Places of Pain and Spaces of Silence: Re-Visiting a Bosnian Rape Camp

ABSTRACT

The relation between gender, silence, place and space is theorised in this article through an analysis of the former rape camp Vilina Vlas in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Combining a spatial perspective with narrative analysis, we dissect spatial practices and narrative silences that shape and reshape a particular place defined by gendered violence. We suggest that ‘places of pain’ and ‘spaces of silence’ are co-constituted through a lack of acknowledgement and spatial erasures, as well as the making and breaking of silences. Our investigation discloses how places of gendered violence are hidden, transformed and forgotten and how women exposing them are silenced and rejected, yet still continue to resist and speak out. The article sheds light on the long-term consequences of gendered violence in war and contributes to the growing research agenda on gendered geographies of violence.

Introduction

Witness OK14 said that she knew Oliver Krsmanović from before the war. The witness said she was held prisoner in Vilina Vlas in May and June, 1992, where beside Krsmanović she was raped by Željko Lelek , and Milan Lukić, who imprisoned her and brought her there. ‘I have never seen Krsmanović again after the rape. At the very beginning of the war, in April 1992, I met him on a street in Višegrad, where in passing I overheard him bragging to a younger, unknown man, that he raped a lot of Muslim women’, said OK14. (Balkan Insight 2012)

The nature of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) was largely defined by ethnic cleansing as a violent strategy of spatial segregation, and systematic rapes were a war strategy for targeting civilians (ICTY.org 2023). The 1992–95 war thus left in its wake a particular gendered ‘geography of violence’ that is marked by absences of bodies, material voids and narrative silences (cf. Halilovich 2013; Riding 2019). People are missing, cultural and religious physical markers have been destroyed, and narratives that link individuals, families and other social networks to places have been severed (Riding 2019; Toal and Dahlman 2011). The Bosnian post-war landscape is loaded with such sites that have witnessed rape, ethnic cleansing and massacres. While some were ‘purpose-built’, others were everyday, ordinary and mundane places that were transformed, such as, for example, schools, sports halls and hotels that were changed for ‘”extraordinary” purposes into spaces of crime’ (Volcic and Simic 2016, 286). Although common to post-conflict societies, such places are often forgotten or silenced and thereby erased from collective memory.

The hotel Vilina Vlas in the small town of Višegrad in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina is one of these places. The health spa hotel was the location of one of the infamous rape camps during the war, where women and girls were imprisoned. There are, however, few easily observable traces of this violent past in the present. The hotel has returned to its original purpose, erasing the horrors of the atrocious events and the stories are largely silenced as no commemoration acknowledges the victims and the dominant narrative among present-day inhabitants denies the fact that crimes were committed here. This denial is part of a larger silence concerning the wartime events in the town, which was hit by the first wave of brutal ethnic cleansing of the war in 1992, when most of the targeted Bosniak population was either killed or forced to flee. Present-day inhabitants, mostly consisting of the original Bosnian Serb inhabitants as well as Bosnian Serbs who have moved there from other parts of the country, uphold a local, hegemonic narrative of the war that erases the crimes of 1992. Detailed documentation of these crimes from international judicial bodies, international organisations as well as local witness statements tend to be dismissed. The silence around these crimes – and its contestations – is part of an ongoing post-conflict process that plays out in private, social and political relationships at a gendered, geopolitical scale reaching from the intimate, individual sphere, to the local, national and global context.

In this article, based on field research in and around Vilina Vlas, we theorise the relation between gender, silence, place and space. We suggest a co-constitution of ‘places of pain’ (cf Halilovich 2013; Logan and Reeves 2009) and ‘spaces of silence’ where emplaced narratives of pain, lack of acknowledgement, erasures, forgetting as well as the breaking of silences produce such co-constitution. Through an investigation of spatial practices and the making and breaking of narrative silences, we shed light on the long-term consequences of gendered violence in war. The article emerges from our experiences in and of the place of Višegrad (cf. Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2017) and from reading emplaced narratives about the events there (cf. Laliberté 2016). During the course of fieldwork in the town, we spent time at sites of gendered violence and noted the narrative silences as well as material erasures in the commemorative landscape. We experienced how emplaced practices transform post-conflict places and how these places are constructed and lived through gendered silences. By looking back upon this particular moment in time and place, we detect silences as well as instances of resistance breaking these silences, and we reflect upon what change may be generated through this agency over time.

We endeavour to contribute to the important and disparate literature that can be summarised under the heading geographies of gendered violence. We do so by reading the past and present of post-conflict societies from a gender perspective and by following the recent spatial turn in peace and conflict research (Annika and Buckley Zistel 2022; Björkdahl and Buckley Zistel 2016; Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2016; Brigg and George 2020; Logan and Reeves 2009; Macaspac 2022, 2022; Schäuble 2014). Much attention has been paid to war as instrumental in shaping gender identities, while the implications of peace in ‘affirming or dispelling the gender order’ in post-conflict contexts remain in comparison less explored (McDowell 2008, 335). A gender lens has also been employed to investigate the relationship between gender, nationalism and war. Through such investigations, women’s role in the gendered dynamics of nationalism has been revealed (Enloe 1990; Yuval-Davies 1997), making visible the home and the female bodies as a space of violence (Sjoberg 2013; Zarkov 2007; Hansen, 2000, 2006). The gendered dimension of war, violence and insecurities has also been investigated within the field of feminist geography (Hyndman 2001; Kobayashi 2009; Koopman 2016; Williams and Massaro 2013). Feminist geographers, when examining the intersecting geographies of war and peace, have pointed out that ‘violence is always a choice often taken in a context of masculine pride and control’ (Hyndman 2003 cited in Kobayashi 2009, 821). With few exceptions, geographers have not investigated war time rape in depth. Yet, feminist geographers have explored the relations between ‘differently scaled violence’ (Laliberté 2016, 27) has provided important insights into the link between intimate violence in peace and war time, and how it relates to trans-scalar conflict and peace dynamics (Hellmüller 2022; Laliberté 2016; Pain 2015).

