumours, gossip, and general conversation. The shape and content of

each rendition differs slightly, though the pith of the story remains constant: the then-17-year old

Nejra was removed in a random selection of women and girls from the detention site to her own

home, then a makeshift headquarters, and raped at least once and possibly repeatedly by

multiple assailants. In a single unguarded moment, the young woman escaped through the

bathroom window and fled on foot across the exposed hillsides and towards the shelter of the

nearby forest under a barrage of gunfire from her military captors.

Nejra’s sudden escape resulted in the liberation of the captives and the collapse of the camp.

The young girl stumbled across a small contingent of the Bosniak army, mostly locals from the

surrounding villages, camped inside the forest. The untidy collection was ill-equipped and under-

prepared to launch any manner of strategic offensive against the larger Serb and Bosnian Serb

forces that, by then, had occupied the mountainside villages for several months. The girl’s fervid

assertions, however, echoed those of a male escapee who, only days earlier, had also come

across the small detachment. On the basis of the two testimonies, the small army prepared for

an assault. Soldiers edged closer to the village camp at nightfall and positioned themselves in

the spaces between the now-empty houses surrounding the detention site. At first light, the unit

advanced. When the enfilade of gunfire and the confusion from the assault had cleared some

hours later, three ‘Četnik’ soldiers counted among the fatalities; the bodies of whom were later

exchanged for those of nine living Bosniak civilians still held by Serb and Bosnian Serb forces in

the village proper (Emir, pers. comm., June, 2012). Sumeja and her middle daughter fled at the

camp’s liberation to the nearby safe haven of Tuzla where they were reunited with Nejra and the

youngest child. There, the small family remained internally displaced until the war’s end. Almost

two decades later, over coffee and sweets in her living room on the outskirts of Tuzla, Sumeja

recalled the horrors of the camp and her deeply personal pain in watching helplessly as her two

elder daughters were both raped and tortured within eye and earshot of their mother:

63 Sumeja’s youngest daughter of six years of age had been removed to the care of relatives in the nearby city of

Tuzla at the first sign of military forces in Zvornik and had remained there until the war’s end.

101

‘… When my Nejra escaped … There, I still have knife marks here. They were beating me

until I lost consciousness. I did not bring a single tooth here to Tuzla; they knocked out my

every single tooth. The girl, my middle girl, the one who stayed there with me, they did

what they wanted to us because the other one escaped. I said, “Do whatever you want.

You can slaughter me now, but I am glad she escaped”. They grabbed hold of me and

one of them put his feet on my legs and struck me with a knife. Here, I still have the scar.

And, so I fainted. They slapped and slapped me on the face. What has been happening

to me … when I got up, they dragged me there. They forced our men detainees outside

and made them carry us to [another] house in a blanket.

‘… There was nothing on me. My clothes were completely torn. They ordered me to sit

down. They tortured me, pushed a scarf inside my mouth. Blood was running and we had

to say no one ever touched us. They tortured my children and me in all sorts of ways. It

was a little easier for [other women] because [their] children were not there. It hurts you so

when they beat your child and they beat you at the same time. As much as she was

crying, I was crying more while they were beating her. And, while they were beating me,

[whispers] they were raping her. There, that is why I said it was not very … No one

survived what those people did. And, I regret, until this day, I regret not leaving this

country. I would never turn my head back if I did.’

(Sumeja, pers. comm., February, 2011)

The multiple rapes experienced by Sumeja and her daughters formed a part of the public secret

of women’s survival in the village of Selo. Dr Nedžara Ahmetović articulates the very real

consequences for Sumeja and others who choose to transgress the informal and unwritten rules

of public secrecy by disclosing their status as rape survivors. A coordinator and psychotherapist

at a local NGO in the nearby town of Tuzla, Dr Ahmetović worked closely with women in the Selo

community over a period of two years, concluding in May of 2007. The organisation provided

regular group therapy in the village and individual counselling at its office in Tuzla during that brief

period of support. Dr Ahmetović speaks at length of the responses of male kinfolk to disclosures

of rape several years after the close of conflict. Many survivors felt obliged to expose the

unspoken details of their camp experiences, reluctantly and under economic duress, rather than

compelled to bear witness or to seek restorative healing through talk therapy. Indeed, the

moratorium placed on registrations for the small state pension granted to survivors in 2006

brought forth a rush of hasty new registrants to meet the final deadline in 2007. The process of

establishing eligibility for the monthly benefit required formal psychological evaluation and a

professional’s report submitted through the office of Žene Žrtve Rata (ŽŽR) in Sarajevo. As Dr

Ahmetović explained:

‘… so, men had different reactions to it. For instance, the men who reacted in the worst

way were those who were not there when it happened. When one sees something,

anything that happens in life, one is able to deal with it in a better way. At least, that is how

it is for me. But, when one is far away and something is happening, one is powerless and

can only sit without knowing what is going on. But, when one is there … For instance,

those men who saw their women immediately after the women were raped rarely

abandoned them; I know only two cases where that happened. Those men were there, and

they abandoned their women afterwards. But, there were cases where husbands and

boyfriends did not abandon their women; they accepted them. Men who were abroad, who

were absent and returned after the war, had troubles dealing with that … Now, these men

claim that they were the ones that were hurt etc. They were not the ones who were raped;

they were not the ones who were hurt. Women were those who were raped, women were

those who were hurt, women were those whose integrity, whose identity, was, in a way,

102

destroyed and changed, shaken; physically, spiritually, psychologically, emotionally, and in

every possible way. And, now men feel embarrassed and ashamed, feel their dignity was

hurt? … Men were always angry about things that were disgraceful, things that disgraced

them. They felt disgraced.’

(Dr Nedžara Ahmetović, psychotherapist, Vive Žene, pers. comm., August, 2011)

The most difficult of reactions was demonstrated in the rejection of wives by their husbands and

in the misplaced attribution of blame that often accompanied such responses. As Dr Ahmetović

recalled of one woman’s experiences of disclosing her personal history of rape:

‘… it was the first time she had spoken to someone about that. She had been raped and

her daughters had been raped. One of them was 16 and the other was 14 when it

happened … When she came to speak with me here in 2007, she and her husband had

been living together again for 11 years after the war, 11 years after she had been raped in

the camp. He asked her if anything had happened when he returned and she has said,

“They did all sorts of things, but they did not touch us. They did not touch us” … so, for

that entire night before she came to see me … She had not slept for two days. At four in

the morning, she woke him up and told him, “There is something I should tell you”, and he

said, “What is it you should tell me?” And, she answered, “Well, you know, they raped me

during the war” [Sigh]. And, what he said to her was, “Whore!” His first reaction was to

call her a whore! And, then he started vomiting. He was vomiting until the morning. She

left her house at 8am and he was vomiting until then. He felt nauseated; he felt sick. Until

this day, she has not told him their daughters were raped; she only said she was raped …’

(Dr Nedžara Ahmetović, pers. comm., August, 2011)

For Sumeja, a former resident of Selo, her experiences in navigating the public secret of her rape

survival was similarly fraught with stigma, shame, and the fear of rejection. The return of her

husband, Nedim, at the war’s end established a tacit code of familial silence around the

articulation of personal experiences of survival from the conflict years. Indeed, Nedim had

remained in Belgrade for the early period of the war, hidden in the Serbian capital he had formerly

laboured in. When later he returned to Bosnia as a refugee from Austria after the close of

hostilities, husband and wife, and father and daughters, had not set eyes on one another in four

years, nor had they shared or survived a single war experience to speak of. Sumeja had,

therefore, dared not disclose her status as a rape survivor to her husband upon his return to

Bosnia for fear of provoking his distress and fury, nor had she thought to confide in him about

their daughters’ camp experiences. Despite her reticence, it is unlikely that Nedim had remained

fully unaware of the war history in Selo village, or of the rape of most women and girls from the

surrounding communities, or even of his elder daughter’s significant role in the liberation of the

camp. The narrative of the Serbian occupation was widely known among those in the village and

the details were regularly discussed through gossip, rumours, and commentary. Sumeja, herself,

stated that her husband had read newspaper stories of the Selo camp and of their daughter’s

escape while taking refuge in Austria. The secret was an illusion, in other words, and the labour

of maintaining the façade was a responsibility shared by both husband and wife. The presence of

this ‘non-secret’ (Simmel, 1950) was made all the more powerful through an ‘active not-knowing’

(Taussig, 1999, 7); it set the tones and coloured the dialogue within the privacy of the marital

space. Certainly, as Michel Foucault (1998, 4) has observed, the repression of sensitive

knowledge operates as, ‘… an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, and, by

103

implication, an admission that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing to see, and

nothing to know’.

Sumeja disclosed her status as a rape survivor to her husband in 2007 alongside many other

women seeking to meet the deadline on registrations for the pension that was available to civilian

victims of war. Her decision to reveal that there was, in fact, something to see and something to

know violated the unspoken code of secrecy established between husband and wife. It was an

act that unsettled and, with the silence surrounding his wife’s wartime suffering now broken,

Nedim was compelled to confront the matter. A traditional village man, Nedim considered himself

the head of the family and the real focus of any wartime assaults on his kin. The rape of his wife

and daughters was understood as a humiliating reflection on his own masculinity and on his

inadequacy as a husband and a father. Indeed, the failure to protect his womenfolk from the

abuse of other men was experienced as a form of emasculation; a symbolic measure of male

strength and virility in which Nedim had been found wanting in comparison to other men. He

chose, instead, to interpret the rape of his wife as a matter of conjugal infidelity, rather than one of

forced assault.64 He imagined his wife to have had some level of consent, and possibly even

willingness, in her interactions with the soldiers in the camp. In such an alternative

(re)construction of events, the perceived character failing could be firmly located with Sumeja; his

wife’s behaviour in the absence of her husband could then be viewed with suspicion and her

virtue as a married woman could wear the moral stains of sexual misconduct in place of his own

symbolic failure as a patriarch and as a protector. As Sumeja stated of her husband’s response

to her disclosure:

‘… it brings no good anywhere. Wherever it happens, there are tensions and humiliation.

Here, my husband is old, but he still says those things to me. Here, he is listening now.

And, let alone the young. They [the husbands] say, pardon my language, “You were raped

by Mr So and So, and Mr So and So. Fuck you and Mr So and So”’.

(Sumeja, pers. comm., June, 2012)

As Dr Nedžara Ahmetović, likewise, explained of another woman’s repeated and hesitant

attempts to disclose her rape experiences to her husband:

64 In much of the literature concerning the Balkan honour/shame complex (Schneider, 1971; Davis, 1977; Olujić,

1995), female chastity remains central to the integrity of the family and community and a wife’s infidelity is

typically considered a reflection of her husband’s reputation and a measure of his masculine ability to maintain

familial control. In this sense, the act of adultery is widely regarded as considerably more shameful than the

experience of rape. The world-shattering experience of war in Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia has disrupted

this customary hierarchy of shame for some men in certain circumstances. As Spyros A. Sofos (1996) makes

clear, women’s bodies become nationalised (de-privatised) in the context of war and are often ascribed with a

heightened sense of significance. The protection of female kin becomes analogous to the protection of the

nation’s borders (Verdery, 1994). Male honour, similarly, becomes increasingly nationalised (de-privatised)

throughout the course of war, particularly as the focus of the ‘property’ that men are required to protect shifts

away from the intimacy of the family and towards the collective responsibility for the nation. In this logic, rape

conceptualised as infidelity remains dishonourable for both women and men; less so, however, than rape as

force, which embodies the failure of men to protect the nation’s property from external invasion rather than

internal betrayal (infidelity). Failure to fulfil the role of male defender of womenfolk is, therefore, suggestive of

the shameful inadequacy of men as men, as well as men as husbands, and also men as ‘Yugoslavs’,

‘Bosniaks’, ‘Croats’, and ‘Serbs’ (Mostov, 1995; Bracewell, 2000).

104

‘… the way a woman tells her man, the way she informs him about what happened, is

extremely important. So, I asked her, “How did you tell him?” And, she said, “I told him

the Četniks’ kitchen was situated in our house. That is where I was forced to cook for

them”. She told him all the women cooked there. He asked her if she had cooked as well.

She said, “Well, I had to. They would point a gun or a rifle at one’s head. I had to”. And,

she told him everything. She said, they came to the room where she was with her

children, and they told her to go to the house and make a pie or to make bread. I do not

know what exactly. They first raped her and then forced her to cook. And she said, “I

ground coffee beans for them. I used the coffee grinder and everything. We all took turns

and ground coffee for them. Do you have any idea how I felt? They sat with guns in their

hands here and with a line of bullets on their chest. Hand grenades and weapons were all

around us,” she said. So, she was raped in her own house, in his own house, because the

kitchen was there.

‘And, the basic point of it is that the traumatised have no words to verbalise the rape; they

lack the words. So, instead of telling her husband what happened, she talked about the

kitchen, about the smell of the kitchen, how coffee beans were roasted, and lunch was

cooked, and how the soldiers sat there and rested, their weapons at their side. And, it is

considered that cooking and preparing food are ways to express love for someone. What

kind of a picture is it for a man who thinks his wife survived the most horrible things? It is a

completely different picture for him than for a woman who was raped. So, then he created

his own fantasies. Women tell their stories and, on the basis of that, men create their own

stories, their own fantasies. He created an image in his own mind. And no one knows

what kind of an idea, what kind of an image, was created. In the minds of those husbands,

an image was created that is absolutely incompatible with the reality of what goes on in a

detainee camp.

‘So, when he returned after the war and [she] told him that she survived rape, he would sit

outside, even if it was really cold. He sat outside and smoked and during spring, summer,

and autumn, he looked after his sheep. And, he occupied himself with that. But, when he

was alone with her … He became extremely jealous … She said he controls where she

was going. He did not trust her anymore; he did not trust her with anything. She would

say how he was intolerable and how she could not live with him anymore. She would say

how he grumbled, how he was jealous if she went somewhere, and he has never been like

that. He became jealous … Perhaps he would act differently if he found out about his

daughters. He would be angry, right? He would be hurt. But, now, the only thing he

knows is that they raped his wife, the woman who belongs to him. And, he turned it into

mistrust, into jealousy, and not in anger, not in advocacy for his wife, so to say. He should

advocate for her, claim it was not her fault, right? But, he turned everything into matters of

the relationship between a man and a woman, into matters of marriage.’

(Dr Nedžara Ahmetović, pers. comm., August, 2011)

The secret of rape survival was central to the operations of power in the very micro-politics of

everyday life in many more complex ways. Indeed, as Michel Foucault (1998, 101) makes clear,

secrecy and silence, ‘… transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and

exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it’. For Sumeja, the secret of her

wartime suffering furnished her with a degree of ‘symbolic capital’ (Bourdieu, 1977), even as it

marked her as the object of stigma and shame and demanded the active silencing of her personal

injuries in public as much as private spaces. The secret had social implications for husband as

well as wife and the threat of disclosure could equally be levied against Nedim to openly discredit

him as a figure of respect and authority in the community. Nedim was made especially vulnerable

to the risk of exposure by the sensitivity of his own circumstances, for he had taken ill a few years

after his return to Bosnia, suffering a stroke that had left him partially paralysed and largely

105

dependent on his wife for his personal and domestic care. According to Sumeja, her husband’s

trauma was a result of the suppression of his grief and suffering over all that had transpired

throughout the war in his little village and to his family. So, while Nedim remained ‘disgusted’ by

his wife’s status as a rape survivor, and furious at the unmasking of her secret, his physical

condition left him reliant on Sumeja for support and unable to abandon her for the sake of his

patriarchal pride. Sumeja, in turn, sought to leverage her husband’s weakness in her own modest

ways to negotiate her constrained position within the familial space. Dr Nedžara Ahmetović

explains how the marital home can become a ‘morally ambiguous space’ (Scheper-Hughes &

Bourgois, 2004, 10) in the presence of a public secret of this nature, one in which husband and

wife could become engaged in complicated relationships of complicity and betrayal:

‘… [one woman] is blackmailing [her husband] now, and she is doing it consciously. She

said to him that she would tell the whole community that he grumbled about the fact that

she was raped by a Četnik, a Serb soldier, during the war. And, he became a little

embarrassed. He was embarrassed because it was something intimate, something

between the two of them. As soon as she threatened him that the entire community, all the

women would find out, that she would tell them, he grumbled.’

(Dr Nedžara Ahmetović, pers. comm., August, 2011)

Occupying a subjectivity other than that of the ‘female šehidi’ or ‘chaste survivor’ is, thus, the

object of a considered and collaborative act of secrecy in the village of Selo and requires constant

vigilance to maintain the semantic contours of those many uncomfortable truths that remain

hidden in plain sight. Indeed, the marital home for Sumeja and her husband Nedim is haunted by

the spectre of the intimate history of rape and the ever-present and tensed possibility of betrayal,

violence, and abandonment. The memory of Sumeja’s wartime suffering acquires strength in this

silence and confers power in different ways to husband and wife. In this sense, Georg Simmel

(1950, 337) writes that secrecy functions as a form of adornment in that the controlled circulation

of especially sensitive information transforms that knowledge into a rare and valuable commodity.

The secret acquires a status similar to that of a jewel and confers on those who possess it a

‘position of exception’ and a special kind of prominence and power. The secret as jewel requires

protection at the same time as it demands revelation; it is concealed to retain its rarity and value

and unmasked to display its power. Both Nedim and Sumeja’s manipulation of the public secret

and its destructive potential – through the threat of rejection by husband and the risk of exposure

by wife – were part of the collective project of sustaining an illusion of patriarchal respectability in

the home and in the community. As Stef Jansen (2002, 90) writes, silence is often evoked in

dominant narratives of the war by those who survived it in an attempt to, ‘… exert a minimum of

control over their own version of history and thereby over their everyday lives’.

Bodily Remembrances and the Politics of Defacement

A most visceral expression of the intimate wartime memories of women survivors in the little

village of Selo are the physical acts and quiet musings of self-harm. The post-war phenomenon

is a social malaise that has marred the personal and political landscapes of Bosnia. The harms

are embodied most violently and visibly in acts of suicide, but also in women’s responses to the

mundane patterns of suffering that mark the bodies of rape survivors, everyday; exactingly and

106

unremittingly.65 Women in the village speak often of the intrusive pain that has become an

absolute and inescapable part of their life worlds since the close of the war. Some speak of the

persistent nightmares through which the events of those nine short days are re-experienced;

others speak of the intrusive thoughts and vivid wakeful remembrances that shadow their

everyday routine movements in the village, and many more speak of chronic headaches, muscle

tension, insomnia, dissociation, and emotional reactivity. Women verbalise, also, if more quietly

and by different means, the ways in which they interpret and respond to these subjective and

culturally informed bodily experiences. Pain, in all its sensuous, instinctual, and emotional guises,

shapes the post-war lives of many women survivors. As one village woman remarked of her body

and the experience of living in a permanent state of unrest, ‘… I suffer pain. My nerves are frayed

so much that I can barely stand to be with myself. I haven’t slept in years. I suffer from many

things, but there, still I say we lived. God had it that we survived. No one can help me except for

dear Allah. I swear to God’ (pers. comm., February, 2012).

Pain is a ubiquitous feature of human experience and its symptoms represent, at times, an ‘other’

language for knowing trauma and distress, both personal and social (Kleinman et al, 1992; Good

et al, 1992; Csordas, 1993; Caruth, 1996; Coker, 2004). Indeed, pain is a symptom of memory

embodied. The many and diverse somatic representations of pain oftentimes address how the

self ‘speaks’ during and after episodes of abject violence or everyday suffering. In the anarchic

and inchoate experiences of bodily distress – the habitual aches, the sharp spasms, ‘frayed’

nerves, and ‘sleepless’ nights – survivors encounter the raw material for varied and diverse

modes of narration, most especially for those difficult remembrances that have eluded or been

denied direct verbal expression, either through the imposition of social sanctions or the difficulties

of finding appropriate words and sympathetic audiences. Elaine Scarry (1985) develops the

argument further in her discussion of torture and suffering in claiming that pain is a pure

ontological assault for the experiencing subject that threatens to ‘unmake’ the world, both real and

conceptual. In an encounter with either ‘spectacular’ acts of violence, or even chronic pain, one’s

entire sense of self and its anchor to the material world is left vulnerable, nothing exists outside

the private corporeal reality of suffering and few languages can effectively capture its sensory and

affective dimensions. As Scarry further suggests, it is the uncanny psychic kinship between pain

and imagination that ‘remakes’ the world. The subject of pain must venture in its aftershock to

‘rewrite’ the story of the self and ‘remake’ its lived and material world in some meaningful way

from a seemingly disordered accumulation of fragmentary and painful experiences.

The complex transactions between the body and pain find a somewhat sympathetic counterpart in

Taussig’s discussion of public secrecy and in the task of unmasking and the politics of

defacement. In the repetition of distressing somatic indicia lies the pith and core of the ‘public

secret’ that troubles collective remembrances in the little village of Selo – that women were not

65 Data on suicide rates, specifically among women raped during the war in Bosnia, are almost non-existent and

information is mostly anecdotal. For data concerning post-war vs. pre-war patterns of suicide among survivors

in Bosnia, particularly organised by gender, ethnicity, and religious affiliations, see: Musić, Emina; Jacobsson,

Lars; and Renberg, Ellinor Salander. 2014. Suicide in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the City of Sarajevo (with

special reference to ethnicity). Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention, Vol 35(4), pp

42-50.

107

only raped and martyred; but were also raped and survived. Here, the very bodies of women

survivors are the secrets themselves. Wives and daughters, alongside mothers and sisters, were

made painfully visible by the brutal inscriptions of gendered and nationalist violence and, then

again, painfully invisible by the moral and social limits of their own life worlds. In this prohibition

to silence, Taussig (1999, 39) argues, lies a ‘surplus’ of negative energy that takes the form of a

clandestine incitement to transgress the very matter or object under prohibition, an incitement to

deface and unmask the public secret. Likewise, the intrusive pains that disturb many women’s

bodies may be read as averments, as evidence pointing to the existence of a secret hiding in

plain sight that threatens its own exposure at any moment. Indeed, the experience of chronic

pain produces problems of ‘control and meaning-making’ and demands enormous energy in the

search for relief (Good et al, 1992). Women’s nervous attentions to the apparent source of their

pain and to the relentless pathology of symptoms may be understood as transgressions of a

secret that has failed to find adequate expression elsewhere. The infliction of self-harms and the

quiet ‘narrativizations’ exchanged between survivors may further be perceived as violations, as

acts of defacement that bring, ‘… insides outside, unearthing knowledge, and revealing mystery’

(Taussig, 1999, 3).

Dr Ahmetović argues similarly that both secrets and atrocities are realities that refuse to remain

buried in either the bodies or the minds of women survivors in Bosnia. In her trauma work with

survivors of war rape in eastern Bosnia, she suggests that secrecy and suffering offer sensory

‘cues’ that infer the hidden presence of a painful event in the everyday lives of victims. Cathy

Winkler (1991, 13), too, draws on a vivid metaphoric language in an effort to capture the chaos of

these ‘cues’ or sensory impressions that come to inhabit the body of the rape survivor in the

aftermath of the event. Winkler suggests provocatively that, ‘… rapists bury landmines in the

bodies of their victims’. The symbolic arsenal remains latent for a time only to explode into a

confusion of nausea, depression, nightmares, intrusive recollections, tremors, and other

distressing physical sensations under the sudden pressure of some external stimuli or internal

reminder. The unexpected and involuntary responses might be triggered by a familiar sound,

smell, or visual sign that remembers the moment of rape or by a rapid intake of breath or an

intense heartbeat that recalls the sensory details of the event. The symptoms draw attention to

the existence of a secret at the same time as they serve to deflect awareness of that which is

considered ‘unspeakable’, most visibly in the alternation between emotional numbness and an

intense reliving of the event. Speaking to these complexities, Dr Ahmetović remarked of that

‘privileged moment’ (Herman, 1992) when a landmine explodes and the secret of repressed

histories, memories, and feelings surface into consciousness:

‘… in a way, they wanted to talk about it. They sent signals but one needed to notice

them. What am I actually trying to say? I am trying to say that there are so many

symptoms and signals sent by these women, women victims, that people are unable to

take notice of … When I listen to certain sessions, they are full of emotions and sighs, full

of pauses. A woman says, “… and then they came …”. I can see her bodily reactions; I

can see that something goes on inside her. I can see she is going through the journey.

They continue to live in their story … And, I just listen and listen and listen … One woman

talks about where her nervousness comes from; how this part of her body is itchy and that

one is aching; how this woman has headaches and that one has neck aches. It is

psychosomatics. They x-ray shoulders, x-ray necks, have CT scans, and mammogram

108

examinations. They go to the doctor’s regularly and spend money unnecessarily to find

this problem that is not physical.’

(Dr Nedžara Ahmetović, pers. comm., May, 2011)

The stories of pain recounted by two village women, Mirsada and Aldijana, indicate the ways in

which the public secret is represented in the very corporeality of the body. Indeed, the pain of

war rape is literally inscribed on these survivors’ bodies, in both material and immaterial forms.

The troubling aches and persistent fatigue repeatedly spoken of in the women’s own narratives

bring into greater relief those difficult experiences of war trauma that have found hostile reception

elsewhere in both public and private spaces. As Bibi Bakare-Yusuf (1997, 178) remarks, it is the

body that remembers ‘long after the infliction [has] ceased’, allowing for the expression of many

different and diverse forms of suffering. For both women, personal memories of the war years

remain tightly tethered to certain pivotal moments; including, most expressly, acts of sexual

violence. Aldijana and Mirsada both articulate the experience of their initial assaults after arrest

and internment in the makeshift camp in Selo village and both equally relate subsequent

corporeal pain to these particular wounds and the manner in which they were endured,

accommodated, and resisted. The women’s stories of sexual violence and survival could not be

voiced through the available and accepted tropes of the female šehidi or the chaste survivor; two

key components to post-war social reconstruction and the communal subjectivity of the little

village. The oral testimonies of raped women, instead, circulated inside the community of

survivors themselves, expressed cautiously, transgressively, within the context of the normative

silence that surrounds the politics of sexual violence and its remembrance in the present.

Mirsada’s narrative ‘defacement’ of rape survival

A former resident of the village communities and camp survivor, Mirsada recounts a profound act

of sexual violence on the first day of her incarceration in the Selo camp. Her most personal

account refers to the intimate relationship between trauma and pain, between psyche and soma,

as a greatly complex knot of bodily, psychological, and existential symptoms. Mirsada lived in her

marital home in the nearby village of Snagini with her three children and extended in-laws prior to

the onset of hostilities. Her husband, a long-term contractor employed in Iraq, remained outside

Bosnia for the duration of the war and has visited only infrequently since its end. The modest

two-storey dwelling in which Mirsada raised their young family was several kilometres back from

the main road on 47 dunum of land. It was isolated enough for the family to remain, despite the

lingering threat of war and her own mother’s repeated pleas to return with her children to her natal

village of Naplju. The soldier’s sudden appearance in Mirsada’s kitchen on a late afternoon in

May was both expected and unexpected in this sense. She had just finished bathing her small

daughter with water heated by the fire and planned to prepare a meal of porridge and unleavened

round cake while the coals still burned. As she put the fire down for the evening so the soldiers

patrolling the roadside in groups would not sight the smoke, the solitary figure appeared at the

door in his untidy fatigues and with her two ‘petrified’ young sons in tow.

The soldier demonstrated little ceremony as he ushered Mirsada – barefoot and without a

headscarf – and her family to the main road where others from the village had been gathered at

gunpoint. As she recalls, ‘… I was covered with a small scarf and he took it from me when he

109

forced me out of my house, stripped it off my head, threw it on a bush and cursed me, calling me

‘Alija’s bitch’.66 He said, ‘Screw you and your Alija! You Turk! Why do you have this on your

head?’ The untidy little group of villagers, once assembled, was then forced downhill to the lower

settlement of Selo, a little more than two kilometres further on. The soldiers, more than two or

three at once, ordered their captives to tread the downhill route at an intermittent pace; a run,

then a walk, a run, then a walk, a run, then a walk under a hailstorm of gunfire and laughter.

Mirsada remembers, ‘… at one moment they said, “Run!” and we ran as fast as we could. Then

they said, “Stop!” There were automatic rifles on all sides. They fired shots above our heads,

fired shots behind us, fired shots … “Stop, run! Stop, run!” We ran as fast as we could, paying

no attention to whether we will fall over or not’ (pers. comm., September, 2011). The group of

villagers, not more than 17 in all, were directed to the little schoolhouse at the foot of the valley in

Selo proper where Serbian military had established a makeshift headquarters. Women and men

were separated for interrogation on arrival and children left to the temporary protection of

neighbours.

The interrogation of women almost inevitably involved brutal acts of sexual violence for all but a

very few elderly villagers. The statements provided by women survivors implied a pattern to

these early interrogations; a grim script intended to strip detainees first of their possessions and

then of their dignity. As Mirsada remembers, ‘… first they listed us and then they forced us

outside and took us away’, after which came the beatings, ‘… every woman had things hidden. I

handed over my wedding ring and a pair of earrings, but they wanted more. They wanted what I

had buried … All sorts of things happened. They beat us, they raped us, they did whatever they

wanted with us …’ (pers. comm., September, 2011). The ordered thread of the woman’s

testimony is informally substantiated by story after story from those in her own village and the

hamlets that surround it. Arrested. Listed. Pillaged. Beaten. Raped. Detained. For many

villagers, the violence was rendered all the more brutal by the complicity of close neighbours,

many of whose familiar faces appeared in military uniform for the first time in the few weeks

before the fall of Zvornik. Mirsada continues, ‘… and, how was it possible that my neighbours

joined Serbians and detained me? … They were all our neighbours, almost all of them … and,

they simply looked away, our neighbours whom we ate and drank with. They looked away. None

of them said, “… do not do it” …’ (pers. comm., September, 2011). Mirsada’s narrative is

fractured with the hesitations, pauses, and disruptions common to many survivors’ descriptions of

sexual violence. Moments such as these, in which language fails to capture the brutality of

memory, bring into focus the sense of being ‘othered’, of not fully belonging, most especially from

one’s own body after the experience of rape. As she recalls:

66 ‘Alija’s bitch’ is a derogatory ethnic or religious epithet typically reserved for the Bosniak population and implying

that the recipient is an adherent of the first president of Bosnia, Alija Izetbegović (1925-2003), and his politics.

Izetbegović served as president of the seven-member collective state presidency during the Bosnian war from

1992 to 1996. Izetbegović authored the controversial manifesto known as the ‘Islamic Declaration’ in 1969

expressing his views on Islam and modernisation. The document was received by many of his political

opponents as an open statement of Islamic fundamentalism and remains a source of controversy to this day

(Burg & Shoup, 1999).

110

‘… I went inside. Nothing. You know what it is like when they strip you naked; they

thought we were hiding things inside our underwear, pardon my language. I had nothing

there. They took my watch and my earrings. If a woman had a bun, she had to undo her

hair. I had no clothes on, was completely naked. They laughed and said, “Check out the

breasts” – pardon my language – “Check out the butt-cheeks”. “Check out the …”. It is

embarrassing for me to repeat their words … A man called Borko, he was beating me; I

think he was beating me with his rifle, but my neighbour told me later it was a black club.

He spoke Ekavian.67 He was from Serbia. He was beating me here and I kept saying, “I do

not have anything”. And, my neighbours looked away once again. They would simply say,

“This one, this one, and that one”. And, they would make others beat us and look away …

And, before the very … The following day … We were liberated a day later, the following

day.

