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Covxvii . Sov.n) i University College London
In the wake of the 1992-5 war in Bosnia a number of anthropologists have written about the role
of memory in creating and sustaining hostility in the region. One trend focuses on the
authenticity and power of personal memories of Second World War violence and on the
possibility of transmitting such memories down the generations to the 1990s. Another focuses
less on memory as a phenomenon which determines human action than on the politics of
memory: the political dynamics which play on and channel individuals memories. In this article
I use the example of three Sarajevo Bosniacs whom I have known since the pre-war 1980s in order
to propose the merit of a third, additional, focus on the individual as an active manager of his or
her own memories. I briefly consider whether work by Maurice Bloch on the nature of semantic
and of autobiographic memory supports a strong version of the first interpretative trend, or
whether, as I suggest, the conclusions of this work instead leave room for individual memory
management and for change down the generations.
I cannot speak of what happened at Ho in, in the faraway Russian land. Not because I dont remem-
ber, but because I dont want to tell. There is no good to be had from talking of horric slaughter,
of human fear and of the brutality of both sides. It should not be remembered or regretted or cele-
brated. The best thing is to forget, to let the human memory of all ugliness die, and for the children
not to sing songs of revenge (Me a Selimovi , The fortress, I,,o).
It makes intuitive sense that peoples memories of traumatic events such as those expe-
rienced in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Second World War or the recent I,,:-
, war will continue to affect the social fabric in some perhaps intangible but
nevertheless important way. We tend to feel that this will be the case even when, as in
Titos socialist Yugoslavia, such memories cannot, for political reasons, be aired too
publicly. Most of us would further allow that the things which are often rather con-
fusingly called transmitted memories, in other words the personally meaningful
images and ideas of younger generations who did not experience the war but who have
lived in intimate contact with elders who did, are also helping, in some less direct way,
to shape the social and political environment. A number of anthropologists have built
on these intuitions and tried to illuminate the role that personal memories and trans-
mitted memories of the Second World War may have played in fuelling the I,,:-, war
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Managing memories in post-
war Sarajevo: individuals, bad
memories, and new wars
in Bosnia
1
(see, e.g., Bax I,,,; Hayden I,,; Simi :ooo). These scholarly approaches
take seriously the authenticity and power of personal memories and transmitted mem-
ories in shaping events. Beyond academic circles, the aid and policy-making world has
acted on the same intuitions. Large sums of money have been spent on psycho-social
programmes which aim to soothe or resolve painful memories of the atrocities of the
recent war, partly for the benet of the individual sufferers but sometimes also in the
hope of avoiding future conicts by intervening in the process of trans-generational
transmission of trauma. The slogan of a May :oo, International Training in Trauma
Recovery illustrates this ambition: Help heal this war and stop future war. Support real
healing and peace in the world.
2
At the far end of this general approach to questions of memory are the ancient
ethnic hatred-style studies which imply that everyone who experiences war is lastingly,
psychologically deformed and that the deformity can be xeroxed down the generations
by the simple means of repeating stories of suffering to ones children. This is what
seems to be implied, for example, by the depiction of Bosnia as a land deeply divided
and steeped for generations in tales of heroism and imbued with a quasi-religious ethos
of revenge and retribution (Simi :ooo: II,). This vision makes it hard to understand
why anything ever changes at all and why children do not always and everywhere repeat
their parents animosities and wars.
In this context, another branch of scholarship (and policy-making) appears as a
welcome corrective. The politics of memory is the label often given to the dynamics
surrounding the construction of monuments, the giving of speeches, the performance
of rituals, and teaching of texts practised by political, religious, and other leading
gures (see, e.g., olovi :oo:; Duijzings :ooo; :oo:; ani I,,8). This approach takes
as its focus not the authenticity and power of individuals memories but the frames
within which assorted political interests seek to constrain and channel those memo-
ries. In the world of policy this approach nds expression, for example, in the efforts
made by the Ofce of the High Representative (OHR) and the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to restructure Bosnias educational
system.
