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The Bleak Visions of Literary Justice for Survivors of Srebrenica: Examining the Fictional Narratives of Srebrenica Genocide in Light of the Insights from Transitional Justice

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Part of the book series: Springer Series in Transitional Justice ((SSTJ,volume 6))

Abstract

Genocide in Srebrenica understandably remains an obsessive topic of public discourse in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Seventeen years later, identifications of mortal remains of more than 8,000 Srebrenica victims and burial ceremonies still continue, along with limited official and unofficial transitional justice efforts in the country covering, inter alia, Srebrenica atrocities. Nonetheless, literary justice for Srebrenica lags behind and is even more pessimistic than the bleak ‘reality of the transitional’ itself. In this chapter, we note a symptomatic correlation between the visions of the future of Srebrenica survivors offered by the ICTY and those presented in the Bosnian literature of genocide. In literary works on the Srebrenica genocide examined in this chapter, codification, mythologization and portrayal of the survivors as voiceless and distant prisoners of the past essentially incapable of healing still remain dominant narrative patterns. We argue that such an approach to fictionalizing the Srebrenica genocide is part of the broader social context in which politically influenced mythologization, on the one hand, and denial of genocide, on the other, continue to shape public discourse on this horrific crime. In such a scenario, fiction can hardly be expected to realize its considerable potential to contribute to dealing with the Srebrenica atrocities. Concluding the chapter, we briefly indicate some possible literary strategies and cultural policy interventions that could enable diversification and improved reception of fictional narratives of Srebrenica, all of which would also put fictional literature in a position to make a substantive contribution to general transitional justice efforts in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See generally Neil J. Kritz, ed., Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, Vol. 1 (Washington: USIP Press, 1995); see also Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).

  2. 2.

    Harold Scheub, ‘Now for a Story’, in The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule, ed. Ksenija Bilbija et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 13.

  3. 3.

    Theresa Godwin Phelps, Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 125.

  4. 4.

    Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 109.

  5. 5.

    Martina Kopf, ‘The Ethics of Fiction: African Writers on the Genocide in Rwanda’, Journal of Literary Theory 6 (2012), 72.

  6. 6.

    See e.g. Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions (New York and London: Routledge, 2011).

  7. 7.

    Writing about the possible tasks of the Holocaust fiction, for example, Lang asserts that the ‘Holocaust seems so thoroughly unreal that we need to bring it down to the human realm’. Berel Lang ed., Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 92, quoted in Daniel R. Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 37.

  8. 8.

    Oscar Hemer, ‘Writing Transition: Fiction and Truth in South Africa and Argentina(PhD diss., University of Oslo, 2011), 13.

  9. 9.

    Shoshana Felman, ‘Crisis of Witnessing: Albert Camus' Postwar Writings’, Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 2 (1991), 198.

  10. 10.

    Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, ed. Stephen Clingman (New York: Knopf, 1988), 298–299.

  11. 11.

    Some of these virtues of fiction, both assumed and neglected, are usefully reviewed and illustrated in Sephiwe Ignatius Dube, ‘Transitional Justice beyond the Normative: Towards a Literary Theory of Political Transitions’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 2 (2011), 177–197.

  12. 12.

    She writes: ‘Literature is a dimension of concrete embodiment and a language of infinitude that, in contrast to the language of the law, encapsulates not closure but precisely what in a given legal case refuses to be closed and cannot be closed. It is to this refusal of the trauma to be closed that literature does justice’. Shoshana Felman, Juridical Unconscious. Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 8.

  13. 13.

    Dube, ‘Transitional Justice’, 195.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 195.

  15. 15.

    Godwin Phelps, Shattered Voices, 45–51.

  16. 16.

    Boniface Mongo-Mobussa, Désir d’Afrique (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 189, quoted in Audrey Small, ‘The Duty of Memory: A Solidarity of Voices after the Rwandan Genocide’, Paragraph 30 (2007), 88.