‘… Some of our neighbours did rape the women, but I was not raped by my neighbours. I

want to talk about that. I know his name was Vuk and he was from Serbia. He was so old

that he could barely hold his gun. Old scumbag! I have to call him a scumbag. Perhaps

he has dropped dead by now. The image still flashes before my eyes. I could never kill

anyone, but I could kill him. That is because he harmed me in the way he did … He did

whatever he wanted to me. I felt like nothing. I tried to wrestle my way out as long as I

was conscious. After I lost consciousness, I could no longer fight … I am certain that I feel

pain in this breast because of that [points to left breast]. The breast no longer feels like

mine. It is deformed. It is … I am … It is deformed. It no longer feels like mine … This

arm as well [indicates left arm]. When they take my blood, I do not even feel the needle

pinch. I had the arm surgically treated. Something formed inside because of the stress,

the beating, the … I do not know what it was. And, so I live from day to day. It no longer

feels like mine. This one does, but the other one does not. This side does because they

did not beat me on this side. It still feels like mine, I guess … They ask me why I take pills.

Dear God, sometimes I wonder if I am still sane.’

(Mirsada, pers. comm., February, 2012)

The disturbing account of sexual violence is particularly striking in its narrative coherence. The

clarity with which Mirsada interprets and explains the subjective origins of her pain and numbness

makes unusually visible the intricate relationship between soma and psyche, between surface

and depth, between concealment and revelation. The memories of rape and the public secret of

survival make their presence apparent in the sensory insistence of pain, a reflection of that

strange surplus of negative energy in which public secrecy itself is entangled. Indeed, the pain in

Mirsada’s left breast and her deadened arm have brought about a heightened awareness of the

woman’s own body and of the intimate somatic memories, or the ‘secrets’, that now reside there.

The body has become one of which Mirsada is acutely aware but in which she no longer feels ‘at

home’ (Leder, 1990, 4). The pain she endures in her breast and arm is at once a part of the

subject, a measure of the body, a dimension of the self and, at the same time, an ongoing

encounter that alienates the woman from her physical being and reframes her own lived

experience of corporeality as ‘strangely other’ (Goldberg, 2009, 34, original emphasis). The

experience makes apparent the tensions implicit in the revelation and concealment of the trauma

of rape and the secret of survival. The pain and numbness for Mirsada comes to represent the

67 The Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian (BCS) languages recognise two official standard dialects: ekavian and ijekavian

or jekavian. The group of dialects is chiefly distinguished by pronunciation differences and organised

geographically rather than by ethnicity or national affiliation. The ekavian variant of BCS is largely spoken in the

Republic of Serbia and in some limited parts of eastern Croatia; ijekavian is the accepted standard for the

Bosnian and Croatian languages and is also the predominant dialect in western Serbia (Alexander, 2006, 4).

111

story of a ‘wound’ that cries out in an effort to draw attention to a reality that sits uncomfortably

within the limits of narrative and form, particularly against a social environment that constrains

women’s voices (Caruth, 1996). The radical sense of disconnection from those injured body

parts, meantime, is part of that same embodied dialogue that urges the woman into a state of

forgetfulness, denial, and concealment of the traumas of the past.

The body and its symptoms, in this sense, become not only the repository of traumatic memories

but also the loci through which survivors make tangible attempts to move beyond violence, to re-

establish order and control, and to ‘remake’ their worlds. For Mirsada, the project of repair

involved the translation of her psychical and somatic suffering into meaningfully formed,

temporally structured, and morally salient terms. The experience of rape during this early and

violent encounter with the war was a disintegrative personal experience that, following Scarry

(1985), rendered the self and its moral and social referents in the material world intuitively

meaningless. The trauma for many women in the villages was both the sudden and devastating

encounter with violence as well as the ongoing experience of having survived it in a local world

that interprets rape and other forms of sexual violence within very complex and ambiguous social

and moral frameworks. The articulation of her painful memories enables Mirsada to recover and

reconstruct a diminished and shattered sense of self and to escape the compulsive repetition and

re-enactment of the event that so often accompanies the survival of rape and other sexual

assaults. Certainly, the naming of a trauma and the acknowledgment of its consequences stands

as both a mode of resistance against the general collective injunction to silence and as a form of

personal healing (Profitt, 2000). As Marcelo Suárez-Orozco (1992, 367) has observed elsewhere

in relation to the related inscription of fear in everyday life, ‘… testimony [is] a ritual of both

healing and condemnation of injustice – the concept of testimony contains both connotations of

something subjective and private and something objective, judicial, and political’.

The narrative rendering of war rape memories, nonetheless, represents an unmasking of the

public secret and an act of defacement. The stories of survival that circulate between women

rupture the fragile façade of secrecy that surrounds rape remembrance in the village communities

and exposes the general collective allegiance to the old gendered order as more of a nostalgic

ideal than an existing reality. The spoken account provided by Mirsada of multiple sexual

assaults at the hands of the old Serbian soldier represents a distinct challenge to the illusion that

the wartime experiences of village women might easily reconcile with the two socially accepted

subject positions of the female ‘šehidi’ and the ‘chaste survivor’. The revelation of rape in both

the woman’s quiet confessions and the habitual pains that have come to inhabit her body in the

meantime implies the existence of a third and confronting subjectivity in that of the ‘rape survivor’.

Mirsada herself shifted continually between these multiple public and private identities as wife and

mother and as ‘rape survivor’ in the quiet delivery of her story, evidenced most clearly in the

repeated small hesitations and subtle changes in tone that affected her elocution at certain

moments and in her agitation at the slightest of sounds. The whispered confession appears as a

violation of the local taboo against disclosures of rape outside the narrow frameworks embodied

by the heart-shaped monument, even when offered in personal conversation to two village

outsiders. Indeed, as Andre Brink (1983, 247) has observed, disclosures that are at variance with

112

normative social and moral codes are unsettling for, ‘… [where] the lie has become established

as the norm: truth is the real obscenity’.

Rape disclosures, like all genuine acts of defacement, bring forth, ‘… a very angry god out of

hiding’ (Taussig, 1999, 5), provoking a charge of feelings from survivors, witnesses, bystanders,

relatives, community members, and others. Mirsada had deeply internalised the opprobrium

often associated with sexual violence. She explained that she, too, had hesitated in sharing the

knowledge of her own rape experiences in detention with her husband who had remained abroad

throughout the length of the war. Her eventual disclosure some years later was met with anger,

recriminations, and a refusal on her husband’s behalf to return to his wife and their marriage; he

having evidently also absorbed the logic of rape as a measure of patriarchal weakness and a

symbol of his own diminished honour and status as a spouse. Even now, her husband returns

from his present home in Russia only infrequently and on the pretext of visiting his now-adult

children and their families, but never to call upon Mirsada. The couple’s children, two sons and a

daughter, have responded to the knowledge of their mother’s camp experiences with greater

ambiguity; their reactions are generally of a supportive nature and yet still shadowed by a sense

of personal unease. Indeed, at the sound of a key in the lock, Mirsada’s voice dropped to a

whisper and she cautioned quickly under breath, ‘… I cannot talk about it in front of my children.

My daughter knows they took me away, but she does not know that [I was raped] … She does not

like to listen to these things. She does not like to remember them. My sons know I was … that it

happened to me, but no one asks questions about it’ (pers. comm., February, 2012).

Aldijana’s narrative defacement of rape survival

The narrative accounts of the camp offered by Aldijana mirrored closely the chronological thread

of Mirsada’s own recollections of arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment. Forced from her home

at gunpoint and marched to the triad of little houses that formed the makeshift camp in Selo by

soldiers claiming to be Arkanovi Tigrovi or Arkan’s Tigers, Aldijana was imprisoned in a single

room with other women detainees. There, at the home of their now-deceased neighbour Almina,

the women waited for their captors to call for them, singling each woman out one-by-one, for

interrogation elsewhere. Aldijana recalls soldiers in gangs of two and three periodically entering

the room and pointing randomly to women with the butts of their riles, commanding, ‘… you, you,

and you’ as they removed the selected few from the house. Her sister-in-law was taken first and

returned a while later in silence. Her demeanour suggested ‘something’ was wrong; and yet,

separated from one another and held in different rooms, no woman could question her, nor did

they risk a chance whisper or furtive word. As Aldijana remembers, ‘… one did not dare to talk.

There was always a Četnik or two in the hallway, listening to hear if we would talk to one another’

(pers. comm., February, 2012). Aldijana was extracted from the group on the pretext of

performing ‘cleaning’ duties for the soldiers and taken to the house ‘… beneath the road’, where

Mehmed the hunter had lived before the war. The little village house with its white washed walls

and red tiled roofing was occupied instead by Serbian military, the Valjevo Corps, turned officers

of the JNA, and guards of Arkanovi Tigrovi. On this first encounter, Aldijana was delivered before

a soldier who she remembers went by the Serbian diminutive of ‘Vlado’ and was a central figure

in the violence perpetrated on the women.

113

For Aldijana, this first interrogation with the soldier, Vlado, involved multiple acts of sexual

violence, including rape, assault, and torture and from which she was returned to the camp, ‘…

beaten and unrecognisable’ (pers. comm., August, 2011). Here, she describes a moment, a

defining act of sexual torture, during the interrogation that threatened to ‘unmake’ her world and

the means by which this event later became inscribed upon her body as a chronic somatic pain

as well as within her personal memory as an ‘origin myth’ or a narrative symbolic of the source of

her unrelenting trauma:

‘… the only thing I know is that he was from Serbia and his name was ‘Vlado’. He was old.

I do not know [what happened to him] … The worst thing is that … I could endure

everything, but the worst thing is that … so, pardon my language, I had to give him a

blowjob. They held a gun next to me. If I had scratched it with my teeth, he would have

killed me. I told him I had my period, but he did not care. He simply wanted to be able to

say that … that he did it with a Turk woman … So, he orders you to give him a blowjob and

you cannot scratch him with your teeth; there is an automatic rifle. Try surviving that! …

When I remember where my teeth were! It is good that they all came out. I do not have a

single one of my teeth anymore. I have dentures. After it happened, I said, “… They ache.

Pull them out”. I had four teeth left and all four came out, thank God. I am glad I no longer

have the teeth. There. I am glad they ended up in the garbage after they swallowed

garbage.’

(Aldijana, pers. comm., February, 2012)

The implication of the face in Aldijana’s narrative of psychosomatic pain is deeply significant. The

face has long been considered an exterior and metonymic representation of the ‘sacred’, ‘elusive’,

and ‘deep’ realities of the self that lie beneath the surface layers of the person (Goffman, 1967,

1963). For Aldijana, the memories of rape and the public secret of survival form part of this

hidden ‘self’ and the more significant of these experiences have become literal inscriptions on the

woman’s worn and wearied body. Certainly, Aldijana returned repeatedly in conversation to the

troubling matter of her painful teeth and to the tangled relationship they continue to hold, even in

absentia, with her own personal experiences of sexual assault during the war. Aldijana’s

narrative details the physical mechanics of what became the first of many sexual assaults over

the passage of nine short days. Her account also describes, and perhaps more profoundly, a

singular moment of terror. Those few minutes at gunpoint represent for her nothing less than ‘an

ontological assault’ (Pellegrino, 1979, 44) in which the confusion of acute fear, horror, and

humiliation converged in a momentary sense of power centred, as it were, on the position of her

teeth. The incessant ache was an acute reminder of the tenuous position of her teeth during the

assault and the surge of terror that had overwhelmed her at the possibility that the slightest

involuntary error in movement might result in a scratch or a graze and end in the woman’s

summary execution. The particular nature of the assault also meant that the woman’s few

remaining teeth were, likewise, in a position to inflict harm on the old man, bidden as well as

unbidden. As Aldijana remembered, quietly and with a short and rueful laugh, ‘… if I think where

my teeth were, and I could just bite down … [drifts off] …’ (pers. comm., August, 2011).68

68 The chronic dental pain experienced by Aldijana in her four remaining teeth is likely a result of multiple

etiological factors; of ill health, prolonged malnutrition, poor hygiene, and the extraordinary physical stressors

produced by war. For Aldijana, however, the pain is more a reflection of the confusion of conflicting emotions

that surround rape ‘survival’, guilt, shame, disgust, and fear coupled with relief and that fleeting sense of power.

114

The narrative Aldijana has authored to explain the origins of her pain, and the actions she takes in

an attempt to alleviate the symptoms, brings the meaning of her suffering into fuller focus. The

incessant throbbing and occasional sharp spasms that surfaced in Aldijana’s teeth after the close

of the war were experienced and remembered as a weakness rather than as a pain ‘survived’ or

as a pain that marked one’s strength and honour. Unlike the visible scars sustained by soldiers,

or the injuries borne by civilians in the course of conflict, the pain in Aldijana’s teeth was

fundamentally aversive (Scarry, 1985); it was received and interpreted as a reflection of some

form of external, malignant force, a moral evil, that had come to inhabit her person as a

consequence of repeated sexual assaults (Leder, 1984). The removal of her teeth, in this sense,

represented not only an attempt to gain relief from the severity, intensity, and intrusiveness of the

pain, but also the expiation and purification of ‘her’ sin (Hubert & Mauss, 1898; Evans-Pritchard,

1953) and the (re)inscription of her moral personhood. The action is very closely aligned with the

logic of expiatory sacrifice. In extracting and disposing of the polluted material, Aldijana has, by

analogy, purged herself of any impurities associated with them, including the sense of repulsion,

shame, and guilt. Aldijana herself draws on the logic of sacrifice and the language of expulsion

and purification in her interpretation of her own motives, relating the removal of her teeth to the

abnegation of evil and even of the guilt she feels at her own survival.

The face, in this sense, has become one of the primary figures, the ‘bubble’, of public secrecy

and, for Aldijana, it is positioned at the ‘magical crossroads’ of both mask and window to the soul

(Taussig, 1999, 229). Indeed, following Georg Simmel (1901, 338), the face is the ‘geometric

locus … of the inner personality’, bearing all the individual marks and traces of identity,

physiognomy, and subjectivity within its physiological structure. The extraction of Aldijana’s four

remaining teeth was a performative gesture, in this sense; it was a defacement of that most

sacred countenance, of both surface and depth, that occasioned a poetic act of ‘presencing’ in

which the pain of rape and the secrecy of survival was quite literally written into the woman’s face.

Indeed, the removal her teeth dramatically reshaped Aldijana’s face and made visible the interior

suffering of the subject. At once, the action established her alterity. The face without teeth was

changed both in how it looked and in how it was looked upon. For Aldijana, especially, the action

was embodied critique, par excellence, of the idealised models of femininity, the chaste wife and

the nurturing mother. In revealing the origins of her scars and the now ‘exaggerated exterior’

(Parry, 2006, 1) of her face in the absence of the few remaining teeth, Aldijana emerged ‘refaced’

as a ‘rape survivor’. Certainly, following a Taussigian (1999, 3) logic of defacement, the bodily

modifications represented a ‘… cut into wholeness and holiness’ of the face that realised varied

and various significations beyond aesthetic appearance.

The defacement of Aldijana’s visage was, thus, very much a complex act. It was an act that

unsettled, one that vividly communicated her distress. Like Mirsada, however, the removal of

Aldijana’s teeth was also an action and a reaction to the insistence and the severity of her visceral

Certainly, as Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock (1987, 30) have proposed, somatic messages provide

insights into the internalisation of distress as a result of war and other traumas, and suggests alternative

readings that encompass both the pathological origins of pain and the entanglement of the individual body with,

‘… emotional, social, and political sources of illness and healing’.

115

suffering that attempted to reclaim control of the self and to remake her own personal world, not

as a victim but as a survivor. Indeed, self-alterations are ‘acts that ask to be witnessed’ and are

deeply resonant with a sense of personal authorship and mastery over the body and its intimate

somatic expressions (Hewitt, 1997, 2). In the removal of her remaining teeth, Aldijana sought to

make visible a most powerful rejection of her wartime past and, more so, of the normative codes

of silence that surround her experiences in the post-war milieu. The face, excised of its teeth and

then dentured is, at once, defaced and refaced, the inner suffering of the rape victim revealed for

a moment in all its vulnerability and then, almost immediately, re-faced as that of the rape survivor

in all her strength and endurance. The effort to recover and then to reconstruct a diminished, and

even shattered, sense of self is also part of the effort to escape the compulsive repetition and re-

enactment of the event that often accompanies the survival of rape and other traumas.

Defacement through embodied action, then, is a productive process; one that serves as a means

of exposing the secretly familiar, but also as a method of redefining it and, for the now re-faced

survivor, of re-entering the everyday world.

Importantly, the secret of rape survival is not destroyed through exposure. Indeed, Aldijana’s

narrative of defacement is not affected by a memorial tone; it does not refer to experiences that

have been resolved and now remain firmly in the past, either for the individual survivor or for the

village community itself. The memory of war rape, instead, continues to occupy the present in its

literal inscription on the woman’s body, on the face without teeth that represents, at any given

moment, both victim and survivor. As Walter Benjamin (1929, 279) has written, to this effect, no

single face can conceivably represent the multiplicity of faces that compose the subject but,

rather, an ‘infinite arsenal of masks’ comprised of potential identities and self-images continually

strives for principal recognition as the ‘signature of the self’. The ‘doubleness’ of the face, then,

lies in the inherent capacity to conceal a ‘secret’ truth beneath the surface and behind the masks

and then to reveal that same depth once more through the very public malleability of the façade.

Aldijana, like Mirsada, shifts constantly between the many different public and private masks that

her gendered and social roles demand in the little village of Selo; she deftly adopts the identities

of rape victim and rape survivor, of nurturing mother and shunned wife, and of community

member and returnee, depending on audience and circumstance. In so doing, she keeps the

public secret of survival relevant and the unwritten etiquettes that surround it alive.

Conclusion: The Public Secrecy of Sexual Violence

The preceding chapter provided an analysis of wartime sexual violence and its long afterlife in the

village of Selo through the Taussigian metalogism of ‘public secrecy’ (Taussig, 1999). The rape

of women and girls in the three little houses that formed a makeshift detention site during the war

is a secret widely known to those in the lower mountainside communities near Zvornik. It is a part

of a local history that is, nonetheless, rarely acknowledged and repeatedly disavowed; a matter

regulated by an unspoken rule that such knowledge should remain hidden from the public realm

for its potential to unsettle moral and gendered orders. The social forces that sustain such

secrets, that establish their very currency and relevance within the village borders, however, have

resulted from the constant stream of transgressions, of small revelations that suggest the

presence of something hidden and, in so doing, violate the principle of concealment. The power

116

in such public secrets, then, lies in the cautious circulation of rumours, gossip, and stories of

survival between villagers and, on occasion, in the presence of outsiders. Everyone knows and

everyone speaks of such secrets quietly and in confidence while simultaneously denying any

knowledge of their existence in public, thereby reinvigorating their power as information still

worthy of dissimulation. The process of concealment and revelation of the secret of war rape in

the village of Selo resonates closely with Michel Foucault’s (1998, 35, original emphasis)

influential exploration of the history of sexuality in which he observed that, ‘… what is peculiar to

modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated

themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret’.

The public secret of rape survival has, thus, become a compelling part of the politics of collective

identity and communal relations in the small village of Selo. Indeed, the secrecy that surrounds

local war history is deeply entrenched in the routines of village life across multiple and

intersecting levels, forming a tacit foundation of rules and regulations that structure the

(inter)subjective encounters and interactions between those who share in the hidden knowledge

and those who do not. The principles of concealment and revelation that empower and preserve

the public secret also contribute to colouring the dialogue between various members of society, to

setting tones, shaping interactions, and determining responses. In this sense, the revelation of a

public secret is a performance of sorts; one that can easily turn precarious in different

communicative contexts, particularly in relation to the sensitive knowledge that the women of Selo

village were not only raped and martyred but were also raped and survived. Disclosure is

transgressive, a violation of certain deep-seated taboos, however deliberate and however partial

or absolute the revelation. For women survivors, the consequences of such transgressions are

potentially devastating; disclosure may lead, in turn, to exposure, and exposure to social

exclusion. Equally, the threat of disclosure may become a strategic tool through which survivors

of war rape find creative ways in which to apprehend, mediate, and resist the social control that

the particular scripts and roles of victimhood sometimes necessitate. Certainly, the telling of

secrets in one manner or another inevitably produces shifts and changes in communal and

interpersonal relationships; disclosure, exposure, and display cannot be undone or easily erased.

The women of the village, nonetheless, found ways and means by which to narrate the forbidden

subject of rape, to communicate hidden memories, and to make visible their intimate war histories

in everyday life. Indeed, the trauma of rape and the ongoing secret of women’s survival both

surface amid the quotidian rhythms of village life in expected and unexpected ways. The habitual

aches and pains, sharp spasms, and nightmares that repeatedly punctuate women’s narratives

serve, in particular, as some of the more constant reminders of sensitive or repressed

experiences, pointing especially to those war traumas that have often met with unfavourable

responses and, at times, even direct censure when articulated in either public or private spaces.

The body, in this sense, stands as a site of social and political memory and a central locus for

much of the public secrecy that surrounds the matter of war rape in Selo. The acts of self-harm

and bodily alteration that some women seek recourse in as a means of alleviating symptoms, and

the quiet ‘narrativizations’ that many compose to bring meaning to their pain, might be understood

as transgressions of the secret, small violations that resist the normative codes of silence and

draw attention to that which society holds as sacred and as worthy of ongoing concealment.

117

Each act is a performance, however modest, a deliberate unmasking of the public secret of

survival through a Taussigian ‘defacement’ that uncovers the secretly familiar within the woman’s

body and, in doing so, makes the knowledge all the more empowered through its exposure.

118

Chapter IV:

Beyond a Manichaean Aesthetics:

Voices from the ‘Grey Zone’

‘… the greater part of historical and natural phenomena are

not simple, or not simple in the ways that we would like’.

Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 1989, 37

On 25 August 2011, a modest assembly of Bosniak women from most regions across the country

descended on the small town of Foča in the Republika Srpska as part of an organised

demonstration to mark the National Day of Human Rights.69 The demonstration in the Serb-

dominated town in the notorious Drina Valley region was a first visit for many of the women

survivors since the early months of the war when Foča became the grim site for several rape and

detention centres. For a few women, however, the protest march through the main street was a

return visit, following an initial trip in September 2004 when a small collection of rape survivors

were pelted with eggs, stones, and insults in a failed attempt to erect a memorial plaque outside

the old Partisan Hall in honour of those who were sexually enslaved and tortured at the site

during the conflict (Henry, 2008). The memory of that earlier and ill-fated visit was very much

present among the second gathering of women survivors; uncomfortably so, on the bus journey

from Sarajevo to Foča and, even more, during the demonstration through the centre of town. The

women survivors presented a united front against the occasional laughter and sneering

comments from members of the local community sitting in nearby cafes, the random ethno-

religious insults and three-fingered Serb salutes from passersby, and the disparaging

interrogations from police officers questioning their grief: ‘Zašto žalite?’ and ‘Ža čim žalite?’ [‘Why

do you complain?’ and ‘What is the reason for your sadness?’].70 In the midst of the sporadic

69 The following chapter focuses on the Bosniak community in the town of Gradić in the Republika Srpska and,

more specifically, on women’s intimate stories of survival in the grey zones of the Serb-run camp in nearby

Omarska. Personal disclosures of morally ambiguous behaviour were rare, however, and scattered across

different populations of survivors throughout Bosnia. As such, the central description and analysis is based on

one woman’s account from the town of Gradić, but also draws on the stories shared by survivors of camps in

other communities to illustrate certain key points in greater ethnographic depth and detail. Where relevant, I

indicate these external narratives in the footnotes to the text.

70 The three-fingered salute, commonly referred to as the ‘Serb salute’, is a familiar gesture among ethnic Serbs

that denotes affinity with, and belonging to, the Serbian nation. The salute is widely held to have originated as a

symbol of Serbian Orthodox Christianity signifying the Holy Trinity and is made by extending the thumb, index,

and middle fingers of one hand. In expressions of nationalism, the gesture is often accompanied by the rallying

expression, ‘Samo sloga Srbina spašava’, or, ‘Only unity saves the Serb’.

For further detail on the origins and contemporary uses of the Serb salute, see:

119

disruptions, one elderly woman at the very rear of the small crowd remarked quietly, and

somewhat ruefully, ‘… look at them! [… indicating towards her fellow Bosniak demonstrators …].

They are supporting each other now, but what did they do in the camps?’ (pers. comm., August,

2011).71

The woman’s offhand remark was telling, in spite of its careless delivery amidst a stream of banal

commentary on the aesthetics of post-war Foča, the sweltering midday heat, and the discomfort

of shouldering several bags over the full length of the political march. Her words were suggestive

of a more complicated history of victimhood than public representations might first allow and the

existence of a diversity of human responses to extreme circumstances. Indeed, experiences of

‘survival’ in the context of the incomprehensible violence and dehumanisation of war necessarily

acquire deeply ambiguous qualities. The pursuit of mere physical survival against the

humiliations, injustices, and miserable daily conditions in conflict were influenced, on occasion, by

unequal distributions of privilege and pain among victims beyond any individual attributes of

ingenuity, resourcefulness, and tenacity. Material survival in the camps, on the frontlines, and in

the cities under siege involved, at times, sharp divisions between victims based on social,

political, and religious hierarchies. In certain circumstances, the scope for any form of action was

so constrained that even the smallest of choices taken around issues of survival were often in the

knowledge that it might be at the expense of another. The elderly woman’s observations on the

behaviours and attitudes of her fellow participants on the Foča demonstration served to disrupt,

ever so slightly, the valorised idea of survival in pointing to the presence of occasional

inconsistencies in public testimonies and to the importance of considering what might be absent,

suppressed, or merely hinted at in memories of war and the ongoing trauma that it produces.

Šuber, Daniel & Karamanić, Slobodan. 2012. Shifting Extremisms: On the Political Iconology in Contemporary

Serbia. In Alexander Jeffrey C.; Bartmański, Dominik & Giesen, Bernhard (Eds). Iconic Power: Cultural

Sociology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 119-138.

71 Foča lies on the banks of the Drina River in the southeastern corner of Bosnia as a part of the Serb-dominated

entity of the Republika Srpska. The small town was of strategic significance for the irredentist wartime pursuit of

a ‘Greater Serbia’, particularly for its location at the border to Montenegro and on the crossroads leading to the

Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, the central administrative and military town of Pale, and clear routes to the sea

(Human Rights Watch, 1998). Indeed, Foča was among the first key regions to fall to Serb and Bosnian Serb

forces in early April of 1992. The town and surrounding municipality, consequently, became the site of an

intense organised campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and the location for some of the more brutal crimes committed

against the local Bosnian Muslim population. The military occupation of Foča was especially renowned for the

network of detention centres established in the area in which non-Serb civilians were summarily arrested and

confined, tortured, raped and, finally, expelled, killed, or ‘disappeared’, leaving the town almost completely

purged of its Muslim population (Bartrop, 2016). The camp system in Foča was especially defined by a highly

organised regime of sexual assault in which Bosnian Serb army personnel, local police officers, and paramilitary

soldiers regularly participated in the mass rape of women and girls (Iacobelli, 2008). The ‘Foča Indictment’,

later issued by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in June of 1996,

acknowledged the significance of the systematic and coordinated use of sexual violence by forces occupying

the region, charging eight men with grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and represented the first

prosecution for sexual enslavement in an international court (Henry, 2011). As Roy Gutman (1993, 8) has

written, ‘… what happened there set a pattern for ethnic cleansing in the rest of Bosnia. Foča could be a case

study in the role played by civilian politicians in the brutality against the non-Serb population’.

120

The following chapter takes the elderly woman’s comment as a point of departure for exploring

the tensions between the experiences of sexual violence and their public representations among

survivor communities in Bosnia. The complex negotiations around memories of war rape in

custodial settings are specifically considered through Primo Levi’s (1989, 33) theorisation of the

‘grey zone’, or what he has variously referred to in other contexts as the ‘grey band’ (1989, 40),

the ‘grey conscience’ (1981, 17), and the ‘grey man’ (Sodi, 1987, 365). In one of his final

exegeses before his own suicide in 1987, Levi (1989, 42) famously described the ‘incredibly

complicated internal structure’ of the extermination and labour camps of National Socialism in

which he, himself, had been confined, as a nebulous space in which the roles of victim and

perpetrator, at times, became blurred amid an atmosphere of extreme moral and physical

mutilation. Levi did not define the boundaries of the ‘grey zone’ specifically but, rather, described

the presence of an indecipherable realm of ambiguity that exists between the extremes of ‘good’

and ‘evil’ and in which moral compromises, imposed collaborations, and complicity – both large

and small – are sometimes made on behalf of the victims. Levi’s paradigmatic framework for

moral ambiguity is grounded on the premise that the infernal conditions of the camps render

inherited ethical frameworks and traditional explanatory models highly problematic for the task of

representing the complexity of human behaviour in extremis. Indeed, an examination of the ‘grey

zone’ demands a rejection of the, ‘… Manichean tendency which shuns half-tints and

complexities’ (Levi, 1989, 22), and defies the often simplified and stylised representations of

collective memory that rely on conventional notions of courage, dignity, heroism, sacrifice, and

freedom.

The chapter focuses specifically on the intimate memories of war rape in the former Serb-run

camp of Omarska in the northern region of Bosnia and on the complicated relationships between

women survivors from the town of Gradić in the Republika Srpska. The metaphorical concept of

the grey zone offers a framework for exploring the complex moral topography that existed inside

one of the most notorious camps of the Bosnian war, established in the remote iron ore-mining

complex near the town of Omarska. The chapter begins with a brief synopsis of the key tenets of

Levi’s seminal meditation on the realms of ethical uncertainty within the concentrationary

universe, particularly as it relates to the organisational complexity of the camp systems run by

Serb and Bosnian Serb forces in the northern region of Bosnia. Focusing on one woman’s

personal narrative of detention in Omarska, the chapter follows with an examination of the

strategies for survival adopted in different ways, for different purposes, and under different levels

of coercion by the camp’s women prisoners under the always-imminent threat of rape and death.

The chapter concludes by turning to the importance of confronting boundaries in the articulation

of traumatic memories and of creating space in broader cultural memory for more nuanced

reflections on the intricacies of women’s experiences in extremis. The redefinition of morality,

suggested by the existence of a grey zone, demands new conceptualisations of victimhood and

standards of judgment.

121

La ‘Zona Grigia’: The ‘Grey Zone’

At the earliest sighting of armed uniforms in the village of Okrugovići on a mountainside in the

northeast of Bosnia, Hasiba retreated to the relative safety of her elder sister’s home further

uphill. The security of Amina’s hearth in the nearby village of Naselje, however, was short-lived.

Unsettling rumours of intermittent violence were routine as the beginning of the war drew closer

and both sisters made the decision to return to Okrugovići to collect a few basic necessities and

feed the family cows in Hasiba’s absence. The two women intended to hastily retrace their steps

to Naselje until the very real and present fear of an armed assault had permanently abated.

Hasiba and Amina were barely halfway returned when the women were accosted by paramilitary

soldiers and arrested without apparent cause on the main road leading to Okrugovići. As Amina

recalls, ‘… we did not hear they had caught anyone elsewhere. Things had calmed down a little.

So, how could I tell her I would not go? … I say, perhaps it was my destiny for them to catch me.