3
Deliberations over the extent to which Serb-, Croat-, and Bosniac-dominated
schools should be allowed to teach different histories which tend to underwrite mutual
hostility, or be made to teach a single version which is unlikely to correspond to what
children hear at home, are premised on the view that the frame (schooling) is crucial
to the shaping of individual memories and thus to the future of Bosnia.
There is a danger that, pushed too far, this more top-down approach to issues of
memory could give the implausible impression that human minds are endlessly
manipulable and that schooling or the broadcasting of nationalistic commemorative
ceremonies can fundamentally alter personal memories of strongly emotional, life-
changing events such as violent bereavement. This impression may be created partly
by a somewhat imprecise use of the word memory, since studies in the domain of
politics of memory often say a lot about politics but not so much about memory; a
monument is not a memory. The danger is that [w]hen historians attempt to
interpret evidence of memory from a representation of the past, the risk of a circular
argument is high (Conno I,,,: I,,,).
This approach follows in the tradition of the great French sociologist Maurice
Halbwachs, who was a colleague of mile Durkheim and who has been closely asso-
ciated with the phrase collective memory (Halbwachs I,:,; I,,o). Halbwachs pointed
to the fact that memory is constructed within social frameworks. No contemporary
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2 Cornelia Sorabji
J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) , :-:8
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psychologist or social scientist would dispute the central role of the social in memory,
in what is silently recalled in the presence of imagined listeners, in what is encoded in
the mind by the listener, and in what is narrated. Halbwachs, however, went further,
seeming to deny the existence of individual memory and to view the social context as
all-determining. From this approach ows much sociological and anthropological
writing on memory, which, at the expense of a focus on memory as a personal expe-
rience, tends to exalt the political nature of social memory and the importance of
commemorative practices for buttressing particular group identities.
Both of the approaches that I have outlined can yield important insights, but in
this article I attempt a third, additional, focus which is neither on memories as
things that control individuals, as in the rst approach, nor on the political dynamics
which seek to control individuals by shaping their memories, as in the second, but on
the individuals awareness of memory and his or her desire to control it for the
perceived benet of self and others. Like Selimovi s ctional protagonist in The
fortress, the three real-life Bosniacs depicted here all manage and work with their mem-
ories and are able to reect on the role of memory and transmitted memory in their
own lives and the lives of those around them. They are no less conscious than
the anthropologist of the implications of imparting or not imparting information to
the young.
Without highlighting the individual, Keith Brown and Stef Jansen point in the direc-
tion of memory management in their works on the Balkans. Jansens Serb and Croat
villagers attempt to exert a minimum of control over their own version of history and
thereby over their everyday lives (Jansen :oo:: ,o) while Browns Macedonians hand
local knowledge down from knee to knee with successive generations but reveal a
nuanced awareness of the havoc that might be wreaked by injudicious narration of
their recollections (Brown :oo,: :I:, :,,). In foregrounding the individual, the
approach that I adopt here shares elements with that of Stoler and Strassler on what
they call memory work in postcolonial Java. Having set out to investigate colonial
memory among former servants and hoping thus to discover alternative, subaltern
histories to those propounded by the Dutch colonists, the ethnographers found that
[o]ur attention was instead arrested by the ways in which people moved from
recipe ingredients and dry shopping lists to dramatic re-enactments of pointed dia-
logues [T]hese accounts refused the colonial as a discrete domain of social relations
and politics, of experience and memory and differed from individual to individual
(Stoler & Strassler :ooo: ,8). Within the same anti-reductionist interpretative vein
Lambek has described memory as a moral practice or a form of practical wisdom,
and suggested that [t]he value of articulating a particular version of the past [is]
explicitly connected to its moral ends and consequences for relations in the present
(I,,o: :,,). The individuality and unpredictability of memory and the moral and
interpersonal aspect of its management emerge strongly in the three Bosnian cases
considered below.