Feminist IR research has made visible women’s experiences of war, understandings of the transition to peace, and demonstrated how women narrate their everyday lives in a post-war setting (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2018; Enloe 2010; Meintjes, Pillay, and Turshen 2001; Sjoberg 2013). From this body of research, we in particular build on that which explores women’s forgotten narratives and quiet silences, absences and marginalisation in the aftermath of war, which often interact with patriarchal and (ethno)nationalist structures that discipline gendered power relations and strip women of agency (e.g. Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2015; Cockburn 2013; Handrahan 2004; Parpart and Parashar 2019). Of particular interest here is the work of Helms (2013) regarding the construction of gendered stereotypes in the Bosnian context and her analysis of how women have to negotiate the discourse around (passive) victims of sexual violence.

Gender scholars have also brought to the fore women’s silence and the absence of their experiences in the knowledge of war. Gender-based violence tends to be publicly forgotten, disclaimed and/or altered (Mannergren Selimovic 2020). Crimes against women may feature in the scripted story of ’womenasvictims’ that is used to reinforce the masculinised nationalist narrative (Enloe 2010), but beyond iconic images of female suffering, the post-conflict hegemonic narrative tends to offer very little space for complex stories of gendered experiences of war crimes. A growing body of literature argues that women’s narratives of war contribute to (en)gendering our knowledge of war and peace (e.g. Curtis, Ebila, and Martin de Almagro 2022). Thus, work has only just begun to explore what consequences the gendered nature of places of pain and spaces of silence hold for peace.

By combining a spatial perspective with narrative analysis, we are able to dissect spatial practices and narrative silences that shape and reshape a particular place of pain defined by gendered violence. Our investigation discloses how such places of gendered violence are hidden, transformed and forgotten and how women exposing them are silenced and rejected, yet still continue to resist and speak out. We hope that our reading will contribute to the growing research agenda on gendered geographies of violence.

Methodological Reflections

We found that in order to map gendered geographies of violence and to foreground women’s experience of war we were required to rescale to a particular place. In so doing, we follow critical and feminist researchers who argue for a place-based perspective. This has brought about a shift in focus towards local places and experiences of peace and war (Enloe 2010; Kappler 2013, 2014; Sylvester 2013). Like feminist scholars, such as Cynthia Enloe, we engage with narratives of the individual and of the place – what Read Jervis calls ‘narratives of emplacement’ – as they constitute and emplace both war and peace (Jervis 2012). With inspiration from the micro-historical method of ‘cinematographic close-up’ we zoom in on a particular place and the individual women’s experiences of that place (cf. Ginzburg, Tedeschi, and Tedeschi 1993, 26). This, however, does not mean to discard the macro-level dynamics, but to recognise an ambiguous correspondence between the micro and the macro.

This article, centred around fieldwork conducted in 2014, is reflexive of both time and space. Three temporalities interact and help us understand the transformation of space and place: the time of the crimes during the war in the early 1990s, the time of fieldwork in 2014, when we trace the legacies of the crimes in local spatial and narrative practices, and the present time when we in hindsight re-read the fieldwork in the light of present-day developments regarding local memory politics in Višegrad and beyond. We have taken care to approach the temporal and spatial reality of Vilina Vlas in a reflexive and critical manner (Ackerly, Stern, and True 2006; Brigden and Hallett 2021) as we share Halilovich (2013, 10) understanding that places are ‘not located in space but in time which has passed’. In addition, through the method of ‘being-in-place’, we were able to spatially read the memoryscape and take detailed note of what is in place – and what is missing (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2018; Nordstrom and Robbens 1995, 139). Furthermore, as part of the research we also conducted several open-ended interviews with key agents as well as one focus group with women from a women’s organisation.¹ Clearly, both the place of Vilina Vlas, the memoryscape of Višegrad and our own positionality have changed over time and we take that into account.

Second, to the analysis of spatial and narrative micro-practices that we noted during fieldwork, we have added analysis of published narratives to be able to map the atrocious events of the war and their aftermath. These narratives are concerned with how the war was performed and experienced in Višegrad and have been collected from a variety of sources such as court transcripts, life stories and documentations of witness stories and in a few cases provided by spokespersons for victims of war crimes. The approach of relying on already published narratives and accessible testimonies is adopted as not to re-traumatise victims, break chosen silences or exacerbate the vulnerability of women who live under precarious circumstances (cf. Schweiger and Tomiak 2023). The stories of survivors of gendered violence represent more than personal stories and testimonies. They are constructed through the interrelationship between narrative, subjectivity and power, and part of a fragmented collective knowledge, or what can be described as a challenge against official meta-narratives. Such alternative narratives put forth by women survivors can be read as defiance and resistance against the dominant nationalist narratives that generated their suffering yet forgot their victimhood (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2018, 59). By ‘being-in-place’, we were able to emplace and visualise the narratives and silences that emerged from the victims and survivors of the violence in Višegrad.