And, perhaps it was hers too. There. But, I was still sorry’ (pers. comm., June, 2012). The two

sisters were taken to the nearby village of Selo and confined with several hundred others in a

makeshift detention site for nine days. In conversation, the now 66-year old Amina’s

remembrances of that period shift chaotically between the rupture of camp imprisonment, and the

insecurity of present-day village existence, to the fate of her children at the prospect of her

eventual passing. The bricolage of anxious reflections, lamentations, and periodic religious

intercessions, even so, returns always and emphatically to the cardinal detail of rape in the camp

and to the woman’s own ‘fortunate’ evasion from such a lot. She recalls:

This quote has been removed by the author of this dissertation for the purposes of maintaining

anonymity and confidentiality.

122

Amina’s quiet admission one morning over coffee in a neighbour’s kitchen speaks to the very

subtle complexities of relationships within the confines of the camps and to those experiences

and behaviours that take place in the interstices that Primo Levi (1989) has, elsewhere and

otherwise, referred to as ‘grey zones’. Indeed, writing specifically on the administration of the

lagers and the ghettos of the Second World War, Levi draws attention to the nebulous spaces, or

the grey zones, that emerge between the extremes of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and to the confusing range

of anti-redemptive behaviours that surface within them. Bearing witness to his own personal

experiences of Holocaust survival, Levi (1989, 38) argues that the extensive network of

concentration and extermination camps maintained by the Nazi regime (1933-1945) was a

separate universe unto itself; a ‘world’ that was not only, ‘… terrible … but also indecipherable; it

did not conform to any model, the enemy was all around but also inside’. Under the aegis of

National Socialism, the camp system developed into an elaborate realm with, ‘… ill-defined

outlines which both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants. It possesses an

incredibly complicated internal structure and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to

judge’ (Levi, 1989, 27). In Levi’s influential meditation on the grey zone, the camp became a site

of physical and moral collapse in which prisoners turned on one another in a desperate and daily

struggle for survival, rather than on the central corpus of Schutzstaffel (SS) personnel who

wielded infinite power and the potential for limitless violence over the persons within these

confused and confusing grey spaces.

The concept of the grey zone is, thus, a metaphor for moral ambiguity, most readily illustrated in

the regime of totalising destruction integral to the internal structure of the camps. The logic of

horror leading to the gas chambers was based on a strict delegation of power and on a system of

coerced collaboration that forced the complicity of members of every inmate group with their

captors, through which it anticipated bringing about a moral collapse amongst the mass body of

prisoners. In an extensive elaboration of Levi’s paradigmatic discussion of the grey zone,

Wolfgang Sofsky (1997) describes the camp structures under National Socialism as those based

on three distinct social strata: the SS command responsible for central administration, the

ordinary internees in the mass garrisons, and the ‘privileged’ few known as funktionshäftlinge or

prisoner-functionaries. The latter, small but significant, assemblage of (un)willing collaborators

were drawn from within the ranks of the abject, the wretched, and the hopeless and made

responsible for the administration of discipline, the maintenance of social control, and the

organisation of daily affairs within the camp. Levi writes, in particular, of the experiences of the

Sonderkommandos, or the ‘special units, in Auschwitz as an extreme example of the population

of prisoner-functionaries who occupied the bleak, aporetic space of the grey zone. The ad hoc

units performed the work of executioners in exchange for a temporary reprieve from death and

certain basic living entitlements. The ‘crematorium ravens’, as they were entitled, ‘burden[ed]

with guilt’ and covered ‘with blood’, thus became the oppressors of their fellow inmates,

compromised by their complicity with camp administration to the extent that, ‘they [could] no

longer turn back’ (Levi, 1989, 43).

The processes at work in the grey zones of the concentration and extermination camps

functioned to displace the burden of guilt from the oppressor to the oppressed. The sophisticated

‘gradation of power’ served, foremost, as a mechanism to maximise surveillance and control

123

inside the inmate blocks but, even more insidiously, as a means of aligning victims with the

interests of their captors and of positioning the most vulnerable in direct opposition to their fellow

detainees (Sofsky, 1997). Indeed, as Nicolas Patruno (1995, 116) notes, ‘… [t]here were groups

within groups, in other words – oppressors among victims, victims among oppressors’. Levi,

himself, condemned this web of forced complicity as the most malignant form of dehumanisation

for its capacity to soften the rigid distinctions between perpetrator, victim, witness, and bystander

and to sever any sense of solidarity or potential for resistance among prisoners. The grey zone of

universal guilt did not sanctify its victims, according to Levi (1989, 40), but, ‘… [o]n the contrary, it

degrades them, it makes them resemble itself’. Following a similar theoretical persuasion, David

Rousset (1945, 588) argues that, ‘… [v]ictim and executioner are equally ignoble; the lesson of

the camps is a brotherhood in abjection’. Sofsky (1997, 144), too, writes that, ‘… [o]ne can hardly

imagine a greater power than that which transforms victims into accessories to their own

execution’. Deprived of even the comfort of innocence, those who withstood the depredations of

the concentrationary universe were then ‘tainted with the luck of survival’ (Gilbert, 1986, 809) and

lived on afterwards with a burdensome combination of guilt, shame, anguish, and ethical

responsibility.

The grey zone produces a ‘crisis of representation’. Indeed, the difficulty of ‘unsnarl[ing] the

agents from victims’ (Langer, 1982, 89) in the abject moral space of the grey zone complicates

issues of agency, accountability, moral judgment, and the representation of suffering. For Levi

(1996, 86), the ‘ordinary moral world’, in such an extraordinarily brutal system, ceases to exist

and normative ethical principles of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘just’ and ‘unjust’, ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’, are

rendered problematic when read against the experiences of many of the victims and survivors of

the National Socialist regime. The impossible nature of representing the ethical dilemmas faced,

and the moral compromises made, by those imprisoned in the camps is further exemplified in

Lawrence Langer’s (1982, 72-74) grim notion of ‘choiceless choices’. Langer argues that the

‘optionless anguish of the death camp’ rendered decision-making in custodial settings an

especially unique form of victimisation, whereby the only alternatives at the disposal of the inmate

were ‘between two indignities’. The choices made, ‘… did not reflect options between life and

death, but between one form of abnormal response and another’. The ‘decisions’ made against

the unparalleled horrors of the camps can more reasonably be defined as ‘perversions of power

and will’ that upset the central tenets of purpose, intent, and volition, which are everywhere

fundamental to conceptualisations of justice and judgment. The grey zone and its myriad

stratifications, instead, frustrate Manichean tendencies to simplify experience and confuse the

capacity to judge the habits, behaviours, and interactions of those liminal figures that inhabit the

grey zones of war.

Amina’s disclosure, and her lingering feelings of guilt towards her sister, Hasiba, draw attention to

the complicated state of victimhood in the grey zones of the camp system in Bosnia and to the

painful process of reclaiming a sense of self after the trauma of war. The woman’s instinctual

abandonment of her sister in that sudden and intense moment of terror sits uneasily alongside the

ideal of the loyal kinsperson. Her chance survival and her narrow avoidance of rape and beating

on that singular occasion was a matter of self-preservation; a conscious, deliberate, and rational

act of disengagement from her sister, and not an outcome of heroism, skill, or even, more simply,

124

passive resistance. The discernible sense of shame in Amina’s confession – however irrational

or misplaced – develops from her later evaluation of the decisions made and the behaviours

taken concerning personal survival in the context of the camp environment. Following Anna

Ornstein (1985), Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg (1991, 188) write that the burden of guilt so

often carried by those who suffered and survived in ‘l’universe concentrationnaire’ is a reflection

of the difficulty of, ‘… having lived in one symbolic world which is accepted for the purpose of

survival … and then moving into another [post-war] symbolic world that is experienced as morally

discontinuous with the previous one’. For Amina, the perceived dereliction of her sororal

responsibilities in the miserable conditions of the camp conflicts with the concepts, mores, and

value structures on which later claims to victimhood are based and collective memories are

formed in the afterward of violence.

Prvo Traži Komšiju pa Izbij Kuću: War in the Town of Gradić72

The campaign of ethnic cleansing and the associated system of camps in the municipality of

Prijedor was a space that produced ‘a vast zone of grey consciences’ (Levi, 1981, 171). The near

complete ruination of the town of Gradić during the early months of the war was a central part of

the Serbian-led destruction and followed closely in the wake of the hostile seizure of nearby

Prijedor on 30 April 1992.73 The swift and well-executed coup d’état of the city was organised by

political elites from the minority party, Srpska Demokratska Stranka (SDS), or the Serbian

Democratic Party, with the assistance of local military and police forces. It heralded the beginning

of the brutal operation to purge the wider region of its non-Serb population and establish a

controlled corridor between Serbia proper and the Croatian Krajina known as the Srpska

Autonomna Oblast (SAO), or the Serbian Autonomous Region of the Bosanska Krajina (Human

Rights Watch, 1997). The čišćenje (cleansing) and kontrola (control) of the surrounding towns,

villages, and hamlets commenced almost immediately with demands for local authorities to

surrender all weaponry and to pledge loyalty to the newly established and self-appointed

government in Srpska Opština Prijedor (Campbell, 2015).74 In Gradić, tensions continued to

escalate as telephone lines and electricity supplies were disconnected and rumours spread of the

sudden departure of the small Serbian population from within the town’s borders. As one survivor

recalled of the mounting hostilities, ‘… we did not believe that such things could happen in Gradić.

Many families here were mixed; people married, were friends, and everything … but shortly

72 Bosnian proverb: ‘First search for your neighbour and only then build a house’.

73 Preparations for the planned seizure of the city of Prijedor began more than six months prior to the final coup

d’état on 30 April 1992 when the predominantly Muslim Stranka Demokratske Akcije (SDA), or the Party of

Democratic Action, won a plurality of seats in the 1991 elections usurping the Srpska Demokratska Stranka

(SDS), or the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), which had dominated the opština (municipality) assembly for

several decades. The SDS subsequently resisted the reallocation of many leading positions consistent with the

new electoral results, however, and established a parallel Serbian governance, entitled Krizni Štab Opštine

Prijedor, or the Crisis Committee of the Serbian Municipality of Prijedor. The ‘shadow’ government included

‘public’ officials, separate administrations, and a police force with a secret service detail and paramilitary units

prepared to assume the formal roles once the city had been forcibly annexed as part of the self-declared Srpska

Autonomna Oblast (Serbian Autonomous Region) of the Bosanska Krajina (Gow, 2003).

74 Serbian Municipality of Prijedor.

125

before the war began, there was a feeling we could no longer have coffee together. Things were

already being said such as, “you are Muslim, this or that”. There was simply separation’ (T.E,

pers. comm., September, 2011).

The residents of Gradić responded defensively. As the self-appointed Serbian leadership in

Prijedor issued an ultimatum to surrender or face military intervention, the non-Serb community in

Gradić hurriedly formed an ad hoc civilian defence council charged with maintaining the town’s

security. Several unofficial patrols and guard posts were organised in and around the perimeters

of the town and small groups of council members manned each station armed with basic knives

and hunting rifles (Lauterpacht, Greenwood & Oppenheimer, 1999, 59). As negotiations with the

Prijedor Crisis Staff reached an impasse, however, Serbian forces surrounded the town periphery

and established a military blockade, easily overwhelming the poorly armed residents of Gradić.

The eventual assault on Gradić was severe and unrelenting. The first of several thousand shells

were fired into the centre of town on Sunday 24 May, little more than two hours after the midday

expiration of the ultimatum had passed. Local reports suggest that up to 15 shells fell per minute

from 11 different directions for close to 37 continuous hours (UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’,

1994: Volume I, Annex V, ‘The Prijedor Report’). The few Muslim houses and community and

religious buildings that remained standing on 26 May when the concentrated artillery offensive

came to a close were later pillaged and destroyed or set ablaze to prevent the potential for future

return. Mary Battiata (1992) depicted the extent of destruction in Gradić as ruinous, describing a

scene crowded with, ‘… mile after mile of scorched buildings, collapsed red-tile roofs, and houses

reduced to shoulder-high piles of rubble’. Several years later, Michael Scharf (1997, 95),

likewise, described Gradić as a ‘ghost town’.

The cleansing of Gradić was a ‘clinical, calculated, and comprehensive’ process (Vulliamy, 1994,

91). Following almost three days of heavily concentrated artillery fire, a brigade of Serbian tanks

and infantry surrounded the besieged town and entered from all sides; VRS soldiers, alongside

paramilitaries and local armed Serbs numbering in the thousands, commenced a ferocious

‘cleansing’ operation that saw the entire population of 27,000 non-Serbs arrested, detained,

expelled, or summarily executed (Haskin, 2006). Serbian troops wearing an array of livery and

displaying the insignia of some of the most radical of militia killed thousands as they attacked

convoys of cars attempting to flee as well as assemblies of people waving white flags in a

desperate and final bid to surrender. Military detachments marched with fearsome purpose from

house to house marshalling each and every surviving man, woman, and child from the feeble

shelter of their homes, ordering them to file in orderly columns in the direction of several gathering

points to the taunts and curses of Serb bystanders. Those who had fled during the initial siege to

find refuge in the forests on nearby Kozara Mountain were, likewise, sought out and compelled to

return to Gradić to share the fate of their family, friends, and neighbours (UN Security Council,

‘Final Report’, 1994: Volume I, Annex V, ‘The Prijedor Report’). In a similar pattern to the

offensives executed in other surrounding villages and hamlets, the military operation in Gradić

also included a deliberate policy of eliticide in which the political and economic leadership of the

community was systematically targeted and killed leaving significant structural gaps in the social

network of the town and severely impairing the capacity of the community to rebuild itself in the

future. As journalist Peter Maass (1996) wrote at the time, ‘… [a]t least 2,500 civilians were killed

126

in Gradić in a 72-hour period’ including politicians, judges, police officers, reservists, and

sportspeople.

The cleansing of Gradić continued for several long months after the initial assault left the town in

charred ruins. Over several months, from late May through to the end of August, almost the

entire population of Gradić and thousands more from Prijedor and surrounds found themselves

interned in a system of camps operated by Serbian authorities, the most ‘sinister’ (Vulliamy, 1992)

of which was established in a disused iron mine and ore processing plant outside the village of

Omarska.75 The facility housed 3,334 prisoners, primarily men of Bosnian Muslim descent, many

of whom were former professionals or others accused of alleged involvement in paramilitary

activities (Morus, 2014, 192). The prisoners detained in the Omarska camp were held in severely

overcrowded conditions with poor ventilation and inadequate sanitation facilities and were

subjected to mass killings, sexual violence, torture, indiscriminate violence, forced labour,

starvation, and other inhumane treatment. Initial figures indicate that well over 1,000 non-Serb

civilians were killed over the space of three months at Omarska, however, International Red

Cross reports suggest that a further 2,000 former prisoners of the camp remain unaccounted for

(Gutman, 1993, 92). Former resident of Gradić and survivor of Omarska camp, Ermin, recalls the

terror of witnessing the torture and murder of his fellow inmates, ‘… there was a message in their

screams; they were messages without words. I was a 20-year old boy and I had never heard

such screams before, nor have I ever heard them after’ (pers. comm., August, 2011). Following

rumours of the existence of a series of Serb-run camps in the Bosnian Krajina, Guardian

journalist Ed Vulliamy wrote of the conditions following his initial visit to the Omarska mining

complex:

‘… their heads newly shaven, their clothes baggy over their skeletal bodies. Some are

barely able to move … The men are at various stages of human decay and affliction; the

bones of their elbows and wrists protrude like pieces of jagged stone from the pencil thin

stalks to which their arms have been reduced. The skin is putrified, the complexions of

their faces have been corroded. These humans are alive but decomposed, debased,

degraded, and utterly subservient …’

(Vulliamy, 1994, 102)

75 Following the illegal coup d’état of the city of Prijedor on 30 April 1992, the Bosnian Serb authorities established

a network of prisoner camps throughout the opština (municipality), the four most nefarious of which were

located alongside the main access route connecting western and eastern Bosnia with Serbia proper. Over the

course of several months in the first year of the war, more than 7,000 non-Serb civilians were segregated,

detained, and confined in camps located at Omarska (a former mining complex), Keraterm (a former ceramics

factory), Trnopolje (a former school), and Manjača (a working farm) (Gow, 2003). The camps were

administered by Bosnian Serb military and police units and served separate but interrelated purposes.

Prominent non-Serb citizens who survived the initial attacks in Prijedor region were held in Omarska and

Keraterm camps where they were subjected to brutal interrogations, torture, and killings. The elderly, women,

and children were detained in Trnopolje camp where they endured torture, repeated sexual assaults, and other

mistreatments, typically prior to expulsion from the area. Men, frequently of battle-age, were transported to

Manjača camp outside of Banja Luka where they experienced regular and systematic beatings, killings, and the

threat of prisoner exchanges. Prisoners were regularly transferred between camps, indicating some level of

coordination at the command level (UN Security Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994: Volume I, Annex V, ‘The Prijedor

Report’).

127

Figure 9: Concentration Camp at the Omarska Iron Mine and Ore Processing Plant

76

The Omarska camp was closed at the end of August shortly after a visit by foreign journalists

revealed the ‘inferno of murder, torture and rape’ (Vulliamy, 1996(b), 9) to an international

audience. Over 1,000 surviving prisoners were transferred to Trnopolje, Manjača, and other

camps in Serb-controlled areas, while more still were hastily ‘disappeared’. Among the remaining

camp population were 37 women of predominantly Muslim descent, most of whom were

prominent and identifiable citizens in their home communities prior to the outbreak of war (Nizich,

1992). Women detainees were confined in a separate administrative building that served as a de

facto military headquarters for camp guards and a refectory for the thousands of male prisoners.

Each morning, women were forced to clean the skin, hair, blood, and excrement from the

interrogation rooms where men were taken, tortured and, oftentimes, killed for real or imagined

infractions. During the day, the women served a single, often rancid, meal to the prisoner

population and, by night, they were repeatedly raped, beaten, and sexually harassed by camp

guards who acted with impunity. The bodies of five women who did not survive the camp’s short,

but brutal, tenure have since been exhumed and are remembered each year with the many

thousands of men whose bodies were buried in mass graves throughout the region (UN Security

76 Photograph a (left, upper): Welcome signage in Serbian Cyrillic script at the entrance to the town of Omarska in

the Republika Srpska where a concentration camp of the same name was located in a nearby disused iron mine

and ore processing plant during the Bosnian war. Photo taken by author. Photograph b (right, upper): A small

crowd gathers on one of the annual commemoration days at the Omarska mining complex outside the building

known as the ‘white house’, where inmates of the concentration camp were interrogated, tortured, and killed.

Photo taken by author. Photograph c (left, lower): The canteen and administrative building where 37 women

were detained, beaten, tortured, and raped during the three-months of the camp’s operation from May through

to August of 1992. Photo taken by author. Photograph d (right, lower): Flowers left inside the ‘white house’

following one of the annual commemoration days at the Omarska mining complex. Photo taken by author.

128

Council, ‘Final Report’, 1994: Volume I, Annex V, ‘The Prijedor Report’). One former civil judge in

the Municipality Court of Prijedor and prisoner of Omarska camp, Nusreta Sivac, recalled the

overwhelming sense of foreboding among the female detainees, ‘… none of us spoke at all …

Fear is a strange emotion. When it overwhelms you, you start being afraid of yourself … you

don’t even dare to ask your fellow inmate who suffers with you where she’s been and what has

happened’ (Al Jazeera, 2017).

Women’s Voices from Omarska: Between Victimhood and Agency

On 24 May each year, a community of mourners gathers by the central war memorial on Maršala

Tita to observe the anniversary of the Serbian military’s initial assault on the town of Gradić.

Following the midday congregational prayer, the assembly of locals, summer returnees, visitors

and, often, accompanying dignitaries and journalists form an untidy column to walk the short

distance from the centre of town to the šehidsko mezarje, or the martyrs’ cemetery, where the

remains of newly identified victims are buried in an annual mass funerary ritual. Over two days

more, many in the crowd make the additional pilgrimages to the former detention sites in the

neighbouring villages of Omarska and Trnopolje for short commemorative services honouring the

thousands of lives that were lost and the untold suffering that was endured throughout the war

years. The annual memorial events in the late spring and mid-summer have profound symbolic

significance, most especially for those who live year-round in the small re-established community

of Gradić.77 Certainly, Sebina Sivac-Bryant (2011) has argued that, in burying their dead and

revisiting places of hardship, the returned women and men seek to secure some form of

recognition and redress from their former Serb neighbours for both the personal and the

collectively experienced trauma and loss of the war years. Sivac-Bryant writes that

acknowledgement of suffering was fundamental to the return of the Bosniak population in the

region and to the gradual development of a renewed sense of co-existence, especially given that

Gradić remains an unwanted ethnic enclave within the entity of the Republika Srpska and

estranged from the local authority of the municipality of Prijedor.

The complexity of experiences during the military assault on Gradić and in the network of camps

in northeast Bosnia, however, is hardly reflected in the collective burial of šehidi or, indeed, in

most other key memorial events that take place throughout the year in the small town. The vast

majority of commemorative activities remain dominated, first by the memory of the men and

women who lost their lives during four years of armed conflict and, then, by the spectre of those

whose remains have yet to be found and identified. The intimate accounts of survivors whose

daily, conscious, and rational attempts to withstand the brutal realities inside the confines of the

camps resulted in choices and behaviours that inadvertently brought harm to others or that

damaged the supposed bonds of connection between fellow prisoners were rarely acknowledged,

though the interpersonal tensions were evident, at times, among certain members of the returnee

77 A second annual visit to the site of the former concentration camp at the Omarska mining complex is made on 6

August each year to commemorate the official date of the facility’s closure. Mourners also gather on 24 July

each year at Keraterm, a former ceramics factory near Prijedor and the site of a second Serb-run concentration

camp, to mark the anniversary of the ‘Room 3 Massacre’ in which some 120-to-200 Bosnian Muslim men were

killed over two nights (King & Meernik, 2011).

129

community. The personal memories recounted by Vildana of the decisions taken by prisoners in

the women’s section of the Omarska concentration camp invite a considered interrogation of the

implications of daily survival under oppressive circumstances, of the moral positions of victims of

extraordinary violence, and of the social obligations that survivors may or may not have to, and

for, one another. The more complex, emotionally fraught, and morally conflicted of experiences,

like those of Vildana’s, are equally as provocative and as meaningful to historical interpretations

as those that recall human dignity and strength, redemption, remorse, and martyrdom. Certainly,

as Paul Ricoeur (1988, 188) has suggested, ‘… one either counts the cadavers or one tells the

story of the victims’ in all their complicated detail.

Vildana’s narrative of the Omarska concentration camp ‘grey zone’

On the second morning of the attack on Gradić, a Serb neighbour hurriedly approached the Vina

(The Vines), a bustling restaurant nearest the market grounds, and urged its two owners to flee

beyond the town borders. Making his own desperate escape, their neighbour reported that the

Bosnian Serb forces that had surrounded Gradić a day earlier had finally entered and begun

slaughtering residents one by one. Vildana and her husband Ajdin took seriously the terrified

man’s exhortations and, with the deafening sound of mortar shells in the distance, the couple and

their three adult children decamped on foot to the shelter of the woods on the very outskirts of

town. In the frightened company of their fellow neighbours, the little family spent their first night in

exile on the damp open floor at the foot of Mount Kozara. Even on that first night in the midst of

the siege, Vildana held close the prospect of returning to her home and the business of the life

she had built in Gradić. She recalled ruefully the moment of expulsion, ‘… as naïve as I was’, she

remembered almost two decades on, ‘I took the keys of the tavern, my house keys, and the keys

of all the buildings I owned with me … I took a white sheet and a pitcher of brandy in order to

dress my wounds if I happened to have them, or anyone else’s, and my keys to the buildings. I

had nothing else’ (pers. comm., May, 2011). Soldiers, however, had already marked the building

with the painted symbol of usurpation; and, before the little family crept back into town the

following morning, a crude, yellow cross on the front door had appeared and clearly branded the

restaurant and its living quarters for martial appropriation.

Vina was a source of great pride for Vildana. She and her husband first opened the small

enterprise in 1980 on the ground floor beneath their small family apartment. The restaurant was,

for both, material evidence of the unsparing work involved in forging ‘… something from nothing’

(pers. comm., May, 2011). Certainly, the business matured from a small and informal single-

room guesthouse into – by Vildana’s reckoning – a thriving establishment with 15 employees and

the capacity for over 300 guests, a large liquor cellar, and an independent catering service. The

establishment is remembered warmly by the returned Gradić community as a central location for

events and celebrations in the municipality – for weddings, anniversaries, business gatherings,

and general social occasions of the larger Bosniak and smaller Serb and Croat populations alike.

On most nights, the restaurant’s dining rooms and garden courtyard were warmed by the savoury

aromas of traditional Bosnian fare and echoed with the melancholic strains of live sevdalinka.78 In

78 Sevdalinka, also commonly referred to as sevdah, is a traditional genre of Slavic and Balkan folk music

originating from Bosnia and prominent throughout several regions of the former Yugoslavia, including Serbia,

130

the few years before the war, when her husband took seriously ill, Vildana became the primary

owner, and only female manager, of what was then one of the larger hospitality businesses in

Gradić. The status and the local recognition that the position afforded her were of genuine

significance to Vildana, even now. As she recalled with the slightest of smiles, ‘… they called me

“Boss” – the Serbs, our women, and everyone – because I was the only woman who owned a

restaurant and managed it. I was really successful in terms of that. And, so, they all called me

“Boss”’ (pers. comm., May, 2011).

The management of Vina and the affectionate sobriquet of ‘Boss’, nonetheless, became an

unsettling point of distinction when the campaign to ‘cleanse’ the non-Serb population began in

earnest in the north-western enclave in the late autumn of 1992. The tensions surfaced in both

the most direct and the most indirect of quarters. Indeed, the pattern of localised ‘cleansings’ in

nearby villages had each commenced with the early and ominous ritual of ‘eliticide’. The very first

victims of the siege of Gradić were reportedly also the prominent intellectual and cultural leaders

in the Bosniak community – lawyers, doctors, teachers, religious heads, and business people

(Maas, 1997). Rumours of a ‘list’ had already quietly circulated in the weeks before the siege of

Gradić and Vildana, herself, had received more than one whispered warning that her position of

local authority rendered her especially vulnerable. Yet, even with the acute fear of military

persecution, it was the unexpected strain that Vildana’s former position provoked among fellow

women victims that proved most extraordinarily distressing. The moment at which she was

delivered into the hands of Bosnian Serb military at the Omarska mining complex held particular

emotional resonance for Vildana for the response of other women detainees. In recounting the

story, Vildana stood leaning into the doorframe and affected a casual pose as she assumed the

role of ‘Belma’, a fellow detainee and neighbour from Gradić who was one of the first to receive

her into the women’s quarters at the Omarska camp. She drew deeply on a fictional cigarette and

waved its imaginary stub emphatically in the air to further effect a grim juxtaposition between her

own vulnerability as a new detainee and her reception by other similarly defenceless internees.

Croatia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. Sevdah is a Turkish word of Arabic origin variously translated to mean

‘love’, ‘caressing’, and ‘black’, and is generally accepted as a metaphor for unrequited love. Accordingly,

sevdalinka is characterised by lengthy, elaborate, and emotionally charged compositions that concern sorrowful

events of passion and love (Buturović, 2007, 79-81).

This quote has been removed by the author of this dissertation for the purposes of maintaining

anonymity and confidentiality.

131

In the grey zone of custodial settings, the ethical distinctions between victim and victimiser can

become, at times, less clearly discernible. The ambiguous space of detention invested even the

most intimate and familiar of relationships with the fear of deception and the possibility of betrayal

such that separating one’s friends from one’s foes was a precarious and always shifting

undertaking. The relationships between the women detainees themselves, between those who

were considered the ‘privileged’ and those who were considered the ‘less privileged’ of victims,

reveals some of the moral complexities in the peculiar space of the univers concentrationnaire

(Rousset, 1945). Indeed, Vildana positions Belma in her narrative as an injurious figure,

underscored by the woman’s place in her narrative standing alongside the supervising camp

guard in the doorframe of the women’s sleeping quarters. The act of casually sharing a cigarette

with an authority figure in a position to administer serious and lethal harm amounted to one of

collusion for Vildana and was an early indication of what she read as Belma’s recreant status

among fellow women detainees. Her very public direction that Vildana accede to the demands of

the Serb guard without complaint was, moreover, received as a betrayal of the assumed bond

between the women victims against their male oppressors in the camps. Vildana read this initial

reception to her arrival in the women’s sector as an act of belligerence and one that had unduly

‘sacrificed’ her own personal welfare in the interests of Belma’s and the other women detainees.

Vildana’s conflation of Belma with the camp guard, however, is most clearly read in the

statement, ‘… at that moment, for me, she was like a war criminal’ and starkly illustrates the

blurring of lines between ‘survivor’ and ‘master’ in the camp.

Vildana’s description of her reception in the women’s sector at Omarska camp parallels closely

Levi’s sombre depiction of newcomers’ first traumatic experiences on arrival in Auschwitz. Levi

(1989, 23-24) posits that one entered the [Auschwitz] camp assured, or at least hopeful of, the

‘solidarity’ of fellow allies in hardship but encountered, instead, ‘a thousand sealed-off monads’

occupied everywhere in a ‘desperate, hidden and continuous struggle’ merely to endure the

Hobbesian-like space. For Levi (1989, 108), ‘survival’ in an extraordinarily abject and brutal

system becomes deeply problematic, a ‘… continuous war of everyone against everyone’. The

effort merely to sustain the physical self and to preserve a sense of individual personhood in

extremis renders the limits of ordinary virtues – of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, of ‘just’

and ‘unjust’ – painfully bare. Aurelian Crăiuțu (2013, 92) writes of the analogous experience of

survival in the political prisons and gulags of the communist regime in Eastern Europe, for which

endurance often necessitates the abandonment of dignity and the muting of conscience.

Following Levi (1996, 92), he suggests that only a very few individuals ‘made of the stuff of

martyrs and saints’ could survive the system without the eschewal of at least some part of their

Redaction continued.

132

moral worlds. Survival was an experience that entailed compromise and compliance; it involved

the negotiation of precarious relationships between ‘survivors’ and ‘masters’, the benefits of which

were neither equally shared nor harmless in consequence. Indeed, the grey zones of camp and

prisons are occupied by people who may routinely become inculpated, through their choices, in

inflicting on others the very evil that threatens to overwhelm themselves (Card, 2000, 514).

The detention site at the Omarska mining complex has certainly drawn – oftentimes provocative –

comparisons to the terrifying landscape of Auschwitz.79 The parallels are most especially marked

in survivor narratives referencing the fear of imminent death that hung as a funerary pall over the

camp grounds and the severity of physical and psychological mistreatment routinely perpetrated

on prisoners by camp personnel and others permitted into the complex for the singular purpose of

inflicting serious injury on the unfortunate detainees (pers. comm., [various], 2011, 2012). For the

several dozen women interned in a separate section, the everyday operations of the camp

encompassed the cleaning of blood from the floors and walls of the interrogation rooms by day

(Kressel, 2002, 12) and, by night, rape ‘according to a schedule, once every four nights’ (Gutman,

79 Survivors of the Omarska camp regularly refer to the site as ‘Bosnia’s Auschwitz’. The analogy is somewhat

controversial and has drawn criticism from many in the international community as inappropriate to the sheer

scale and magnitude of the operations at Auschwitz I, Auschwitz-Birkenau (II), Auschwitz Monowitz-Buna (III),

and the 39 satellite camps, and for the enormity of its role in the Nazi-driven policy known as the ‘Final Solution

to the Jewish Question’. Survivors of the Omarska camp are hasty in clarifying that the informal comparison to

Auschwitz should not be read as a direct and simplistic parallel between figures of mortality, per se, but to the

corresponding significance of Omarska to the Serbian irredentist policy of a ‘Greater Serbia’ incorporating parts

of Bosnia. The analogy also concerns the form and nature of violence employed in the Omarska camp and to

the potential for these ‘cleansing’ practices to have resulted in genocidal level deaths of the Bosnian Muslim

population had the camp remained concealed and in operation for the full length of the Bosnian war.