These cases cannot in themselves disprove but do pose a challenge to those anthro-
pological interpretations which rightly accord signicance to emotion-laden personal
memories of trauma but wrongly suggest that these can be transmitted in any simple
way down the generations, causing renewed wars. Towards the end of this article I will
consider one small corner of the rapidly expanding eld of cognitive psychology which
could potentially be used to buttress the ancient ethnic hatreds school of Bosnian
interpretation. A recent article in this journal concerning second-generation mental
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representations of the Second World War massacres in Tuscany cites Maurice Blochs
work on autobiographical and historical memory, arguing that there is no difference
between the representations of autobiographical memory and those of historical
accounts (Cappelletto :oo,: :I, my emphasis), and that therefore the representations
of the younger generation are the same as those of the older generation whose accounts
of witnessing massacres they have imbibed and made their own. I will suggest that a
closer reading of Bloch does not entail this conclusion or give support to an ancient
ethnic hatreds interpretation, and that, rather than thinking of memories as actively
handed down by elders and absorbed wholesale by passive youth (as the phrase trans-
mitted memories tends to suggest), it is more helpful to think of them as actively
inferred by the younger generations, whether Bosniac, Tuscan, or other, on the basis
of information emanating from the elders. This approach allows for the fact that,
just as people manage their own personal memories, so they manage and work with
the ideas and images they have acquired through proximity to elders (transmitted
memories).
The three Sarajevans on whom I focus are people I have known since the pre-war
mid-I,8os, but there is nevertheless, of course, a possibility that I have over-interpreted
these most inaccessible of data about peoples innermost concerns and memories.
Except in the clear-cut case of Hamida, I have not here attempted a detailed tracking
of changes over time in the way these three individuals have expressed memories. My
general observation is that, as time has passed since the war ended in I,,,, wartime
incidents have been narrated less frequently and less spontaneously and that many
individuals appear to narrate the same one or two episodes repeatedly, and to narrate
them in a more organized, story-like form than previously. This observation ts with
psychological work on the way in which trauma survivors impose narrative structure
on memories about experiences which themselves lack essential narrative elements
(Barclay I,,o). It is important to stress, however, that, contrary to the tacit implica-
tion of some works in the politics of memory genre, memories are not limitlessly vul-
nerable to alteration through narration or social pressure: Narrative patterning does
not get in the way of accurate autobiographic reporting or interpreting, but rather,
provides a framework for both telling and understanding (Bruner & Fleisher Feldman
I,,o: :,I).
Three Sarajevans and their social milieu
Hamida, Amra, and Omer are all Bosniacs who lived in Sarajevo both before and
during the war and who derive some status from this. In socialist Sarajevo the concept
of the dobra, stara porodica (good, old family) was an important one (Sorabji I,8,;
see also Brown :oo,: :I,-I on Macedonia). Part of its signicance lay in the charac-
teristic Bosnian and wider former Yugoslav disdain felt by urbanites for rural dwellers
(see also Bringa, I,,,: ,8-oo). The many Sarajevans whose parents had moved to the
town from villages did not advertise this image-tarnishing fact, and during the war
there was a widespread urban tendency to blame the seljaci (villagers) or papci (bump-
kins) for the violence.
4
Combined with urbanity, longevity implied that the family in
question somehow pre-dated socialism. This conferred prestige not because of wide-
spread disapproval of or resistance to Communist rule but because longevity was
seen to imply the containment and contextualization of socialism within an older
and deeper moral tradition which, from the Bosniac perspective, also contained Islamic
piety.
