Old and Fresh Wounds in Bosnia - Hercegovina

How little I knew about Bosnia before I went there was very scary.

I had heard that 200,000 people had died during the wars of the 1990s just as democracy was finally coming to South Africa. This was to be my second exposure to the Balkans having visited Kosovo a few years back.

I visited Bosnia - Herzegovina from the 9th April for 9 days accompanied by Victor Cervati. I was invited by Svetlana Broz, a courageous and outspoken woman and granddaughter of Tito of Yugoslavia. I had met her eight years before in Cambridge, MA, USA. Svetlana heads an NGO called Gariwo which promotes what she calls “civil courage”. She wrote a book called “Good People in an Evil Time” about those who during the ethnic conflicts acted with humanity and compassion towards the “other”.

Gariwo had arranged the translation of my biography (sponsored by Norwegian embassy) into the Bosnian language (the only language other than the original English that it has been translated into) by Zeljka Vojinovic herself a remarkable person and a widow from the Bosnian war. We were assisted with transport by the OSCE, sponsored by the Dutch embassy and hosted by Mayors of Sarajevo, Tuzla and Bihac.
We travelled across Bosnia and Herzegovina after the first days in Sarajevo visiting Tuzla, Mostar, Srebrenica and Bihac with a very well organised and delightful team from Gariwo. There was massive media coverage of the visit, public launches of the book which were given away free, and lectures to university students. I arrived a nonentity only to become a celebrity a couple of days later. Several staff members of Gariwo had spent 3-4 months preparing for the visit. Virtually, everybody we met had lost relatives in the conflict. Many experiences during the visit will stay with me forever – graveyards, genocide sites and personal encounters. I am sure there will be future opportunities to do healing of memories work in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The day after our arrival we were taken to see the tunnel which was the only lifeline during the siege of Sarajevo in the early nineties - a few short years after it hosted the Olympic games. It is not easy to get your head around what it was like to live in a besieged city in modern times especially during a bleak European winter with little food and without heating or electricity and daily shelling and sniper firing.

We went to Mostar famous for the beautiful Old Bridge Through international financial aid (notably from Turkey, Italy, the Netherlands and France) managed by the World Bank, UNESCO established an International Committee of Experts to reconstruct the old bridge and the old town of Mostar. Work on the foundations has started in June 2001, and work on the reconstruction, in line with 16th century building methods, was finalized in 2002.” ) destroyed in the war and now rebuilt. It was accepted at a meeting in Durban, South Africa, as a world heritage site. Tragically whilst the bridge has been built the town is characterised by an “apartheid” reality where people live apart and children go to separate schools.
Tuzla is a town which is lead by a remarkable Mayor Mr. Jasmin Imamovic, who has a high level of popularity and a moral vision for the town, indeed for the country. During the war young people gathered in a local square on the day that Tito's birthday is celebrated as the Day of youth on May 25 1995. The square was shelled and scores of young people, mostly between the ages of 18 and 25 were killed. Each gravestone included photos of the dead – many of them teenagers with most of their lives still unlived.

From Tuzla we travelled to Srebrenica a place that is known throughout the world because of the act of genocide that took place under the noses of Dutch UN troops although the place had been declared a safe haven by the Security Council. Our visit was filled with tension. The mayor told us that everything was fine and that former residents were returning. A few minutes later the local leader of another political party told us the exact opposite of everything the mayor had said – indicating that people were leaving the town and that there was widespread despondency.
We visited the genocide site at Srebrenica and were shown around by Hassan, himself a survivor of the act of genocide which took place there. Both his twin brother and his father were killed there. He told us that working as a guide there and telling the story was something he could do for his brother and father. To conceal the genocide victims were buried in hidden graves and later dug up and reburied. This has lead to a huge challenge to verify the identities of remains which have been uncovered.

At the launch of the book in Srebrenica, I said that this is place renowned throughout the world as a place of great pain as well as shame for the whole world as WE ALL failed to protect the Bosnian Moslems who had fled here for protection. Shortly after I started speaking a group of young men walked out and continued walking up and down outside the venue in an agitated manner. They were overheard saying that if they had something they would throw it. At the end of the meeting we were asked to make a rapid exit from the town.

I was struck by the emotional reaction of those who feel indicted by simple statements of truth and who respond with great anger. However even here there were signs of hope. I had asked the audience what kind of society they dreamed for their children and grandchildren One young student said that she was not waiting for the future, she was already living her dream every day.

The last town we visited was Bihac, a beautiful town close to the pristine waters of the river Una. It was here that we met the liveliest and most responsive group of students at a technical college – some subsequently inviting me to be their friends on Facebook.

In the National Theatre in Tuzla a woman stood up and spoke about her son who had been murdered and how her life had become meaningless with her husband also dying shortly afterwards. It was as if there was no-one else present just the two of us having an intimate conversation. I asked her, as I had asked another woman many years previously: What kind of life would your son have wished for you.
Other people whispered their private stories into my ears or shared them quietly at dinner tables.

One woman told me a story that continues to haunt me. Her son who is half Serb was disabled as a consequence of an accident. During the war he was assisting with a medical team in defense of Bosnia. A badly injured Serb soldier was brought in and refused a blood transfusion of blood coming from a Bosniak (Moslem) nurse. The young man offered his own blood to save the soldiers life. The soldier refused saying that this would be twice as bad coming from someone with a mixed ethnic identity and he died. Today the young man has begun to hate that part of himself which is Serbian. What an urgent and deep need there is for healing.

During our final weekend in Sarajevo retired General Braco Fazlic of the Bosnian army, a leader of the partisans defending the city during the siege gave us an enthralling firsthand account of the siege including the graveyard partly carved out of tennis courts and now the last resting place of all the city's residents who were killed during the war.
The Dutch embassy hosted a seminar on our final morning on the lessons of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation process for Bosnia and Herzegovina. This meeting confirmed the assertion made by many others about the lack of visionary leadership at national level from either political or religious leaders. It seems that the picture is not as bleak at municipal level where there are leaders who act in the interest of all citizens.
The convergence of the narrowest forms of ethnic nationalism with brands of Christianity – Orthodox and Catholic in contradistinction to each other and to Moslems is as poisonous and as violent in the former Yugoslavia as ever it was under Christian Nationalism in apartheid South Africa.
There is an urgent need for forms of acknowledgment of the past, a process of mechanisms to detoxify the hearts and minds of people – to break the cycle that turns victims into victimisers.

I am looking forward to my next visit.

Father Michael Lapsley SSM
April 2010.