Reclaiming erased lives: archives, records and memories in post-war Bosnia and the Bosnian diaspora

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Archival ScienceInternational Journal on RecordedInformation ISSN 1389-0166Volume 14Combined 3-4 Arch Sci (2014) 14:231-247DOI 10.1007/s10502-014-9227-z

Reclaiming erased lives: archives, recordsand memories in post-war Bosnia and theBosnian diaspora

Hariz Halilovich

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ORI GIN AL PA PER

Reclaiming erased lives: archives, recordsand memories in post-war Bosniaand the Bosnian diaspora

Hariz Halilovich

Published online: 1 August 2014

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract In this paper, based on conventional and digital ethnography, I first

identify three dominant research areas relating to the issues of destruction, use and

abuse of archives and records in post-war Bosnia, and discuss their legal, political

and ethical dimensions. I then go on to present two ethnographies describing how

survivors of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide in Bosnia and in the Bosnian refugee

diaspora perceive, experience and deal with missing personal records and material

evidence of their histories, as well as how they (re)create their own archives and

memories, and in the process reassert their ‘erased’ identities in both real and cyber

space. This paper also describes how contemporary technologies—including bio-

medical technology and information and communication technology—impact the

reconstruction of individual and collective identities in shattered Bosnian families

and communities in the aftermath of genocide. The ethnographies described point to

the novel contribution that these technologies have made to re-humanising both

those who perished and the survivors of the war in Bosnia.

Keywords Bosnia � Genocide � Archives � Diaspora � DNA � Cyber villages

The 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina—which involved systematic

violence against the ethnic ‘other’ through the genocidal campaigns of ‘ethnic

cleansing’—resulted in more than 100,000 deaths, some 2.5 million displaced,

800,000 destroyed homes and the widespread abuse of human rights (Becirevic

2014). The war will also be remembered for the systematic annihilation of material

culture, ranging from the destruction of sacred buildings, historical monuments and

bridges, libraries, museums and archives to historical documents, unique

H. Halilovich (&)

Office of the Vice-Provost (Learning and Teaching), Monash University,

PO Box 197, Caulfield East, VIC 3145, Australia

e-mail: [email protected]

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DOI 10.1007/s10502-014-9227-z

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manuscripts and official records held at various local government and state

institutions. The violence behind the destruction was not some spontaneous

rampage, but a diligently planned and executed military campaign aimed at erasing

any evidence that those who were ethnically cleansed once existed. Parallel to this,

the perpetrators paid close attention to hiding and destroying the evidence about the

crimes they committed. It was not only the loss of life and destruction of

infrastructure by war’s end, but also the obliteration of culture and the disappear-

ance of official records that created massive obstacles for intending returnees. Those

who had been ‘erased’ now were required to produce documents in order to reclaim

their property, school qualifications, and even birth and death certificates.

While the records at a local level were largely irretrievable, at a higher level, the

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) managed to

obtain access to highly classified records about the war crimes and how the whole

chain of command of the Serbian army operated during the war in Bosnia

(Nettelfield 2010). However, before handing over the records, the Serbian

government made a deal with the ICTY that the records could only be used in

the trial against Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s wartime president. Even after

Milosevic died in custody, before his trial was finished, the ICTY has continued to

honour this agreement, which de facto retrospectively gives immunity to the Serbian

government for the war crimes and genocide committed in Bosnia.

Stolen, hidden and destroyed memories, archives and records

When discussing the issues of missing, destroyed, hidden and misappropriated

records and archival material in Bosnia–Herzegovina during the 1990 war and in its

aftermath, much of the research thus far has been focused on the systematic

destruction of archives and cultural heritage, which was directly targeted by the

Serbian military, such as the 1992 burning of Bosnia’s National Library (the famous

Vijecnica), the destruction of the Oriental Institute and the shelling of museums and

archives across the country (Riedlmayer 2001, 2002, 2007; Bakarsic 1994;

Lovrenovic 1994; Saric 1999; Supple 2005). Almost every book on the conflict

in Bosnia has, in some way, referred to the act of destruction of the Vijecnica and

burning of places symbolising or keeping the cultural memory of the country and its

people. The brutality and eagerness to completely obliterate the most important

collections of Bosnia’s cultural memory, as well as the consequences of these

actions, or ‘memoricide’ as Lovrenovic called it, provide valid reasons for the

researchers’ ongoing preoccupation with these barbaric acts unseen in Europe since

WWII (1994). While there has been a considerable interest in the destruction of

Vijecnica, many other archival centres, museums, libraries, galleries and registry

offices destroyed during the war have not had so much written about them, in spite

the fact that, as Saric points out, in some of these places up to 90 % of their archival

sources were completely destroyed (1999).

Another area that has been of interest to researchers and particularly popular

among local investigative journalists relates to the confidential archives of the

former Yugoslav state apparatus, especially those of the secret police and security

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organisations such as UDBA, KOS and DB. During the break-up of Yugoslavia,

much of the confidential archival material was appropriated by different suspect

characters and semi-clandestine security agencies of the newly created states and

political parties. In a number of instances, as it has been covered in various media

outlets including independent magazines Slobodna Bosna, BH Dani and Nezavisne

novine, the information from those sources was used to discredit prominent public

figures such as politicians, businessmen and religious leaders. The book The

Guardians of Yugoslavia (Cuvari Jugoslavije) edited by Ivan Beslic and published

in three volumes—and three colours: red, green and blue—lists thousands of names

and documents about the Bosnian informers and collaborators of the notorious

Yugoslav secret and intelligence agencies (2003). Each colour of the book stands

for a respective ethnicity: red for Serbs, green for Bosniaks and blue for Croats.