These two combined methodological strategies have been developed to address both the past violence of the rape camps and the ongoing gendered violence in the present (cf. Brigden and Hallett 2021). They have resulted in a rich archive of empirical material that we have studied in order to understand how the spoken and the unspoken, the marked or unmarked place, strive for a particular narrative and spatial coherence (Garfinkel 1984; Morrison and Macleod 2014). Through this analysis, we can trace and make visible practices and emplaced narratives that shape and re-shape place, produced by a broad register of agents in Višegrad and beyond.

In terms of structure, the article now proceeds to outline a theoretical framework that assists our investigation of places of pain and spaces of silence. In the subsequent empirical analysis, we discuss how silences around wartime rapes play out in local and international spaces, and how these silences are challenged by local, vocal agents that demand acknowledgement of the gendered experiences of war, and we move through time and space. We trace how these various demands and strategies converge around a particular place of pain: the hotel/turned rape camp/turned hotel Vilina Vlas.

Conceptualising Places of Pain and Spaces of Silence

Our theorisation of the becoming of places of pain and spaces of silence draws on spatial and narrative analysis. We understand spatial practices of place-making and narrative silences to produce places of pain and spaces of silence. This theorisation aims to advance the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies. It also aims to engage with the separation between space (as abstract, disassociated from the body) and place (as bounded, material, mundane, lived and everyday) by arguing that place and space are co-constituted.

Feminist geographers have critiqued the bounded understanding of place, and critical geographers have challenged the notion that ‘violence sits in places’ and ‘violence is experienced through the ontological priority of place’ (Springer 2011, 91). Massey (2005) argues that place is a locus of stories and produced by power geometries that are transscalar, reaching from the body to the global, as well as across temporal dimensions, making their mark on the past, present and future.

In this article, we argue that spaces of silence and places of pain are co-constituted by emplaced narrative silences and spatial practices that resonate with hegemonic ethno-nationalist discourses. Spatial practices ‘influence the dynamics of peace and conflict in profound ways, from daily, localized, and embodied actions to spatial framings and narratives’ (Macaspac and Moore 2022, 6). Spatial practices make social space happen (cf. Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2022), they produce social effects, or simply, spatial practices ‘are ways of doing things’ (Pouliot 2015, 238). Moreover, spatial practices are embedded in space through emplaced narratives. Macaspac and Moore (2022, 6) summarise spatial practices as ‘bodily doings and sayings, as well as intentional and routinized actions. Socially shared […] they are shaped by, and in turn shape, the social and material world’. Places such as Vilina Vlas that are imbued with power relations and hierarchies as well as violence and trauma are shaped by and shape spatial practices that restrain or enable certain forms of agency and narration (cf. Gaventa 2006).

Places of pain are made up of fragmented memories, interrupted narratives, absences, muzzled narratives as well as collective silences and spatial practices that erase material traces, create gaps, obscure memories and deny the events of the place, thereby muting acknowledgements of gendered crimes and women’s suffering. Such places cannot be disentangled from embodied experiences and narratives (Halilovich 2013). Thus, ‘stories make places important to us and places become vessels for holding and keeping our stories’ (Van Gelder cited in Halilovich 2013, 12). The material erasure of the traces of violence in a place of pain reinforces silences, mutes victims and witnesses and remakes place and space (Fredrikzon and Haffenden 2023). Thus, we find places of pain to be made up of both place-making spatial practices and emplaced narratives including personal stories and testimonies about the place as well as collective silences.

A gendered reading of places of pain and spaces of silence thus reveals that such places and spaces are co-constitutively constructed. Place reinforces gender hierarchies, and space hosts power-laden social relations through which gender identities are constructed and agents constituted. To understand the constitution of power relations that make up places of pain we thus see a need to engage more with the phenomenon of silence and examine how certain emplaced narratives are told, retold and put into circulation, that is, how material places are narrated, by whom, and with what interests (Massey 1994). We note that silence is a medium for collective forgetting, performed and transmitted both through material absences in post-conflict places, as well as the narrative silences of the agents who operate in these particular places. In the words of Winter (2010, 4), silence can be conceived as ‘a socially constructed space in which and about which subjects and words normally used in everyday life are not spoken’.

Feminist scholars have long taken an interest in silence, analysing silence as an effective tool for denial and erasure of women’s voices and experience through processes of collective forgetting that are always intersected with gendered power structures (see e.g. Clair 1998; Hall and Bucholtz 1995; Massey 1994; Olsen 1978). Indeed, the silences that we attend to here take place within multi-layered power hierarchies. Reading collective silences through a gender lens reveals how the denial of gender-based crimes moves on a spatial scale from the individual bodies that were hurt to family and community networks and to the collective amnesia of national remembering and forgetting, all the way to global oblivion (Massey 2005).

In such spaces of silence, the atrocious events of the past are contested; they are not marked, their meaning of grief and fear are overwritten by practices that seamlessly continue after the war rupture, and they are absent from narrative communication. Thus, it may seem as if the atrocious events are obliterated – ’as if it never happened’. In the Bosnian post-war context, few women speak of the atrocities that they experienced, and when they do, they are often questioned by the community to which the perpetrators of those atrocities belong. Also, often lacking support from their own community and family, the women remain silent (cf. Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2018, 49). Similar processes have been noted in other contexts. Kaitesi (2014, 239), writing about Rwandan rape victims, argues that their experiences have been ‘socially labeled … as unbearable and unspeakable’. In such situations, when ‘speaking out’ may in fact be life-threatening to the survivor, silence and secrecy can be an effective strategy to survive and keep out of immediate danger. Likewise, D’Costa’s (2011, 79–80) work shows the implications of strategic silences deployed by the state of Bangladesh to exclude women who were survivors of sexual violence, and how at the same time women used silence as a ‘negotiated survival strategy’.

