Srebrenica: banality of memory

It would not stop raining as our rent-a-car hesitantly made its way through the windy roads of eastern Bosnia on our way to Srebrenica. The fog that descended threateningly from Bosnia's steep and gorgeous mountains--and followed us throughout our four-hour ride-- added to the melancholy that had overtaken me even before we left Sarajevo. I felt as if we were participating in the grisly enterprise of "genocide tourism," craving to touch, smell, and gaze at the place where over 8,000 Muslim men and young boys were summarily executed in just four days, take our snapshots, and be on our way, content that we could boast to our friends back home that we had been to Srebrenica. Melancholy soon gave way to fear as we stopped at the first gas station in Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb entity) to ask for "directions to Srebrenica." I felt as if the very utterance of the word would disrobe me of anonymity, exposing my deepest thoughts in front of a glaring stare of a stranger, enabling him to reduce me to an ethnic category in a matter of seconds. I was surprised by the politeness of the gas attendant who gave us detailed directions on how to get to Srebrenica and even wished us a good trip as we pulled out of the station. "Maybe he is a Muslim," I thought to myself, immediately regretting it, realizing once again that I was not as immune to nationalist logic as I often boast. On our way we got lost several more times and stopped to ask directions at a police stop, a hotel, and a restaurant. At each stop, the politeness of the strangers and what it seemed like their genuine desire to make sure we find our way, exposed not the chauvinistic and nationalistic thinking of the "Serbs," but my very own prejudices. Srebrenica, even before we even reached it, was teaching me something about myself.

The landscape was littered with houses with unfinished second floors, their owners probably having had to stop rebuilding due to the so-called donor fatigue in Bosnia. The cemeteries reflected the prewar ethnic composition of this region: a Serb cemetery would be followed by a Muslim one, to be followed by a Serb one, and so on. Every so-often a newly rebuilt mosque would surprise me, but "for sale" signs on the houses reminded me that these are just artificial symbols of a supposedly renewed multiethnic coexistence: most Muslims were gone, and they were not coming back. The newly (re)built Orthodox churches, with Serbian flags waving on top of them, campaign posters advertising Bosnian Serb political parties, and the exclusive use of cyrillic on all signs were unequivocal reminders that this was Serbian land.

The lonely, but enermous, Bosnian flag reminded me that we had arrived at the Memorial Center in Potocari, a small village on the outskirts of Srebrenica. Across from the center is a burned out building that used to house a car battery factory before the war. It would be just another fossil, symbolizing the swift end of the socialist industrializing project had it also not been one of the many execution spots. Inside the memorial center, the white marble gravestones fill an entire meadow, representing less than half of all the genocide victims with the remaining ones still to be identified. The stones with inscriptions of prayers for the dead from the Kur'an greeted us at the entrance. Behind, on a semi-circular marble wall--resembling the Vietnam memorial in D.C.--the names of the dead, presented in an alphabetical order. Almost all of the last names repeat several times, entire families wiped out (one last name appears 34 times!). Next to the wall, "8372..." engraved on a stone, reminding the visitor that this is not the final number.

I looked around and noticed that the memorial intruded into the yards of the surrounding houses which seemed to be inhabited. "How would it be to live here?" one of my friends asked. This remark made me remember of how personal the war here has been. Unlike in most other places in the country--where atrocities were committed by mercenaries and thugs who came from the outside--the Srebrenica genocide was a local affair, mostly carried out by the Bratunac brigade (Bratunac is a small village we passed on our way to Srebrenica). After Srebrenica was declared a "safe haven" by the UN, the small Muslim forces remained holed up in the town, refusing to surrender their weapons. Instead they would carry out raids on local Serb villages while the men from these villages were out on the front-lines. The Srebrenica genocide was carried out by many of these men who had lost their loved ones in these raids. While looking at the houses surrounding the memorial I also realized that entire Serb families from this area were wiped out by Muslim and Croat Ustasha forces in World War II. The cycle of violence, maddening and brutal in its logic, is what depressed me the most about this place. I noticed that some houses had graves in their very yards, wanting to keep the memory of the dead as close to the hearth as possible.

After visiting the memorial, we entered the town, which is more like a ruin. The burned out Energoinvest building--a Yugoslav industrial giant--gapes at the center, right next to the recently reconstructed central hall building, housing the UN Development Program. The burned out factories serve as reminders that this was a place which the Communists promised to usher into a new era with their industrializing project.

Rain insisted on following us on our way out of town, the fog as dense as my melancholy. As we drove out, I noticed a few visitors at the memorial laughingly chase each other in a fit of childplay, turning the memorial--if only momentarily--into a playground. Remembering Hannah Arendt, I thought of "banality" of memory and its vulnerability to the whims of human mood.