Writing After the Genocide: Lessons from Srebrenica and the Meaning of Community After Violence

Abstract

This essay explores four themes that run as a thread through recent writings about the genocide in Srebrenica and its aftermath: systemic and premeditated character of violence used by the Bosnian Serb forces during the war, which still echoes in politics of Republic Srpska; delicate politics of witnessing and identification which draws Srebrenica's survivors into the courts but also into the past; layered yet often self-serving interests circling around Srebrenica and annual commemorations in Potočari; and changing, multiple and, at times, conflicting understandings of “community” since the war. The essay draws on four books—Sarah Wagner's To Know Where He Lies, Hariz Halilovich's Places of Pain, Robert Donia's Radovan Karadžić: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide, and Lara Nettelfield and Sarah Wagner's Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide.

Notes

1. The Economist, July 6, 1991.

2. The Economist, “War in Europe”, p. 13, ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Lara J. Nettelfield and Sarah E. Wagner, Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 12.

5. Ibid., p. 295.

6. Ibid., p. 255.

7. Ibid., p. 245.

8. Witness testimony from ICTY Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić 2000b: 5754–5755; 5761; 5768–5769 cited in Sarah E. Wagner, To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica's Missing, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, p. 152.

9. Erdemović's testimony is alluded to in another moving text, a letter by Srebrenica survivor Hasan Nuhanović, cited at length in Nettelfield & Wagner, op. cit., pp. 20–21.

10. Hariz Halilovich, Places of Pain, Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2013, p. 93.

11. Ibid. p. 94.

12. Nettelfield and Wagner, op. cit., p. 50.