And yet, silence is not only a tool for oppression and erasure, or survival. As a growing body of research argues, silence can also be a site of power and agency and while silence tends to have a strongly disabling effect, it can also be enabling (e.g. Mannergren Selimovic 2020; Kent 2016; Parpart 2010). Especially in volatile and contested environments, agents can challenge ‘hegemonic forgetting’ (Connerton 2012, 41) through silence. In such situations, one may note ‘ … how expression is silenced and how silence is turned into expression’ (Clair 1998, 162). For example, silent demonstrations can be very powerful, and even when a collective act of resistance is not possible, individuals can make claims just by an embodied act of ‘being-in-place’, refusing to hide. Another way of using silence in an empowering way can be to refuse to tell one’s story according to a pre-defined script – for example, not taking part in a hearing or truth commission. That power lies in remaining silent in such situations is an insight that destabilises the epistemological focus in transitional justice on ‘speaking out’ as a path towards restitution, justice and even healing (e.g. Motsemme 2004).

Silence, then, is performative (Austin 1962) and holds multiple functions. It can be used to enforce denial and support spatial practices of erasure, it can communicate resistance and can even be used as a tactic to demand respect, or signal disengagement. Spaces of silence thus carry meanings that reflect and generate action, in everyday life as well as through rituals and other formalised events (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2017; Mannergren Selimovic 2020).

Furthermore, silence is never completely successful. There are gaps and ruptures in the weave of silence, even in a context such as Višegrad, where crimes are denied persistently and repeatedly. In fact, in such local and contested contexts, we have to be extra aware that the atrocious past has been experienced by victims, perpetrators as well as bystanders who may at any time leak their knowledge and disrupt hegemonic forgetting. Hence, the making of silences is always threatened by the breaking of silences. The breaking of silences can be conceptualised as agential efforts to reclaim the memory of certain places of pain and challenge spaces of silence by demanding acknowledgement of experiences of violence and war. By linking the breaking of silence not only to narrative utterances but also to spatial practices, we further stress the co-constitution of place of pain and spaces of silence. Some of the agents who take on this work of breaking silences at a certain time do it on behalf of those who have chosen a strategy of silence – as discussed above – in order to overcome the past (cf. Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2018, 49). The breaking of silence can be made through claiming space in the physical locality of the place in pain in question, for example, demonstrations and the setting up of commemorative monuments.

In addition, we argue that the reclaiming of both space and speech has a temporal dimension. Speech and silence fluctuate over time, and agents judge at when silence or speech is the most effective or possible strategy (Eastmond and Mannergren Selimovic 2012; Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2016). The reading over time of moments when silence is broken makes visible how silences can transform into voice through spatial and narrative interventions of contending agents.

To summarise our theoretical argument, we propose that the co-constitution of spaces of silence and places of pain means that places are not static but can be understood as produced through spatial practices and emplaced narratives that unfold over time and whose meaning is time and again contested and transformed through the making and breaking of silence. Social relations make up spaces of silence, and emplaced narratives and practices imbue place with emotional, social, and political attributes. In essence, the co-constitutive relationship between spaces of silence and places of pain emphasises that the way we experience and understand material places is not solely determined by its physical attributes, but also by the social, cultural and personal contexts in which we engage with it. This dynamic relationship will be untangled in the empirical analysis that now follows.

Vilina Vlas – A Place of Pain

The health spa hotel Vilina Vlas (named after the endemic plant Fairy’s Hair) is situated on the outskirts of Višegrad, a small town which nestles on the banks of the river Drina. The hotel used to be a popular resort and attracted both local and foreign visitors before the war. From reading witness statements and reports we know that during the war the hotel was turned into a rape camp in BiH, where hundreds of Bosniak women were raped by Serb paramilitary groups (cf. Volcic and Simic 2016). Since the war, it has resumed its functions as a hotel spa and the rape camp seems hidden in history. The painful past events are marked by shame and silence in the present. Nevertheless, the silence has been repeatedly challenged by various agents at local, national and international levels and protests have of late gained some momentum, as we will discuss further below.

The Legacy of Violence in Višegrad

Višegrad was one of the first towns to come under attack by Serb forces (Karcic 2022). Horrendous atrocities were committed in the town, and many victims were thrown into the waters of the Drina River from the famous Old Ottoman bridge (Vulliamy 1998). Many of the bodies floated downstream to three lakes and disappeared in the lakes’ deep water, which ‘may be the largest mass grave of Bosniak victims’ of the 1992–1995 cleansing of eastern Bosnia (Halilovich 2013, 36). Some of the bodies surfaced in August 2010 in the lake Perućac near the hydro-electric powerplant station Bajina Bašta (Nikolic 2012).

For the casual visitor, there is nothing left that reminds of this violence – it is silenced, and erased. But a closer scrutiny reveals signs and material marks in the place, available to those who know something about the history of the place. In a collection of testimonies by women about the war, one of the narrators, Nada Dabić, recounts her encounter with such subtle signs at a Bosniak cemetery on the outskirts of Višegrad:

Throughout it, sprouting like poppies, there are wooden markers with inscriptions, NN #324, NN bones #197, NN bones #69. I quickly realized that bones means that there is no DNA available from a close living relative. Everyone was killed. Unknown sister, when will you no longer be NN #186? When will I be able to give you human respect, so that you, as a victim of pointlessness, are not unknown?. (Dabić 2007)

The atrocities committed in Višegrad have forever disrupted the relations between place and belonging (Boose 2002) and the meanings attached to the place dictating who belongs and who does not belong have been altered by the violence and suffering. A few Bosniaks have returned to Višegrad which is now a predominantly Bosnian Serb town located in the Bosnian Serb entity called Republika Srpska, which came into being as the the Dayton Peace Accord consolidated the Bosnian Serb territorial war gains (Toal and Dahlman 2011).²

By revisiting our fieldwork, we are able to conduct a temporal as well as a spatial reading of continuity and change in the gendered geographies of violence of Višegrad. Below, we recall ‘being-in-place’ and we share our observations from the past in Višegrad as well as disruptions from the present that trouble boundaries between then and now.