4 Cornelia Sorabji
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Amra was always closer to good, old family status than Omer or Hamida but war
has blurred such distinctions. This is in part because some of the previously good, old
families are perceived as having become over-associated with the corrupt business-
political elite which emerged out of the war. It is also because old status distinctions
between Sarajevo residents have been challenged by the arrival of two new categories
of resident the in-migrated Bosniac displaced persons (DPs) from ethnically
cleansed villages, and a new wave of religious believers who have adopted a version of
Islam widely associated with some of the Arabs who participated in the war (see
Bellion-Jourdan :ooI). This manifestation of Islam, sometimes pejoratively dubbed
Wahhabi, is experienced by many believing Muslims in Sarajevo, and particularly by
those closer to the pre-war dobra, stara porodica end of the spectrum, as an attack on
Bosniac national identity, familiar values and practices, and their own sincerity as
believers and legitimacy as religious authorities. Against such perceived new threats
(corrupt elites, in-migrated villagers, Wahhabis) there is a tendency for pre-war
Sarajevo Bosniacs to play down status divisions between them in the interests of
unity. Thus Hamida, Amra, and Omer are socially less distant than they were before
the war.
All three also have a certain threadbare status as people who remained in Sarajevo
during the siege. In the early days of the war staying was squarely understood by Bosni-
acs as the brave and patriotic choice. As the war ground on, resentment towards
departed Bosniacs became more tempered with understanding of their motivations.
None the less, in :oo, few Bosniacs claimed that, given the choice again, they would
stay in besieged Sarajevo. In retrospect staying is seen as having been pointless: justice
did not triumph in Bosnia, and those who left have returned with educational quali-
cations, language skills, and money.
Amra is employed, Omer is self-employed, and Hamida has an employed daughter.
All three are linked to pre-war neighbourhood communities which offer a degree of
mutual support and have managed to build upon the remains of pre-war and wartime
networks of veze (connections) which, now more than ever, are of vital importance for
gaining and retaining employment, expediting medical treatment, registering a child
at a desirable school, and so on. While aware that their situation is far better than that
of most DPs, people from this milieu are more consistently conscious of what they
have lost than of what they currently have. Before the war most felt themselves to be
upwardly mobile. Regaining economic ground lost in the war is now seen as an aspi-
ration for the next generation. Relative economic hardship is compounded by the
lasting sorrows of war injury, bereavement, broken relationships (the divorce of war-
separated couples, family quarrels over resources), lost ambitions (vanishing career
plans and marital prospects), and sometimes tarnished self-images (discovery of ones
limitations). During that war Sarajevo was encircled, sniped at, and shelled from the
surrounding hills so that, as the Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladi put
it, they cant sleep, so we drive them out of their minds (da ne mogu da spavaju, da
im razvu emo pamet njihovu, see BBC I,,,). Omer, Amra, Hamida and many thou-
sands of Sarajevans live now with this legacy.
Omer: unwelcome memories
Before the war Omer was a married man with a young son and was self-employed in
one of the small private businesses allowed in socialist Yugoslavia. He had a car and
drove his family to the coast most summer weekends. When the war began he and his
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wife, who was not a Yugoslav citizen, agreed that she should take their son to her home-
land for safety. Omer did not go; he felt it a duty to stay rather than shirk and, in any
case, like almost everyone in the town, he did not think the war would last so long and
be so brutal.
Sarajevo was militarily unprepared for the attack upon it. Its defence was initially
drawn from the ranks of the Territorial Defence, from the police force, from the
Patriotic League military organization established in I,,I under the wing of the Party
of Democratic Action (SDA), the Bosniac party within the pre-war coalition govern-
ment, and from local volunteers, some of them organized into units known as Green
Berets (zelene beretke). Eventually all troops were merged into an army, the Army of
the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH), of which the First Corps was that
operating in and around Sarajevo. Between I,,: and I,,,, o,,8, First Corps soldiers
were killed, over half of them within the beseiged city.