(Meanwhile, the lists are freely available online at archive.org http://archive.org/

details/cuvari_jugoslavije_hrvati).

While gaining access to the records representing a secret past of the now non-

existent communist state may look like an interesting and useful piece of detective

work aimed at confronting a problematic collective past in order to move forward, a

process that many other post-communist countries have gone through (Ash 1998),

researching—and searching for—various documents and records relating to crimes

committed during the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia certainly represents a much more

challenging and risky area for researchers.

Despite the fact that, between 1992 and 1995, many war crimes, crimes against

humanity and gross violations of human rights were literally taking place in broad

daylight and sometimes in front of TV cameras, those who ordered and executed

these crimes did not leave behind much evidence in written or other forms that

would prove ‘without reasonable doubt’ their involvement in the crimes. Rare finds

such as General Mladic’s wartime diaries, discovered in 2010, provide extraordi-

nary glimpses into the day-to-day running of a joint criminal enterprise and the

people who issued or approved the most heinous orders, involving summary

executions, shelling of residential areas and forced deportations of the civilian

population. After the war, such specific and hardcore evidence became more than

just of symbolic importance because in order to pronounce the alleged war criminals

guilty, the ICTY in The Hague required original documents, written orders,

signatures, dates, etc.,—as if those perpetrating crimes would have willingly left

such a paper trail behind.

The so-called Mladic diaries, comprising 3,500 pages in 18 notebooks, have been

described as the single most important source of solid prosecution evidence in the

war crimes trials before the ICTY (Milutinovic 2011). However, a much larger set

of classified documents relating to the army General Mladic was in charge of, and

the crimes this army committed in Bosnia were handed over to the ICTY by the

Serbian government seven years earlier (Hartman 2007). These documents also

included Stenographic records of the sessions of the FRY [i.e. Serbia’s] Supreme

Defense Council (‘Zapisnik Vrhovnog Saveta Odbrane Jugoslavije’), the crucial

piece of evidence proving the direct link between the Serbian government and

Mladic’s army, which practically operated as a part of Serbia’s armed forces

fighting in neighbouring Bosnia. Two ICTY insiders, Sir Geoffrey Nice, a former

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leading prosecutor at the ICTY responsible for prosecuting the late Slobodan

Milosevic, and Florence Hartman, spokesperson and adviser to the Chief Prosecutor

at the ICTY, Carla Del Ponte, between 1999 and 2008, have in the meantime blown

the whistle alleging that Carla Del Ponte, who was the Chief Prosecutor at the ICTY

between 1999 and 2008, made a secret deal with the Serbian government that the

documents they handed over to the ICTY would remain under an embargo for any

other trials apart from the proceedings against Milosevic. As is known, Slobodan

Milosevic died in the ICTY custody in 2006, before his trial was finished, and with

his death, the valuable documents about war crimes in Bosnia and Serbia’s role in

them became off-limits to the prosecutors and the victims of those crimes. It has

been argued that because of the fact that key evidence of Serbia’s guilt was covered

up (Hoare 2008) that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Serbia was

not guilty of participating in genocide in Bosnia in the 2007 Bosnia and

Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro case (The Application of the Convention

on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide). Notwithstanding the

outcome of that case, the ICJ did confirm that genocide in Srebrenica took place and

that Serbia failed to take necessary steps to prevent it. The survivors and the public

in Bosnia were appalled by this ruling and could not understand how and why this

legal battle could be so easily lost. It remains to be seen how much evidence from

various protected sources will be used in the still ongoing proceedings against the

Serb wartime leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic charged with genocide

and crimes against humanity at the ICTY.

Bosnian archives torn between politics, justice, ethics and ethnics

The three primary areas relating to destruction, appropriation and use of archival

material, records and memory artifacts in post-war Bosnia remain highly political

and differently interpreted by various parties within and outside of the country.

While, for instance, many Bosnians—and Bosnian Muslims in particular—regard

the shelling and burning of Vijecnica as a barbaric act aimed at destroying common

cultural memory of all Bosnian citizens, the Serb nationalists still see it as

destruction of a primary Muslim cultural symbol built during the Austro-Hungarian

occupation. Divided memories reflect the division of the country and public spheres

and fall along the ethnic lines that were created during the 1992–1995 war. These

divided memories are also reflected in the separation and renaming of the old and

formation of the new archival centres. In addition to the Central Archive of BiH

based in Sarajevo, before the war there also existed eight regional archival centres,

operating within the same organisational system (Saric 1999). Today, many of the

centres do not exist any more, while others have become ethnically exclusive

institutions. For instance, the former Archival Centre of Bosnian Krajina, based in

Banja Luka, became the central Archive of Republika Srpska, while another ‘Serb’

archival centre was established in Bijeljina.