When walking the shabby streets of Višegrad in 2014, we noted that wartime, long in disgrace in other parts of the world, is still celebrated here. As we passed by the office of one of the small nationalist parties, we see on the door a poster of the wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2018), now serving a 40-year sentence after being convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity in 2016 at the ICTY, is openly displayed.³ At the Square of the Fallen Soldier in the centre of town, a monument that pays homage to the fallen Serb soldiers in the Fatherland War 1992–1995 dominates the place. It shows a soldier with a sword with a handle representing the Orthodox cross who sacrifices his life for the country and is associated with Christ’s passion. Moreover, there is the patriotic motto Dulce et decorum, est pro patria mori (It is sweet and honourable to die for the fatherland) (Nicolic 2016, 178). Researchers, visiting Višegrad at other times, have noted that under the cross someone had put a portrait of the Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić in military uniform, a convicted war criminal, sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide (Nicolic 2016, 178). Several wartime paramilitary leaders and members, SDS officials as well as local police officers alleged to have committed atrocities still live in Višegrad without being indicted. The wartime director of the Vilna Vlas Hotel is among those who continue to live in town and participate in the everyday life of the town without facing justice (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2017). Thus, Višegrad is still infused with the legacy of the violent conflict. Such a place is not welcoming Bosniak returnees.

We continued along the same street that winds parallel to the green river Drina and came by a mosque. It is a new structure, raised at the site of the old, which was destroyed during the war.⁴ It was locked, empty and with very few congregators left as so few have returned. However, a notice on the door drew our attention. It announces the funeral of Muniba Medušeljac and the flimsy photocopied paper displays a picture of a blond woman. Born in 1952, ‘tragically killed’ 30 May 1992. Clearly, yet another body has been identified, may be found in one of the mass graves that are being excavated. Did she know anything about the events at Vilina Vlas, we ask ourselves. Had she been there? (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2017, 383)

The Spatial Practices and the Making of a Place of Pain

In the days following the occupation of Višegrad, Vilina Vlas became the headquarter of Milan Lukić’s paramilitary group ‘the’White Eagles’, composed of police officers, members of the Bosnian Serb army and volunteers from Serbia. Vilina Vlas then turned into a rape camp where women and girls from Višegrad and surrounding villages were imprisoned.

In one of the many testimonies collected by the organisation Research and Documentation Centre (RDC) in Sarajevo, a Bosniak woman spoke of her suffering at the hotel: ‘He raped me from 12.00 to 21.00 hours on that day. All that time, he held a knife in his hand, or within reach’, she said (IWPR 2008). This testimony, in addition to foreign correspondents’ articles, Amnesty International’s investigation, a Helsinki Watch report and indictments by the ICTY,⁵ confirms that war crimes were committed at the hotel spa Vilina Vlas.⁶ While it is not known how many women and girls that were held there, it is estimated hundreds of women were held in the guestrooms for days or weeks, locked up and chained to the radiators in the hotel rooms (Karcic 2022, 75–106), brutally raped, mutilated, and often killed. Such reports made ‘Višegrad … famous for rape camps like Vilina Vlas’ (Belma Zulcić of the Sarajevo-based Society for Threatened Peoples, cited in IWPR 2008). The alleged abuses were so brutal that some women are reported to have jumped out of windows on the second or third floor to their deaths (Higgins 2020).

In the collection of women testimonies referred to above, one inhabitant of Višegrad conveys the following narrative:

I heard from the wife of F.H., my acquaintance, that their daughter had been forcibly taken to the Vilina Vlas Hotel where she spent 9 days and was raped many times over. She is now abroad. I heard that a chetnik helped her to get out although he had been tasked with killing her because she had seen many killings in the Vilina Vlas Hotel.

The Washington Post in 1992 carried the reports of rapes at Vilina Vlas. Mersiha, a girl aged 17 from Višegrad, stated to the Washington Post reporter that Milan Lukić had taken her and her younger sister Emina to Vilina Vlas, describing and naming Milan Lukić as the man who raped her. She said her sister never returned from the hotel:

He said that if I didn’t do what he wanted, I would never go home. Then he ordered me to take off my clothes. I didn’t want to do that. He said I must, that it would be better to take my clothes off myself, or else he would do it and he would be violent. […] I started to cry. He said I was lucky to be with him. He said I could have been thrown into the river with rocks tied around my ankles. But I didn’t want to do it. He got angry and cursed and said, ‘I’m going to bring in 10 soldiers’.