As one survivor of the Omarska camp explained, ‘… the Auschwitz concentration camp operated for four years

[from May 1940-January 1945] and 1.1 million mostly Jewish people were murdered there during that space of

time in the most horrendous of ways; one million Jewish people in a population of nine million across all of

Europe … Omarska existed for five months, but almost a thousand men and five women were killed in the camp

over that short space of time; one thousand people in a population of around two million non-Serbs, mostly

Bosnian Muslims. It is a relative scale. If Omarska had not been discovered a few months in, or had been

permitted to continue, the figures of those who were murdered would have escalated to a genocide and the

methods used by camp authorities to carry out their plans would have become more heinous, more systematic,

and more efficient, I have no doubt’ (S.M., pers. comm., May, 2011).

The analogy between the camps of Auschwitz and Omarska has been referenced frequently by journalists

writing on the memorial politics in the municipality of Prijedor. As examples of the frequency of the allusion to

Auschwitz in discussions of the Omarska camp both during and post-war, refer to:

1) Gutman, Roy. 1992. Bosnians Deported in Sealed Rail Cars Muslim says, ‘Like Jews to Auschwitz’.

Newsday, July 21, 1992. Available at:

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1992-07-23/news/1992205081_1_banja-freight-cars-serbs-in-bosnia

2) Halberstam, David. 2001. War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals. New York, NY:

Scribner, [especially] p 130.

3) Vulliamy, Ed. 1996(a). ‘Middle Managers of Genocide’. Bosnia Report. Available at:

http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/bosnia/Vulliamy.html

4) Vulliamy, Ed. 2012. The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: The Reckoning. London: Vintage:

Random House.

133

1993, xi). The conditions in the camp, moreover, were miserable; facilities were overcrowded and

suffocatingly hot, food was scarce and of poor quality, water supplies were undrinkable, and

camp guards were brutal. As one of the very first women detainees to arrive at the mining

complex in Omarska in the earliest days of the camp’s establishment and operation, Belma had

reportedly negotiated her own individual survival strategies in order to endure the daily

humiliations, sufferings, and injustices in which she found herself. Alliances between women,

however shifting and unstable, had already been drawn, and ‘privileges’, however paltry, had

already been settled with camp guards by the time of Vildana’s arrival at the site. Transferred to

the Omarska camp only six weeks prior to its closure, Vildana found herself alone and at the very

bottom of a steep and prior established ‘pecking order’ among the women interned. The trauma

of her enforced delivery to the Omarska camp was aggravated even further by what Lawrence

Langer (1978, 202-203) has referred to as the ‘creatureliness’ of imprisonment, or its materiality,

‘… life as physical sensation’ from which, ‘… it was not possible to escape into the realm of

ideas’. As Vildana recalled:

Belma’s response to the arrival of Vildana was most reasonably part of her own individual

strategy of survival in the face of the ‘extraordinariness’ of the camp environment. Indeed, Raul

Hilberg (1985) writes of the commonplace strategies of anticipatory ‘compliance’ and ‘alleviation’

as registers for understanding the desperate modes of individual and collective self-protection

amongst survivors of Nazi policies. In the terrifying landscape of Omarska, Belma, too, reportedly

demonstrated at least an occasional sagacious tendency to exert any small leverage she might

have with Serbian guards, however negligible, to alleviate first her own burden of survival in the

camp environment and, then, to realise some level of equalisation of suffering between women

prisoners. The precarious benefits of Belma’s carefully negotiated conciliatory relationships with

camp authorities were, therefore, not necessarily equally shared amongst fellow prisoners and

likely contributed to the creation of an internal hierarchy of victims and victimhood between the

unfortunate women who shared the cramped confines of the administrative building in the old

mining complex at Omarska. The fear of what might happen while in detention was redoubled,

then, for newly arrived prisoners like Vildana when the terror of the camp regime operated

alongside an inegalitarian culture between inmates. While it was, ultimately, never within Belma’s

– or any other individual detainee’s – power to control circumstances or manage situations in the

camp, the internal governance of the prisoner community occasionally contributed to the

inequitable distribution of privation and suffering for some women and to a temporary reprieve

from the miseries of daily survival for others.

This quote has been removed by the author of this dissertation for the purposes of

maintaining anonymity and confidentiality.

134

The individual and collective resentment reportedly directed toward Vildana by the women in

Omarska was epitomised in Belma’s censorious and casually delivered remark that she had

remained in the comfort of her own home for the previous two months while the other women had

borne the greater share of wartime sufferings. The simple statement carried deeper implications.

Vildana understood the remark as an indictment of her own personal wartime conduct. The

women, and Belma most openly, assumed that Vildana had leveraged her position as owner of

one of the larger restaurants in town to ingratiate herself with the influential echelons of the

Bosnian Serb military to secure hers and her family’s much delayed arrest and imprisonment in

the camps. Vildana, in so doing, was regarded by the other detainees as effectively ‘colluding’

with the very commanders, officers, and military personnel who were now responsible for the

women’s miserable plight and that of their families. Certainly, army officers had frequented Vina

in the several weeks prior to the siege of Gradić and the facilities were later fully appropriated as

a headquarters for the Bosnian Serb army during the few months of occupation following the

initial assault. The property was later almost completely destroyed, however, by the same

soldiers who left it as little more than a mound of rubble. Vildana, however, claimed that any

preferential treatment she may have received was a consequence of her own personal pre-war

standing in the community, which carried over to her time in the camps. As she stated, ‘… the

commanders probably knew me, knew that I did not take part in such things [dissension]. I

worked, I lived, I was a private owner, and so on. All of them talked to me politely and they all

knew me … Perhaps that is why God saved me, because I am neither malicious nor envious’

(pers. comm., August, 2011). Vildana continued:

‘… [The army] came to my restaurant [at the beginning of the war]. I had to act as

manager of the restaurant, police officer, host, and everything … Our people, people from

Gradić, always welcome guests, but guests who come with good intentions. However,

they came with weapons. They were armed. They frequented my tavern. They asked for

songs that did not suit me. I forbade playing them. I did not allow nationalistic things to be

done by anyone, because I was the one who paid for the music, who paid for the costs,

and things had to be done … not the way others wanted, but the way I said. So, I had no

problems at my tavern as far as that is concerned’.

(Vildana, pers. comm., August, 2011)

Contrary to her fellow prisoners’ assumptions, Vildana and her family had not escaped capture by

Serb forces for any extended length of time, though she had certainly evaded rape in the first two

months following her exile from Gradić. Indeed, her earliest experiences of sexual violence

began shortly after her arrival at Omarska camp in late July. By her own reckoning, she was

certainly mindful that the ‘privileges’ granted to her during detention were partially the result of her

former position as a community leader. As she recalls, ‘… I was not raped in Trnopolje and

neither were my girls. I say, I was not [raped] thanks to Inspector Pile, the army officer.80 For, I

80 Predrag Radulović, also known as ‘Pile’ or ‘Inspector Pile, is referenced repeatedly in Vildana’s accounts of her

experiences in Trnopolje and Keraterm camps, in particular. Radulović was a former inspector of the

intelligence group, ‘Miloš’, of the Banja Luka Security Services Centre whose responsibility it was to report on

developments in the region during the war. In 2010, Radulović testified for the prosecution in the ICTY case

against two former senior Bosnian Serb officials, Mićo Stanišić and Stojan Župljanin, both of whom were

135

knew all those chief officers at the Kozara army barracks. They frequented my restaurant …

There, it saved me … I mean, they could do whatever they wanted to me, but they did not.

Everyone knew me’ (pers. comm., August, 2011). Nonetheless, Vildana was insistent that she

and her family had suffered in other ways. On the third and final morning of the siege of Gradić,

she and her family had crept back into town. Under spurious assurances from the Serb army that

those who surrendered voluntarily would remain safe, Vildana and her family joined a column of

wretched evacuees fleeing town and, with ‘shells exploding behind [their] backs’, hurried the three

short kilometres to a nearby sports centre on foot. Bosnian Serb soldiers at the makeshift

waypost separated the small family group from one another as they systematically partitioned

women from men, elderly from under-aged, and abled-bodied from infirm. Vildana, together with

her two adult daughters and granddaughter, were allocated to the group of women destined for

the detention site at the Bratstvo-Jedinstvo elementary school in the village of Trnopolje where

the family was again reunited briefly with the younger son and husband. Those first short days of

detention in the overcrowded school grounds, however, were the only few that the little family of

six were to spend in one another’s presence for several more long and frightening months.

Only a few short days after the assault on Gradić and their incarceration at the Trnopolje camp,

Vildana, and later her husband Ajdin, were once again separated from their children. Wife and

husband were isolated from one another and taken first to a second ill-famed camp established

on the premises of an old ceramics factory in the village of Keraterm where Vildana recalled, ‘…

they were already raping women … Screams could be heard. Women could be heard’ (pers.

comm., August, 2011). A few grim nights later, she and Ajdin were moved onward to a hotel in

the city of Prijedor. Here, both parties were regularly harassed and repeatedly interrogated by

various members of the Serbian military dressed in ‘colourful uniforms’ and bearing arms. On

one occasion, Vildana remembered, the inquiries concerning her own suspected wartime actions,

and those of her fellow Bosnian Muslim neighbours, persisted for several hours under the threat

of imminent violence with soldiers, ‘… pointing their guns at us as if we had been the ones who

arrested people … they were beating people in the other room. He [a soldier] said, “We will beat

you in the same way. You have to confess this, you have to confess that”, and I said, “I cannot

confess any lies. I can say what happened, but I cannot say one is this or that, if one is not. I

cannot. I would have a guilty conscience. I prefer that you kill me rather than touch anyone else.

I would have a guilty conscience”’ (pers. comm., August, 2011). The terror of those early days in

custody and the uncertainty of her position as a captive, a prominent local business leader, and a

woman weighed heavily on Vildana as she witnessed the brutal treatment of friends, neighbours,

and colleagues from her region:

‘… that [first] night [in Keraterm] they were bringing people on buses, beating and killing

them there. We were watching, sitting on a concrete floor in the first hall. The door was

made of glass … The other two halls were full of men as well … As far as I could see,

there could not have been less than 500 or 700 souls in the hall. I was the only woman

among them … and, when they [the soldiers] struck … they were treading on people and

beating them with their guns. Whenever they would hit a man, we would hear it. The blow

would echo inside me … I felt sorry for others, and especially for those who were mine.

sentenced to 22 years respectively for war crimes and crimes against humanity (Institute for War and Peace

Reporting, 2010).

136

For I did not know whether my son was brought there, or whether my husband or brother

was brought there too …’

‘… they say I am a legend because I survived all those things, witnessed all those things

… There, there were killings, and everything committed before my eyes. I saw all those

things [in Omarska]. Alright. You know how [I did it]? Like a proper restaurant owner; you

sit at your own table, but you see everything that is going on around you. That is what I

did. I washed the dishes, distributed the food, but I saw everything that was going on

around me. I sat at the table and watched through the curtain, could see everything. For,

they forbid us to watch. They forbid us; did not allow us to watch anyone. But, there, dear

Allah had it so that I survived to talk about it.’

(Vildana, pers. comm., August, 2011)

The memories of rape in the camp at Omarska, nonetheless, remain exceptional among Vildana’s

wartime experiences and each one has an especially persistent and physical dimension for her.

Indeed, the Vildana who returned to Gradić from exile in Germany was always immaculately

presented in public; often clothed in tailored suits and dressed in full make-up and styled hair. In

private, however, the attentions to her appearance were frequently obsessive, involving several

changes of outfit each day and an agonising concern with detail. Her most troubling memories

were frequently present in the later hours when the difficulties in sleeping and the nightmares

surfaced alongside ever-restless limbs and aching joints. Even more, the woman exhibited a

readiness and, at times, even a compulsion to share the details of her personal history with

sympathetic audiences, even without persuasion. On one evening visit, unbidden, she produced

a simple black photo album from a cabinet drawer in her lounge room and, with almost no

prompting, began leafing through the pages, all the while taking care to explain each meticulously

catalogued press clipping, article, excerpt, and photograph in three languages – Bosnian,

German, and English. The collection told especially of her experiences as a rape survivor and,

even more so, of her suffering and strength through the long aftermath of war. For Vildana, it was

most evident that the memory of war rape remains extremely raw, not soley for the traumatic

recall, but for the perception of betrayal at the hands of fellow victims who she considered should

have provided camaraderie and some level of protective armature when she first arrived at the

concentration camp. As Vildana recalls:

This quote has been removed by the author of this dissertation for the purposes of

maintaining anonymity and confidentiality.

137

Primo Levi (1987, 15) described the need to recount the story of his suffering and survival in

Auschwitz as a ‘… violent impulse … an interior liberation’. Dominick LaCapra (2001, 186), too,

speaks of the urgent imperative to voice traumatic experiences as a sanative endeavour that

involves, ‘… processes of acting out, working over, and to some extent, working through in

analysing and ‘giving voice’ to the past’. Certainly, Vildana’s evident preoccupation with telling

and retelling the stories of the personal betrayals she had experienced in the grey zones of the

camp at the hands of her fellow prisoners, likewise, contain a clear sense of her profound need

for some form of narrative vindication in her reading of wartime events. Vildana’s interpretation

and representation of her initial arrival at the disused iron ore complex turned camp site near

Omarska in early June of 1992 and the immediate responses of the other women detainees –

Belma, in particular – revealed some fragment of her unsettled desire for emotional redress and,

even, a sense of quiet revenge for the grievances she continued to hold against those with whom

she had survived the six short and brutal weeks of incarceration. Her testimonies resonate with

indignant and unresolved humiliation and her words provide a momentary impression of the deep

undercurrents of tension that still exist among some in the returnee population in Gradić. The

articulation of these most personal and most troubling of memories held cathartic relevance for

Vildana, albeit inconsiderable and short-lived. For, as Dori Laub (1992, 68) has argued, ‘… the

absence of an empathic listener or, more radically, the absence of an addressable other, an other

who can hear the anguish of one’s memories and thus affirm and recognize their realness,

annihilates the story’ [emphasis original].

Return and the Paradoxes of Rape Victimhood in Gradić

Vildana returned to Gradić in 1999 to bury her husband, Ajdin beneath one of the hundreds of

white marble obelisks in the small Muslim graveyard at the southernmost entrance to the town.

Since that first affecting return, Vildana made regular yearly pilgrimages each summer to Gradić,

and to her husband’s final resting place, until the scarred ruins of the Vina were fully replaced,

brick by brick, with a smaller and more modest family house. The year the final brick was laid, the

finishing window was placed, and the last floorboard levelled, Vildana returned once again from

Munich to live in her natal village permanently. The effort of reconstruction was, in some small

measure, an act of defiance for Vildana. The task of producing a home from the ‘charred

remnants and ashes’ was a symbolic gesture of sorts, intended to stand in opposition to those

who set it ablaze during the war and those who would have it remain in ruins even now. The act

of return, however, was also one of personal necessity. In her own words, Vildana speaks of her

personal yearning to return to the town of her birth, despite her adult children’s permanent

resettlement in their country of asylum, ‘… Germany and Bosnia; the former took me in, and the

latter forced me away … But, I love my Bosnia. I want my Bosnia … I was born and raised in

Gradić and I married in Gradić. I gave birth to my three children in Gradić. My husband is buried

here. I want to be buried here as well, buried here in my Gradić’ (pers. comm., May, 2011).

The return from exile in Germany to her hometown of Gradić, however, was bittersweet for

Vildana. The places of memory in the small, reconstructed settlement were now also unavoidably

marked by pain, loss, and mourning. Levi (1965), too, referred to a similar sense of discomfort

that haunted his own homecoming after the terrors of Auschwitz, and to a ‘split self’ that emerged

138

to navigate the disjuncture between his old and new personas – the man he was before the war

and the man he was after the dehumanisation of the camps. Levi (1965, 207) spoke, not of the

relief of home nor of the return to safety, but of a recursive dream ‘full of horror’, an ‘unlistened-to

story’, in which he recounted the desperate realities of his imprisonment to an indifferent audience

of family, friends, and colleagues. As the vision unfolds and he retells his story, the familiar

surrounds of home slowly disintegrate, giving way to the ‘grey and turbid’ environs of the camp

and to the dawn commands of the prison guards, calling: get up, ‘Wstawàch’. Levi’s haunting

reverie alludes, in some measure, to the constant struggle to describe, analyse, and explain

suffering and survival in extremis. Indeed, Lawrence Langer (1991, 22) writes that one of the

more provocative themes to emerge from the oral testimonies of Holocaust survivors is, ‘… the

difficulty of narrating, from the context of normality now, the nature of the abnormality then, an

abnormality that still surges into the present to remind us of its potent influence’ [emphasis

original]. Levi (1996, 129), likewise, reflects on the remarkable incommensurability of common

language to capture the obscure, incomparable reality of the camps:

‘… Just as our hunger is not that of missing a meal, so our way of being cold needs a new

word. We say ‘hunger’, we say ‘tiredness’, ‘fear’, ‘pain’, we say ‘winter’ and they are

different things. They are free words, created and used by free men [sic] who live in

comfort and suffering in their homes. If Lagers had lasted longer, a new, harsh language

would have been born: and only this language could express what it means to toil the

whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt,

underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger

and knowledge of the end drawing nearer’.

The necessity of developing a ‘new, harsh language’ is an even more pressing obligation for the

work of understanding and exploring the moral chiaroscuro of survival. A vocabulary of ‘free

words, created and used by free men [sic]’ necessarily limits the scope available to think through,

recount, represent, and imagine the substance of Belma’s reportedly perfidious actions, the

significance of Vildana’s disaffected responses, and the import of the demimonde of bystander

inmates in the grey zones of Omarska, especially in the aftermath of the war. Indeed, Anna

Ornstein (1985) suggests that the profound disconnect between the behaviour of prisoners during

the war and their conduct under civilised conditions renders most common value structures

deeply inappropriate. The sharp distinction between the interdependent concepts of ‘good’ and

‘evil’ leaves little space for the many complicated intermediary gradations in the moral lives of

victims of evil and in the ethical complexities inherent in their desperate struggle for survival.

Hannah Arendt (1944; 1951), too, argues that the totalising destruction of the Nazi regime

rendered moral evaluations based on inherited frameworks inappropriate. Reflecting specifically

on his discomfort with the reductiveness of these frameworks for understanding the moral fragility

of prisoners, Levi insists on the necessity of a state of impotentia judicandi, or of the impossibility

of passing judgment on the conduct of those who suffered and survived in extremis. Following

Alessandro Manzoni (cited in Levi, 1989, 44), Levi contends that, ‘… [p]rovocateurs, oppressors,

all those who in some way injure others, are guilty – not only of the evil they commit, but also of

the perversion into which they lead the spirit of the offended’. He proposes, instead, that

judgment should only be entrusted to:

139

‘… those who found themselves in similar circumstances and had the opportunity to test

for themselves what it means to act in a state of coercion … The condition of the offended

does not exclude culpability, which is often objectively serious, but I know of no human

tribunal to which one could delegate judgment’.

(Levi, 1989, 44)

The ethics of representation after war is further complicated by the confused and confusing

rationales of the survivors themselves, which were not without fracture and contradiction. Claudia

Card (2002) writes that the many and unfortunate survivors, like Vildana, who have occupied the

extreme grey zones of life oftentimes continue to adhere with grim resolution to the moral

concepts and categories that once served to shape and define everyday existence prior to war.

Social constructions of the ‘dutiful wife’, the ‘devoted mother’, the ‘loyal sister’, and the ‘trusted

friend’ often remained the standards by which women evaluated one another’s conduct in

Omarska, even as they were compelled to navigate their own morally unclear and ethically

problematic circumstances under the desperate weight of extreme violence and the possibility of

imminent death. The failure of any one woman to conform to the gendered expectations

associated with these feminine roles provoked angry and reproachful remonstrances from her

fellow detainees more often than they did empathy and understanding. As Card (2002, 223)

notes, ‘… people who are bonded to others can also abuse them’, and the subsequent realisation

of, ‘… women’s capacity to compromise with evil is disillusioning’. The sense of betrayal is,

oftentimes, felt far more keenly in those in whom expectations of trust have been placed, ‘…

[t]hus, women may feel, paradoxically, more wronged by other women than by men, even though

the women who wrong them have less power to do them harm’. As Vildana recalls of the hostile

responses of her fellow women detainees and the disrupted moral relations between them at

Omarska:

‘… When I arrived in Omarska, my feet were hurting. I guess it was the fear and

everything. There was a chair where they interrogated people. I took another chair and

put my feet up on it. It was crazy. The women shouted, “Get your feet off the chair! They

will kill you!” At that moment, a police officer opened the door. He said, “Which of you put

her feet up on the chair?” They said, “This woman from Gradić, from The Vines.” My

restaurant was called The Vines. “Fine,” he said. And, he just closed the door and left.

They knew me. The commanders probably knew me, knew I did not take part in any such

things. I worked, I lived, I was a private owner, and so on. All of them talked to me politely

and they all knew me. They all called me “Boss”, all of them. “Boss, come here and have

a brandy. Come and wash your teeth. Boss, come, and do this or do that.” I did not want

to. I did work, but it was better to work than to sit and think, and then to go upstairs [to the

rooms in which women were incarcerated, military offiers were housed, and rapes took

place]. I cleaned the hallway twice and the toilet too. I cleaned the tables outside once.

Every day, I worked in the kitchen, at the counter, distributed food, and cleaned everything

later. When the five of us were left alone [immediately prior to the closure of the camp], we

ate the leftovers of the food the police ate. That food was of better quality. But, there, I

wish they had not raped me at least.’

(Vildana, pers. comm., August, 2011)

The particularities of moral decisions taken in the grim world of the concentration camp often

continue to pursue survivors in the afterward of violence. Indeed, survival is a matter of degree.

The majority of those who emerged from the ‘l’univers concentrationnaire’ bore lasting moral and

personal scars that have had ongoing traumatic repercussions for survivors and their

140

relationships with one another in Gradić. The uncomfortable realisation of one’s own and others

readiness to compromise in extremis has continued to figure in the background of everyday

exchanges despite the perceived sense of unity among the returnee community. Temporal and

spatial distance from the events has brought no sense of closure to the tormented survivor; the

wounds remain open, the agitation with others constant, and the disillusionment ever-present.

The memories of those uncertain relations in the camp continue to offend the commonsense

perception of order, reason, and civilised behaviour in the pre- and post-war worlds. The painful

memory of Vildana’s initial reception in the women’s quarters of the Omarska camp, for example,

remains inextricably entwined with the intimate recollections of her own, admittedly resentful and

embittered, reciprocations towards her fellow detainees. The early conduct of Belma so

decisively violated the established conventions of loyalty and friendship that Vildana felt acquitted

of her own perceived moral responsibilities towards certain women in the camp. Vildana’s

personal story, at times, captured a sense of what Beate Müller (2012, 161) has described as the

‘… conflicting intentions and epistemological complexities’ of the narrator in the process of

(re)constructing her narrative. In recalling her own personal moral indecisions in the

concentrationary universe, Vildana states:

This quote has been removed by the author of this dissertation for the purposes of

maintaining anonymity and confidentiality.

141

Vildana likely carries her own ‘rightful … quota of guilt’ (Levi, 1996, 33) alongside her fellow

prisoners. Indeed, as Levi (2001, 175) observes, ‘… [t]here are good people and less good

people, each of us is a mixture of good and not so good’. Claudia Card (2002, 217), likewise,

notes that, ‘… being a victim does not imply that one is [necessarily] innocent’. Certainly, the

frequent references to Serb authorities that punctuated Vildana’s own testimonies of survival point

to the confusing relationships that she might also have negotiated at various moments with the

military men stationed outside the women’s quarters in the Omarska camp and with the officials

who had intermittently interrogated her throughout four months of imprisonment in the detention

sites around Gradić. Vildana’s evident pride in the esteem that she felt many of the Serb soldiers

had accorded her, especially in comparison to other women, seemed somewhat opposed to the

tenuous relationships she had maintained with other female prisoners. The repeated mention of

her pre-war reputation as an honest and exacting businesswoman, as someone who had once

commanded a certain level of respect, may very well have served as some form of symbolic

currency in the monstrous ‘upside down’ (Levi, 1987) logic of the camps. Vildana may not have

consciously exchanged her cooperation with the guards for a nip of brandy, or for the opportunity

to brush her teeth, or wash her hair, but she had certainly passively complied, at times, with their

demands or failed to actively oppose their orders when resistance may have been a safe

possibility. In recalling a minor incident among a small number of women prisoners in the

Omarska camp, Vildana articulates her own uncomfortable role as intermediary on behalf of the

guards:

‘… the one [guard] simply came up to me and said, “Please …” Everybody in Gradić used

to call me “Boss” … “Boss, go there and tell those three to calm down, please”. He did not

know my name; he forgot it. I went inside and told them, “Do not. It is not his fault. He

received an order. And, I am thankful to him for watching us”. What else could I have told

them? There was nothing else I could tell them. However, for me, they were all the same.

Perhaps some of them had to do it; perhaps they would have killed them if they had not

done it. You know? But, at that moment, the less you talked, the worthier you were. I just

told them, “Do not, women. This is not pleasant for him either. He is watching us, looking

over us, and those things”’.

(Vildana, pers. comm., August, 2011)

The emotionally and morally fraught experiences of Vildana and Belma during their internment in

Omarska serve as powerful and provocative ‘object[s] and vehicle[s] of ethical inquiry’ (Saxton,

2008, 3). Indeed, a nuanced reflection on the most deeply unsettling and ambiguous of akratic

behaviours may draw fresh attention to the heavy burdens of responsibility that are often carried

by many survivors long after the war’s end, most especially through the difficult memories of their

own and others’ responses to victimhood. As Levi (1965) notes, the harsh realities of life inside

the camps extend far beyond its specific time and place in history; for, the victims of past

atrocities now exist in the present as survivors of the war and each one must constantly work to

reconcile the sharp disjunction between the two worlds. The challenge of articulating and

understanding the limit experiences of the camps in the ‘ordinary moral world’ (Levi, 1996, 86) is

a project that confronts the boundaries of the thinkable and the sayable. It requires that new

explanatory and representational frames are developed that might encompass the ethical

dilemmas experienced by survivors without passing judgment on the behaviours and conduct of

142

those who merely acted as they felt they had to in order to survive. Writing on the representation

of experience in a post-Holocaust world, Lawrence Langer (1991, 8) observed, however, that a

collective ‘language’ has failed to emerge from the ashes of the Second World War from which to

navigate, interpret, and describe the horrors of the past. In the absence of such a specific

lexicon, he suggests, that, ‘… an interpreter is constantly at work in the texts of deep memory to

remind us of the need to collaborate with all efforts at redefinition’.

Conclusion: Representing the Unrepresentable

In exploring the prevailing representations of rape in custodial settings during the Bosnian war,

the preceding chapter has examined one layer of the elaborate moral topography of the

concentration camp through the Levian (1989) concept of the ‘grey zone’. The ‘gray, incessant

alchemy’ (Agamben, 1999, 21) that Levi once described as an integral feature of the camps

maintained by the Nazi regime during the Second World War provides a valuable heuristic

framework for reflecting upon the brutal realities of the Serb-run prisoner facilities in the far

northwest of Bosnia. The complex network of relationships that surfaced between prisoners and

perpetrators in the camp nearest the town of Omarska, and the perilous morass within which

detainees existed, produced certain unsettling acts of compliance and collaboration that have

complicated the manner in which wartime events were later attended to among the survivor

community in Gradić. The momentary acts of connivance with camp authorities, the small

breaches of trust, and the informal pacts between prisoners that admitted some and excluded

others each represented another form or a different expression of violence located somewhere

between the extremes of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘just’ and ‘unjust’, ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’. The grey zone,

here in the horrors of Omarska, is, ‘… both an empirical object and an analytical lens that draws

our attention toward a murky area where normative boundaries dissolve’ (Auyero, 2007, 32).

Indeed, as Levi (1989, 9) evocatively suggested, ‘… [e]very victim is to be mourned, and every

survivor is to be helped and pitied, but not all their acts should be set forth as examples’.

The chapter principally drew on the personal narratives of survivors like Vildana whose

experiences bear witness to the distinct forms of interpersonal aggression for which many women

detainees found themselves susceptible to in custodial settings. The infrequent admissions of

contrary behaviours and ill-disposed thoughts against fellow detainees that punctuated the

woman’s accounts of life inside the confines of the camp speak to the many layers of complexity

in the responses of female detainees to the moral dilemmas of survival. As Leslie Dwyer and

Degung Santikarma (2007, 419) have noted in a related context, ‘… violence does not

necessarily create solidarity among victims but rather exposes normally hidden possibilities of

betrayals, reprisals and social tensions within families and communities’. Lawrence Langer

(2000, 43), too, writes even more simply that, ‘… abnormal living conditions prompt unpredictable

responses’. Certainly, women’s conduct with respect to the miserable daily conditions of the

camp at Omarska was reportedly somewhat inconsistent, on more than one occasion, with the

abstract, redemptive ideals conventionally expected of victim behaviours. The experience of

mere survival in the severely confined spaces of the women’s quarters – with their bare and

inhospitable furnishings and blood-smeared walls (Kressel, 1996) – at times produced the sort of

moral grey zone in which sharp divisions were evident based on the tenuous and shifting

143

allegiances of the small prisoner population. Echoing the paradigmatic sentiments of Levi on

moral indistinction in extremis, Christopher Browning (1993, cited in Paris, 2001, 313) describes

this manner of behaviour as falling within the grey zone of that, ‘… foggy universe of mixed

motives, conflicting emotions, personal priorities, reluctant choices, opportunism and

accommodation, all wedded, when convenient, to self-deception and denial’.

The chapter suggests that a serious reflection on the ambiguity of experiences – like those of

Vildana’s – that have emerged from within the ‘foggy universe’ of the camp system often disturbs

the ordered and conventional representations of war rape in collective memory. Indeed, the

narrative frames that structure public discussions of rape victims and rape victimhood in post-war

Bosnia generally, and in Gradić in particular, are both limited and limiting. The figure of the

quintessential rape victim identity that animates memorial activities in the small township

significantly narrows any genuine discursive scope for the articulation of certain wartime

experiences that have the potential to unsettle the associated moral imperatives of purity (Heru,

2001), innocence (Marcus, 1992), and fragility (Engle, 2008). The intimate accounts of the

various and strategic forms of resistance and the modes of self-protection that women had

occasionally resorted to as detainees of the prisoner camps in northeastern Bosnia have, instead,

remained effectively silenced, suppressed, and marginalised from mainstream discourses

concerning local war history. The stories of those less discernible forms of violence that rendered

the space governed by fellow prisoners as another site of vulnerability and subjection are equally

as illuminating as those depictions of history that prioritise the collective ideals of heroism,

sacrifice, and endurance. The creation of space in official colloquies for the voices of the grey

zone, however, necessitates the development of new representational frames and different

standards of judgment through which to confront and interrogate the boundaries of the ‘thinkable’

and the ‘sayable’, and extend the possibilities for disclosure of traumatic experiences in the

aftermath of armed conflict.