5
Owing to a lack of weaponry and other equipment, the ARBiH operated a military
shift system and Omer spent periods ranging from two days to two months on the
frontline, interspersed with similar periods spent at home. His longest stint was on
Treskavica mountain, which he reached by rst walking the long, snipered miles from
his home to the airport, then making his way through the hand-dug tunnel under the
airport runway to Butmir, then climbing Mount Igman. During the climb he and his
fellows were given chocolate and cigarettes to keep us happy and keep our minds off
the frontline. They were then picked up by helicopter and own to Treskavica, being
shot at en route. On the frontline the soldiers built log bunkers for shelter. The food
was terrible and frozen in winter, but more plentiful than in civilian life. Hoisting
themselves up by rope to the literal frontline for two days at a time, they carried water
bottles and rations on their backs or in their teeth. None the less, Omer says he found
life easier at the front than in the town below because on the line he was unable to
worry too much about his loved ones. During his spells back in town, Omer, without
his wife and child, strengthened his relations with neighbours. They cooked, washed,
mended, and were company for him while he shared with them food parcels sent by
his spouse and news brought from other parts of town which he had gleaned from
fellow soldiers.
In :oo,, thanks to his energy and ingenuity, Omers business was still alive, but
ailing. His marriage was over. Omer was never especially religious and after the war
professed himself even less inclined to faith as a result of the thievery (lopovluk) of
religious functionaries he witnessed during it. He saw much post-war religious obser-
vance as battery-powered (na bateriju) hypocrisy designed to curry favour with the
political and business elites but was respectful of those whom he viewed as sincerely
devout.
What of his frontline memories? Most of them he does not enjoy or talk about and,
as he told me, You cant forget but you try to wipe it away (izbrisati). They are not
pretty memories. Mostly we recall funny or strange things that happened. His words
echo those of the Greek Cypriot refugee Petris interviewed by Loizos in I,,,: I want
to forget, not to remember. But you cant forget completely, you just cant (Loizos I,8I:
I,o).
6
Both during the war and after, Omer has indeed tended to tell me curious anec-
dotes and funny stories of the frontline. He told me of how they all laughed when a
self-consciously pious comrade tried to perform abdest (ritual washing before prayer)
in the dark in what he thought was a pile of snow but was in fact ashes from a camp
re. He told me of a dog who dug up a land-mine and stood in the doorway of the
6 Cornelia Sorabji
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newly built log bunker with the deadly weapon in its jaw, causing the men to demol-
ish the back wall of their just-completed handiwork and ee. He told me of a rain of
artillery re battering the forest during the Geneva Peace negotiations and how a fellow
soldier lay at on the ground yelling sign, Alija, sign!.
7
He told me of a conversation
between Serb and ARBiH troops on the frontline where they were close enough to hear
each other, jocular and friendly, until one of the Serbs lobbed a grenade. He also spoke
of an ARBiH sniper who shot a cow, waited until its owner came out to check on it,
and then shot her too.
This last tale, told to me in I,,, was recounted in the same appalled but humor-
ous tone as the rest but it was obviously morally darker and was perhaps a sort of test
balloon. For, as Omer was later to explain, he spent ve hundred days in the army and
felt proud that in all that time he was never promoted from the rank of ordinary
soldier. Those who were promoted were villagers who had ingratiated themselves with
their commanders by performing terrible acts inside the houses so you didnt see. In
contrast to most of Omers talk about the war there was no anecdote here, and no
punch-line. When others left the room, Omer told me that we were just as bad as they.
He did not mean this numerically or strategically (few outsiders and no Bosniacs could
accept the all-sides-equally-guilty thesis), but it seemed clear that he wanted me to
know something that is not easily spoken of in public or, I suspect, in mixed-
civilian/soldier or mixed-gender company. Although he waited until the other two
women were out of the room, I felt that his voice was not so quiet that it would be
impossible for them to overhear.
I present Omer as someone who would like to forget certain things but cannot. He
tries to focus his recall on selected amusing tales and to wipe away the rest. However,
his desire to forget conicts with his wish not to let certain things slip from the record.