Separation of the archives and establishment of the new ethnicised bureaucracy

dealing with the archival material and personal records have resulted in making it

more difficult to access the existing sources, preventing the return of the forcibly

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displaced, as is described later in this article. In some instances, archival matters in

Bosnia have legal implications, from those relating to ordinary people wanting to

reclaim their property to the evidence used in local and international courts. In post-

war BiH, like in other post-genocide societies where documentary evidence is used

in judicial proceedings involving war crimes, documents, records and archives are

often used as primary documentary evidence for establishment of truth. In her

article discussing the trial of the Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia, Michelle

Caswell calls for the assumptions of epistemological authority of archives over the

oral testimony of survivors into question and examines how archives could provide

extrajudicial space for the voices of survivors to be heard (2010, p 27). In Bosnia, in

addition to forensic evidence, the survivors’ testimonies have often been the only

evidence about numerous war crimes committed in the country, while the scarce

documents from the 1990s war have provided sanitized and incomplete versions of

such events (Halilovich 2013a). Nonetheless, in both court and public arenas, the

written evidence is still perceived as more reliable evidence than oral accounts of

the survivors and witnesses.

While much of the documentary evidence remains scarce, incomplete and

controversial, there are also many unanswered questions about ethical dimensions,

legality, authenticity and ownership of some of the existing archival material. As in

the case of the former secret police records, privileged information is often used

strategically to discredit and defame those active in public life in post-war Bosnia.

Other issues are connected to the fine line between protecting individuals’

confidentiality (for example, those recorded in the Yugoslav secret police files) and

the right of the public to know about the secret past (for example about state

guarded records relating to injustices and war crimes). All this suggests that as much

as the archives, records and cultural memory institutions were subjected to

systematic destruction during the war, their reconstruction continues to play an

important role in social healing, restoration of justice and the reconciliation process

in post-war Bosnia. In fact, as Terry Cook argues, archives and recordkeeping

systems have the potential to prevent future abuses and to promote better

accountability for public affairs and governance (2013, p 111). Similarly, Anne

Gilliland concludes that, rather than being neutral and oblivious to their social

surroundings, archives and archival work must ultimately serve social justice (2011,

p 198).

(Re)creating records of shredded memories using ethnography

Unlike the high profile cases—like those that led to the arrests of army generals,

created diplomatic tensions or disclosed names of some amateur spies who were

denouncing their colleagues and neighbours thirty or more years ago—in post-war

Bosnia there are many other issues with the archives, memories and records which

have been less well documented, including the most recent destruction of

irreplaceable records burned in the Bosnia’s Central Archive during the riots in

February 2014 (Oltermann 2014). An area that has been of particular interest to me

involves mundane records relating to ordinary people, their memories and identities

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and what it means to these ordinary people when the records of their existence are

erased. As I argue here, despite attempts to erase them physically, symbolically and

bureaucratically, the survivors have been able to use their own memory resources to

reconstruct their identities and places in both real and cyber space.

The stories described in this paper come from my ethnographic research,

involving both conventional and digital ethnography in Bosnian war-torn commu-

nities. Ethnography has for long been closely aligned with anthropological

fieldwork and even with anthropologists’ identities; however, this research method

has become increasingly popular among memory scholars from various disciplines

(Halilovich 2011). Defined as a holistic qualitative method, ethnography applies a

variety of approaches and techniques to studying human actors in a social context.

As such, ethnography is actor-centred in it puts an emphasis on practice and agency,

that is, the experiences, feelings, meanings, imagination, narratives, metaphors and

social networks of the people who are the subjects of scholarly inquiry. The most

common ethnographic approaches involve participant observation, in-depth inter-

views and participating in the everyday realities of research participants as well as a

reflexive engagement with the subject of study—i.e. people, their stories and their

respective material and non-material cultures.

One of the crucial elements of ethnography is time, as most good ethnographies

take months, and more often years, to be conducted and written. While being a

method, or a process, involving a long-term engagement in the field, ethnography is

also an outcome—or the end product (usually text based)—of ethnographic

research; one conducts, writes and reads ethnography—another holistic quality,

keen ethnographers may insist.

Sociocultural anthropology (my home discipline), which relies heavily on

ethnography, has long been regarded as the ‘science of the other,’ where the

researcher is one of ‘us’ and the researched are ‘them’—the ‘other,’ members of the

exotic foreign cultures, those different from ‘us’ about whom ‘we’ want to learn and

understand more. In other to produce ‘thick description’ of the cultural phenomena

explored, i.e. to unveil the meanings of the informants’ actions, ethnographers are

required to engage with those they research at a very close, personal level (Geertz

1973). In the process, the researcher gradually moves from the purely etic, or

‘culturally neutral’, outsider’s perspective to the one of an insider, adopting at least

to some extent an emic perspective, i.e. a view and understanding of a person from

within the culture being studied. However, more recently anthropological research

has increasingly been done ‘at home’, i.e. in the researcher’s own cultural setting;

thus, turning anthropology from the ‘science of the other’ to the one of the familiar

or proximate. This anthropological turn has not stopped there; a number of

researchers have also used themselves as their primary research subjects, focusing

on and describing their personal experiences relating to the topic under investiga-

tion. Unlike the traditional ethnographies of the ‘other’, these researchers have

produced ethnographies of the ‘self’, or autoethnographies (Halilovich 2013b).