(Mersiha cited in Maass 1992)

War rapes were defined and understood along ethnic lines and ethnic differences between perpetrator and victim made the rapes political and as a tool of ethnic cleansing rape was as gruesome as it was devastating and effective (cf. Skjelsbæk 2006; Zarkov 2007). Skjelsbæk (2006, 380, 395) finds that the victims talk from different, conflicting, and parallel subject positions when recounting their experiences of war rapes and their narratives centre on the ‘ethnic survivor’ and the ‘gendered victim’ as rape in the Bosnian war targeted both the ethnic and gendered identity of victims. These war rapes were thus not only physical assaults on the women but also targeting the ethnic group through attacks on the male members of their family, whose honour was closely connected to the female family members’ chastity (cf. Clark 2023). According to this logic, the woman’s body becomes a metaphor for the social body, and the killing or maiming of that body also symbolically kills and maims not only the woman but also her family and ethnic group (Olujic 1998; Hansen, 2006).

The ICTY’s indictments and sentences confirmed rape camps and the town were referred to as a place of ‘outstanding cruelty’. For example, the indictment against the former Bosnian Serb paramilitary Mitar Vasiljević described in some detail the atrocities committed at the camp set up in the Vilina Vlas hotel, by portraying it as a place ‘where prisoners were beaten, tortured and sexually assaulted’ (ICTY IT-98-32). According to witnesses, also the convicted war criminal Milan Lukić regularly visited the Vilina Vlas with his paramilitaries to abuse women and girls imprisoned at the hotel. But despite testimonies, the events at the hotel, and the allegation of rape, were not included in the final indictment against Lukić, although an associate of Lukić, Boban Simsić, was sentenced for aiding and abetting rape in Višegrad in 1992 by the Bosnian court.⁷ The court also handed down another conviction for rape and sexual violence in Višegrad to Željko Lelek, a former police officer.

Such statements, reports and indictments raise questions in the present about how a place of pain is constructed, narrated and purposely hidden and forgotten. Our (re-)reading of the hotel’s past brings to the fore a place imbued with pain and suffering. Attached to the hotel are individual and collective memories of crimes committed and suffered. Yet, at present, gendered violence is invisible to the eye and its memory is largely erased or silenced by the current, mundane practices taking place in the spa hotel.

Spatial Practices and the Re-Making of Place

Vilina Vlas has been renovated since the war and transformed into its pre-war function as a mid-grade health spa hotel. Since the end of the war, it caters to mostly elderly visitors who come to bathe in the medicinal waters or foreign tourists who want to explore the historical and cultural heritage of the region, such as the bridge over Drina made famous by Nobel Laureate Ivo Andrić’s novel. Those who visit Višegrad often also stop to spend the night at Vilina Vlas.

Despite the layers of paint that have been applied since the war, the atmosphere, service and décor mostly date back to the socialist era of Yugoslavia. Inside the hotel, the air is stale from cigarette smoke, thick curtains cover most of the windows and the furnishings in the lobby bear unmistakable signs of wear and fading brought on by the passage of time. Neither are the thermal spa pools in the basement holding up well; tiles are cracked and chipped and there is a smell of decay. But the treatments are popular, and guests shuffle to and from in white robes on their way to massages and baths. Our stay at the Vilina Vlas reveals a site that carries no physical trace of the crimes and traumas that took place there during the ethnic cleansing of Višegrad. Yet, spending nights in the hotel made us think about how many untold stories of pain the walls keep secret.

Spaces of Silence

Our analysis now approaches a closer reading of how spaces of silences are upheld and co-constitutive of the place of pain of Vilina Vlas. Through some key empirical illustrations, we will attempt to capture how the agential making and breaking of silence play out in space and time.

Making Silence

Starting with the absence of material acknowledgement as well as the denial of the events at the very hotel, we may first note how one such a space of silence is locally produced. Immersing ourselves in the mundane rhythm of the hotel meant that we were brutally confronted with the silencing of the wartime events. We awkwardly tried to ask some questions to the staff of the history of the place. These attempts were futile and ended in the same way – the staff said they knew nothing of what happened there during the war. The suffering, fear and humiliation that had taken place here were experienced by us as a void, an oppressing absence of acknowledgement and as a silence loaded with meaning.

While the staff at the hotel produced this silence through a refusal to say anything at all, there were other inhabitants in Višegrad who engaged in outspoken denial. One example is the interview with a communication officer at the municipal office. The young woman was keen to stress the beauties of the region, but her accommodating attitude changed when we brought up the issue of war crimes. She had been ‘shocked’ by the film For Those Who Can Tell No Tales (a film about Vilina Vlas, see below) and said that ‘the events described in the movie simply did not take place – it is not true’ (interview 23 Sept. 2014). The fact that she, who had come to Višegrad from Belgrade after the war, had never heard anyone talk about it, was taken as a proof that it had not happened: ‘Višegrad is a small town. People talk, and had those things described in the movie happened we would have known about it’. When we pointed out that Bakira Hasečić, one of the key witnesses to the events at Vilina Vlas who features in the film, comes from the area, and had in fact talked and broken silences, the communication officer said that Hasečić is an ‘awful woman making awful accusations that are untrue’, and that ‘she pays women to witness about the rape camp’ (interview 23 Sept. 2014). Bakira Hasečić has continued her work as a human rights activist until today, and in 2018, she was awarded an honorary degree from Glasgow Caledonian University in recognition of her work as a human rights advocate for victims of sexual violence (Brown 2018).