In telling me (and the other two women?) about the darker side of the heroic defence
of Sarajevo, he challenged what he saw as the Bosniac elites version of events, which
lines its own pockets while belittling the lived reality of those who actually fought on
the frontline. Omer was cautious in this, partly out of respect for the different per-
spective more characteristic of civilian women, whose experiences were statistically
less perilous but often marked by a terrible sense of powerlessness. He tries to manage
his memories with a view to his own emotional well-being, his personal relationships
with others (including me a ready ear for war narratives, and less likely than insid-
ers to become upset), his animosity towards an elite perceived as corrupt, and his
desired relationship to History and Truth (as an outsider I probably play some
role here as a vessel for fragments of a future version of history not to be asserted in
the public space of todays Sarajevo). I doubt that I have really captured the complex-
ity of Omers thought processes and motivations, but what I think is clear is that he is
consciously trying to work on and with his memories rather than being fully com-
pelled by them or allowing them to be controlled by the ofcial version as purveyed,
for example, by the dominant SDA or the religious establishment, the Islamska
Zajednica.
It would, of course, be possible to argue that Omers narratives, although not deter-
mined by the dominant Bosniac political discourse of the day, are in fact conditioned
by a minority Bosniac perspective as propounded by sections of what is called the
independent media. My purpose is not to claim that Omers recall or narration is
entirely divorced from any social context or inuence, but to highlight the individual
and self-consciously reective nature of his memory management techniques.
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Amra: the problem of what to pass on
Amra is in her late thirties and has a husband, children born at the tail end of the
war, and a professional job in the public sector, where her pay is well above the
average. She was brought up in a house in one of the oldest Sarajevo neighbourhoods,
to which she still feels strongly tied, although she and her husband have bought
and live in a modern at in another part of town. Both have been practising Muslims
since long before the war and are also caf-goers and globe-trotters. With her
education and contacts she could probably have secured one of the much-coveted jobs
with the UN peacekeeping forces during the war, but she preferred to remain in the
state sector in order to build a professional role and stake in the post-war Bosnia she
believed would endure. She now has this stake but, like many, feels that the Bosnia
she stayed for does not actually exist. As she put it, In the war it was simpler; you
knew who was your friend and who was your enemy, but today she feels it is hard
to trust anyone beyond ones own immediate circle who is not personally vouched
for by that circle. Amras husband told me: If ever a single shell falls on Sarajevo again
Ill be the rst out of town. Oh no you wont, Amra interjected, youll be second,
behind me.
Like many, Amra is troubled by what she sees as the betrayal of past Serb friends
who left without warning on the eve of war or during it (see also Ma ek :ooo: I,,-,I).
Serbs who remained in Sarajevo during the siege face difculties in negotiating new
relationships in the post-war city, and therefore in procuring necessary papers or per-
missions, but they are not subject to the suspicion of pre-war Sarajevo friends, neigh-
bours, and colleagues who know their wartime pedigree. Those who left the town,
however, are often seen as having put themselves na njihovoj strani, on their side, that
is, the side of the enemy.
8
Amra knows that not all Serbs who left did so with the active
aim of shelling the city, but argues that being on their side is not a complex mental
state but a simpler positional one; it is about having been used for an immoral purpose
and allowing those who stayed to suffer the consequences. Bosniacs who left Sarajevo
may be viewed as shirkers,
9
but Serbs who left were, regardless of their own personal
motives, used by the enemy propaganda machine as evidence of a policy of violent
ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the town.
10
Their departures therefore helped bolster
the Serbian political claim that, rather than attacking Sarajevo, Serb forces were merely
defending against Bosniac or Islamic persecution. This claim affected popular percep-
tions and decision-making processes in wider Bosnia, in Serbia, and in the interna-
tional community, and is one component of the uncomfortable logic behind the
Sarajevo Bosniac phrase na njihovoj strani. Such a logic of polarization was fully com-
prehended by the orchestrators of war, whose aim was precisely to divide Bosnians into
ethnically determined sides.