  17. 17.

    Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 3.

  18. 18.

    Minow, Between Vengeance, 142.

  19. 19.

    Indeed, ‘…the body of the witness is the ultimate site of memory of individual and collective trauma…’, Felman, Juridical Unconscious, 9.

  20. 20.

    Aleksandar Hemon, ‘Srebrenica Web’, Dani, July 1, 2005, accessed 21 January 2012, http://www.ex-yupress.com/dani/dani121.html.

  21. 21.

    Very often, these works are published by their authors or in very limited number of copies. In addition, the system of legal deposit in national libraries of BiH and Republika Srpska is not fully effective, so the current national bibliography of BiH is incomplete and has rather limited coverage.

  22. 22.

    Advancing their thesis of ‘social life as storied’, Margaret Somers and Gloria D. Gibson emphasize that narratives need to be treated as social products, in that ‘… stories guide action; that people construct identities (however, multiple and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories; that “experience” is constituted through narrative…’. M. Somers and G. Gibson, ‘Reclaiming the epistemological “Other”: Narrative and the social constitution of Identity’, in Social Theory and Politics of Identity, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), 38–39, quoted in Steph Lawler, ‘Narrative in Social research’, in Qualitative research in action ed. Tim May (London: Sage publication, 2002), 244.

  23. 23.

    Such as the oratorio Srebrenica Inferno, which has been featuring prominently during the central July commemoration and burial of the newly identified victims of genocide, Abdulah Sidran’s poem Tears of the Mothers of Srebrenica, which was initially published in the most widely circulated newspaper in the Federation of BiH, or a bestselling novel When it Was July.

  24. 24.

    Examples include writings by Emir Suljagić Razglednica iz groba (Postcards from the Grave) (Sarajevo: Civitas, 2005) or (factual) novels based on survivors’ testimonies such as Mihrija Feković-Kulović’s Živjeti i umirati za Srebrenicu (Living and Dying for Srebrenica) (Sarajevo: Connectum, 2009) or Sadik Salimović’s Put smrti: Srebrenica-Tuzla: prema istinitim događajima (The Path of Death: Srebrenica-Tuzla: Based on True Events) (Sarajevo: Udruženje pokret majki enklava Srebrenica i Žepa, 2008).

  25. 25.

    Kali Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma, accessed 15 April 2011, http://www.kalital.com/Text/Worlds/Chap1.html

  26. 26.

    See generally Hemer, Writing Transition.

  27. 27.

    For full text of a working draft of the strategy (in local languages), see Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees of BiH and Ministry of Justice of BiH, Transitional Justice Strategy for BiH 2012–2016, 2012, accessed 08 July 2012, http://www.mpr.gov.ba/aktuelnosti/propisi/konsultacije/Strategija%20TP%20-%20bosanski%20jezik%20fin%20doc.pdf.

  28. 28.

    See e.g. Alejandro Chehtman, ‘Developing Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Capacity to Process War Crimes Cases: Critical Notes on a “Success Story”’, Journal of International Criminal Justice 3 (2011), 547–570.

  29. 29.

    See generally Graeme Simpson, Edin Hodzic and Louis Bickford, Looking Back, Looking Forward: Promoting Dialogue through Truth-Seeking in Bosnia and Herzegovina, accessed 8 July 2012, http://www.undp.ba/upload/publications/Looking%20back,%20looking%20forward.pdf. See also Dragan Popović, Transitional Justice Guidebook for BiH, UNDP BiH (2009), esp. 147–151, accessed 27 February 2012, http://www.undp.ba/upload/publications/Vodic%20kroz%20tranzicijsku%20pravdu%20u%20BiH.pdf.

  30. 30.

    See e.g. Paul B. Miller, ‘Contested Memories: The Bosnian Genocide in Serb and Muslim Minds’, Journal of Genocide Research 3 (2006), 311–324.

  31. 31.