144

Conclusions:

Towards a Gendered Semiotics of Silence and

Suffering in Memory Studies

‘… Even the most horrific acts of aggression do not stand as isolated exemplars

of a ‘thing’ called violence but cast ripples that reconfigure lives in the most

dramatic of ways, affecting constructs of identity in the present, the hopes and

potentialities of the future, and even the renditions of the past.’

Antonius C.G.M. Robben and Carolyn Nordstrom, Fieldwork Under Fire, 1995, 5

Valentine’s Day of 2012 in the old city of Sarajevo was flush with an air of expectancy beyond the

tradition of flowers and chocolates that typically accompanies the date nominated to celebrate

love and romance in Bosnia and around the world. Preparations had been underway for more

than a week for the much-anticipated Bosnian premiere of the Hollywood feature film, ‘U Zemlji

Krvi i Meda’, or ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey’. The film represented the first large-scale, silver

screen production based on the four-year war in Bosnia and released to a worldwide audience.

On this late winter evening, not even the unusually heavy snowfall that had brought the city to a

standstill and plunged the country into a state of emergency only a week earlier could deter the

5,000-strong crowd of theatregoers fortunate enough to garner tickets to the gala event. Koševo

Stadium in the former Zetra Olympics Centre was suitably dressed for the occasion. The main

entrance to the sporting facility was lined with the requisite red carpet, the walkway illuminated by

floodlights, and the entire thoroughfare crowded with paparazzi and scores of local fans cramped

behind the cordon eager for the arrival of the film’s writer, director, and producer, Angelina Jolie

and her accompanying husband Brad Pitt. As one Sarajevan friend commented in a tone of wry

humour, ‘… it’s as if the city is an ageing actress with a fading career who’s been offered an

unexpected and short-lived return to fame and she’s striving desperately to hold fast to it for as

long as possible, her attentions and her loyalties shifting constantly in whichever direction the light

seems brightest’ (L.H., pers. comm., February, 2012).

The casual comment was somewhat revealing. The warmth and hospitality with which Jolie was

greeted by both fans and local dignitaries alike in the months following the film’s premiere belied

the protracted imbroglio that had accompanied its fitful and lengthy production. Indeed, only a

few short weeks into casting and location scouting for the project, Jolie’s filming permits for what

was then-referred to as an ‘Untitled Bosnian Love Story’ were summarily revoked by Gavrilo

Grahovac, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Culture and Sports for the Federation of

Bosnia and Herzegovina. Initially citing incomplete paperwork as his primary motivation,

Grahovac later acknowledged that he had acted at the behest of a small, but prominent, group of

victim-activists who were strenuously opposed to the production of the film. According to

145

Grahovac, the collection of mostly female rape survivors was representative of a larger, ‘…

resistance the Bosnian people had towards a film that does not show the truth and that will hurt

many of the victims of war’ (Arslanagić, 2010). In a clear demonstration of support with the

protestors, the minister asserted that, ‘… no one may insult a Bosniak woman’ (Lippman, 2012),

and declared that he would ensure that the film was not produced on Bosnian soil, even if he

could not prevent Jolie from moving forward with the project altogether. The filming prohibitions

were later lifted on presentation of the script to the Ministry of Culture, but the politics surrounding

the cinematic venture continued well beyond the premiere on Valentine’s Day 2012 and, as a

result, Jolie chose to persevere with filming in the Hungarian cities of Budapest and Esztergom

with only a few exterior scenes shot on location in Sarajevo.

At issue was the rumoured plot of the film, which reportedly involved the inter-ethnic relationship

between a Bosnian Muslim woman imprisoned in a detention camp during the war who fell in love

with her Serbian captor and rapist. Neither the victim-activists, nor the minister himself, had

sighted the original script – written by Jolie herself – at the time of the permit restrictions.

Nonetheless, the rumour itself was enough for some local rape survivors to publicly censure Jolie

for her ‘ignorance’ (Child, 2010) of the situation and her insensitivity at failing to consult widely

enough on the plight of women victims of war in Bosnia. The small group of protestors, chiefly

from the Sarajevo-based Udruženje Žene Žrtve Rata, or the Association of Women Victims of

War, claimed that the film had caused many survivors undue ‘mental suffering’ and was, ‘… an

outrageous and humiliating representation of our ordeal’ (Child, 2010). In spite of repeated

assurances in the media from Jolie herself that the script was both informed and sensitive to the

local history of war, the group of women rape survivors steadfastly maintained their position. The

association’s president Bakira Hašečić argued that, ‘… as far as we are concerned, a love story

between a captured Muslim and a Serb war criminal could never have happened during the war

in Bosnia. It is impossible, an unthinkable concept that a man and a woman could experience

love and sexuality in the camp environment, love toward a commander of a Četnik camp, where

this same Četnik commander allows killing and abuse. It is impossible’ (Bakira Hašečić, Žene

Žrtve Rata, pers. comm., November, 2011). In an open letter to Jolie published in the Balkan

Chronicle, Hašečić further elaborated:

‘… [a]ll those who know the psychology of a victim who is a woman and upon whom a

horrendous war crime of rape was committed know that it is not possible that a woman

thus raped, unless she is a pathological case, falls in love with her rapist. That is well

known to those who know and understand the culture and tradition of Muslim women,

Bosniak women’.

(Bakira Hašečić, ‘Open Letter to Angelina Jolie’, The Balkan Chronicle, 7 November, 2010)

The small protest was powerful and deeply polarising, especially for those in the victim-survivor

community. The President of the women’s division of Savez Logoraša, or the Association of

Concentration Camp and Torture Survivors in Sarajevo, Enisa Salčinović, was vocally opposed to

the public remonstrations led by Hašečić. Salčinović and her organisation separated from Žene

Žrtve Rata in 2006, in part, over concerns with Hašečić and her organisation’s control of the rape

survivor community and their monopoly of the public representation of related issues. Salčinović

stated that many of her own organisation’s members had taken umbrage at Hašečić’s aggressive

146

approach towards Jolie and her presumptive stance in ‘… talk[ing] in all our names’ (Beaumont,

2010) on the matter of the film’s production. Salčinović later commented on the emotional

gravitas of the film and on the intense visceral impact the story had on her at her initial viewing,

stating that she had, ‘… first vomited from the sheer force of my suffering’ (Hopkins, 2011) and,

shortly afterwards, developed severe tachycardia requiring medical assistance (Hopkins, 2012).

She claimed that Jolie’s ‘truthful’ interpretation of the torture that women had endured in the

camps during the war had ‘… touched [the] souls’ (Hopkins, 2011) of many survivors. Other

opinions in the rape survivor community closely echoed Salčinović’s sentiments and her personal

identification with the film’s plot. Following an early screening of the film for select groups of

survivors in the few months prior to the official premiere, a fellow rape survivor commented that

the authenticity of the narrative had, likewise, resonated with her, and she had felt intensely

moved by Jolie’s rendering of their wartime pain and suffering, stating:

‘… what is more important is that someone so well-known and respected made this movie.

She is a Hollywood star and she is standing behind this movie. This movie took me back

to 1992 when I was captured by Serbs and they led me to my execution. I almost left [the

film] a couple of times, but I managed to stay until the end. I wish that I could cry but I am

not able to. Those of us captured by Serbs know what fear is and what it is to be without

hope, what it means to feel like nothing, and that someone is just playing games with your

life.

‘… it touched me so much in many scenes, and I am from Višegrad, so the movie can

really represent any place, any village, and any corner in Bosnia during that time. I was in

Višegrad when we went through the torture of Serbs coming into our flat and asking for

money and gold and the expropriation scene took me back to when I was in Višegrad in

1992. There are scenes of Sarajevo and Vareš, so the story is definitely well-rounded in

that it speaks about all Bosnia and Herzegovina. During and after the war, you always

have to prove that you are a victim and you are constantly reminded that you are a victim

and go through the pain every day.

‘… what I really liked were the scenes where Angelina portrayed the feelings of

helplessness, like when you feel so small that you can’t do anything. You have no power

to do anything against the army and their ammunitions. If we don’t portray that feeling on

the screen or through photography, we would be in a phase where someone could just say

these things never happened. One day, we victims will disappear, but this movie will stay

forever and will live on after we are gone’.

(V.H., Screening Discussion with Victims, December, 2011)

In the end, the final script for Jolie’s film, U Zemlji Krvi i Meda, attempted to explore a far more

ambiguous liaison between woman and man, Bosniak and Serb, victim and victimiser, captive

and captor, but the plot still easily dovetailed with the widely established narrative of wartime

events articulated by Bosniak ethnonationalist actors in the public sphere. In the Land of Blood

and Honey follows the fictionalised wartime experiences of its two youthful protagonists, Ajla and

Danijel – she, a Bosnian Muslim artist and he, a Bosnian Serb police officer. The couple meet

only briefly in the hedonistic space of a dance hall in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo but find their

earliest encounter interrupted by a sudden explosion that delivers the city and the country into the

midst of an intractable war. Here, Ajla and Danijel’s paths diverge sharply along familiar ethnic,

national, and militarised lines against the background of the brutal 44-month Siege of Sarajevo

only to become entangled again four months later in the harsh conditions of a prison camp.

147

Danijel – now a member of the Serb army – serves in the role of a commander under the strict

leadership of his general father, Nebojša. Clearly disturbed at her unexpected appearance in the

camp, Danijel intervenes to separate Ajla from the general population of the prison camp, keeping

her alone and sequestered in a barracks room. Thereinafter, Danijel takes a protective interest in

Ajla, installing her as his personal servant, taking her with him when he is transferred, and finally

designating her as his official artist in residence.

The damaged romance between Ajla and Danijel continues in the threatening space of the camp

and in the context of their newly imposed and deeply imbalanced positions. As Jolie herself has

suggested, however, the interactions between the two characters develop well beyond the very

rigid and constrained roles of victim and perpetrator; both personas are conflicted, confused, and

many layered, and their evolving relationship veers recklessly between moments of intense

tenderness and periods of menace. Ajla is a torn woman; wavering, at first, between her terror at

the uncertain conditions of the camp and her personal feelings for her erstwhile suitor and, later,

with her grief-stricken allegiance to her own ethnic group. Danijel, similarly, struggles with a deep

filial desire to satisfy the expectations of his extremist nationalist father, his loyalty to his fellow

soldiers, and his competing feelings for Ajla. In the end, both characters choose their ethno-

national identities over their transgressive romance. Ajla escapes. On learning of her nephew’s

death, however, she agrees to return to the camp as a spy. On the basis of her information,

resistance fighters detonate an explosive at the Serbian army headquarters. Danijel narrowly

survives the blast and, angered, confronts Ajla seeking a confession or an explanation for her

betrayal. Finding her fearful and silent response insufficient, he shoots and kills her. At the film’s

conclusion, a stricken Danijel approaches the perimeter of Sarajevo, where peacekeeping forces

have established a ‘safe zone’. Overwhelmed with remorse, Danijel falls to his knees before the

international presence repeating the phrase, ‘… Ja sam ratni kriminalac’, or ‘…I am a war

criminal’.

The vignette is illustrative of a larger debate on the politics of memory and its gendered

dimensions in post-war Bosnia, particularly with regards to the matter of rape. The polemic over

Jolie’s film project speaks to the contested nature of victim narratives, especially those that, ‘…

many still see fit to keep underground, unseen, and unspoken’ (Zurbuchen, 2002, 580). The very

public controversy over certain survivor-activists’ responses to the possibility of a narrative based

on an inter-ethnic and hierarchical relationship in the detention camps of Bosnia is indicative of

the depth of resistance to stories that might disrupt dominant readings of wartime events. In the

Republika Srpska and Serbia, the media reaction to the film’s official release in late 2011,

likewise, provoked immediate condemnation from certain sectors of society and repeated

allegations that Jolie’s script had falsely represented the Serbian people as barbarians and

murderers and Bosniaks as the singular victims (see: Helms, 2014, for further details). Indeed,

the intimate memories of rape survival in Bosnia are narratives that have often been appropriated

and bowdlerised by the state; removed of their many unpalatable or uncomfortable nuances and

absorbed into the symbolic domain of collective suffering. At other times, those same troubling

details in women’s personal recollections have been exaggerated, objectified, and made to speak

for larger discourses around gender normativity and ethno-nationalism. The ‘real character’ of the

mass rapes in Bosnia remains the subject of continued debate in the post-war environment.

148

Rape as a weapon of war is still largely positioned in relation to the constructs of nationalism and

ethnicity in which women, and their bodies, are reduced to metaphors representing the rape of a

group or a country. Vesna Kesić (2003) has argued, for example, that, ‘… a raped Croat or

Bosniak woman stands for a raped Croatia or Bosnia’. As she continues, ‘… [w]hat is here

contested, dispensed with, and instrumentalized for nationalistic, political, military, or other,

sometimes “merely professional” (journalistic), purposes are women’s bodies in pain’ (Kesić,

2003). In a similar sense, James E. Young (2009, 1778) writes that:

‘… in ‘regarding the pain of women,’ we often split these women off from their lives and

deaths, their stories and experiences. We may hold the pain of women in high regard, but

when we regard it, we also find spectacle in it, converting their suffering into cultural, even

psychological, objects around which we tell our own stories, find large meanings, fixed and

full of symbolic portent … these idealized icons of victimization, innocence, or even

resistance … serve as fixtures around which other survivors’ stories are told, around which

cultures and nations may even tell their own stories’.

The extended furore over Jolie’s artistic interpretations also speaks to the influence of other

paradigmatic discourses, including those within academia, that serve – sometimes unwittingly – to

objectify, define, and colonise the wartime experiences of women and girls. Indeed, the intimate

accounts of women’s suffering and survival in Bosnia are frequently framed by dominant, Euro-

centric discourses on trauma that rely on assumptions of the indelibility of violence, its

irreducibility in language, and the redemptive qualities of testimony. Within this framework,

women survivors of war rape are often positioned as passive victims, their experiences of conflict-

based sexual violence defined as ‘incomprehensible’ and, even more notoriously, as ‘shrouded in

public silence and private shame’ (Kligman, 1996, 81). Trauma, in this sense, is understood as a

very human response to events that tend to rupture the linear flow of experience and radically

destroy any sense of normal temporality. Given the difficulties of consciously incorporating past

traumatic events within the here and now, episodes of extraordinary violence and suffering – like

those of conflict and war rape – are often considered ‘psychically unassimilated or unmetabolized’

(McKinney, 2007, 269); they exist somewhere beyond narration. The dominant trauma model,

then, assumes that the liberation of the voice has a curative function for survivors and the

dialogical process of narrativising memories is both personally healing and politically redemptive

(Roy, 2012). Certainly, Judith Herman (1992, 1) suggests that remembering and articulating, ‘…

the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for

the healing of individual victims’. Bell Hooks (1989, 9), likewise, writes that moving from silence

into speech is, ‘… a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible.

It is that act of speech, of “talking back”, that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the

expression of moving from object to subject – the liberated voice’.

The confessional practices involved in these orthodox psychoanalytical perspectives, as James

Slotta (2015, 144) demonstrates, have, ‘… become important political, historiographic, and

juridicial activities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’. The therapeutic ethos has

permeated global understandings of traumatic memory and remembrance practices and

underscored Allen Feldman’s (2004, 166) characterisation of a ‘post-Holocaust world of

anamnesis’ in which the dominant narrative trajectories that are (re)constructed in the aftermath

of an atrocity follow a linear progression based on historical redress, therapeusis, and completion.

149

Indeed, as Vanessa Pupavac (2004) has argued, contemporary therapeutic frameworks have had

a significant influence on international security paradigms, viewing war-affected populations – like

those that constitute post-conflict Bosnian society and other Yugoslav successor states – as

dysfunctional and in need of external governance and psychosocial intervention. Expressions of

emotional ill-being, unhappiness, anger, frustration, and survivor silence that might once have

been interpreted as normative, or even as a mark of general resilience within local

conceptualisations, are regarded, instead, as pathological under classic trauma models.

Underlying this Euro-centric preoccupation with trauma is a pressing concern with interrupting

ongoing cycles of violence based on the assumption that any unresolved grievances that might

surface in the aftermath of a war will eventually result in further brutality and bloodshed. War

trauma is, thus, considered an impairment to the health of the individual, but also to the welfare

and development of the collective (Pupavac, 2004). As Pupavac (2004, 156) contends, ‘…

individual emotions have become a legitimate target of external intervention’.

The trauma model often pathologises survivor silence and reinforces commonplace perceptions

concerning the fragility of the female body and the weakness of the female spirit. As Susan Gal

(1989, 1) writes, silence is generally ‘deplored’ as a marker of ‘passivity and powerlessness’ in

that those who have been, ‘… denied speech cannot make their experiences known and thus

cannot influence the course of their lives or of history’. The absence of verbal expression is

conceptualised as a void, a failure of speech, a burial of the voice (Kidron, 2009) such that the

history of women’s personal and collective trauma, both during war and in its long aftermath,

becomes, to borrow from Maurice Blanchot (1986, 28), the ‘un-story’ – an absent presence yet to

find externalisation and objectification in speech. The imperative to speak, to transform the

‘unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences’ (van der Kolk & van der Hart, 1995, 176) into

meaningful narrative language, positions survivor silence, self-censorship, and the desire to

forget, as psychopathological. In this vein, Andreas Huyssen (2003) argues that survivors who

fail to work through their trauma, who are unable to restore their lost or fractured memories to

narrative coherence, remain vulnerable to re-experiencing the event through a series of intrusive,

repetitive, and unwanted symptoms. Unresolved trauma, he suggests, often resurfaces without

volition as a series of inchoate, non-verbal, and embodied re-enactments. Silence, in this sense,

is regarded as symptomatic of an emotional wound; a psychic injury whose absent presence

signifies an abnormal process of repression that can only find resolution when that which is

considered ‘unsayable’ has been revisited, retrieved, and publicly articulated.

As the narratives of women survivors in Bosnia demonstrate, however, silence, is a weighty

concept. Indeed, Carol Kidron (2009, 15) illustrates that silence is not only, ‘… a marker of

absence, hegemonic silencing, pathology, or the unspeakability of genocide’. The framing of

psychic and embodied material as inevitably silent and repressed, moreover, narrows the

potential for understanding other, alternative readings of these same trauma symptoms. Indeed,

critics suggest that contemporary trauma paradigms that conceptualise psychic, sensory, and

motoric markers as ‘record[s] that [have] yet to be made’ (Laub, 1992, 57) are fraught with

limitations. The presumptive definition of silence as a mode of failed communication precludes

any possibility of understanding the absences, deferrals, and crises of meaning as intentional,

affective, and elaborative mediums of expression in their own right that do not rely upon verbal

150

articulation to ensure their own objectification. Kelly McKinney (2007) argues, in this regard, that

prevalent logocentric assumptions predicated on the notion that survivors inevitably find recourse

in the translation of their experiences into organised, detailed, and temporally oriented accounts

may be a distinctly cultural and historical perception rather than a universal one. Dominant

notions of silence as pathological and verbalisation as normative, instead, tend to depoliticise,

dehistoricise, and decontextualise the phenomena and inhibit the development of a richer

understanding of the vast range of women’s experiences and responses to trauma, violence, and

suffering. As Galen Strawson (2004, 429) writes, with reference to a discussion on narrativity and

non-narrativity, the act of focusing uncritically on key explanatory frameworks can, ‘… hinder self-

understanding, close down important avenues of thought, impoverish our grasp of ethical

possibilities, needlessly and wrongly distress those who do not fit their model, and are potentially

destructive in therapeutic contexts’.

Remembering Wartime Rape has endeavoured to explore some of the many intricate layers and

dimensions of these ‘other’, hidden stories and to contribute to discussions of trauma and

memory making as multidimensional and multi-sensory. Through thick ethnographic description,

the dissertation has demonstrated that women’s wartime histories – while sometimes concealed

and at other times suppressed – are not necessarily absent from public and private discourse or

always and everywhere in need of therapeutic redress. The general reluctance to fully engage

with the brutal forms and nature of the violence levelled against women in conflict, and to find

space in official practices of remembrance for histories of war rape, does not inevitably imply

‘silence as absence’ or a reluctance to speak on behalf of the survivors. Indeed, in many

women’s stories, silence itself can be read as a careful and conscious frame of narration and the

various unacknowledged strands within each individual narrative have, more readily, assumed a

diversity of other different shapes and forms that extend beyond those typically contained in most

established modes of remembrance. Women’s memories are frequently expressed through a

much wider array of communicative strategies, repertoires, and genres; each one a strategic

response to the different audiences and distinctive political, economic, religious, and social

contexts of the moment. Silence, in this sense, is not necessarily a symptom of powerlessness in

women’s stories of war rape and can represent, instead, a mode of resistance to the dominant,

hegemonic cultural forms that structure practices of memory making. Certainly, as Stef Craps

(2012, 127) has suggested, engaging in the complicated task of exploring traumatic histories

requires a critical commitment to, ‘make visible the creative and political’ as much as the

‘pathological and negative’. In the absence of such a meaningful and significant shift in

perspective, ethnographic research in post-conflict settings risks overlooking the polyvocality in

women’s stories and restricts the myriad possibilities for their expression.

The dissertation has, thus, explored some of the multitude of practices and possibilities for

individual and collective remembering that are both discursive and non-discursive in nature. In

Bosnia, the intimate memories of war rape have become a familiar part of the fabric of everyday

life through partially verbal and non-verbal modes as much as through verbal and material

means. The phenomenal presence of the wartime past in the commemorative landscapes of

Bosnia points to the porous boundaries between lifeworlds and deathworlds and survivors’ routine

efforts to negotiate the two realms in their daily existence. As demonstrated in the Prologue,

151

painful retrospection on the history of mass rape often reveals itself in fragments filtered through

the sensorium and engages the bodies and the psyches of individual survivors, whole

communities, and, even, bystanders. Certainly, the critical engagement of my own haptic

sensibilities with the dark and complicated history of the old resort-spa of Vilina Vlas in the

southeast region of the country illustrated that this embodied reflection is made present and

known in many different ways and mediated through diverse interlocutors. My personal response

to the wartime history of the old building drew from the many testimonies recounted and revisited

over two years from women survivors who remember and re-experience their violent encounters

with rape through their individual bodies and its senses. The corporeal responses may be read

as an eloquent and expressive means through which survivors come to know, relate to, and make

meaning around their own personal histories rather than forms of knowledge that resist

articulation.

Memories of war rape are also frequently contained in the public secrets of testimonial subjects,

as Chapter III illustrates through the complex and creative negotiations of rape history in the

village of Selo. Secrecy is a social fact throughout Bosnia; it is an habitual part of everyday life

and an indispensable detail in the organisation of public culture, both in the context of, and in the

aftermath to, war. The dynamics of concealment and revelation often provide an effective

medium through which to remember and process the traumas of the past and to mask from the

public realm all that might be considered harmful, destructive, or shameful (González, 2011). As

Luise White (2000) argues, however, secrets are, paradoxically, modes by which information is

ascribed value, rather than the means by which it is withheld, suppressed, or forgotten. Certainly,

the impossible memories of war rape have seemed to acquire, rather than relinquish, strength

through their many and varied representations as secrets in the local memoryscapes of Bosnia.

The specific memorial practices carried out by community members in the village of Selo, in

particular, point to the importance of seeking meaning in the interstices where secrets cumulate.

The most painful threads of memory are oftentimes animated, expressed, and made known, here,

in the gaps created in historical narratives, in the practiced mendacity of survivors, in the social

interplay of the said and the unsaid, and in the conspiracies of silence and denial that contribute

to a communal appearance of imagined unity in the afterlife of extraordinary episodes of violence.

Responses to mass rape are sometimes further constrained by the language, symbolism, and

imagery considered appropriate to public representations of victimhood, as discussed in an

elaboration of Levi’s (1989) concept of the ‘grey zone’ in Chapter IV. The personal accounts of

one Omarska survivor, Vildana, and her strained relationships with the few other women

prisoners in the camp sit uncomfortably with notions of the ‘socially sayable’, or the ‘specific and

formulaic speech acts’, that consist of the ‘acceptable channels for the narration of trauma’

(Nance, 2006, 106). Vildana’s recollections of the strategies adopted by some women in their

efforts to negotiate the extraordinarily complex issues associated with surviving rape in custodial

settings demonstrate the moral ‘greyness’ of certain prisoners in their reluctant readiness to

compromise, collaborate, and comply with authorities. The stories of those liminal figures who act

at the expense of fellow victims in different ways, for different purposes, and under different levels

of coercion are experiences that have been especially unlikely to find sustained form in public

narratives of trauma. The silence surrounding such matters does not inevitably speak to the

152

difficulties of representing the trauma of rape and other atrocities, however; it is rather more

suggestive of the general reluctance to fully engage with the ambivalence and painful complexity

of certain wartime experiences. Indeed, Lawrence Langer (1991, 2) argues for the importance of

de-romanticising the survival experience, of extricating it from its references to the ‘indomitable

human spirit’, and of moving away from narratives that ‘make us feel better’ and towards those,

like that of Vildana, that ‘help us see better’ (Langer, 1982, 12).

The project of exploring the uncomfortable memories of a nature and essence similar to those

contained in Remembering Wartime Rape, and of interpreting the many different modes through

which women’s narratives are re-presented is a necessary and meaningful undertaking. The

particular field of research lacks a robust and established historiography (Brownmiller, 1975;

Lindsey, 2002; Watson-Franke, 2002). Indeed, much of the empirical groundwork on which the

earliest theoretical foundations have been based concern histories of rape that emerged from the

battles and battlefields of the First (1914-1918) and Second (1939-1945) World Wars, the

Holocaust (1933-1945), and the Bangladesh War of Independence (1971). The evidence from

these historical paradigms has inevitably been hindered by the length of time passed, by the

number of remaining survivors in a position to offer primary accounts or to corroborate existing

knowledge, and by the various motives that undergird the work of uncovering, and giving voice to,

such narratives. The nascent analytical frameworks that evolved from such work have unwittingly

contributed to the firmly entrenched impression that survivors of sexual violence are either unable

or unwilling to articulate their experiences in public and, even, private realms. Certainly, Miriam

Gebhardt (2017, 4) writes of an ‘impenetrable barrier of silence’ created by the ‘social

opprobrium, moral condescension, political instrumentalization, official chicanery, patronizing

compensation, feminist partiality, and lack of recognition’ that have resulted in the neglect of the

many German survivors of rape at the end of World War II. Helke Sander and Barbara Johr

(2005), likewise, refer to the decades-long political suppression of the same matter and to the

social censure of war rape as a crime of gender.

The diverse modes of remembrance and forgetting produced by the different forms of memory

work in the communities of Selo and Gradić, in this sense, have significant implications. Indeed,

as Chapter I makes clear, the important work of gendering the histories of the major wars of the

past has largely remained an act of ‘counter-memory’, one that recovers and restores women’s

narratives to the formal record some half a century or more after the fact (Boose, 2002; Ueno,

1994). As a result, the retrieval of the female voice as a distinctive subject from within the male

canon of wartime history has, oftentimes, been filtered through secondary sources, including

those of the many unpublished manuscripts, personal memoirs, letters, diaries, poems, and other

literary artefacts that have been written by, or about, women and their experiences of armed

conflict (Brereton, 1998; Boose, 2002; Reading, 2002; Tec, 2003; Theidon, 2007). The firsthand

oral testimonies that allow women to, ‘… speak for themselves, to describe their situation, define

their identity, and interpret the meaning of their own lives’ (Osterud & Jones, 1989, 1-2) have

remained conspicuously absent in certain places and gravely under-valued in others. The violent

events associated with the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian war, however, are still

grievously close, and the stories that have emerged from the very earliest attempts at memory

making in the post-war communities of Selo and Gradić offer space to explore these historical

153

moments in the present, as it occurs, with the actors and subjects of the events. Certainly, as

Dan Stone (2003, 94) has argued, ‘… [o]nly while the memorial landscape, and memory claims in

general, are in competition do the stakes of the debate get considered’.

The narrative that emerges from the intimate memories of women survivors in Bosnia disrupts

any unproblematic assumptions that might exist within dominant interpretations of history

associating speech with remembrance and silence with social amnesia. Critical attention to the

gaps and denials, the erasures and distortions, and the deliberate hesitations that habitually

punctuate the stories of survivors like Sumeja, Mirsada, and Aldijana in the village of Selo, and

Vildana and Belma in the town of Gradić reveal the expressive nature of silence itself and the

urgency of forming new ways of listening to traumatic memories, especially following the

shattering experience of war. Indeed, rape is a complex experience and, even when narrative

space has existed for the articulation of personal trauma histories, the languages used to

compose and convey each story have often proven uneasy mediums for capturing the rich and

varied nuances of survival. Marjorie DeVault (1999) suggests that both the spoken and the

written word are often reflective of male bearings and concerns and, at times, the categories of

signification can seem incongruous with the realities of women’s lived experiences. Women’s

stories can, thus, assume a halting, hesitant, tentative, and ‘not-quite-articulated’ quality when the

available language frameworks feel inadequate for the undertaking (DeVault, 1990, 103).

DeVault (1990, 111) refers to such linguistic disjunctures as ‘strategic imprecision[s]’, moments in

everyday conversations that require women to ‘translate’ available vocabularies, to use words

and phrases with slight inaccuracy, and to work with language in non-standard ways. Subtle

rhetorical markers – facial expressions, bodily gestures, variations in tone, and different

inflections that signal the emotional timbre of the moment – very often accompany these ‘small

imprecisions’. For women survivors of war rape, the communicative limitations are telling in

themselves, hinting at a deeper experience of living everyday with ‘poisonous knowledge’ (Das,

2007, 76) after the violence of the Bosnian war.

A critical emphasis on war rape as an object of ethnographic inquiry remains an important

scholarly endeavour in this respect; one that certainly has the potential to offer meaningful

theoretical and methodological contributions. Indeed, many of the post-war ‘lessons’ concerning

women’s suffering and survival still remain to be heard. The responsibility of engaging with the

most unsettling, painful, and ambivalent of memories requires a shift in research priorities away

from the intimate particularities of the violence itself, beyond what is known of the events, and

towards a focus on how the trauma of war rape might be remembered or, even more importantly,

forgotten in all its different registers. The memories of women’s survival are sometimes

articulated in public through various conventional modes of expression, but the deeper and more

profound meanings behind each story are revealed, at least as often, by other means and in other

ways. The challenge of understanding and appreciating these ‘submerged’ (Blackwell, 2005)

stories entails a search for new and ‘transformative’ practices of listening and interpreting the

voices that emerge from within the many complex semiotic spaces that develop in the aftermath

of war. As Lea S. McChesney (2010) maintains, the burden of a ‘committed’ (Bourdieu, 2003)

scholarship, one that engages fully and responsibly with the subject of trauma, demands that the

field of anthropology continues to evolve and, in so doing, that ethnography becomes not only a

154

site of observation and exploration, but also one in which the production of knowledge continues

to make it possible for people to bear witness to their most personal of experiences in ever richer

and more nuanced ways.