More recently, ethnography has also gone digital, with terms such as ‘digital

ethnography’, ‘netnography, ‘online ethnography’ and ‘cyber ethnography’ becom-

ing methodological neologisms used interchangeably to describe ethnographers’

research in the cyber world. As Murthy points out, ‘ethnography is about telling

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social stories’, and while ‘ethnography goes digital, its epistemological remit

remains much the same’ (2008, p 837). While digital ethnography, as a research

method, takes the ethnographer beyond the geographically situated places into the

domain of cyber space and digital media, it ultimately expands beyond mere data

collection on the Internet, becoming also the media through which narratives of

mixed forms of existence—real/virtual, now/then and here/there—are being told

and created (Halilovich 2013b). As an end product, digital ethnography enables the

ethnographer to move beyond text-based ethnography by presenting their findings in

a multimedia form involving not only text, but also video, sounds, pictures

(Underberg and Zorn 2013). All these different forms of ethnography, as I attempt

to demonstrate in this paper, can be valuable methods in archival and memory

research, a field that has itself been undergoing significant changes and challenges

in recent years.

The first ethnography described here explores an individual, and the second, a

collective story about how Bosnian survivors of ethnic cleansing and genocide have

struggled to reclaim their erased lives and their own identities as well as the

identities of their loved ones who perished. Now, I will turn to the story of Fatima

(not her real name) in order to illustrate the importance of records in the recovery of

memory and identity to displaced war widows in post-war Bosnia and in the

diaspora.

(Re)creating records: ‘Temporary’ war widows remarrying dead husbands

Fatima’s living room in the St. Louis’ suburb of Bevo looks very much like most

other living rooms in Bosnian homes I have been in—in Bosnia as well as in the

Bosnian refugee diaspora in Australia, Sweden, Austria and the USA. What makes

her household recognisably ‘Bosnian’ is not only the distinct coffee cups (fildzani),

copper coffee pots (dzezve) and crystal glasses and ornaments displayed in the large

credenza dominating the living room, but also the framed photos of her family

members.

One of the photos is of a young man, a teenager, dressed in an olive green shirt

and a Titovka cap with a red star on his head, a Jugoslav People’s Army uniform.

The young recruit is in a serious pose, his eyes directed somewhere in the distance,

but one could easily recognise an adolescent who only recently might have finished

high school and is still learning how to look like a serious adult, a JNA soldier. In

another photo, one can see a moustached man, probably in his thirties, hugging a

school-age boy: both are smiling happily. Next to them, in the same photo, is a red

car, a 101 Stojadin, which seems to have been the main reason for the photo

opportunity. Both photos were taken during the 1980s, when Fatima’s life looked

fairly ordinary and when it was impossible for her to imagine that some two decades

later she would become a refugee, a migrant living in the USA, while all three

people in the pictures, her husband and two of her sons, would be dead, killed in the

Srebrenica genocide in 1995. Her youngest son and her daughter, who at the time

were 12 and 14, respectively, survived. Almost apologetically, Fatima explains that

it was only because of them, her remaining children, that she decided to migrate to

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the USA in 1999, hoping that they would have a better future there than they would

have in war-torn Bosnia.

The pictures in her living room are some of the few material records of Fatima’s

past life. She tells how in 1992, before escaping to the nearest safe village, she only

managed to fetch a photo album and a handful of documents from her burning

home. Among the photos were the two now standing on top of her credenza in her

house near St. Louis. The documents she saved back then included her children’s

school certificates and the family’s healthcare booklets. She believed they would

need them as soon as the madness they ended up in would come to a halt. But the

madness did not stop then and even today it affects Fatima’s life on a daily basis.

When her two sons and husband ‘did not come out of the woods’—an expression

which has become a synonym for the ‘march of death’ referring to the route men

and boys from Srebrenica took in July 1995, hoping to escape the onslaught of the

Serbian army—Fatima and her two surviving children became internally displaced

persons (IDPs), moving from one refugee centre to another and she experienced all

the hardships of a war widow and of single parenthood, until four years later,

encouraged by her former neighbours who were in a similar situation, she decided to

migrate to the USA.

She recalls, among the many difficulties affecting her life as an IDP in post-war

Bosnia, the difficulty of getting basic identity documents such as birth certificates

(for her living and missing family members), a marriage certificate (even though she

now was a war widow), employment history (to claim her late husband’s pension),

written confirmation of missing persons (her two sons and husband), evidence of

property ownership (for the property she and her husband once owned), a written

statement confirming displacement (in order to be eligible for support and

healthcare for IDPs) and many other papers proving that she once really existed and

that she was who she claimed to be. For Fatima, who lacked most of these

documents because they were destroyed in the local municipality when her town

was raided or evaporated in smoke when her house burned down, the constant chase

after the papers—from one office to another, from one part of the country

to another, finding two willing witnesses who would sign legally binding statutory

declarations in order to get at least basic temporary documents valid for

six months—came on top of all the other hardships.