    See e.g. Jasmila Zbanić, ‘Filmovi, zabrane i radost’, accessed 28 February 2012, Radio Sarajevo http://www.radiosarajevo.ba/novost/74532/jasmila-zbanic-filmovi-zabrane-i-radost.

  32. 32.

    UN General Assembly, Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35, ‘The Fall of Srebrenica’, 15 November 1999, A/54/549.

  33. 33.

    See e.g. Alexander Moens, ‘Lessons for Peacekeepers: Srebrenica and the NIOD Report’, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 3 (2003), 141–158.

  34. 34.

    See Popović, Transitional Justice, 60–63.

  35. 35.

    Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić, ICTY Case No. IT-98-33-T, (2 August 2001), para. 91.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., para. 597.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., para. 592. In text quotes refer to the prosecution argument.

  38. 38.

    See e.g. Diane F. Orentlicher, That Someone Guilty Be Punished: The Impact of the ICTY in Bosnia (New York: Open Society Institute, 2011), 39–42, accessed 21 January 2012, http://www.soros.org/initiatives/justice/articles_publications/publications/that-someone-guilty-20100707/that-someone-guilty-20100708.pdf.

  39. 39.

    Enver Kazaz, interview by Omer Karabeg, Magazin plus, 26 June 2010, accessed 20 May 2011, http://www.magazinplus.eu/index.php.kultura/2482-kada-ce-biti-napisan-prvi-roman-o-srebrenici

  40. 40.

    Isnam Taljić, Roman o Srebrenici, 5th ed. (Srebrenica: Općina Srebrenica, 2007).

  41. 41.

    Džemaludin Latić, Srebrenički inferno: pismo Danteu Alighieriju iz Bosne, 3rd ed. (Sarajevo: Connectum, 2006).

  42. 42.

    Nura Bazdulj-Hubijar, Kad je bio juli (Zagreb, VBZ, 2005).

  43. 43.

    Osman Arnautović, Srebrenica city (Tuzla: Infograf, 2007).

  44. 44.

    Đidana Sarić, Čudi se, svijete (Sarajevo: Grafički promet d.o.o, 2006).

  45. 45.

    Mirsad Mustafić, Krvava šamija (Tuzla: Off-Set, 2006), Rastanak u Potočarima (Tuzla: Off-Set, 2007), Samrtni zvuci srebrenog grada (Tuzla: Off-set, 2009), Posljednji vapaj enklave (Tuzla: Off-set, 2012).

  46. 46.

    Fuad Kovač, ed., Očev zagrljaj: priče o Srebrenici (Sarajevo: Behar, 2006).

  47. 47.

    Abdulah Sidran, Suze majki Srebrenice (Sarajevo: Bemust, 2009).

  48. 48.

    For example, V. Bajramović, Srebrenica nakraj srca (Sarajevo: self-publishing, 2010.); Z. Muratović, Srebrenica je vrisak do neba (Sarajevo: self-publishing, 2005); M. Salihbeg Bosnawi, Srebrenica je zvijezda padalica (Sarajevo: self-publishing, 2000); S. Šahović, Krvava Srebrenica. (Sarajevo: Zonex ex Libris, 2006).

  49. 49.

    Almir Bašović, Priviđenja iz srebrnog vijeka (Sarajevo: Oko, 2004).

  50. 50.

    This award-winning play by Zlatko Topčić has still not been published, but it was set on scene in 2011 at The Chamber Theatre 55 from Sarajevo and directed by Sulejman Kupusović.

  51. 51.

    Belvedere, directed by Ahmed Imamović (Sarajevo: Comprex, 2010), DVD.

  52. 52.

    See generally Schwarz, Imagining Holocaust.

  53. 53.

    Examining, inter alia, the issue of viability of representing Holocoust in a different narrative model, Hayden White identifies the prevalence of ‘the kind of rule that stipulates that a serious theme—such as mass murder or genocide—demands a noble genre, such as epic or tragedy, for its proper representation’. Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999), 31.