155

References:

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1990. Can there be a Feminist Ethnography? Women and Performance: A

Journal of Feminist Theory, Vol 5(1), pp 7-27.

Adler, Rachel. 1991. A Question of Boundaries: Toward a Jewish Feminist Theology of Self and

Other. Tikkun, Vol 6(3), pp 43-46.

Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. by Daniel

Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books.

Ahmed, Sara & Stacey, Jackie. 2001. Testimonial Cultures: An Introduction. Cultural Values, Vol

5(1), pp 1-6.

Ahmetašević, Nidžara, Nerma Jelačić & Selma Boračić. 2006. Investigation: Višegrad rape

victims say their cries go unheard. Justice Report, 20 October 2006. Balkan Investigative

Reporting Network (BIRN). Available at: http://www.bim.ba/en/32/10/1312/ Accessed: 27

December 2012.

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma. In Alexander Jeffrey C,

Eyerman, Ron, Giesen Bernhard, Smelser, Neil J & Sztompka Piotr. Cultural Trauma and

Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp 1-30.

Alexander Jeffrey C, Eyerman, Ron, Giesen Bernhard, Smelser, Neil J & Sztompka Piotr.

Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp 1-30.

Alexander, Ronelle. 2006. Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A Grammar with Sociolinguistic

Commentary. Madison & London: University of Wisconsin Press.

Al Jazeera. 2017. Bosnia 1992: The Omarska Camp. Al Jazeera World, 10 May 2017. Available

at: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeraworld/2017/05/bosnia-1992-omarska-

camp-170508061724966.html Accessed: 18 November 2016.

Allen, Beverly. 1996. Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Altınay, Ayşe Gül & Pető, Andrea. 2016. Uncomfortable Connections: Gender, Memory, War. In

Ayşe Gül Altınay & Andrea Pető (Eds). Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist

Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence. London: Routledge, pp 1-23.

156

Ambrosio, Thomas. 2001. Irredentism: Ethnic Conflict and International Politics. Westport,

Connecticut & London, UK: Praeger.

Amnesty International. 2009. Whose Justice? The Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina are Still

Waiting. London: Amnesty International. Available at:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/EUR63/006/2009/en/ Accessed: 15 December

2017.

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism. London & New York: Verso.

Andrić, Ivo. 1959. The Bridge Over The Drina. Trans. Lovett F. Edwards. London: The Harvell

Press.

Andrić-Ružičić, Duška. 2003. War Rape and the Political Manipulation of Survivors. In Giles,

Wenona; de Alwis, Malathi; Klein, Edith & Siva, Kuluka (Eds) & Korač, Maja; Knežević,

Djurdja & Papić, Žarana (Advisory Eds). Feminists Under Fire: Exchanges Across War

Zones. Toronto: Between the Lines Press, pp 103-114.

Anzulović, Branimir. 1999. Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide. New York: New York

University Press.

Arendt, Hannah. 1944. The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition. Jewish Social Studies, Vol 6(2),

pp 99-122.

____ 1951. The Burden of our Time. London: Secker & Warburg.

Argenti, Nicholas & Schramm, Katharina. 2012. Introduction: Remembering Violence:

Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission. In Argenti, Nicholas &

Schramm, Katharina (Eds). Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on

Intergenerational Transmission. New York: Berghahn Books, pp 1-39.

Arslanagić, Sabina. 2010. Bosnia Suspends Permission for Jolie Film. Balkan Insight, 14 October

2010. Available at: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/bosnia-suspends-filming-

permission-for-jolie-s-directorial-debut Accessed: 2 January 2017.

Askin, Kelly D. 1997. War Crimes against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes

Tribunals. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

____ 2003. Prosecuting Wartime Rape and Other Gender-Related Crimes under International

Law: Extraordinary Advances Enduring Obstacles. Berkeley Journal of International Law,

Vol 21(2), pp 288-349.

Assmann, Aleida. 2006. History, Memory and the Genre of Testimony. Poetics Today, Vol 27(2),

pp 261-273.

157

Assmann, Jan. 1995. Collective Memory and Cultural Identity. New German Critique, Vol 65

(Spring/Summer), pp 125-133.

Attarian, Hourig. 2016. Narrating Women’s Bodies: Storying Silences and Secrets in the

Aftermath of Genocide. In Ayşe Gül Altınay & Andrea Pető (Eds). Gendered Wars,

Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence.

London: Routledge, pp 257-268.

Augé, Marc. 2004. Oblivion. Trans. by Marjolijn de Jager. Minneapolis, MI: University of

Minnesota Press.

Auyero, Javier. 2007. Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina: The Grey Zone of State Power.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bagus, Mary Ida. 2006. Transcending Transgression with Transgression: Inheriting Forsaken

Souls in Bali. In Rao, Ursula & Hutnyk, John (Eds).

Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi. 1997. The Economy of Violence: Black Bodies and the Unspeakable Terror.

In Ronit Lentin (Ed). Gender and Catastrophe. London: Zed Books, pp 171-184.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. C. Emerson (Trans). Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

Barkan, Joanne. 2002. As Old as War Itself: Rape in Foča. Dissent, Vol 49(1), pp 60-66.

Bartlett, Frederic C. 1932. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bartrop, Paul R (Ed). 2016. Bosnian Genocide: The Essential Reference Guide. Santa Barbara,

California: ABC-CLIO.

Bassiouni, M. Cherif. 2013. Introduction to International Criminal Law: Second Revised Edition.

Leiden & Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

Batinić, Jelena. 2015. Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance.

New York: Cambridge University Press.

Battiata, Mary. 1992. A Town’s Bloody Cleansing. Washington Post, 2 November 1992.

Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/11/02/a-towns-bloody-

cleansing/3c5bbcee-7c9c-4669-82b7-bcec86c01237/?utm_term=.228b3d71c265

Accessed: 6 June 2017.

Baumel, Judith Tydor. 1998. Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust. London: Vallentine

Mitchell.

158

Beaumont, Peter. 2010. Angelina Jolie’s controversial film divides Bosnian rape victims. The

Guardian, 24 October 2010.

Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/23/angelina-jolie-bosnia-serbian-

rape-camps Accessed: 3 January 2017.

Bećirević, Edina. 2012. Hotel Vilina Vlas – Then and Now, Commemorating Rape Victims. Spirit

of Bosnia, Vol 7(2), Available at: http://www.spiritofbosnia.org/v7n2/hotel-vilina-vlas-

visegrad-then-and-now-commemorating-rape-victims/ Accessed: 6 March 2013.

____ 2014. Genocide on the Drina River. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Begić, M. 2015. Genocid u Prijedoru. Hrvatski Memorijalno-Dokumentacijski Centar Domovinskog

Rata Zagreb, Institut za Istraživanje Zločina Protiv Čovječnosti i Međunarodnog Prava

Univerziteta u Sarajevu.

Beidelman, T.O. 1993. Secrecy and Society: The Paradox of Knowing and the Knowing of

Paradox. In Mary H. Nooter (Ed). Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and Reveals. New

York: Museum for African Art, pp 41-52.

Bell, Michael Mayerfeld. 1997. The Ghosts of Place. Theory and Society, Vol 26(6), pp 813-836.

Bellah, RM, Madsen, WM, Swindler, A & Tipton, SM. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism

and Commitment in American Life. New York: Harper & Row.

Bellman, Beryl. 1981. The Paradox of Secrecy. Human Studies, Vol 4(1), pp 1-24.

____ 1984. The Language of Secrecy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 1929. Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia. In Michael

W. Jennings; Howard Eiland; and Gary Smith (Eds). Roger Livingstone and others (Trans).

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume II: 1927-1934. Cambridge Mass: Harvard

University Press, 1999), pp 207-221.

____ 1969 [1940]. Arendt, Hannah (Ed). Zohn, Harry (Trans). The Image of Proust. In

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books.

____ 1979. The Doctrine of the Similar. Knut Tarnowski (Trans). New German Critique, Special

Issue: Walter Benjamin, Vol 17 (Spring), pp 65-69.

Berliner, David. 2005. ‘The Abuses of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in

Anthropology’, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol 78(1), pp 197-211.

Bet-El, Ilana R. 2002. Unimagined Communities: The Power of Memory and the Conflict in the

Former Yugoslavia. In Jan-Werner Müller (Ed). Memory and Power in Post-War Europe:

Studies in the Presence of the Past. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp 206-222.

159

Bhabha, Homi K. 2004. The Location of Culture. London & New York: Routledge.

Bieber, Florian. 2002. Nationalist Mobilization and Stories of Serb Suffering: The Kosovo Myth

from 600th Anniversary to the Present. Rethinking History, Vol 6(1), pp 95-110.

BiH Tourism Website. 2017. Visit My Country: Bosnia i Hercegovina. Available at:

http://www.visitmycountry.net/bosnia_herzegovina/bh/ Accessed: 15 December 2017.

Bille, Mikkel; Hastrup, Frida & Sørensen, Tim Flohr (Eds). 2010. An Anthropology of Absence:

Materializations of Transcendence and Loss. New York: Springer Publishing Company.

Biondich, Mark. 2006. “We Were Defending the State”: Nationalism, Myth, and Memory in

Twentieth-Century Croatia. In Lampe, John & Mazower, Mark (Eds). Ideologies and

National Identities: The Case of Twentieth-Century Southeastern Europe. Budapest:

Central European University Press, pp 54-109.

Birch, Maxine & Miller, Tina. 2000. Inviting Intimacy: The Interview as Therapeutic Opportunity.

International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Vol 3(3), pp 189-202.

Blackwell, Maylei. 2005. Bearing Bandoleras: Transfigurative Liberation and the Iconography of la

Nueva Chicana. In Tadiar, Nerferti Xina M. & Davis, Angela (Eds). Beyond the Frame:

Women of Color and Visual Representation, pp 171-195.

Blanchot, Maurice. 1986. The Writing of the Disaster. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Bodnar, John. 1992. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the

Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights (BIM). 1994, 1998. Ethnic Cleansing Operations in the

northeast-Bosnian City of Zvornik from April through June 1992. Vienna: Ludwig

Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights.

Boose, Lynda E. 2002. Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement and

Serb Cultural Memory. Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, Vol 28(1), pp 71-

96.

Bos, Pascale R. 2006. Feminists Interpreting the Politics of Wartime Rape: Berlin, 1945;

Yugoslavia, 1992-1993. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol 31(4), pp

995-1025.

Bose, Sumantra. 2002. Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention.

London: Hurst & Co.

160

Bougarel, Xavier. 2007. Death and the Nationalist: Martyrdom, War Memory, and Veteran Identity

among Bosnian Muslims. In Bougarel, Xavier; Helms, Elissa & Duijzings, Ger (Eds). The

New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories, and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society.

Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, pp 167-192.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.

____ 2003. Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market. Trans. by Loïc Wacquant. New

York: Verso.

Bowman, Glenn. 1994. Violence before Identity: An Analysis of Identity Politics. The Sociological

Review, Vol 62(S2) pp 152-165. Available at: https://www.kent.ac.uk/politics/carc/reading-

group/Bowman%20paper.pdf Accessed: 3 February 2017.

Bracewell, Wendy. 1996. Women, Motherhood, and Contemporary Serbian Nationalism.

Women’s Studies International Forum, Special Issue on Links across Differences: Gender,

Ethnicity, and Nationalism, Vol 19(1-2), pp 25-33.

____ 2000. Rape in Kosovo: Masculinity and Serbian Nationalism. Nations and Nationalism,

Vol 6(4), pp 563-590.

Brereton, Bridget. 1998. Gendered Testimonies: Autobiographies, Diaries, and Letters by Women

as Sources for Caribbean History. Feminist Review, Vol 59(1), pp 143-163.

Bringa, Tone. 1995. Being Muslim the Bosnian way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian

Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.

____ 2004. The Peaceful Death of Tito and the Violent Destruction of Yugoslavia. In Borneman,

John (Ed). Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority. London:

Berghahn Books, pp 148-201.

Brink, Andre. 1983. Mapmakers: Writing in a State of Siege. London: Faber and Faber.

Browning, Christopher. 1993. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution

in Poland. New York: Harper Perennial/Aaron Asher Books.

Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. London: Penguin.

____ 1994. Making Female Bodies the Battlefield. In Stiglmayer, Alexandra (Ed). Mass Rape:

The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

pp 180-182.

Brunet, Ariane & Rousseau, Stephanie. 1998. Common Grounds: Violence Against Women in

War and Armed Conflict Situations. Quezon City: ASCENT.

161

Bruno, Guiliana. 2002. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys through Art, Architecture, and Film. London

and New York, NY: Verso.

Burg, Steven L. & Shoup, Paul S. 1999. The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and

International Intervention. Armonk, NY & London, UK: M.E. Sharpe.

Burić, Fedja. 2010. Dwelling on the Ruins of Socialist Yugoslavia: Being Bosnian by

Remembering Tito. In Post-Communist Nostalgia. Todorova, Maria & Zsuzsa, Gille (Eds).

New York: Berghahn Books, pp 227-243.

Butalia, Urvashi. 2000. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press.

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:

Routledge.

Buturović, Amila. 2007. Love and/or Death? Women and Conflict Resolution in the Traditional

Bosnian Ballad. In Buturović, Amila & Schick, Irvin Cemil (Eds). Women in the Ottoman

Balkans: Gender, Culture and History. London & New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, pp 73-98.

Calic, Marie-Janine. 2009. Ethnic Cleansing and War Crimes 1991-1995. In Ingrao, Charles &

Emmert, Thomas A. (Ed). Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholars’ Initiative.

West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press.

Campbell, Bradley. 2015. The Geometry of Genocide: A Study in Pure Sociology. Charlottesville

and London: University of Virginia Press.

Campbell, Rebecca. 2002. Emotionally Involved: The Impact of Researching Rape. London, U.K:

Routledge.

Cannell, C.F. & Axelrod, M. 1956. The Respondent Reports on the Interview. American Journal of

Sociology, Vol 62(2), pp 177-181.

Caplow, Theodore. 1956. The Dynamics of Information Interviewing. American Journal of

Sociology, Vol 62(2), pp 165-171.

Card, Claudia. 1996. Rape as a Weapon of War. Hypatia, Vol 11(4), pp 5-18.

____ 2000. Women, Evil, and Grey Zones. Metaphilosophy, Vol 31(5), pp 509-528.

____ 2002. The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil. New York: Oxford University Press.

Carlson, Eric Stener. 2006. The Hidden Prevalence of Male Sexual Assault during War:

Observations on Blunt Trauma to the Male Genitals. British Journal of Criminology, Vol

46(1), pp 16-25.

162

Carpenter, Charli R. 2006. Recognizing Gender-Based Violence against Civilian Men and Boys

in Conflict Situations. Security Dialogue, Vol 37(1), pp 83-103.

Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore &

London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chaitin, Julia. 2003. “I Wish He Hadn’t Told Me That”: Methodological and Ethical Issues in Social

Trauma and Conflict Research. Qualitative Health Research, Vol 13(8), pp 1145-1154.

Chamberlayne, Prue; Bornat, Joanna; Wengraf, Tom (Eds). 2000. The Turn to Biographical

Methods in Social Science: Comparative Issues and Examples. London: UK: Routledge.

Chedgzoy, Kate. 2007. Introduction: Gender. In Rossington, Michael & Whitehead, Anne (Eds).

Theories of Memory: A Reader. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, pp 216-219.

Chesterman, Simon. 1997. Never Again … And Again: Law, Order, and the Gender of War

Crimes in Bosnia and Beyond. Yale Journal of International Law, Vol 22(2), pp 299-343.

Child, Ben. 2010. Angelina Jolie is Unfit Ambassador, Bosnian activists tell United Nations. The

Guardian, 1 December 2010.

Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/nov/30/angelina-jolie-bosnia-un-

ambassador Accessed: 2 January 2017.

Chow, Rey. 1992. Postmodern Automatons. In Butler, Judith & Scott, Joan W. Feminists Theorize

the Political. New York: Routledge.

Clancy, Tim. 2004. Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Bradt Travel Guide. Buckinghamshire, England:

Bradt Travel Guides.

Clausewitz, Carl von. 1976. On War. Edited and translated by Michael Eliot Howard and Peteer

Paret. New York: Princeton University Press.

Clifford, James. 1990. Notes on (Field)notes. In Sanjek, Roger (Ed). Fieldnotes: The Makings of

Anthropology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp 47-70.

CNN. 2001. Massacre Suspect Due Before U.N. CNN.com/World, 16 April 2001. Available at:

http://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/04/16/bosnia.arrest.02/ Accessed: 13 January

2013.

Cockburn, Cynthia. 1998. The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in

Conflict. London & New York: Zed Books.

Cohen, Paul A. 2014. History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis.

New York: Columbia University Press.

163

Cohen, Stanley. 2001. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge:

Polity Press.

Coker, Elizabeth Marie. 2004. ‘Travelling Pains’: Embodied Metaphors of Suffering among

Southern Sudanese Refugees in Cairo. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Vol 28(1), pp

15-39.

Confino, Alon. 1997. Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method. American

Historical Review, Vol 102(5), pp 1386-1403.

____ 2010. On the Liberation of the Tyranny of the Past: Arabs and Jews in Israel. Historically

Speaking, Vol 11(5), pp 30-32.

Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge

University Press.

____ 2008. Seven Types of Forgetting. Memory Studies, Vol 1(1), pp 59-71.

Conroy, Pat. 1986. The Prince of Tides. New York: Houghton-Mifflin.

Copelon, Rhonda. 1994. Surfacing Gender: Reconceptualizing Crimes against Women in times

of War. In Stiglmayer, Alexandra (Ed). Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-

Herzegovina. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, pp 197-218.

Cousens, Elizabeth M. & Cater, Charles K. 2001. Toward Peace in Bosnia: Implementing the

Dayton Accords. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Crăiuțu, Aurelian. 2013. On Happiness in Unusual Places: N. Steinhardt’s Uplifting Lesson. In

Bradatan, Costica (Ed). Philosophy, Society and the Cunning of History in Eastern Europe.

Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Craps, Stef. 2012. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan.

Csordas, Thomas J. 1993. Somatic Modes of Attention. Cultural Anthropology, Vol 8(2), pp 135-

156.

Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures.

Durham: Duke University Press.

Dahlman, Carl & Ó Tuathail, Geróid. 2005. Broken Bosnia: The Localized Geopolitics of

Displacement and Return in Two Bosnian Places. Annals of the Association of American

Geographers, Vol 95(3), pp 644-662.

164

Daniel-Wrabetz, Joana. 2007. Children Born of War Rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the

Convention on the Rights of the Child. In Carpenter, R. Charli (Ed). 2007. Born of War:

Protecting Children of Sexual Violence Survivors in Conflict Zones. Bloomfield, CT:

Kumarian Press Inc.

Danner, Mark. 1997. America and the Bosnia Genocide. New York Review of Books, Vol 44(19),

4 December 1997. Available at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/12/04/america-and-

the-bosnia-genocide/ Accessed: 27 July 2013.

____ 2009. Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War. Melbourne: Black Inc.

Das, Veena. 2006. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley and Los

Angeles, California: University of California Press.

____ 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley and Los

Angeles, California: University of California Press.

Das, Veena & Kleinman, Arthur. 2001. Introduction. In Das, Veena; Kleinman, Arthur, Lock,

Margaret M.; Ramphele, Mamphela & Reynolds, Pamela (Eds). Remaking a World:

Violence, Social Suffering and Recovery. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp 1-30.

Dasberg, Haim. 1992. The Unfinished Story of Trauma as a Paradigm for Psychotherapists (A

Review and some Empirical Findings on Paradigms and Prejudices. Israel Journal of

Psychiatry and Related Sciences, Vol 29(1), pp 44-60.

Davis, John. 1977. People of the Mediterranean: An Essay in Comparative Social Anthropology.

London: Routledge.

Dawidowicz, Lucy S. 1975. The War against the Jews: 1933-1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart &

Winston.

Dawson, Andrew. 2008. Post-War Settlements and the Production of New Illegalities: The Case

of Dayton and People Trafficking and Prostitution in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dialectical

Anthropology, Vol 32(1), pp 123-127.

___ 2009. Serbian National Resurrection: Myths of Waiting and Being. In Hage, Ghassan (Ed).

Waiting. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, pp 150-169.

___ 2015. The Road to Srebrenica: Automobility and Belonging in a PostSocialist/War Milieu.

Anthropological Notebooks, Vol 21(2), pp 5-25.

___ 2017. Driven to Sanity: An Ethnographic Critique of the Senses in Automobilities. The

Australian Journal of Anthropology, Vol 28(1), pp3-20.

Dawson, Graham. 1994. Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of

Masculinities. London: Routledge.

165

D’Costa, Bina. 2006. Marginalized Identity: New Frontiers of Research for IR? In Ackerly, Brooke,

Stern, Maria, & True, Jacqui (Eds). Feminist Methodologies for International Relations.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 129-152.

DeVault, Marjorie L. 1990. Talking and Listening from Women’s Standpoint: Feminist Strategies

for Interviewing and Analysis. Social Problems, Vol 37(1), pp 96-116.

____ 1999. Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research. Philadelphia: Temple University

Press.

Dickson-Swift, Virginia; James, Erica L; Kippen, Sandra & Liamputtong, Pranee. 2009.

Researching Sensitive Topics: Qualitative Research as Emotion Work. Qualitative

Research, Vol 9(1), pp 61-79.

Diken, Bülent & Laustsen, Carsten Bagge. 2005. Becoming Abject: Rape as a Weapon of War.

Body and Society, Vol 11(1), pp 111-128.

Djokić, Dejan. 2009. Whose Myth? Which Nation? The Serbian Kosovo Myth Revisited. In János

M. Bak; Jörg Jarnut; Pierre Monnet & Bernd Schneidmüeller (Eds). Uses and Abuses of

the Middle Ages: 19th-21st Century. Munich: Wilhelm Fink.

Dolgopol, Ustinia.1997. A Feminist Appraisal of the Dayton Peace Accords. Adelaide Law

Review, Vol 19(1), pp 59-71.

Donia, Robert, J. & Fine, John V.A. Jr. 1994. Bosnia-Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed. New

York: Columbia University Press.

Drakulić, Slavenka. 1993. Women Behind a Wall of Silence. In Ali, Rabia & Lifschulz, Lawrence

(Eds). Why Bosnia? Writings on the Balkan War. Stony Creek Conn: Pamphleteer’s Press.

____ 1994. The Rape of Women in Bosnia. In Davies, Miranda (Ed). Women and Violence:

Realities and Responses Worldwide. London: Zed Books, pp 176-181

Duijzings, Ger. 2000. Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo. London: Hurst & Company.

____ 2003. Ethnic Unmixing Under the Aegis of the West: A Transnational Approach to the

Breakup of Yugoslavia. Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies, Vol 5(2), pp 1-

16.

____ 2007. Commemorating Srebrenica: Histories of Violence and the Politics of Memory in

Eastern Bosnia. In Bougarel, Xavier; Helms, Elissa & Duijzings, Ger (Eds). The New

Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories, and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society. Aldershot,

UK: Ashgate, pp 141-166.

Durkheim, Émile. 1954. Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: The Free Press.

166

Dwyer, Leslie. 2004. The Intimacy of Terror: Gender and the Violence of 1965-66 in Bali.

Intersections: Gender, History, and Culture in the Asian Context, Vol 10(2). Available at:

http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue10/dwyer.html

Dwyer, Leslie & Santikarma, Degung. 2007. Posttraumatic Politics: Violence, Memory, and

Biomedical Discourse in Bali. In Kirmayer, Lawrence J; Lemelson, Robert & Barad, Mark

(Eds). Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical and Cultural Perspectives.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 403-432.

Edkins, Jenny. 2003. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1987. Women and War. New York: Basic Books.

Emmert, Thomas Allan. 1990. Serbian Golgotha: Kosovo 1389. New York: East European

Monographs.

Encyclopaedia Britannica [Online]. 2017. Shariah. Available at:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Shariah Accessed: 16 November, 2017.

Engle, Karen. 2005. Feminism and its (Dis)contents: Criminalizing Wartime Rape in Bosnia and

Herzegovina. The American Journal of International Law, Vol 99(4), pp 778-816.

____ 2008. Judging Sex in War. Michigan Law Review, Vol 106(6), pp 941-962.

Enloe, Cynthia. 1994. Afterward. In Stiglmayer, Alexandra (Ed). Mass Rape: The War Against

Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp 219-230.

Ericsson, Kjersti. 2011. Rape, Love and War – Personal or Political? Theoretical Criminology, Vol

15(1), pp 67-82.

Erikson, Kai. 1995. Notes on Trauma and Community. In Cathy Caruth (Ed). Trauma:

Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp 183-1999.

Eriksson, Maria. 2010. Defining Rape: Emerging Obligations for States under International Law?

PhD Dissertation, Örebro University, School of Law, Psychology, and Social Work.

Erll, Astrid & Nünning, Ansgar (Eds). 2008. Cultural Memory Studies: An International and

Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter.

Etherington, Kim. 2007. Working with Traumatic Stories: From Transcriber to Witness.

International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Vol 10(2), pp 85-97.

Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1953. The Sacrificial Role of Cattle among the Nuer. Africa, Vol 23,

pp 181-197.

167

Farquhar, Judith. 2002. Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China. London: Duke

University Press.

Farrell, Kirby. 1998. Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press.

Feldman, Allen. 2004. Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma-Aesthetic.

Biography, Vol 27(1), pp 163-202.

Fentress, James & Wickham, Chris. 1992. Social Memory. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Filice Ivana, Vincent Christine, Adams Amina & Bajramović Fersada. 1994. Women Refugees

from Bosnia-Herzegovina: Developing a Culturally Sensitive Counselling Framework.

International Journal of Refugee Law, Vol 6(2), pp 207-226.

Fisher, Siobhán K. 1996. Occupation of the Womb: Forced Impregnation as Genocide. Duke

Law Journal, Vol 91, pp 93-110.

Foreign Investment Promotion Agency of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FIPA). 2008. Investment

Opportunities in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Fifth Edition, February 2008. Available at:

http://www.ascendant.hr/docs/investment.pdf Accessed: 10 March 2013.

Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. A.M.

Sheridan Smith (Trans). London: Tavistock.

____ 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. A.M. Sheridan Smith (Trans). New York: Pantheon

Books.

____ 1998. The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, Volume I. Random House (Trans).

London: Penguin.

Freedberg, David. 1985. Iconoclasts and their Motives. Maarssen: Gary Schwartz.

French, Brigittine M. 2012. ‘The Semiotics of Collective Memories’, Annual Review of

Anthropology, Vol 41, pp 337-353.

Freud, Sigmund. 1919. The Uncanny, In Strachey, James (Ed). The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol XVII) (1917: 1919): An Infantile

Neurosis and Other Works. London: Hogarth Press.

Friedlander, Saul (Ed). 1992. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final

Solution’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Fuller, Lenora R. 1997. Bosnia Peace Operation: Progress Toward Achieving the Dayton

Agreement’s Goals. Collingdale, PA: DIANE Publishing.

168

Gal, Susan. 1989. Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language

and Gender. IPrA Papers in Pragmatics, Vol 3(1), pp 1-38.

Gasengayire, Monique. 2005. Murekatete, un Temoignage (im)possible. Et Gallimore, Rangira B.

& Kalisa, Chantal (Eds). Dix Ans Apres: Reflexions sur le Genocide Rwandais. Paris:

L’Harmattan, pp 143-160.

Gebhardt, Miriam. 2017. The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War.

Somers, Nick (Trans). Cambridge, UK & Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Geertz, Clifford. 1974. ‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological

Understanding. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol 28(1), pp 26-

45.

Geographic Guide (Maps of Europe). Undated. Map of Bosnia and Herzegovina & Bosnia and

Herzegovina (Post-War Ethnic Composition).

Available at: http://www.geographicguide.com/europe-maps/bosnia.htm Accessed: 6 February

2013.

Gilbert, Martin. 1986. The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy. London: Harper Collins.

Glenny, Misha. 1992. The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War. New York: Penguin Books.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma. London: Penguin.

____ 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior. Chicago: Aldine.

____ 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience. Boston: Northeastern

University Press.

Goldberg, Daniel S. 2009. Exilic Effects of Illness and Pain in Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward: How

Sharpening the Moral Imagination can Facilitate Repatriation. Journal of Medical

Humanities, Vol 30(1), pp 29-42.

Goldberg, Jonathan. 1985. Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power. In Patricia Parker

& Geoffrey Hartman (Eds). Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. London: Methuen,

pp 116-137.

Goldstein, Joshua S. 2001. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice

Versa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

González, Olga M. 2011. Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Good, Mary Jo DelVecchio; Brodwin, Paul E and Good, Byron J (Eds). 1992. Pain as Human

Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press.

169

Gordon, Avery F. 1997. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Gottschall, Jonathan. 2004. Explaining Wartime Rape. Journal of Sex Research, Vol 41(2), pp

129-136.

Gough, Mark. 2002. Human Security: The Individual in the Security Question – The Case of

Bosnia. Contemporary Security Policy, Vol 23(3), pp 145-191.

Gow, James. 2003. The Serbian Project and its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes. London:

Hurst & Co.

Graham, Lucy Valerie. 2003. Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.

Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol 29(2), pp 433-444.

Grandits, Hannes. 2007. The Power of ‘Armchair Politicians’: Ethnic Loyalty and Political

Factionalism among Herzegovinian Croats. In Bougarel, Xavier; Helms, Elissa & Duijzings,

Ger (Eds). The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories, and Moral Claims in a Post-

War Society. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, pp 101-122.

Griswold, Charles L. and Griswold, Stephen S. 1986. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the

Washington Mall: Philosophical Thoughts on Political Iconography. Critical Inquiry, Vol

12(4), pp 688-719.

Grossmann, Atina. 1995. A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation

Soldiers. In Merritt, Richard (Ed). Democracy Imposed: U.S. Policy and the German Public,

1945-1949. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp 33-52.

Guterson, Hugh. 1997. Studying Up Revisited. Political and Legal Anthropology Review (POLAR),

Vol 20(1), pp 114-119.

Gutman, Roy. 1992. Bosnians Deported in Sealed Rail Cars Muslim says, ‘Like Jews to

Auschwitz’. Newsday, July 21, 1992. Available at: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1992-

07-23/news/1992205081_1_banja-freight-cars-serbs-in-bosnia Accessed: 3 June 2016.

____ 1993. A Witness to Genocide. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company.

Hadžišehović, Munevera. 2003. A Muslim Woman in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Butler, Thomas &

Risaluddin, Saba (Trans). College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press.

Halberstam, David. 2001. War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals. New York,

NY: Scribner, [especially] p 130.

Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago & London: University of Chicago

Press.

170

Hansen, Lene. 2001. Gender, Nation, Rape: Bosnia and the Construction of Security.

International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol 3(1), pp 55-75.

Hardy, Jacky. 2001. Everything Old is New Again: The Use of Gender-Based Terrorism Against

Women. Gender Watch Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military, Vol 19(2),

pp 3-38.

Harris, Verne. 2002. The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa. Archival

Science, Vol 2(1-2), pp 63-86.

Hašečić, Bakira. 2010. Open Letter to Jolie. The Balkan Chronicle, 7 November 2010. Available

at: http://www.thesoulshattering.net/TSS-WEB-PAGES/PDF/October_25__2010_-

_An_open_letter_to_A.J..pdf Accessed: 8 January 2017.