‘It was a constant humiliation and no one seemed to care’, she states. ‘It

became too much when I had to ‘‘marry’’ my dead husband in order to claim a

widow’s pension’, she continues, ‘I felt like using my dead husband, putting a

price on his dead head’.

The ‘re-marrying’ was a standard procedure after the war and applied to tens of

thousands of war widows who lacked written evidence that they were married to the

men who were now dead or missing.

Chasing the papers (ganjanje papira), as she calls it, was not only time-

consuming and humiliating, but it also cost money required for various adminis-

tration fees and transportation. At the same time, Fatima had to take care of her

children and support her elderly in-laws who were accommodated in a collective

centre for IDPs, as well as search for the truth about what happened to the other

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three members of her family, her husband and two sons, who were among some

forty thousand missing presumably killed persons when the war ended. The hopes

that her missing sons and husband and several other members of her extended

family might have been still alive were severely diminished when the evidence of

mass executions of Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica emerged shortly after the

atrocities took place. One of her sons was 25 and another 21. Her husband was 46.

Bodies of living women as archives of the dead men’s identities

As the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre, the International

Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), the BiH Missing Persons’ Institute and

many other sources have confirmed, mostly men perished during the war in Bosnia;

their executions were systematically planned and carried out in Srebrenica, Prijedor,

Zvornik, Visegrad and across the country. Killing male members of these

communities was intended to destroy social groups ‘in whole or in part’, and in

most cases, this was partly or completely achieved. While mostly men were killed, it

should not be forgotten that women’s men were killed: husbands, sons, fathers,

brothers and lovers. Adam Jones, the Canadian scholar who specialises in

researching gender–selective mass killings, calls such killings ‘gendercide’, a

particular form of genocide (2004, 2006). As Raphael Lemkin put it, genocide

signifies ‘a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of

essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the

groups themselves’ (2002, p 27). Through the physical elimination of men in the

‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns in Bosnia, it was the essential foundations of

communities—namely, families as primary units of communal structure—that were

severely affected and in many cases completely destroyed (Halilovich 2011, 2013b).

According to the Research and Documentation Centre (2007), only 10 %—or

10,000 war casualties—were women. However, 96 % of the women killed were

civilians. The figure of 10 % of overall casualties, or any other attempt to quantify

the depth and continuing significance of women’s suffering, is simply inadequate.

The reality I have encountered ‘in the field’ during my research in Bosnia and the

Bosnian diaspora tells a different story from the statistics: women have been

severely affected by both forced migration and direct and indirect violence against

them. Nonetheless, the full scale of women’s suffering, during and after the war, has

been under-represented, including the fact that a considerable burden of the war and

its aftermath was carried and continues to be carried by women. As ICTY

judgments have confirmed, women were not merely collateral damage of the war,

but in most cases, primary targets of organised violence—including sexual

violence—by armed men (ICTY 1996). In addition to the 10,000 killed, it is

estimated that between 20,000 and 50,000 women and girls were raped and

systematically abused during the war (Orentlicher 1997). But even the worst crimes

against women committed in the notorious rape camps—for which a number of war

criminals faced trial by the ICTY—remain ‘invisible’, under-reported and

un(der)documented. The reason for this can be found in the stigma and the

individual and communal shame associated with victims of such violence, resulting

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in a silent ‘collective denial’ of the war crimes committed against women. These

crimes may, therefore, not be remembered and memorialised in the same way as

some other crimes. In the collective memory of victimised groups, there is a

hierarchy of events and suffering that gets remembered and memorialised; clearly,

in this hierarchy, crimes against women do not feature prominently—if at all. As

Xavier Bougarel points out, ‘[the] image of a male hero defending his nation and his

family is often complemented by that of the passive and powerless female victim

(zrtva)’ (2007, p 171). Nonetheless, the crucial role women have had in identifying

the remains of the men who perished, their relatives, has been widely recognised

and cannot be denied (Wagner 2008). They have been the embodiment of the search

for and identification of the missing in more than one way.

As Fatima’s story demonstrates, the magnitude of the direct and indirect crimes

against women (and their men) has irrevocably affected the memories and identities

of women survivors, their families and communities. It is also a poignant example

of how women have preserved a link between those who perished and those who

survived, not only through their narrated and documented memories of the missing

men, but also though their bodies, their own DNA, which proved to be the most

important piece of data required to give identities to the missing.

Like thousands of other war widows and survivors whose family members

‘disappeared’ during the war, Fatima’s search for her missing relatives turned into a

search for their remains. As the dental records, medical histories and other ‘ante-

mortem data’ of Fatima’s husband and sons were destroyed during the war, the

biographical and physical facts she could provide about them as well as her own and

her surviving children’s DNA extracted from the blood samples they gave, helped

the ICMP create the first post-war records of her missing family members. Now, the

remains of the dead could be matched with the DNA of the living, linking them

again more than just symbolically, even if this only meant that, once identified,

those who perished would not be counted as missing anymore and would be given

their names back and a dignified burial in a marked grave. As Sarah Wagner has

written in her groundbreaking book To Know Where He Lies, ‘the absence of

knowledge—not knowing where their missing lie—plagues the surviving families’,

as ‘to be absent is to be missing in both time and space’ (2008, p 156). Use of DNA-

based identification technology in the identification process of the missing whose

bones were exhumed from mass graves in Bosnia has changed the way that the

identities of the victims after mass atrocities get re-established. DNA technology, as

Nettelfield and Wagner argue, has changed the nature of the discussion about what

really happened in Bosnia, as truth-telling has assumed a more scientifically backed,

rigorous tone (2011).