From the municipal office, we found our way up the hill to a small, local NGO called Most, a women’s organisation. It was mainly a Bosnian Serb organisation, but the women were eager to stress that they supported the poor Bosniak women who had returned to the villages around Višegrad, and they were proud of the help they had provided in the immediate war aftermath – giving them hygiene articles, helping them to fix their hair and so on. They also worked on the issue of domestic violence and rape, and protested against a legal system that disregards women witness statements of such abuse and did not consider it as evidence. Yet, when we brought up the issue of Vilina Vlas, silence fell around the table in the small, overheated apartment that served as their office. The five women who met with us looked at each other – would anyone speak? After a few moments, one of them repeated the criticism against Bakira Hasečić, and the conversation moved on. Later on, another of the women said that there are so many stories from the war and that ‘it is impossible to get proof what happened’ in Vilina Vlas and other places. It is overall ‘impossible to speak about Višegrad of that period’ as there is nothing you can prove. ‘We only hear stories about this, that people are accused of crimes and arrested’ (interview 23 Sept. 2014). On a general note, they were prepared to accept that Bosniak women had suffered in and around Višegrad, but, as one of them explained, an open acknowledgement would be conditioned on the acknowledgement of the suffering of Bosnian Serb women.

We find that this type of silence is collectively produced and upheld by the majority living in Višegrad and challenged by individual women’s efforts to break this silence. So, in order not to break the ethnonationalist narrative of the community that they belonged to, they upheld silences around the gendered place of pain that is Vilina Vlas and any acknowledgement of gendered violence had to be subordinated the framework of ethnopolitics. It seemed that this strategy towards the war events in fact counteracted the work the organisation performed concerning present-day domestic violence.

These local makings of silence also feature on a global scale through international legal processes. Although Milan Lukić was sentenced to life by the ICTY, and his cousin, Sredoje, who also was a paramilitary in Višegrad, is serving 30 years, the charge did not include rape, nor did it mention the Hotel Vilina Vlas as a rape camp (IWPR 2008). Thus, the court did not consider the allegations that the cousins were responsible for numerous rapes of Bosniak women they held prisoner at Vilina Vlas spa hotel, which was the headquarters of Milan Lukić’s paramilitary group. Although the prosecution sought to add charges of rape, enslavement and torture that it said were carried out in Višegrad by both cousins, it only did so a month before the trial started, and the trial chamber rejected this last-minute addition to the charge (IWPR 2008). In the eyes of many of the women who came forth to witness about rape, this was not justice. ‘The only justice’, Bakira Hasečić has said, ‘is that the crime is named’. Even if he only got one year for the rapes, the crime must be named’ (Morgan 2011).

These omissions of the ICTY create a space of silence at a global scale with ongoing consequences. It affects individual and social processes in the local, as silences travel back and forth between local and the global. According to Mirsada Tabaković, a Bosniak who fled Višegrad in June 1992 ‘we have heard a lot about what happened at Vilina Vlas, but there is so much we will not hear, especially because they decided not to include rape in [Milan] Lukić’s indictment’ (IWPR 2009). For the women who were victims of the violence, these spaces at the global and local are related and reinforce the denial of their experiences at an individual and family level. ‘We have women who may be living among us and who are victims of (wartime) rape. But if you’re not recognised and feel like a victim again, it is easier for you stay quiet. So, everyone stays silent about it. And that is the most distressing side of it, when everyone is silent’ (Stanojka Tesić, Forum Zena Bratunac, interviewed by Amnesty International 2012).

Breaking Silence

The difficulty of breaking spaces of silence can be immense. Yet when studying the events and narrative communication around Vilina Vlas, it is clear that a number of interventions have been made, gaining momentum over the years through a variety of agents. Although in the margins, they engage in political work and symbolic acts, speaking a counter-narrative that refuses the atrocious past to be forgotten.

A central activist who speaks up concerning the atrocious events of Vilina Vlas in particular and the issue of conflict-related sexual violence in general is the above-mentioned Bakira Hasečić. The organisation that she is part of (Association of Women Victims of War), has been vocal in at least two different ways. They have fought the omission of the rape indictment in the trials on Višegrad through direct communication with the ICTY, and they have challenged local spaces of absence by physically demonstrating in places such as Višegrad and Foča and demanding public acknowledgement of gendered crimes. Their office on the outskirts of Sarajevo also functions as an informal shelter and safe space for speech and sharing among rape victims (Interview, and participant observation, 20 Dec. 2004). According to Bakira Hasečić, women survivors have been ‘left to their own devices’ (cited in Morgan 2011). Hasečić is no doubt a controversial figure and is intent on retaining the voice of the Bosnian rape victims to tell their own story. For example, she was at the forefront of the protests against the film In the Land of Blood and Honey by director Angelina Jolie that attempts to tell the story of rape camps. Hasečić accused Jolie of ignoring the voices of women war victims and claimed that the film was unrealistic as a love story could not have existed in the rape camp (Helms 2014). The protests eventually led Jolie to move the filming from the Bosnian location to Hungary (The Guardian 2010; Helms 2014).

The film In the Land of Blood and Honey eventually came to be accepted as an important contribution to breaking the silence around war rape, but it is another film that has attracted more attention in the local context. Made by the Bosnian director Žbanić and Vercoe (2013), ‘For Those Who Can Tell No Tales’ focuses on the events at Vilina Vlas and recounts how an Australian tourist in Višegrad stays in the hotel on the recommendation of a travel book. There is no mention in the book of the atrocities, which she comes to realise after her stay. The pain of these insights, coupled with subsequent explorations of the culture of silence in Višegrad, makes the film an intense and personal journey into the mechanisms around denials of gendered violence (cf. Simic and Volcic 2016).

Another important voice that has challenged the silences around the events in Višegrad is Bilal Memisević, the only Bosniak member of Višegrad’s town council: For years he has asked that the authorities put up a plaque at the Vilina Vlas spa hotel to commemorate the victims (Higgins 2020). ‘We understand that the spa was and will be a magnet for tourists and are not asking for it to be shut down’, he said. ‘All we want is a single sentence on the wall saying: ‘At this site war crimes were committed between this date and that date’ (cited in Higgins 2020). So far, his efforts have been met with silence, but recently more attention has been paid to Vilina Vlas and demands that its dark past be recognised are mounting.