Hashmi, Mobina. 2005. Embodying the Nation: Gender, Violence and Memory during the

Partition of British India in 1947. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the

International Communication Association, New Orleans, LA. Available at:

www.allacademic.com/meta/p113378_index.html

Haskin, Jeanne M. 2006. Bosnia and Beyond: The ‘quiet’ Revolution that Wouldn’t Go Quietly.

Hayden, Robert M. 2000. Rape and Rape Avoidance in Ethno-National Conflicts: Sexual Violence

in Liminalized States. American Anthropologist, Vol 102(1), pp 27-42.

____ 2012. From Yugoslavia to the Western Balkans: Studies of a European Disunion, 1991-

2011. Leiden, The Netherlands: BRILL.

Helms, Elissa. 2012. Bosnian Girl: Nationalism and Innocence through Images of Women. In

Daniel Šuber & Slobodan Karamanić (Eds). Retracing Images: Visual Culture after

Yugoslavia. London: Brill, pp 195-222.

____ 2013. Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women’s Activism in Post-War

Bosnia. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.

____ 2014. Rejecting Angelina: Bosnian War Rape Survivors and the Ambiguities of Sex in War.

Slavic Review, Vol 73(3), pp 612-634.

Henke, Suzette A. 1998. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing.

New York, N.Y: St Martin’s Press.

Henry, Nicola. 2008. Wartime Rape, Collective Memory and the Law. Interview with Dr Nicola

Henry conducted by Cameron Boyd. ACSSA Newsletter, No 19. Available at:

https://aifs.gov.au/sites/default/files/publication-documents/acssa_news19.pdf Accessed:

18 April 2015.

171

____ 2010. The Impossibility of Bearing Witness: Wartime Rape and the Promise of Justice.

Violence Against Women, Vol 16(1), pp 1098-1119.

____ 2011. War and Rape: Law, Memory and Justice. London: Routledge.

____ 2014. The Fixation on Wartime Rape: Feminist Critique and International Criminal Law.

Social & Legal Studies, Vol 23(1), pp 93-111.

Herman, Judith. 1992. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse

to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books.

Heru, Alison, M. 2001. The Linkage Between Gender and Victimhood. International Journal of

Social Psychiatry, Vol 47(3), pp 10-20.

Herzfeld, Michael. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York:

Routledge.

Hetherington, Kevin. 2004. Secondhandedness: Consumption, Disposal and Absent Presence.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol 22(1), pp 157-173.

Hewitt, Kim. 1997. Mutilating the Body: Identity in Blood and Ink. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling

Green State University Popular Press.

Highmore, Ben. 2002. The Everyday Life Reader. New York: Routledge.

Hilberg, Raul. 1985 [1961]. The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.

____ 1992. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945. New York:

Aron Asher Books.

Hirsch, Marianne & Smith, Valerie. 2002. Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction. Signs:

Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol 28(1), pp 1-19.

Hlavka, Heather R; Kruttschnitt, Candace & Carbone-López, Kristin C. 2007. Revictimizing the

Victims? Interviewing Women about Interpersonal Violence. Journal of Interpersonal

Violence, Vol 22(7), pp 894-920.

Hobsbawm, Eric & Ranger, Terence O (Eds). 1992. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Hook, Derek. 2005. Monumental Space and the Uncanny. Geoforum, Vol 36(6), pp 688-704.

Hooks, Bell. 1989. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press.

172

Hopkins, Valerie. 2011. ‘Angelina Jolie touched our souls’ – Bosnia’s rape victims have their say.

The Guardian, 15 December 2011.

Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2011/dec/15/angelina-jolie-bosnia-

rape-victims Accessed: 8 January 2017.

____ 2012. Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut gives voice to Bosnian war’s women. The National,

14 April 2012. Available at: https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/angelina-jolie-s-

directorial-debut-gives-voice-to-bosnian-war-s-women-1.447271 Accessed: 8 January

2017.

Horowitz, Sara. 1998. Women in Holocaust Literature: Engendering Trauma Memory. In Dalia

Ofer & L.J. Weitzman (Eds). Women in the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press,

pp 364-377.

Housing Sector Task Force. 1999. War Damaged Residential Buildings and Status on

Repair/Reconstruction and Funding Requirement. Sarajevo: International Management

Group.

Hubert, Henri & Mauss, Marcel. 1898. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. W.D. Halls (trans).

(1964). London: Cohen & West.

Hulleman, Bengt-Arne B.F. & Govers, Robert. 2011. The Hague, International City of Peace and

Justice: A Relational Network Brand. In Dinnie, Keith (Ed). City Branding: Theory and

Cases. London: Palgrave MacMillan, pp 150-156.

Human Rights Watch (HRW). 1997. Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Unindicted: Reaping the

Rewards of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’. Human Rights Watch General Reports, Vol 9(1). Available

at: http://pantheon.hrw.org/reports/1997/bosnia2/ Accessed: 2 May 2015.

____ 1998. Bosnia and Herzegovina: ‘A Closed Dark Place’: Past and Present Human Rights

Abuses in Foča. Vol 10(6). New York, NY: Human Rights Watch. Available at:

https://www.hrw.org/report/1998/07/01/closed-dark-place/past-and-present-human-rights-

abuses-foca Accessed: 2 February 2017.

Husić, Sabiha; Šiljak Irma; Osmanović, Emina; Đekić Ferida; and Heremić, Lejla. 2014. “We are

still alive”: Research on the Coping Strategies of Survivors in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Zenica: Medica Mondiale & Medica Zenica. Available at:

http://www.medicamondiale.org/fileadmin/redaktion/5_Service/Mediathek/Dokumente/Engli

sh/Documentations_studies/141128_Research_We-Are-Still-Alive_CR-Medica-

Zenica_medica-mondiale.pdf Accessed: 22 November 2017.

Hutton, Patrick. 1988. Collective Memory and Collective Mentalities: The Halbwachs-Aries

Connection. Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, Vol 15(2), pp 311-322.

173

Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Palimpests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press.

Iacobelli, Teresa. 2008. The Sum of Such Actions: Investigating Mass Rape in Bosnia-

Herzegovina through a Case Study of Foča. In Dagmar Herzog (Ed). Brutality and Desire:

War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 261-

283.

Ibrahimpasić, Emira. 2012. Women Living Islam in Post-War and Post-Socialist Bosnia and

Herzegovina (PhD Dissertation), Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico.

Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/1928/21042

Ingrao, Charles. 2013. Introduction. In Ingrao, Charles & Emmert (Eds). Thomas A. Confronting

the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholar’s Initiative (Second Edition). West Lafayette, India:

Purdue University Press.

Inić, Slobodan. Undated. Biljana Plavšić: Geneticist in the Service of a Great Crime. Bosnia

Report. Available at: http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/bosnia/plavsic.html Accessed: 28

September 2016.

Institute for War and Peace Reporting. 2010. Serb Witness Tells of Banja Luka ‘Terror’, 31 May

2010. Available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/4c662f88.html Accessed: 13 December

2018.

International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP); Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and

Herzegovina (MPI) & Centre for Free Access to Information (CSpi). Guide for Civilian

Victims of War, 2007. Sarajevo: International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP).

Available at: https://www.icmp.int/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/guidebook-wictim-of-war-

rs.pdf Accessed 16 November, 2017.

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Undated. Case of The

Prosecutor of the Tribunal vs. Duško Tadić, 1995-2008 (Case No: IT-94-1-T). Available at:

http://www.icty.org/case/tadic/4 Accessed: 1 December 2017.

____ Undated. Case of The Prosecutor of the Tribunal vs. Anto Furundžija, 1995-2008 (Case

No: IT-95-17/1-T). Available at: http://www.icty.org/case/furundzija/4 Accessed: 1

December 2017.

____ Undated. Case of The Prosecutor of the Tribunal vs. Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovač,

and Zoran Vuković, 1996-2013 (Case No: IT-96-23 & 23/1). Available at:

http://www.icty.org/case/kunarac/4 Accessed: 1 December 2017.

____ Undated. Case of The Prosecutor of the Tribunal vs. Radislav Krstić (Case No: IT-98-33)

Available at: http://www.icty.org/case/krstic/4 Accessed: 1 December 2017.

174

____ Undated. Case of The Prosecutor of the Tribunal vs. Zdravko Mucić, Hazim Delić, Esad

Landžo & Zejnil Delalić. Available at: http://www.icty.org/case/mucic/4 Accessed: 1

December 2017.

____ 2009. Case of The Prosecutor versus Milan Lukić and Sredoje Lukić: Public Judgement,

Available at: http://www.icty.org/x/cases/milan_lukic_sredoje_lukic/tjug/en/090720_j.pdf

Accessed: 21 December 2012.

International Crisis Group (ICG). 2010. Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Parallel Crisis.

ICG Europe Report No. 209. Sarajevo, Istanbul, Brussels. Available at:

https://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/balkans/bosnia-and-

herzegovina/federation-bosnia-and-herzegovina-parallel-crisis

____ 2011. Bosnia: State Institutions Under Attack. ICG Europe Briefing No. 62,

Sarajevo/Brussels. Available at: https://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-

asia/balkans/bosnia-and-herzegovina/bosnia-state-institutions-under-attack

Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona. 1994. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory.New

York: Routledge.

Jacobs, Janet. 2016. The Memorial at Srebrenica: Gender and the Social Meanings of Collective

Memory in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Memory Studies, [online], pp 1-17.

Jacobson, Mandy; Jelinčić, Karmen; Ormond, Julia; Rostock, Susanne & Delić, Mario. 1996.

Calling the Ghosts (Prozivanje Duhova). DVD. New York: Bowery Productions & Women

Make Movies.

Janesick, Valerie J. 2000. The Choreography of Qualitative Research Design: Minuets,

Improvisations, and Crystallisation. In Denzin, NK & Lincoln, YS (Eds). Strategies of

Qualifications Inquiry (Second Edition), Thousand Oakes, CA: SAGE, pp 46-79.

____ 2001. Intuition and Creativity: A Pas de Deux for the Qualitative Researcher. Qualitative

Inquiry, Vol 7(5), pp 531-540.

Jansen, Stef. 2002. The Violence of Memories: Local Narratives of the Past after Ethnic

Cleansing in Croatia. Rethinking History, Vol 6(1), pp 77-94.

____ 2006. The Privatisation of Home and Hope: Return, Reforms and the Foreign Intervention

in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Dialectical Anthropology, Vol 30(3-4), pp 177-199.

Jarvis, Michelle. 2016. Overview: The Challenge of Accountability for Conflict-Related Sexual

Violence Crimes. In Brammertz, Baron Serge & Jarvis, Michelle (Eds). Prosecuting

Conflict-Related Sexual Violence at the ICTY. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jayawardena, Kumari & de Alwis, Malathi de. 1996. Embodied Violence: Communalising

Women’s Sexuality in South Asia. London and New Jersey: Zed Books.

175

Jeffrey, Alex. 2013. The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton

Bosnia. Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Jenichen, Anne. 2010. Women and Peace in a Divided Society: Peace-Building Potentials of

Feminist Struggles and Reform Processes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Chandler, Robin M;

Fuller, Linda K & Wang, Lihua (Eds). Women, War, and Violence: Personal Perspectives

and Global Activism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 137-154.

Johnson, Hilde F. 2009. War’s Ultimate Secret Weapon: Stop Rape Now. UN Action Against

Sexual Violence in Conflict. 29 September, 2009.

Jones, Adam. 2004. Gendercide and Genocide. In Adam Jones (Ed). Gendercide and Genocide.

Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, pp1-38.

Jones, Briony; Jeffrey, Alex; & Jakala, Michaelina. 2012. The ‘Transitional Citizen’: Civil Society,

Political Agency and Hopes for Transitional Justice in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Olivera Simić &

Zalačič (Eds). Transitional Justice and Civil Society in the Balkans. New York: Springer

Science & Business Media.

Joshel, Sandra R. 1992. The Body Female and the Body Politic: Livy’s Lucretia and Verginia. In

Richlin, Amy (Ed). Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome. New York:

Oxford University Press.

Jović, Dejan. 2009. Yugoslavia: A State Withered Away. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University

Press.

Judah, Tim. 1997. The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. New Haven:

Yale University Press.

____ 2002. Kosovo: War and Revenge (Second Edition). New Haven CT & London: Yale

University Press.

Kesić, Vesna. 2002. Muslim Women, Croatian Women, Serbian Women, Albanian Women... In

DUSAN I, Bjelic & Obrad Savic (Eds). Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and

Fragmentation. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, pp 311-322.

____ 2003. Muslim Women, Croatian Women, Serbian Women, Albanian Women. Eurozine.

https://www.eurozine.com/muslim-women-croatian-women-serbian-women-albanian-

women/ Accessed: 6 July 2019.

Kidron, Carol. 2009. Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the

Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and their Descendants in Israel. Current

Anthropology, 50(1), pp5-19; Discussion pp 19-27.

176

King, Kimi L. & Meernik, James D. 2011. A Distant Court: Assessing the Impact of the

International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: Balancing International and

Local Interests while doing Justice. In Swart, Bert; Zahar, Alexander & Sluiter, Göran

(Eds). The Legacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, pp 7-54.

Kleinman, Arthur; Brodwin, Paul E; Good, Byron J; and Good, Mary Jo DelVecchio. 1992. Pain as

Human Experience: An Introduction. In Good, Mary Jo DelVecchio; Brodwin, Paul E and

Good, Byron J (Eds). Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective.

Berkeley: University of California Press, pp 1-28.

Kligman, Gail. 1996. Women and the Negotiation of Identity in Post-Communist Eastern Europe.

Bonnell, Victoria (Ed).Identities in Transition: Eastern Europe and Russia after the

Collapse of Communism. Berkeley: Center for Slavic and Eastern European Studies,

University of California at Berkewley.

Klile, Lene & Laustsen, Carsten Bagge. 2006. The Kosovo Myth: Nationalism and Revenge. In

Tonny Brems Knudsen & Carsten Bagge Laustsen (Eds). Kosovo between War and

Peace: Nationalism, Peacebuilding and International Trusteeship. London: Routledge, pp

19-36.

Klungel, Janine. 2012. Rape and Remembrance in Guadeloupe. In Argenti, Nicholas & Schramm,

Katharina (Eds). Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on

Intergenerational Transmission. New York: Berghahn Books, pp 41-59.

Knaus, Gerald & Martin, Felix. 2003. Travails of the European Raj – Lessons from Bosnia and

Herzegovina. Journal of Democracy, Vol 14(3), pp 60-74.

Kohn, Hans. 1945. The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background. New York:

The Macmillan Company.

Kosovo Institute for Policy Research and Development (KIPRED). 2014. Interethnic Relations in

the Western Balkans: Implications for Kosovo. Policy Paper No. 6/14. Priština: Kosovo.

Available at:

http://www.kipred.org/repository/docs/INTERETHNIC_RELATIONS_IN_THE_WESTERN_

BALKANS_IMPLICATIONS_FOR_KOSOVO_321833.pdf

Kressel, Neil Jeffrey. 1996. Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror. New York:

Springer.

____ 2002. Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror. New York: Basic Books.

Kurtalići, 2012. Bosnia and Herzegovina. Razno.

Available at: http://kurtalici.blogspot.com.au/p/razno.html Accessed: November, 2012.

177

Kvale, Steinar. 1996. Interviews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. Thousand

Oaks, CA: SAGE.

LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press.

Lambek, Michael. 1996. The Past Imperfect: Remembering as Moral Practice. In Paul Antze and

Michael Lambek (Eds). Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York

and London: Routledge, pp 235-254.

Langer, Lawrence L. 1978. The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature. Boston: Beacon

Press.

____ 1982. Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit. Albany, New York: State

University of New York Press.

____ 1991. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven & London: Yale

University Press.

____ 2000. Preempting the Holocaust. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Laqueur, Thomas W. 2002. Introduction. Representations, Vol 69 (Special Issue: Grounds for

Remembering), pp 1-8.

Laub, Dori. 1992. Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening. In Felman, Shoshana & Laub,

Dori (Eds). Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psycoanalysis, and History. New

York: Routledge.

Lauterpacht, Elihu; Greenwood, CJ; Oppenheimer, AG. 1999. International Law Reports, Volume

112. Cambridge University Press.

Leder, Drew. 1984. Medicine and Paradigms of Embodiment. Journal of Medicine and

Philosophy, Vol 9(1), pp 29-44.

____ 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Lee, Sabine. 2017. Children Born of War in the Twentieth Century. Manchester: Manchester

University Press.

Le Goff, Jacques. 1992. History and Memory. Rendall, Steven & Claman, Elizabeth (Trans).

New York: Columbia University Press.

Lentin, Ronit. 1999. The Rape of the Nation: Women Narrativising Genocide. Sociological

Research Online, Vol 4(2), Available at: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/4/2/lentin.html

178

____ 2006. Femina Sacra: Gendered Memory and Political Violence. Women’s Studies

International Forum, Vol 29(5), pp 463-473.

Levi, Primo. 1965. The Reawakening. Trans. by Stuart Woolf. New York: Touchstone Books.

____ 1981. Moments of Reprieve. Trans. by Ruth Feldman. London: Abacus.

____ 1987. If This Is A Man. Trans. Stuart Woolf. London: Abacus.

____ 1989. The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. by Raymond Rosenthal. London: Abacus.

____ 1996. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Trans. Stuart Woolf. New

York: Touchstone Books.

____ 2001. The Voice of Memory: Interviews, 1961-1987. Trans. by Robert Gordon.

Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Leydesdorff, Selma; Passerini, Luisa; & Thompson, Paul (Eds). 2005. Gender and Memory

(Memory and Narrative Series). New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers.

Lieberman, Benjamin. 2013. The Holocaust and Genocides in Europe. London: Bloomsbury

Academic.

Lilly, Carol S. & Irvine, Jill A. 2002. Negotiating Interests: Women and Nationalism in Serbia and

Croatia, 1990-1997. East European Politics and Societies, Vol 16(1), pp 109-144.

Lindsey, Rose. 2002. From Atrocity to Data: Historiographies of Rape in Former Yugoslavia and

the Gendering of Genocide. Patterns of Prejudice, Vol 36(4), pp 59-78.

Lippman, Peter. 2012. Bosnia: Blood, Honey, and War’s Legacy. Open Democracy, 7 February

2012. Available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/peter-lippman/bosnia-blood-honey-

and-wars-legacy Accessed: 7 January 2017.

Lipsitz, George. 1990. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Maass, Peter. 1996. Bosnia’s Ground Zero. Vanity Fair, March, 1996. Available at:

http://www.petermaass.com/articles/bosnias_ground_zero/ Accessed: 2 March 2016.

____ 1997. Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War. London: Vintage Books.

MacKinnon, Catharine. 1994. Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide. In

Stiglmayer, Alexandra (Ed). Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp 73-81.

Malcolm, Noel. 2002. Bosnia: A Short History. Updated edition. London: Pan Books.

179

Mandel, Naomi. 2003. Ethics after Auschwitz: The Holocaust in History and Representation.

Criticism, Vol 45(4), pp 509-518.

Marcus, George E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited

Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol 24, pp 95-117.

Marcus, Sharon. 1992. Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape

Prevention. In Butler, Judith & Scott, Joan W (Eds). Feminists Theorize the Political. New

York: Routledge, pp 385-403.

Marcus, Paul & Rosenberg, Alan. 1991. The Religious Life of Holocaust Survivors and its

Significance for Psychotherapy. In Berger, Alan L. (Ed). Bearing Witness to the Holocaust

1939-1989. Lewiston, Maine: Edwin Mellen Press, pp 165-206.

Markowitz, Fran. 2010. Sarajevo: A Bosnian Kaleidoscope. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Mayer, Tamar (Ed). 2000. Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation. London and New

York: Routledge.

McAdam, Marika, Jayne D’Arcy, Chris Deliso & Peter Dragičević, Mark Elliott, Vesna Marić &

Anja Mutić. 2009. ‘Bosnia & Hercegovina’. In Western Balkans. Second edition. London:

Lonely Planet, pp 101-168.

McChesney, Lea S. 2010. The Body Breaks: Narrating Child Sexual Abuse through Transcultural

Metaphors of Bodily Disease. Voices, Vol 10(1), pp 31-37.

McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest.

New York: Routledge.

McKenzie-Mohr, Suzanne & Lafrance, Michelle N. 2011. Telling Stories without Words: ‘Tightrope

Talk’ in Women’s Accounts of Coming to Live Well after Rape or Depression. Feminism &

Psychology, Vol 21(1), pp 49-73.

McKinney, Kelly. 2007. Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence: Testimony, Traumatic Memory, and

Psychotherapy with Survivors of Political Violence. Ethos: Journal of the Society for

Psychological Anthropology, Vol 35(3), pp 265-299.

Mead, Margaret. 1964. Warfare is Only an Invention – Not a Biological Necessity. In Bramson,

Leon & Goethals, George W. (Eds). War: Studies from Psychology, Sociology,

Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

Menon, Ritu & Bhasin, Kamla. 1998. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. New

Brunswick & New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

180

Mežnarić, Silvia. 1994. Gender as an Ethno-Marker: Rape, War and Identity Politics in the Former

Yugoslavia. Moghadam, Valentine M (Ed). Identity, Politics and Women: Cultural

Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective. Boulder CO: Westview Press,

pp 76-97.

Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees. 2003. Comparative Indicators on Refugees, Displaced

Persons and Returnees, Property Law Implementation and Reconstruction in BiH from

1991 to 30 June 2003. Sarajevo: Bosnia and Herzegovina Ministry for Human Rights and

Refugees.

Mischkowski, Gabriella & Milinarević, Gorana. 2009. ‘… and that it does not happen to anyone

anywhere in the world’: The Trouble with Rape Trials. Views of Witnesses, Prosecutors,

and Judges on Prosecuting Sexualised Violence During the War in the Former Yugoslavia.

Köln: Medica Mondiale. Available at:

http://www.medicamondiale.org/fileadmin/redaktion/5_Service/Mediathek/Dokumente/Engli

sh/Documentations_studies/medica_mondiale_and_that_it_does_not_happen_to_anyone_

anywhere_in_the_world_english_complete_version_dec_2009.pdf Accessed: 15

December 2017.

Moeller, Robert. 2001. War Stories: The Search for a Useable Past in the Federal Republic of

Germany. Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press.

Mookherjee, Nayanika. 2002. ‘A Lot of History’: Sexual Violence, Public Memory in the

Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. PhD Dissertation. University of London, School of

Oriental and African Studies.

____ 2006. ‘Remembering to Forget’: Public Secrecy and Memory of Sexual Violence in the

Bangladesh War of 1971’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol 12(2), pp

433-450.

____ 2008. Gendered Embodiments: Mapping the Body-Politic of the Raped Woman and the

Nation in Bangladesh. Feminist Review, Special Issue on War, Vol 88(1), pp 36-53.

____ 2012. The Absent Piece of Skin: Gendered, Racialized, and Territorial Inscriptions of

Sexual Violence during the Bangladesh War. Modern Asian Studies, Vol 46(6), pp 1572-

1601.

Moore, Adam. 2013. Peacebuilding in Practice: Local Experience in Two Bosnian Towns. Cornell

University Press.

Morris, Virginia & Scharf, Michael P. 1995. An Insider’s Guide to the International Criminal

Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: A Documentary History and Analysis. Irvington-on-

Hudson, NY: Transnational Publishers.

181

Morus, Christina. 2007. The SANU Memorandum: Intellectual Authority and the Constitution of an

Exclusive Serbian ‘People’. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Vol 4(2), pp 142-

165.

____ 2014. Bosnian Genocide Victims. In Bartrop Paul R. & Jacobs, Leonard Steven (Eds).

Modern Genocide: The Definitive Resource and Document Collection. Santa Barbara,

California: ABC-CLIO, pp 191-193.

Moser, Caroline & McIlwaine, Cathy. 2004. Encounters with Violence in Latin America: Urban

Poor Perceptions from Colombia and Guatemala. New York: Routledge.

Mosse, George L. 1990. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York:

Oxford University Press.

Mostov, Julie. 1995. Our Women/Their Women: Symbolic Boundaries, Territorial Markers and

Violence in the Balkans. Peace and Change, Vol 20(4), pp 515-529.

Müller, Beate. 2012. Trauma, Historiography, and Polyphony: Adult Voices in the CJHC’s Early

Postwar Child Holocaust Testimonies. History and Memory, Vol 24(2), pp 157-195.

Munn, Jamie. 2008. The Hegemonic Male and Kosovar Nationalism, 2000-2005. Men and

Masculinities, Vol 10(4), pp 440-456.

Murray, Elisabeth Hope. 2015. Disrupting Pathways to Genocide: The Process of Ideological

Radicalization. England, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Music, Emina, Jacobsson, Lars; and Renberg, Ellinor Salander. 2014. Suicide in Bosnia and

Herzegovina and the City of Sarajevo (with special reference to ethnicity). Crisis: The

Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention, Vol 35(4), pp 42-50.

Muzej Sarajeva. Undated. Muzej Sarajeva (The Sarajevo Museum). Available at:

http://muzejsarajeva.ba/en/ Accessed: 13 December 2012.

Nance, Kimberly A. 2006. Can Literature Promote Justice? Trauma Narrative and Social Action in

Latin American Testimonio. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Narayan, Uma. 1997. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminism. New

York: Routledge.

Neier, Aryeh. 1998. War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror and the Struggle for Justice. New

York: Times Books.

Neimeyer, Robert, A; Prigerson, Holly, G. & Davies, Betty. 2002. Mourning and Meaning.

American Behavioural Scientist, Vol 46(2), pp 235-251.

182

Nettlefield, Lara J. 2010. Courting Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Hague Tribunal’s

Impact in a Postwar State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Newell, Richard. 2012. Bosnia Twenty Years On: Victims Return to Višegrad to Bury their Dead.

Open Democracy, 20 June 2012. Available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/richard-

newell/bosnia-twenty-years-on-victims-return-to-vi%c5%a1egrad-to-bury-their-dead

Accessed: 10 November 2012.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1969. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Walter Arnold

Kaufman (Trans). New York: Vintage Books.

Nikolić-Ristanović, Vesna. 2000. Women, Violence, and War: Wartime Victimization of Refugees

in the Balkans. Budapest: CEU Press.

____ 2002. Social Change, Gender and Violence: Post-Communist and War-Affected Societies.

Boston: Kluwer.

Nizich, Ivana. 1992. War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina: Volume II. New York: Human Rights

Watch.

____ 1994. Violations of the Rules of War by Bosnian Croat and Muslim Forces in Bosnia-

Herzegovina. Hastings Women’s Law Journal, Vol 5(1), pp 25-52.

Nora, Pierre. 1989. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations, No.

26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, pp 7-24.

____ 1997. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (Volume II): Traditions.

Trans. by Arthur Goldhammer & Edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Columbia

University Press.

Nordstrom, Carolyn. 1995. War on the Front Lines. In Nordstrom, Carolyn & Robben, Antonius

CGM (Eds). Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies in Violence and Survival.

Berkeley: University of California Press, pp 129-153.

____ 1996. Rape: Politics and Theory in War and Peace with Stribethrough. Australian

Feminist Studies, Vol 11(23), pp 147-162.

____ 2010. Simultaneity, Multi-plexity, Extra-Legal: Emerging Ideas in Times of Global Crisis.

AAS Working Papers in Social Anthropology, OEAW Arbeitspapiere zur

Sozialanthropologie.

Nordstrom, Carolyn & Robben, Antonius CGM (Eds). 1995. Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary

Studies in Violence and Survival. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Norma, Caroline. 2016. The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery during the China and

Pacific Wars. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

183

Nurković, Safet & Mirić, Ranko. 2006. The Political-Territorial System of Bosnia and Herzegovina

as a Factor of Transformation of the Regional-Geographical Structure. In Bufon, Milan;

Gosar, Anton; Nurković, Safet; André-Louis Sanguin (Eds). The Western Balkans: A

European Challenge. On the Decennial of the Dayton Peace Agreement. Koper: Založba

Annales, pp 421-436.

Oberti, Alejandra. 2006. Contarse a Sí Mismas: La Dimensión Biográfica en los Relatos de

Mujeres que Participaron en las Organizaciones Político-Militares de los ’70. Carnovale,

Vera; Lorenz, Federico; Pittaluga, Roberto E. (Eds). Historia, Memoria y Fuentes Orales.

Buenos Aires: CeDinCI, pp 45-62.

O’Brien, James C. 2010. The Dayton Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Miller, Laurel

(Ed). Framing the State in Times of Transition: Case Studies in Constitution Making.

Washington D.C: United States Institute of Peace Press, pp 332-349.

Okely, Judith. 2007. Fieldwork Embodied. The Sociological Review, Vol 55, Issue Supplement

S1 (Sociological Review Monograph Series: Embodying Sociology), 65-79.

Olick, Jeffrey K. 1999. Collective Memory: The Two Cultures. Sociological Theory, Vol 17(3), pp

333-348.

____ 2007. The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. New

York: Routledge.

Olick, Jeffrey K. & Robbins, Joyce. 1998. ‘Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to

the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices’, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol 24

(1998), pp 105-140.

Olujić, Maria B. 1995. Sexual Coercion and Torture in Former Yugoslavia. In Cultural Survival

Quarterly (Special Issue: Women and War), Vol 19(1), pp 43-54.

____ 1998. Embodiment of Terror: Gendered Violence in Peacetime and Wartime in Croatia

and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Vol 12(1), pp 31–50.

Omerdić, Muharem. 2002. The Position of the Islamic Community on the Care for Children of

Raped Mothers. In Tokaca, Mirsad (Ed). The Plucked Buds. Sarajevo: Commission for

Gathering Facts on War Crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, pp 428-432.

Orlović, Sandra. 2011. Transitional Justice in Post-Yugoslav Countries (Report for 2010-2011).

Humanitarian Law Center, Belgrade. Available at: http://www.recom.link/wp-

content/uploads/2014/12/Transitional-Justice-in-Post-Yugoslav-countries-2010-2011.pdf

Accessed: December, 2012.

Ornstein, Anna. 1985. Survival and Recovery. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Vol 5(1), pp 99-130.

184

Oskam, Kim. 2009. ‘I am trying to live’: War Rape Victims and their Position in Post- War Bosnia.

Unpublished thesis. Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Osterud, Nancy Grey & Jones, Lu Ann. 1989. If I Must Say So Myself: Oral Histories of Rural

Women. The Oral History Review, Vol 17(2), pp 1-23.

Ottenberg, Simon. 1990. Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text. In

Sanjek, R (Ed). Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, pp 139-160.

Ó Tuathail, Geróid & Dahlman, Carl. 2004. The Effort to Reverse Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-

Herzegovina: The Limits of Returns, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Vol 45(6), pp

439-464.

Oxford Dictionary [Online]. 2017. Fatwa.

Available at: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/fatwa Accessed 16 November,

2017.

Paković, Aleksandar. 2000. The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism and War in the

Balkans. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Paletschek, Sylvia & Schraut, Sylvia (Eds). 2008. The Gender of Memory: Cultures of

Remembrance in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

Palmberger, Monika. 2006. Making and Breaking Boundaries: Memory Discourses and Memory

Politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Milan Bufon, Anton Gosar, Safet Nurković, and

André-Louis Sanguin (Eds). The Western Balkans: A European Challenge: On the

Decennial of the Dayton Peace Agreement. Koper: Za-Ložba Annales, pp 525-536.

Paris, Erna. 2001. Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History. New York: Bloomsbury.