In :oo: Amra was particularly troubled by her chance meeting with an old college
friend, Biljana, a Serb who had left for Serbia at the beginning of the conict. During
the seige Biljana had sent Amra a food parcel, and Amra was genuinely pleased when
she ran into her friend at a ski resort on the edge of town. She expressed to me her
certainty that Biljana was not in any way anti-Bosniac and had never wanted to attack
Sarajevo. However, a close relative of Biljanas was at that time an important gure in
the administrative structure of Serb Sarajevo, the semi-rural suburb which Bosnias
Serb-dominated entity (Republika Srpska) ambitiously claims as a counterpart to the
actual city.
11
Amra raised with me the topic of her meeting with Biljana on various
occasions, obviously turning it over in her mind, but I felt that she was ultimately glad
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that Biljana did not intend to return to live in Sarajevo since any such return would
entail far more frequent thought on a painful set of issues.
This reluctance to dwell on emotionally difcult issues is relevant to Amras stated
desire to ensure that her children know what happened during the war. Although she
feels it her duty to pass on her knowledge, and told me in some detail of the experi-
ences of her relatives who were expelled from the suburb of Dobrinja, when she started
to talk of her own wartime experiences she tended to become agitated and come to a
halt, dismissing the topic with the claim that we hardly talk about that any more
we used to talk about it all the time. Amra did not enjoy talking about the war and
also appeared convinced that her children would not understand anyway. She cited the
example of her own grandfather, who, in the I,8os, warned the family that the Dobrinja
at was too close to the airport, which would be the rst location to be captured if a
war broke out. At the time, said Amra, she merely laughed at what seemed a fantasti-
cal concern of an old man, but in retrospect she feared that her own children would
laugh in the face of any warnings she offered them.
From a social science perspective this view may seem defeatist; Amras historical
interpretations will receive more support in the public sphere of Bosniac-dominated
Sarajevo than did her grandfathers in socialist Yugoslavia. They should therefore,
arguably, have more chance of inuencing her children. Perhaps, however, part of
what Amra and others are expressing is the impossibility, in any political circum-
stances, of truly conveying memory with all its attendant emotions. In I,,o, one year
after the wars end, another woman, Suada, joked to me about how she herself was
becoming like a foreigner, unable to believe how bad the war had really been; another
year and Ill be denying there ever was a war!, she laughed. Both Suada and Amra were
perhaps expressing the disjunction between the experience of a world turned upside
down by war, and that of trying subsequently to describe that experience. When past
events already seem vaguely unreal to those who actually experienced them, it may
indeed seem impossible that the next generation should ever grasp their reality.
Lawrence Langer, speaking of the experiences of Holocaust survivors, writes of an
underlying discontinuity [which] assaults the integrity of the self and threatens the
very continuity of the oral narrative (I,,I: IoI). It may be due to such a sense of dis-
continuity that, despite her desire that her children should know what happened,
Amra has at one level given up in advance on transmitting her memories down the
generations.
Hamida: memories not narrated
Hamida was born in a distant village before the Second World War and moved to
Sarajevo with her husband and in-laws in the I,oos. She retained all her traditional
village domestic skills, habits, and industry while watching her upwardly mobile chil-
dren acquire educational qualications and white-collar jobs. I knew that the area
where Hamida had grown up had been subject to attacks by Serbian Chetniks during
the Second World War, and during my rst eldwork in the socialist I,8os I occasion-
ally asked her about those days. She was never very forthcoming and would only reply
that her family had ed to the woods when the Chetniks came. Then she would
change the subject or fall silent. It did not seem right to persist since I was already
studying one topic that was potentially politically sensitive Islam and I did
not want to discomfort people by pursuing a second and even more politically
sensitive one.
Cornelia Sorabji 9
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After my Ph.D. eldwork, the taboo on public discussion of the atrocities of the
Second World War imposed by Yugoslav socialist brotherhood and unity (bratstvo i
jedinstvo) gradually lifted.