The DNA matching and kinship software also demonstrate how violence is

capable of restructuring kinship, how categories of persons are defined and relations

between them ordered. While blood as the ‘shared essence’ through which kinship is

defined is one of the ways through which relations between individuals are

imagined, DNA matching links not only parents and siblings in a direct blood

relation, but also husbands and wives. It is not unusual that missing/dead husbands

get identified thanks to DNA donated by their wives. In the process, DNA of their

common child (or children) is a crucial component in the matching. This then can

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subsequently lead to identification of other missing ‘non-blood’ relatives (Wagner

2008, p 115).

However, as Wagner points out, ‘DNA evidence does not exist in a vacuum;

rather, its success depends on other manifestations of individual lives, social ties and

everyday practice. Family members holding a piece of cloth, touching its fabric,

whose pattern and stitching are indelibly etched into their memory, use their own

recollections to help retrieve their missing relatives’ remains’ (2008, p 268). When

there is a complete absence of any identifiable material belonging to identify

victims, the survivors use their own imagination to fill the gaps and integrate it in

the memory of perished relatives.

No country for old memories

For Fatima, giving her blood at the ICMP office was the last duty she felt she had to

do before joining tens of thousands of other displaced Bosnians looking for a safer

place under the sun when the war in their homeland was officially over. It proved

easier to get all the documentation required for migration to the USA than to keep

prolonging her many temporary statuses: as an IDP, a war widow, a fallen

defender’s family (sehidska porodica), a sole parent, a mother who lost two sons, a

civilian victim of war and other bureaucratic categories imposed upon people who

lost their homes and their family members and who were now required to renew the

documents proving these known facts every six months. ‘I was not even given time

to mourn my losses’, Fatima says with sadness. The migration process took about

three months and went through via neighbouring Croatia where a distant relative

assisted her with the logistics. The migration officers who interviewed her in Zagreb

showed understanding and accepted all the documents she had even though some

were close to expiration. On 18 November 1999, she and her children landed in the

USA, in St. Louis. But the cliche about migrants and refugees starting a new life in a

new country only partly applied to Fatima and many other Bosnian refugees settling

in this and other places; the legacy of the war and the social, cultural and emotional

burden of what it meant to be a war widow did not vanish overnight, nor was it gone

14 years later when I met Fatima for the second time, in November 2013.

Thanks to the DNA matching, in 2004, the remains of Fatima’s oldest son

recovered from a mass grave were positively identified. Accompanied by her son

and daughter, Fatima travelled to Bosnia to attend the collective burial of her son

and several hundred other identified genocide victims at Srebrenica Memorial

Cemetery, the same place she was deported from nine years earlier. Then, in 2006,

Fatima was notified that both her younger son and her husband had also been

identified via the DNA matching system. Fatima and her children returned for

another burial of their family members.

This time Fatima asked the ICMP officials about any material belongings that

might have been found at the sites where her family members were exhumed. She

remembered her husband’s pocket watch, wedding ring and cigarette holder as well

as a silver necklace her younger son was wearing. But she also thought of the

personal ID cards they had in their pockets as well as the clothing they had on, the

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very jackets and trousers she had patched and stitched during the war. She was

hoping that some of these material artefacts would have been identified and handed

over to the relatives. However, she accepted the official’s explanation that these

personal belongings now represented important pieces of forensic evidence to be

used by the ICTY and that one day all the artefacts would be returned to Bosnia and

then relatives would be asked to identify each item which thereafter might form a

part of a genocide museum collection or be appropriated by the surviving relatives.

This is why she, like many other Srebrenica survivors, felt betrayed and robbed

of their pieces of memories again in 2009, when she learned that the ICTY officials

had destroyed material recovered from the mass graves of the Srebrenica genocide,

comprising some 1,000 pieces of identification, photographs and articles of clothing

belonging to the victims found in the graves (Simic 2012). Confronted with the

survivors’ requests to clarify why the ICTY did this, the official explanation was

cold and sanitised: the destruction of material from gravesites is standard procedure

if the material is no longer being used as evidence during UN court proceedings and

if it poses a risk to public health (Meer 2009). Fatima now lost every hope that any

of the personal belongings her family members last wore would be ever returned to

her. This is why she treasures even more the two framed photographs in her living

room. ‘These pictures’, she concludes, ‘bring a bit of the old home here…without

them I would feel like a complete stranger in this foreign world’.

Attachment to photographs and identifying them with home is not unique to

Fatima’s experience. As Belaj writes, family photography can be understood as a

ritual of home culture in which family is both an object and subject (2008).

Photography becomes evidence of something that really happened, something that

exists as part of human experience and as such photography serves as memory and

archiving of reality. For Fatima, family photography evokes the imaginary

connection between her family members across time and space and provides her

with a platform from where to create her oral history about the exodus and the

tragedy of her family. In the absence of archival records, as Swain argues, oral

histories are the only remaining way to gain information about particular events and

create the actual records based on testimonies of eyewitnesses and survivors (2003).