  54. 54.

    See generally Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. C. Emerson. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

  55. 55.

    As Renata Jambrešić Kirin explains, analysing testimonial literature on the war in Croatia, ‘[p]ersonal experience relies on ideological patterns in order to get an acceptable interpretation within a wider community, whereas the reception of these interpretations, adaptations, artistic works etc. is often realized through intensive emotional identification, which forms the basis for building the common identity markers’. ‘Svjedočenje i povijesno pamćenje: o pripovjednom posredovanju osobnog iskustva’, Narodna umjetnost 2 (1995), 180.

  56. 56.

    See e.g. Craig Evan Pollack, ‘Intentions of Burial: Mourning, Politics, and Memorials Following the Massacre at Srebrenica’, Death Studies 2 (2003), 125–142.

  57. 57.

    In Mourning and Melancholia (1917), Freud describes melancholia ‘as an enduring devotion on the part of the ego to the lost object. A mourning without end, melancholia results from the inability to resolve the grief and ambivalence precipitated by the loss of the loved object, place, or ideal” as cited in David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, ‘Introduction’, in Loss. The Politics of Mourning, eds. David L Eng and David Kazanjian (Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press, 2003), 3.

  58. 58.

    Ruti Teitel, ‘Transitional Justice as Liberal Narrative’, in Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Process of Truth and Reconciliation: Documenta 11, Platform 2, ed. Okwui Enwezor et al. (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2001), 241, as cited in Dube, ‘Transitional Justice’, 185.

  59. 59.

    Bašović, Priviđenja iz, 9.

  60. 60.

    Taljić, Roman o, 150–151 (Unless otherwise indicated, all citations from selected narratives are translated by the authors).

  61. 61.

    Latić, Srebrenica Inferno, 11–12.

  62. 62.

    Bazdulj-Hubijar, Kad je bio, 153.

  63. 63.

    Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking. Toward the Politics of Peace (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989), 46.

  64. 64.

    The verse from Abdulah Sidran’s acclaimed poem Uzevši kost i meso (Taking the Bone and Flesh Away), from his collection of poems Sarajevski tabut (The Coffin of Sarajevo), published in 1993 in besieged Sarajevo.

  65. 65.

    Belvedere, dir. Imamović. accessed 10 January 2012, http://belvederemovie.com/.

  66. 66.

    Taljić, Roman o Srebrenici, 33.

  67. 67.

    Sidran, Tears of, 5.

  68. 68.

    This tension is particularly thematized in novels When it was July and Srebrenica City, where the respective central characters are a young boy Mirza and a teenager girl Zarfa.

  69. 69.

    In particular, through a series of contrapuntal scenes his attempt to live a life of an ordinary teenager is presented in parallel with his aunt’s painstaking search for the truth. For example, while the women are visiting the post-mortem identification centre, he is making a set of weights; while they are attending a silent protest they participate in every month on the eleventh day, he is going to an internet café.

  70. 70.

    For example, the very title of Imamović’s movie is taken from the name of the real refugee camp near Gorazde in eastern Bosnia.

  71. 71.

    Sidran, Tears of, 11.

  72. 72.

    Examples are the main character of When it Was July, Mirza and his decision to marry a Serb girl as a somewhat simplistic and superficial step towards restoring ‘brotherhood and unity’, or the illustrative conversation of the woman survivor of Srebrenica with Maria in Ravenna, at the end of Srebrenica Inferno.

  73. 73.

    In Srebrenica City, the main female character chooses the path of revenge as the only viable form of justice.

  74. 74.

    In Belvedere, for example, the main character Ruvejda activates a bomb to kill both herself and the man she suspects to be connected with the slaughter of her family; in Crocodile Lacoste, the killing of both herself and her father is the only way out for the woman who had found out about the heinous crimes her father committed.

  75. 75.