Parker, Noel. 2008. The Geopolitics of Europe’s Identity: Centers, Boundaries, and Margins. New

York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Parry, Albert. 2006. Tattoo: Secrets of a Strange Art. New York: Dover Publications.

Patruno, Nicholas. 1995. Primo Levi. Colombia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina

Press.

Peffer, John. 2005. Censorship and Iconoclasm: Unsettling Monuments. Res: Anthropology and

Aesthetics, Vol 48 (Autumn), pp 45-60.

Pellegrino, E.D. 1979. Toward a Reconstruction of Medical Morality: The Primacy of the Act of

Profession and the Fact of Illness. Journal of Medical and Philosophy, Vol 4(1), pp 32-56.

185

Perica, Vjekoslav. 2002. Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States. Oxford &

New York: Oxford University Press.

Perrot, Michelle (Ed). 1992. Writing Women’s History. Felicia Pheasant (Trans). Oxford, UK &

Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Perry, Valery. 2013. The 2013 Bosnia and Herzegovina Census: Waiting for Results and

Counting the Questions. Contemporary Southeastern Europe, Vol 2(2), pp 50-64.

Pešić, Vesna. 1996. Serbian Nationalism and the Origins of the Yugoslav Crisis. Peaceworks, No.

8. Washington: United States Institution for Peace. Available at:

http://www.usip.org/publications/serbian-nationalism-and-the-origins-the-yugoslav-crisis

Plummer, Ken. 1995. Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds. London:

Routledge.

Plutarch. 1931. Moralia, Volume III. Frank Cole Babbitt (Trans). Cambridge, Mass: Harvard

University Press.

Pollak, Michael. 1993. Une Identité Blessée. Etudes de Sociologie et d’Histoire. Paris: Métailié.

Power, Samantha. 2002. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. London:

Harper Perennial.

Priesner, Stefan; O’Donoghue, Lynne & Dedić. 2006. Transitional Justice in Bosnia and

Herzegovina: Findings of a Public Survey. Local-Global: Identity, Security, Community, Vol

2(1), pp 119-128. Available at: http://mams.rmit.edu.au/3bk59qvfdynr.pdf

Profitt, Norma Jean. 2000. Women Survivors, Psychological Trauma, and the Politics of

Resistance. New York: The Haworth Press.

Pupavac, Vanessa. 2004. International Therapeutic Peace and Justice in Bosnia. Social & Legal

Studies, Vol 13(3), pp 377-401.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Undated. Bosnia and Herzegovina (Pre-War Ethnic

Composition). Available at: http://www.rferl.org/a/lasting-ethnic-divisions-in-

bosnia/27363192.html Accessed: 6 February 2013.

Ramcharan, Bertrand G. 2011. Human Rights and U.N. Peace Operations: Yugoslavia. Leiden,

Holland & Boston, Massachusetts: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

Reading, Anna. 2002. The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Culture and Memory.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Redman, Peter. 1999. Boys in Love: Narrative, Identity and the Production of Heterosexual

Masculinities. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birmingham.

186

Reid-Cunningham, Allison Ruby. 2008. Rape as a Strategy of Genocide. Genocide Studies and

Prevention, Vol 3(3), pp 279-296.

Republika Srpska Institute of Statistics. 2009. Statistical Yearbook 2014 [online]. Available at:

www.rzs.rs.ba/. Accessed: 13 September 2016.

____ 2014. Statistical Yearbook 2014 [online]. Available at: www.rzs.rs.ba/. Accessed: 13

September 2016.

Research and Documentation Centre (Istraživačko Dokumentacioni Centar). 2013. Report

Analysing Centres in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Izvjestaj Analize po Centrima). Available at:

http://www.idc.org.ba/onama/izvjestaj_analize_po_centrima.html#podrinje Accessed: 13

November 2015.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1988. Time and Narrative (Volue III). Trans. Kathleen Blamey & David Pellauer.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

____ 1999. Memory and Forgetting. In Kearney, Richard & Dooley, Mark (Eds). Questioning

Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, London: Routledge, pp 5-11.

Rimmer, Susan Harris. 2010. Gender and Transitional Justice: The Women of East Timor.

London & New York: Routledge.

Rittner, Carol. 2009. Rape, Religion, and Genocide: An Unholy Silence. In Jacobs, Steven

Leonard (Ed). Confronting Genocide: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Lanham (MD):

Lexington Books, pp 291-305.

Robben, Antonius C.G.M. & Nordstrom, Carolyn. 1995. Introduction: The Anthropology and

Ethnography of Violence and Sociopolitical Conflict. In Nordstrom, Carolyn & Robben,

Antonius, C.G.M (Eds). Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and

Culture. Berkeley & London: University of California Press.

Robson, Angela. 1993. Rape: Weapons of War. New Internationalist, Issue 244. June 13-14.

Available at: http://www.newint.org/issue244/rape.htm Accessed: 6 July 2019.

Rogel, Carole. 1998. The Breakup of Yugoslavia and the War in Bosnia. Westport (CT) & London:

Greenwood Publishing Group.

Rousset, David. 1945. L’Univers Concentrationnaire. Trans. Ramon Guthrie (translated as: The

Other Kingdom) New York: Reynal & Hitchcock.

Rowling, Louise. 1999. Being In, Being Out, Being With: Affect and the Role of the Qualitative

Researcher in Loss and Grief Research. Mortality, Vol 4(2), pp 167-181.

Roy, Srila. 2012. Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence, and Subjectivity in India’s

Naxalbari Movement. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

187

Salvatici, Silvia. 2008. Public Memory, Gender and National Identity in Post-War Kosovo: The

Albanian Community. In Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes (Eds). Oral History and Public

Memories. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Salzman, Todd A. 1998. Rape Camps as a Means of Ethnic Cleansing: Religious, Cultural, and

Ethical Responses to Rape Victims in the Former Yugoslavia. Human Rights Quarterly, Vol

20(2), pp 348-378.

Samardžić, Slobodan. 1990. Yugoslavia and the Challenge of Federalism. Belgrade: Stručna

Kniga.

Sander, Helke & Johr, Barbara. 2005. Befreier und Befreite. Krieg, Vergewaltigung, Kinder.

Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag.

Sangster, Joan. 1995. Earning Respect: The Lives of Working Women in Small-Town Ontario,

1920-1960. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Santikarma, Degung & Dwyer, Leslie. 2000. Landscapes of Emotion, Embodiment, and Ritual:

Post-1965 Balinese Culture. Paper presented at the Conference of the Society for Balinese

Studies, Denpasar, Indonesia, 11-13 July 2000. Cited in Mary S. Zurbuchen. 2002.

History, Memory and the ‘1965 Incident’ in Indonesia. Asian Survey, Vol 42(4)

(July/August), pp 564-581.

Sarbin, Theodore R. 1986. Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct.

London: Praeger Press.

Sarkar, Mahua. 2012. Between Craft and Method: Meaning and Inter-subjectivity in Oral History

Analysis. Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol 25(4), pp 578-600.

Saxton, Libby. 2008. Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust. New York:

Columbia University Press.

Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York:

Oxford University Press.

Scharf, Michael. 1997. Balkan Justice: The Story Behind the First International War Crimes

Tribunal since Nuremberg. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy & Bourgois (Eds). 2004. Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology.

Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Lock, Margaret. 1987. The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future

Work in Medical Anthropology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series, Vol 1(1), pp

6-41.

188

Schmidt-Harzbach, Ingrid. 1992. Eine woche im April. In Sander, Helke & Johr, Barbara (Eds).

Befreier und BeFreite. Krieg, Vergewaltigung, Kinder. Munich: Kunstmann, pp 21-45.

Schneider, Jane. 1971. Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honor, Shame and Access to Resources in

Mediterranean Societies. Ethnology, Vol 10(1), pp 1-24.

Schudson, Michael. 1997. Dynamics of Distortion in Collective Memory. In Daniel L. Schacter

(Ed). Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp 346-364.

Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press.

Scott, Joan Wallach. 1988. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University

Press.

Seifert, Ruth. 1994. War and Rape: A Preliminary Analysis. In Stiglmayer, A (Ed). Mass Rape:

The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

pp 54-72.

____ 1996. The Second Front: The Logic of Sexual Violence in Wars. Women’s Studies

International Forum, Vol 19(1-2), pp 35-43.

Sell, Louis. 2002. Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

Sells, Michael. 2001. Kosovo Mythology and the Bosnian Genocide. In Omer Bartov & Phyllis

Mack (Eds). In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century. New York:

Berghahn Books, pp 180-205.

Sexual Violence and the Triumph of Justice. 2011. [DVD] Rob Barony (Director). Netherlands:

ICTY.

Sherman, Daniel J. 1996. Monuments, Mourning and Masculinity in France after World War I.

Gender and History, Vol 8(1), pp 82-107.

Silber, Laura & Little, Allan. 1997. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation. London: Penguin.

Simmel, Georg. 1901. The Aesthetic Significance of the Face. In Kurt H. Wolff (Ed). 1959. Essays

on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics. Lore Ferguson (Trans). New York: Harper &

Row, pp 276-281.

____ 1950. The Secret and the Secret Society. In Kurt H. Wolff (Ed). The Sociology of Georg

Simmel. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, pp 307-376.

189

Sindbæk, Tea. 2009. The Fall and Rise of a National Hero: Interpretations of Draža Mihailović

and the Chetniks in Yugoslavia and Serbia since 1945. Journal of Contemporary European

Studies, Vol 17(1), pp 47-59.

Sivac-Bryant, Sebina. 2008. Kozarac School: A Window on Transitional Justice for Returnees.

The International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol 2(1), pp 106-115.

____ 2011. An Ethnography of Contested Return: Re-making Kozarac. PhD Dissertation.

University College London: Department of Anthropology.

____ 2016. Re-Making Kozarac: Agency, Reconciliation and Contested Return in Post-War

Bosnia. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan.

Sivakumaran, Sandesh. 2007. Sexual Violence against Men in Armed Conflict. European

Journal of International Law, Vol 18(2), pp 253-276. Available at:

http://ejil.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/18/2/253

Skjelsbæk, Inger. 2001. Sexual Violence and War: Mapping Out a Complex Relationship.

European Journal of International Relations, Vol 7(2), pp 211-237.

____ 2006(a). Therapeutic work with victims of sexual violence in war and postwar: A discourse

analysis of Bosnian experience. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, Vol

12(2), pp 93-118.

____ 2006(b). Victim and Survivor Narrated Social Identities of Women who Experienced Rape

during the War in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Feminism and Psychology, Vol 16(4), pp 373-403.

____ 2007. Sexual Violence in Time of War: Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Gender Diversity in the

War in Bosnia-Herzegovina. PhD Thesis. Institute for Psychology, University of

Trondheim (NTNU), Norway.

____ 2012. The Political Psychology of War Rape: Studies from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

London & New York: Routledge.

Slotta, James. 2015. Phatic Rituals of the Liberal Democratic Polity: Hearing Voices in the

Hearings of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Comparative Studies in Society

and History, Vol 57(1), pp 130-160.

Sluka, Jeffrey. 1990. Participant Observation in Violent Social Contexts. Human Organization, Vol

49(2), pp 114-126.

____ 1995. Reflections on Managing Danger in Fieldwork: Dangerous Anthropology in Belfast.

In In Nordstrom, Carolyn & Robben, Antonius CGM (Eds). Fieldwork Under Fire:

Contemporary Studies in Violence and Survival. Berkeley: University of California Press,

pp 276-294.

190

____ 2007. Fieldwork Conflicts, Hazards, and Dangers. In Robben, Antonius CGM & Sluka,

Jeffrey (Eds). Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell,

pp 217-221.

Smith, Rogers M. 2003. Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership.

Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.

Snyder, Cindy S; Gabbard, Wedley J; May, J. Dean & Zulćić, Nihada. 2006. The Battleground of

Women’s Bodies: Mass Rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Affilia, Vol 21(2), pp 184-195.

Sodi, Risa. 1987. An Interview with Primo Levi. Partisan Review, Vol 54(3), pp 355-366.

Sofos, Spyros A. 1996. Inter-Ethnic Violence and Gendered Constructions of Ethnicity in Former

Yugoslavia. Social Identities, Vol 2(1), pp 73-91.

Sofsky, Wolfgang. 1997 The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp. Trans. William Templer.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Soh, Sarah. 2008. The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and

Japan. London: University of Chicago Press.

Solis, Gary, D. 2010. The Law of Armed Conflict: International Humanitarian Law in War.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Spahić-Šiljak, Zilka. 2014. Nation, Religion and Gender. In Ognjenović, Gorana & Jozelić, Jasna

(Eds). Politicization of Religion: The case of ex-Yugoslavia and its Succesor States.

London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Srpska National Review. 2013. Third Decade of Republika Srpska. Available at:

http://issuu.com/sasa011/docs/srpska_-_specijalno_izdanje_-_engleski_-_niska_rez

Accessed: 10 March 2013.

Stacey, Judith. 1988. Can there be a Feminist Ethnography? Women’s Studies International

Forum, Vol 2(1), pp 21-27.

Stallaerts, Robert. 2002. The Disintegration of the Yugoslav Intellectual Community. In

Coppieters, Bruno (Ed). Secession, History, and the Social Sciences. Brussels: Brussels

University Press, pp 141-158.

Statistički Godišnjak Republike Bosne i Hercegovine 1991 (Statistical Yearbook of Bosnia and

Herzegovina, 1991). Sarajevo: Državni Zavod za Statistiku (National Institute for

Statistics). Formerly Socijalistička Republika Bosna i Hercegovina: Republički Zavod za

Statistiku (Republican Institute for Statistics) (1945-1991).

Steiner, George. 1967. Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the

Inhuman. London: Faber and Faber.

191

Stephens, Beth. 1993. Women and the Atrocities of War. Human Rights, Vol 20(3), pp 12-15.

Stern, Maria & Zalewski, Marysia. 2009. Feminist Fatigue(s): Reflections on Feminism and

Familiar Fables of Militarisation. Review of International Studies, Vol 35(3), pp 611-630.

Stern, Steve J. 2004. Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998. Durham &

London: Duke University Press.

Stiglmayer, Alexandra (Ed). 1994. Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Stone, Dan. 2003. Making Memory Work, or Gedächtnis macht frei. Patterns of Prejudice, Vol

37(1), pp 87-98.

Stover, Eric. 2005. The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promise of Justice in the Hague.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Strawson, Galen. 2004. Against Narrativity. Ratio, Vol 17(4), pp 428-452.

Sturken, Marita. 1997. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics

of Remembering. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo. 1992. Grammar of Terror: Psyco-Cultural Responses to State Terrorism

in ‘Dirty War’ and Post ‘Dirty War’ Argentina. In Carolyn Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin

(Eds). The Paths to Domination, Resistance and Terror. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and

Oxford: University of California Press, pp 219-259.

Šuber, Daniel & Karamanić, Slobodan. 2012. Shifting Extremisms: On the Political Iconology in

Contemporary Serbia. In Alexander Jeffrey C.; Bartmański, Dominik & Giesen, Bernhard

(Eds). Iconic Power: Cultural Sociology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 119-138.

Sud Bosnia-i-Hercegovina (SUD BiH). 2008. First Instance Verdict of the Appellate Panel in the

case of Željko Lelek (X-K-o8/572-3), Section I for War Crimes of the Court of Bosnia-

Herzegovina, delivered 23 May 2008, pp 2 & 4. Available at:

http://www.asser.nl/upload/documents/DomCLIC/Docs/NLP/BiH/Lelek_Zeljko_First-

Instance_23-5-2008.pdf Accessed: 1 April 2013.

____ 2009. Second Instance Verdict of the Appellate Panel in the case of Željko Lelek (X-K-

o8/572-3), Section I for War Crimes of the Court of Bosnia-Herzegovina, delivered 12

January 2009, para 69. Available at:

http://www.asser.nl/upload/documents/DomCLIC/Docs/NLP/BiH/Lelek_Zeljko_Second-

Instance_12-01-2009.pdf Accessed: 1 April 2013.

192

____ 2011. Case of Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. The Accused Saša

Baričanin (First Instance Verdict), 9 December, 2011 (Case No: S11 K004648 11 Kri [X-

KR-05/111]). Available at:

www.sudbih.gov.ba/files/docs/presude/2012/4648_1K_BS_drugostupanjska_28_03_2012_

ENG%20(3).pdf Accessed: 1 December 2017.

____ 2012. Case of Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. The Accused Velibor

Bogdanović (Second Instance Verdict), 21 June, 2012 (Case No: S1 1 K 003336 11 Krž 3).

Available at:

www.sudbih.gov.ba/.../14806740441K_3336_15_Krz_Bogdanovic_Velibor_Appellate_verdi

ct_revised_18_09_2015_eng%20(1).pdf Accessed: 1 December 2017.

Sullivan, Cris M. & Cain, Debra. 2004. Ethical and Safety Considerations when Obtaining

Information from or about Battered Women for Research Purposes. Journal of

Interpersonal Violence, Vol 19(5), pp 603-618.

Summerfield, Penny. 1998. Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourses and Subjectivity

in Oral Histories of the Second World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Surin, Kenneth. 2001. The Sovereign Individual and Michael Taussig’s Politics of Defacement.

Nepantla: Views from South, Vol 2(1), pp 205-220.

Tal, Kali. 1996. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma. New York: Cambridge

University Press.

Tanaka, Toshiyuki. 2002. Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World

War II and the US Occupation. London: Routledge.

Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and

Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

____ 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford, California:

Stanford University Press.

____ 2003. The Adult’s Imagination of the Child’s Imagination. In Pamela R. Matthews and

David McWhirter (Eds). Aesthetics Subjects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

pp 449-467.

Tec, Nechama. 2003. Resilience and Courage: Women, Men and the Holocaust. New Haven &

London: Yale University Press.

Tedlock, Barbara. 1991. From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The

Emergence of Narrative Ethnography. Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol 47(1), pp

69-94.

193

Thaler, Kai. 2012. Foreshadowing Future Slaughter: From the Indonesian Killings of 1965Đ 1966

to the 1974Đ 1999 Genocide in East Timor. Genocide Studies and Prevention: An

International Journal, Vol 7(2), pp 204-222.

Theidon, Kimberley. 2007. Gender in Transition: Common Sense, Women, and War. Journal of

Human Rights, Vol 6(4), pp 453-478.

____ 2015. Hidden in Plain Sight: Children Born of Wartime Sexual Violence. Current

Anthropology, Vol 56 (Supplement 12), pp 191-200.

Thomson, Alistair. 1994. Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend. Melbourne: Oxford University

Press.

Toal, Gerard & Dahlman, Carl. 2011. Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and its Reversal. Oxford,

UK: Oxford University Press.

Todorova, Teodora. 2011. Giving Memory a Future: Confronting the Legacy of Mass Rape in

Post-Conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina. Journal of International Women’s Studies, Vol 12(2), pp

3-15.

Todorović, Marija. 2012. The Emergence of the Bosniak Identity Politics in Sandzak in the 1990s.

Masters of Arts thesis, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.

Tokača, Mirsad; Ibrahimagić, Osman; Grebo, Zdravko; Šarčević, Ivan; Divjak, Jovan; & Kandić,

Nataša. 2013. Human Losses in Bosnia and Herzegovina 1991-95 (Bosnian Book of the

Dead). Research and Documentation Centre (IDC) & Humanitarian Law Ceter of Serbia.

TRIAL International. 2012. Written Information for the Consideration of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s

Second Periodic Report by the Human Rights Committee. Geneva: TRIAL.

TRIAL International [Website]. 2016. Latest: Mlađo Radić (26.04.2016). Available at:

https://trialinternational.org/latest-post/mlado-radic/ Accessed: 2 December 2017.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston:

Beacon Press.

Tumarkin, Maria. 2005. Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy.

Carlton: Melbourne University Publishing.

Tzifakis, Nikolaos & Tsardanidis, Charalambos. 2006. Economic Reconstruction of Bosnia and

Herzegovina: The Lost Decade. Ethnopolitics, Vol 5(1), pp 67-84.

Ueno, Chizuko. 1994. The Japanese Responsibility for Military Rape during World War II. Asian

Studies Review, Vol 17(3), pp 102-107.

194

United Nations Economic and Social Council. 1993. Situation of Human Rights on the Territory of

Yugoslavia (E/CN.4/1993/50). 10 February 1993. Available at:

https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/226088/files/E_CN.4_1993_50-EN.pdf Accessed: 29

December 2016.

United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 2013. World

Heritage List: Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge in Višegrad. Available at:

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1260 Accessed: 15 November 2012.

United Nations General Assembly. 1996. Human Rights Questions: Human Rights Situations and

Reports of Special Rapporteurs and Representatives: Rape and Abuse of Women in the

Areas of Armed Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia (A/51/557). Report of the Secretary

General. 25 October 1996. Available at:

http://www.un.org/documents/ga/docs/51/plenary/a51-557.htm Accessed: 29 December

2016.

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN – OCHA). 2008.

Discussion Paper 2: The Nature, Scope, and Motivation for Sexual Violence Against Men

and Boys in Armed Conflict. UN – OCHA Research Meeting, 26 June 2008. Available at:

http://gender.care2share.wikispaces.net/file/view/Discussion+paper+and+Lit+Rev+SV+aga

inst+Men+and+Boys+Final.pdf Accessed: 22 August 2016.

United Nations Security Council (UNSC). 1993. Resolution 827: International Criminal Tribunal for

the former Yugoslavia. [S/RES/827]. 25 May 1993. Available at:

http://www.icty.org/x/file/Legal%20Library/Statute/statute_827_1993_en.pdf Accessed: 2

January 2017.

____ 1994. Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts (established pursuant to

Security Council resolution 780 (1992) (S/1994/674/Add.2 – 27 May 1994). Under: M.

Cherif Bassiouni, Chairman and Rapporteur on the Gathering and Analysis of the Facts for

the Commission of Experts. Available at:

http://www.icty.org/x/file/About/OTP/un_commission_of_experts_report1994_en.pdf

Accessed: 9 September 2014.

____ 1994. Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts (established pursuant to

Security Council resolution 780 (1992) (S/1994/674/Add.2 – 27 May 1994). Annexes VIII:

‘Prison Camps’ (Vol IV). Under: M. Cherif Bassiouni, Chairman and Rapporteur on the

Gathering and Analysis of the Facts for the Commission of Experts. Available at:

https://phdn.org/archives/www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VIII-01.htm Accessed: 7

August 2016.

195

____ 1994. Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts (established pursuant to

Security Council resolution 780 (1992) (S/1994/674 – 27 May 1994). Annexes IV-IX: ‘Rape

and sexual assault’ (Vol V). Under: M. Cherif Bassiouni, Chairman and Rapporteur on the

Gathering and Analysis of the Facts for the Commission of Experts. Available at:

https://law.depaul.edu/about/centers-and-institutes/international-human-rights-law-

institute/publications/Documents/europe/ANNEX_IX.pdf Accessed: 16 August 2016.

____ 1994. Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts (established pursuant to

Security Council resolution 780 (1992) (S/1994/674/Add.2 – 27 May 1994). Annex V: ‘The

Prijedor Report’ (Vol I). Under: M. Cherif Bassiouni, Chairman and Rapporteur on the

Gathering and Analysis of the Facts for the Commission of Experts. Available at:

https://phdn.org/archives/www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/V.htm Accessed: 8 February

2016.

____ 2006. Report of the Secretary-General and High Representative for the Common Foreign

and Security Policy of the European Union on the activities of the European Union military

mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (EUFOR) covering the period from 1 September to 30

November 2006 (S/2006/1035). 28 December 2006. Available at:

http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2006/1035 Accessed: 3 March

2015.

____ 2006. Report of the Secretary General, pursuant to paragraph 30 of resolution 1546

(2004). Available at: https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/ Accessed: 4 June 2015.

Unkovski-Korica, Vladimir. 2015. Self-Management, Development and Debt: The Rise and Fall of

the ‘Yugoslav Experiment’. In Horvat, Srećko & Štiks, Igor (Eds). Welcome to the Desert of

Post-Socialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia. London: Verso, pp 21-43.

Valentine, Daniel, E.. 1996. Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropology of Violence.

Princeton University Press.

Van Boeschoten, Riki. 2003. The Trauma of War Rapes: A Comparative View on the Bosnian

Conflict and the Greek Civil War. History and Anthropology, Vol 14(1), pp 41-54.

Van Der Kolk, Bessel A. & Van Der Hart, Onno. 1995. The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of

Memory and the Engraving of Trauma. In Caruth, C (Ed). Trauma: Explorations in Memory.

Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp 158-182.

Vandiver, Margaret. 2001. Reclaiming Kozarac: Accompanying Returning Refugees. In Sokolović,

Džemal & Bieber, Florian (Eds). Reconstructing Multi-Ethnic Societies: The Case of

Bosnia-Herzegovina. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Verdery, Katherine. 1994. From Parent State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in

Contemporary Eastern Europe. East European Politics and Societies, Vol 8(2), pp 225-

255.

196

Verrips, Jojada. 2006. Aisthesis and An-Easthesia. Ethnologia Europea, Vol 35(1/2), pp 27-33.

Vilina Vlas. 2012. Rehabilitacioni Centar Vilina Vlas Višegrad. Available at: http://www.vilina-

vlas.com/index.php# Accessed: 13 December 2012.

Vucetić, Srdjan. 2004. Identity is a Joking Matter: Intergroup Humor in Bosnia.

Spacesofidentity.net, Vol 4(1). Available at:

http://soi.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/soi/article/view/8011/7168 Accessed: 17 March 2013.

Vulliamy, Ed. 1992. Shame of camp Omarska. The Guardian, 7 August, 1992. Available at:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/1992/aug/07/warcrimes.edvulliamy Accessed: 18

November 2017.

____ 1994. Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War. New York: St Martin’s Press.

____ 1996(a). ‘Middle Managers of Genocide’. Bosnia Report. Available at:

http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/bosnia/Vulliamy.html Accessed: 18 November 2017.

____ 1996(b). Yugoslavia: Horror Hidden Beneath Ica and Lies. The Guardian, London, 19

February 1996, p 9.

____ 2012. The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: The Reckoning. London: Vintage

Books.

Wagner, Sarah. 2008. To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for

Srebrenica’s Missing. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Warburton Ann. 1993. European Community Investigative Mission into the Treatment of Muslim

Women in the Former Yugoslavia: Report to the EC Foreign Ministries, Warburton Mission

II Report (E/CN.4/1993/92, S/25240). London: Women Aid International. Available at:

http://www.womenaid.org/press/info/humanrights/warburtonfull.htm Accessed: 9 June

2016.

Ward, Jeanne & Marsh, Mendy. 2006. Sexual Violence against Women and Girls in War and its

Aftermath: Realities, Responses and Required Resources. A briefing paper prepared for

Symposium on Sexual Violence in Conflict and beyond. Brussels: 21-23 June, 2006.

Waters, Timothy W. 2004. Contemplating Failure and Creating Alternatives in the Balkans:

Bosnia’s Peoples, Democracy, and the Shape of Self-Determination. Yale International

Law Journal, Vol 29, pp 423-475.

Watson-Franke, Maria-Barbara. 2002. A World in which Women Move Freely Without Fear of

Men: An Anthropological Perspective on Rape. Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol

25(6), pp 599-606.

197

Weaver, Gina Marie. 2010. Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War. Albany: State

University of New York Press.

Weitsman, Patricia A. 2008. The Politics of Identity and Sexual Violence: A Review of Bosnia and

Rwanda. Human Rights Quarterly, Vol 30(3), pp 561-578.

Werbner, Richard P. 1998. Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Post-Wars of the Dead, Memory

and Re-inscription in Zimbabwe. Werbner, Richard P (Ed). Memory and the Post-Colony:

African Anthropology and the Critique of Power. London: Zed Books, pp 71-104.

Wertsch, James V. 2009. Collective Memory. In Pascal Boyer & James Wertsch (Eds). Memory in

Mind and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 117-137.

Wheeler, Mark C. 1980. Britain and the War for Yugoslavia, 1940-1943. East European

Monographs.

White, Luise. 2000. Telling More: Lies, Secrets, and History. History and Theory, Vol 39(4), pp

11-22.

White, Michael. 2000. Reflections on Narrative Practice: Essays and Interviews. Adelaide:

Dulwich Centre Publications.

White, Michael & Epston, David. 1990. Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. New York, N.Y:

W.W. Norton & Co.

Wikimedia Commons. Undated. Map of the Former Yugoslavia. Available at:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Former_Yugoslavia_Map.png Accessed: 6

February 2013.

Wilmer, Franke. 2002. The Social Construction of Man, the State, and War: Identity, Conflict, and

Violence in Former Yugoslavia. London: Routledge.

Wingfield, Nancy M & Bucur, Maria. 2006. Gender and War in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Winkler, Cathy. 1991. Rape as Social Murder. Anthropology Today, Vol 7(3), pp 12-14.

Winter, Jay. 2010. Thinking about Silence. In Ben-Ze’ev, Efrat, Ginio, Ruth & Winter, Jay (Eds).

Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Wolff, Cristina Scheibe; Pedro, Joana Maria & Gomes da Silva, Janine. 2016. ‘Gendered’

Memories: Women’s Narratives from the Southern Cone. In Benmayor, Rina; Dominguez,

Prats; Pilar Cardenal de la Nuez, María Eugenia (Eds). Memory, Subjectivities, and

Representation: Approaches to Oral History in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain.

Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 57-73.

198

Young, James E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven

and London: Yale University Press.

____ 2009. Regarding the Pain of Women: Questions of Gender and the Arts of Holocaust

Memory. PMLA, Vol 124(5), pp 1778-1786.

Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: SAGE Publications.

Zalihić-Kaurin, Azra. 1994. The Muslim Women. In Alexandra Stiglmayer (Ed). The War against

Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, pp

170-173.

Žarkov, Dubravka. 2001. The Body of the Other Man: Sexual Violence and the Construction of

Masculinity, Sexuality and Ethnicity in Croatian Media. In Moser Caroline & Clark Fiona

(Eds). Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence.

London, Zed Books, pp 69-82.

Zawati, Hilmi M. 2007. Impunity or Immunity: Wartime Male Rape and Sexual Torture as a Crime

Against Humanity. Torture Journal, Vol 7(1), pp 27-47.

Zempléni, András. 1984. Secret et sujétion: Pourquoi ses ‘informateurs’ parlent-ils à l’ethnologue?

En Le Secret: En Traverses, Revue du Centre de Création Industriele (March 30-31).

Centre Georges Pompidou, pp 102-115.

Zerubavel, Eviatar. 2006. The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial Everyday Life. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Zerubavel, Yael. 1995. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National

Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Zurbuchen, Mary S. 2002. History, Memory, and the ‘1965 Incident’ in Indonesia. Asia Survey,

Vol 42(4) (July/August), pp 564-581.

Zwierzchowski, Jan & Tabeau, Ewa. 2010. The 1992-95 War in Bosnia and Herzegovina:

Census-Based Multiple System Estimation of Casualties Undercount. Hague: ICTY.

Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s:

Quillinan, Sarah

Title:

Remembering wartime rape in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina

Date:

2018

Persistent Link:

http://hdl.handle.net/11343/226885

File Description:

Redacted thesis - Open access

Terms and Conditions:

Terms and Conditions: Copyright in works deposited in Minerva Access is retained by the

copyright owner. The work may not be altered without permission from the copyright owner.

Readers may only download, print and save electronic copies of whole works for their own

personal non-commercial use. Any use that exceeds these limits requires permission from

the copyright owner. Attribution is essential when quoting or paraphrasing from these works.