Similarly, Sue McKemmish, Anne Gilliland and Eric Ketelaar point to the

importance of the cultural dimension of oral histories in groups in which memories

are passed down through narrative forms, including storytelling, rather than written

or photographic records (2005). They describe an example from Tasmania when, in

a legal process, oral testimony of Aboriginal ancestry prevailed over documentary

evidence located in government archives and births, deaths and marriages records

(McKemmish et al. 2005, p 150).

Zep@ online: from ethnically cleansed villages to ‘cyber villages’

In a similar fashion, like Fatima recreating her ‘old’ home in her new living room in

the place she resettled in, many other survivors of ethnic cleansing and genocide

have been imagining and imaging their old homes and hometowns in their new

living rooms via the Internet. The Internet and ‘technologies of self’, as Jose van

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Dijck calls them, ‘are in and of themselves social and cultural tools; they are means

of reflection and self-representation as well as communication’ (2007, p 39).

Usually starting in the beginning as an individual exchange of scanned photographs,

documents and other records between people coming from the same place or

neighbourhood, many such grassroots initiatives have grown into sophisticated

portals and online repositories of documents, images and stories about local places.

In fact, some of the places destroyed during the 1992–1995 war now only exist in

cyberspace and as a part of the social relations of those who identify with the lost

places (Halilovich 2013a).

In order to engage with the Bosnian ‘cyber villages’, I was required to modify my

research approach and expand my fieldwork beyond the real space, effectively

practising digital ethnography. As with the people described here, for many refugees

cyber space and digital social networks do not only act as an extension of the places

and networks in real space, but as often their replica and the only possible

alternative. Hence, I argue that research into contemporary forced displacement

very often requires elements of both conventional and digital ethnography—or ‘on-

site and online fieldwork’. The approach I have adopted is to position and interpret

my ‘sites’ and interactions in cyber space in relation to actual places and actors in

real space.

Ideally, the reader would now follow the inserted hyperlinks, tap into online

forums and discussions and watch YouTube videos to get a sense of what kind of

places, stories and archives I am exploring here.

Zepa Online (http://www.zepa-online.com/) offers one such story and an alter-

nate place which has been a site of my digital ethnography, but I have also visited

real Zepa, or what is left of it, and met with people from Zepa living in diaspora,

including St. Louis.

Zepa is a village, or more precisely a cluster of villages in hamlets, nested in the

mountainous region along the river Drina, in eastern Bosnia, some 40 km from

Srebrenica and 20 km from Visegrad—or this is what and where Zepa used to be

before the war in Bosnia. It was one of many picturesque Bosnian places with long

traditions and a rich history as well as its own local cultural norms, dialect and a

distinct way of life. Known as proud highlanders, the people of Zepa are still

associated with many positive stereotypes. With his historical novel The Bridge in

Zepa, the Nobel Prize winning author Ivo Andric might have contributed to such

somewhat exotic perceptions of people from Zepa that still persist within and

beyond Bosnia. In terms of ethnicity and religion, Zepa residents or Zepljaci are

Bosniaks and Muslims.

Bordering Serbia and being inhabited by non-Serbs sealed Zepa’s fate in 1992,

when Zepa was attacked by heavy artillery and bombed by Serbian jets (Nuhanovic

2012). Many villagers of Zepa lost their lives during these attacks and many were

forced to abandon their homes and look for safety in the mountains. Between 1992

and 1995, Zepa was completely besieged by the Serb forces, separated from

Bosnian government territories and practically cut off from the rest of the world

(Kurtic 2006). Like Srebrenica, in July 1995, Zepa was overrun by Serb troops, with

General Mladic personally commanding the operation. However, unlike the mass

executions of men and boys at Srebrenica, most Zepa men survived, some by

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fighting their way through until reaching the distant town of Kladanj, others by

crossing into Serbia and surrendering themselves to Serbia’s army and police rather

than to Mladic’s troops. Those who crossed into Serbia were detained in improvised

prisons by the Serbian police, and many were tortured and abused (Kurtic 2006).

After being registered by the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC), they

were allowed to resettle ‘in third countries’, but not allowed to return to Bosnia and

their native Zepa. The USA was willing to accept the detainees and most of the

surviving men from Zepa ended up in St. Louis and Atlanta. In the following

months and years, many members of their families who remained in Bosnia joined

them. This effectively created a chain migration, with relatives, friends and

neighbours sponsoring more fellow Zepljaci to migrate to the US. Today, St. Louis

probably has the largest concentration of people from Zepa anywhere in the world.

Often the only surviving records of their pre-migration lives have been their

ICRC cards that enabled them to migrate to the USA. While most villagers survived,

their village did not exist anymore as a social place; during the Serb offensive in

July 1995, Zepa was completely ‘ethnically cleansed’, depopulated and the place

literally erased from the map; all houses, administrative buildings and mosques

were destroyed. Nonetheless, the survivors from Zepa now living thousands of miles

from their original village proved that places are made of people and their social

relations rather than of bricks and mortar. They recreated their sense of belonging to

their local place through their relationships with each other as well as by sharing

their memories in forms of photographs, documents and stories of their old home

village with other fellow Zepa residents (Zepljaci) now living in St. Louis, Atlanta

and worldwide.