    The association was officially formed in 1999, but their activism goes back to 1996, when they organized their first protests demanding serious investigations into the fate of their missing men. On this association and their trajectory from a small grass root organization to a powerful transitional justice actor see Olivera Simic, ‘What Remains of Srebrenica? Motherhood, Transitional Justice and Yearning for the Truth’, Journal of International Women's Studies 4 (2009).

  76. 76.

    Association ‘Women-Victims of War’. See more about the organization at www.zena-zrtva-rata.ba.

  77. 77.

    Initially, after a fierce protest by a representative of The Association of Women-Victims of War over the then still unconfirmed information that the film would feature a love story between an imprisoned Bosniak woman and a Serb army officer, the Ministry of Culture of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina has refused to issue an authorization for shooting the film on the territory of this Bosnia’s entity. See e.g. Belma Bećirbašić ‘Trgovanje emocijama žrtve’ Dani, 22 October 2010, 30.

  78. 78.

    Kali Tal considers ‘mythologization’, along with ‘medicalization’ and ‘disappearance’, one of the principal strategies of cultural coping with a traumatic event: ‘Mythologization works by reducing a traumatic event to a set of standardized narratives (twice- and thrice-told tales that come to represent "the story" of the trauma) turning it from a frightening and uncontrollable event into a contained and predictable narrative’. Tal, Worlds of Hurt, Chap. 1.

  79. 79.

    Husanović, Između traume, 65.

  80. 80.

    Cf. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 215–216.

  81. 81.

    See e.g. Lara Nettelfield, Courting Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Hague Tribunal’s Impact in a Postwar State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Chap. 5.

  82. 82.

    See e.g. Miller, Contested Memories.

  83. 83.

    Schwarz, Imagining Holocaust, 141.

  84. 84.

    See generally Godwin Phelps, Shattered Voices.

  85. 85.

    See generally Damir Arsenijević, Forgotten Future: The Politics of Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010).

  86. 86.

    Šehabović, Srebrenica. Potočari, English translation and a convincing analysis of the poem are found in: Damir Arsenijević ‘Mobilising Unbribable Life: The Politics of Contemporary Poetry of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, in Toward a New Literary Humanism, ed. Andy Mousley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 166–180.

  87. 87.

    Mirsad Sijarić, Još jedna pjesma o ljubavi i ratu (Another Song of Love and War) (Sarajevo: Connectum, 2008).

  88. 88.

    Kazaz, interview by Omer Karabeg.

  89. 89.

    For example, as Titus Levy elaborates, this kind of an emphatic response in what essentially is a trauma narrative is one of the notable qualities of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go. See Titus Levy, ‘Human Rights Storytelling and Trauma Narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go’, Journal of Human Rights 10 (2011), 1–16.

  90. 90.

    Cf. Martina Kopf, ‘Trauma, Narrative and the Art of Witnessing’, in Slavery in Art and Literature: Approaches to Trauma, Memory and Visuality, eds. Birgit Haehnel and Melanie Ulz (Berlin: Frank and Timme, 2010).

  91. 91.

    An example of such a project is a valuable and much cited two-year literary initiative Le Devoir de memoir, which resulted in publication of nine works by African writers thematizing the Rwandan genocide. The results of this project are valuable literary works, exhibiting a variety of sentiments—from hope to hopelessness, from continuous suffering to dreams of a better future. See generally Small, The Duty of Memory.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Louis Bickford for valuable and detailed comments on an earlier draft and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. We are also grateful to the editorial team for their helpful guidance and patience.

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Correspondence to Ajla Demiragić .

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Demiragić, A., Hodžić, E. (2014). The Bleak Visions of Literary Justice for Survivors of Srebrenica: Examining the Fictional Narratives of Srebrenica Genocide in Light of the Insights from Transitional Justice. In: Rush, P., Simić, O. (eds) The Arts of Transitional Justice. Springer Series in Transitional Justice, vol 6. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8385-4_8

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