As Vilina Vlas Hotel has been invested in by the Republika Srpska government, developed as a tourist destination and promoted as ‘a nice and peaceful place’, many Bosniaks have been outraged by these recent activities to re-make the place and to erase the not-so-distant history of the hotel, deny and whitewash the gruesome past of the Vilina Vlas Spa Hotel. For example, an online petition was recently launched by Amela Trokić, a lecturer at the University of Sarajevo, demanding that Google ‘remove Vilina Vlas (as a tourist site)’ from its search engine and map tool (Change.org 2022).

Thus, this place of pain transcends scale and becomes part of transnational place-making and space-making practices, and the narratives and counter-narratives resonate with a global audience.

Conclusion

Most societies have their scars of history and a range of places and sites represent the legacy of painful events: massacres and genocide sites, and places related to imprisonment and detention. Some of these places are not acknowledged and commemorated because of their association with pain and suffering in the past. By bringing such hidden places to light, agents are able to uncover untold histories of crimes of war.

This article has investigated the making and re-making of place of pain as well as the making and breaking of spaces of silence around the Hotel Vilina Vlas. We have opened up for new readings of the gendered logic of ‘forgotten’ places, thus probing the relation between gender and post-war silence. Through a reflexive methodological engagement with spatial practices and emplaced narratives, we have attempted to break new empirical ground, map material absences, and identify agents in the margin, thereby letting the forgotten place of the former rape camp of Vilina Vlas emerge as an acknowledged place of pain that is part of the post-conflict Bosnian geography. We have traced the active work of silencing an event (rape) at a particular time (1992) and in a particular place (Vilina Vlas), and we have argued that these silences in narratives as well as the absence of material acknowledgement are not voids or mute, but on the contrary charged with meaning. Further, they are disturbed, contested and changed over time by a number of agents and events.

The silences in Višegrad are thus multi-faceted and comprise chosen silences by women victims/survivors of war time rape who choose not to speak out as a strategy of healing or coping with the everyday, imposed silences by family and community in order to avoid social stigma, and women threatened and afraid of speaking, as well as a collective silence produced by a majority of the villagers that deny the atrocities of the past. Such silences contribute to ethnonationalist, collective forgetting that refutes claims for justice. They interplay with spatial practices overwriting the past, producing a space of silence in a place of pain. At the same time, the ongoing making of silence is destabilised by the breaking of silence, foremost by individuals who at a high personal cost have chosen to repeatedly speak up and name the crime through emplaced narratives as well as spatial practices.

Our analysis of the spatial practices and narrative silences around Vilina Vlas shows the intertwining of ethnonationalist and gendered mechanisms of imposed erasure. These mechanisms are manifested both materially and discursively in the form of voids and silences. Our microanalysis of the agential production of these mechanisms captures how the making of silence plays out in the everyday spaces of Višegrad. We have also connected the making of silences to scales and agents beyond the local. For example, the disregard for gender-based violence has led to the obliteration of the crimes of rape at Vilina Vlas from the records of ICTY, an omission that will continue to travel to the local and back to the global. At the same time, the silence of this crime has been broken on a number of occasions by several agents, and while these interventions may not decisively break imposed silences, they are part of ongoing and plural processes that negotiate the meaning and consequences of the past.

A close reading of the unfolding over time and space of this work is crucial to understanding what the co-constitution of places of pain and spaces of silence does to the building of a gender-just peace. Our probing into the making and breaking of silences around the rape camp at Vilina Vlas empirically underpins conceptualisations of gender, silence, place and space as complex intersections of power relations. These insights help to identify and theorise geographies and temporalities of gendered violence that reach far beyond the micro-level of analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Formas [FR-2016/0004].

Notes

1. The fieldwork at the hotel and in the town was conducted for seven days, and in addition to the spatial analysis we interviewed six persons and conducted one focus group. The study forms part of a series of multiple and multi-sited ethnographic fieldworks that has taken place at various sites of violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the last two decades producing research on women’s narratives of wars.

2. Before the war, Višegrad’s 21,000 residents were majority Bosniaks (60%) (Volcic and Simic 2016, 219;).

3. Changes in the criminal code of Bosnia and Herzegovina have recently been made. In July 2021 the High Representative introduced prison sentences for up to five years for genocide denial as well as glorification of war criminals (Office of the High Representative, 23 July 2021)

4. The mosque was rebuilt by the Islamic community of Bosnia and Herzegovina with funding from the Višegrad diaspora.

5. It was the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) that first confirmed rape as a crime against humanity in 2001. It is safe to say the number of tribunal cases in which rape has been a charge does not accurately reflect the high incidence of sexual crimes during the war (ICTY.org).

6. A German reporter Alexandra Stiglmayer (1994) also identified Vilina Vlas as a rape camp in her book on women rape victims in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2009, Željko Lelek, mentioned in the witness statement above and a member of the Republika Srpska police force, was sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment for crimes against humanity and the crime of rape in Višegrad (Indictment Želko Lelek 2006).

7. In a 2007, judgement passed at the Bosnian War Crimes Court in Sarajevo in the case of Boban Šimšić, Šimšić was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment and in the indictment the Spa Hotel Vilina Vlas was mentioned. Case number X-KRŽ-05/04 https://www.internationalcrimesdatabase.org/Case/1187