As I personally witnessed in August 2013, Zepa remains largely in ruins, and

many destroyed houses, and sometimes whole hamlets, are completely overgrown

with vegetation, so that it is even hard to recognise that people lived there until two

decades ago. However, there is another reality of Zepa; for anyone interested in

finding out about Zepa on the internet, Zepa Online will appear representing an

intact and vibrant village full of human activity, a place one would love to visit or

live in. There are pictures of the village’s iconic buildings and houses, the legendary

Zepa bridge, monuments and cultural symbols as well as the photos of the pristine

nature. One can engage in chats and discussion forums with residents of this online

village, as well as read opinion pieces posted by renowned Zepa intellectuals living

in different places, but regarding Zepa Online portal as their home(page).

Along embedded videos with local music and satirical prose, there are also

political discussions going on as well as options for conducting more one-to-one

conversations in divanhana or a group chat in zepsko sijelo. There is also an online

library hosting a free collection of e-books about Zepa as well as references about

other relevant books and how they can be ordered.

Zepa Online contains an archive on the history of the village, including extensive

records of what happened there during the Serbian aggression of 1992–1995. One

can visit an online memorial and read about those who lost their lives during the

war. Next to it is an obituary for Zepljaci who died more recently in various corners

of the globe. The names, nicknames, dates and places of births and deaths, and

photos of the deceased included in the obituaries tell a story about a community,

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kinship and identity of Zepljaci ‘back then and there’ as well as about the ‘here and

now’, the places where they live (and die) today.

In recent years, since a handful of Zepljaci started returning to their home village,

Zepa Online regularly includes updates about individual and communal projects

taking place in ‘real’ Zepa, and acts as a hub through which people can get involved

in humanitarian and community work aimed at supporting their fellow Zepljaci

either back in Bosnia, in St. Louis or elsewhere. Today, Zepa Online is more than a

resource for people with origins in a village in eastern Bosnia; it is a communal

archive, but also a place where Zepa identity is asserted and performed in a variety

of ways. No less importantly, by recreating collective memory about and for

themselves, the survivors from Zepa have created an archive including the records

of the grave human rights violations and of the suffering of their village that would

otherwise have gone unrecorded. As McKemmish et. al have recognised, ‘available

technologies and prevailing literacies play a formative role in shaping the archives

and the formation of collective memory’ (2005, p 146). As the Online Zepa

demonstrates, the digitally mediated collective memories provide an opportunity for

new forms of communal archiving, which—as Cook argues—‘as concept and

reality, evidently makes us think differently about ownership of records, replevin,

oral and written traditions, the localism-globalism and margins-centre nexus,

multiple viewpoints and multiple realities about recordkeeping, and so much else,

including evidence, memory, and obviously identity, and, depending on our

responses, around deeper ethical issues of control, status, power…’’(2013, p 116).

Conclusion

Starting as a response to forced displacement and systematic erasure of local

memories and identities, Bosnian ‘cyber villages’ now flourish on the internet acting

as digital museums, archives and online shrines to the places lost, but also as

alternate worlds and places of defiance as well as vibrant social hubs for interactions

and performances of distinct local identities, memories and spatial practices. The

existence of ‘cyber villages’ demonstrates that, even when it is reduced down—or

elevated—to the level of an idea(l), the place called home remains a ‘symbolic

anchor’, a metaphor around which narratives of belonging and memories of home

are constructed and performed.

In the era of genocides, politically motivated violence and other widespread

human rights crises, when exploring the complex political, ethical, legal and cultural

challenges faced in the creation, preservation and use of records documenting

violence, it is important to recognise both the impact of such documents (or lack of

them) on ordinary people directly affected by violence as well as to acknowledge

the resilience and resourcefulness of ordinary people in recreating, repurposing and

preserving their records and memories of suffering. Such ‘popular records’ of

ordinary people can indeed be valuable and are sometimes the only existing

resource for researchers interested in uncovering the human dimension of great

crimes committed in some small places like Zepa, or against some ‘small’ people

like Fatima. Such mundane records are not merely the old photographs in Fatima’s

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home in St. Louis, but the stories and meaning she attaches to the pictures of her

killed relatives. Fatima is (still) a walking and breathing archive holding the story of

her past life and the records of injustices against her family and her community.

Witnessing her story and allowing her to put it on record, as I have attempted to do

here, is not just a methodological challenge, but also, I would argue, the ultimate

ethical responsibility of scholars involved in memory research. So is the

engagement with the ‘cyber village’ Zepa Online.

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Hariz Halilovich is a sociocultural anthropologist and author, currently working as a Senior Lecturer at

Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He has widely researched and written on the issues of genocide

in Bosnia and the long-term effects of politically motivated violence on individuals, families and

communities. His current research project ‘Gendered displacement, memory and identity in Bosnian

refugee diaspora’ (funded by the Australian Research Council) explores experiences of Bosnian war

widows in three diaspora contexts in Europe, Australia and the USA. His book Places of Pain: Forced

Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-local Identities in Bosnian War-torn Communities was

published by Berghahn: New York–Oxford (2013a).

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