12
Although relevant statistical research had been published
in London and Zagreb in the I,8os (Ko ovi I,8,; erjavi I,8,), it was the I,,o pub-
lication of a volume entitled Genocid nad Muslimanima :,,:-,, (Genocide Against
Muslims, i.e. Bosniacs in todays terminology) that brought the issue of Second World
War Bosniac suffering to public prominence in Sarajevo (Dedijer & Mileti I,,o). A
long annexe of this work listed the names of all the known Bosniac victims of Chetnik
forces, including eight members of Hamidas village family. Other writing on the topic
followed (see Imamovi I,,I). During the I,,:-, war the systematic killing and exiling
of Bosniacs resulted in indictments for genocide and other crimes at the Hague-based
International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
13
In this context, writ-
ings about genocide and persecution of Muslims proliferated (see, e.g., Su eska I,,,),
culminating in the polemical thesis of the historical ten genocides against Balkan
Muslims (Spahi I,,o).
14
Despite this change to public discourse, Hamida recounted nothing of her Second
World War memories until :oo:, when, out of the blue as we sat together, she began
to tell me about what had happened in her village at that time. I can see it before
my eyes now, she said of the burning tapers that had been applied to the roof
of her familys house to burn it down. She told of family members who had escaped
when the Chetniks were distracted from their task by the sight of a stash of gold
ducats, and of others who did not. Her narrative involved ight to the woods, a
mothers desperate thought of strangling a toddler whose cries might reveal their posi-
tion, and eventual rescue by an Italian truck which drove them to the nearest town. A
baby sister had been left behind in the home of a sympathetic Serb who was later forced
by Chetniks to kill the baby. After the war Hamida and her remaining family had
returned to live in the village and she told me also of the Serb neighbours grief and
his conviction that God had punished him for the killing by making his own
children sickly.
Why did Hamida tell me her recollections in :oo: and not before? Discussing the
case of a woman who revealed her rape during the Greek civil war fty years after it
took place, Riki van Boeschoten (:oo,) has suggested that the timing of the revelation
was partly the result of the political context surrounding the I,,8 interview, which
included the increased international focus on human rights as a concept and value. In
contrast I want to suggest that far more private and personal reasons inuenced the
timing of Hamidas narration, for I believe that she told me of her childhood experi-
ence primarily because she felt older, closer to death, and more in the mood to review
her life, and because it happened to be a quiet day with an atmosphere conducive to
condence. She spoke for reasons which were personally strongly emotive.
15
Such an
interpretation would also seem to apply to the case of Pashkalina, a citizen of Greece
from Macedonia who vehemently and even litigiously denied any Bulgarian roots,
only, in deep old age, to reveal that her natal village had been burned down by the
Greek army in I,I,, and that her family had ed to the safety of a Bulgarian village in
Serbia (Karakasidou I,,,: I:o-,I). Both cases, of course, challenge Halbwachss view
that what is not narrated is forgotten. In Hamidas case, political manipulation or social
pressure would surely have been expected to produce a narrative far sooner than :oo:,
given that the Second World War Chetnik atrocities had been a topic of public discus-
sion for over a decade. It is of course possible that had socialism endured and the
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10 Cornelia Sorabji
J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) , :-:8
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I,,:-, war never occurred then Hamida might never have told this Second World War
story. In this sense it can be said that the socio-political context affected the timing of
the narration, but it needs to be emphasized that even this claim is a more modest one
than those frequently made or implied by the politics of memory genre.
Memories handed down?
I cannot exclude the possibility that Hamida had narrated parts of her story to her
husband, whose family came from the same region and would therefore have known
of the killings, but I am fairly sure that she had not told this tale to her children. The
degree of Hamidas discretion towards them was made evident to me by a separate
incident in :oo: when Hamida revealed to myself and one of her daughters that a scar
on her leg was the result of ying debris from Second World War bombing (by
Germans against Partisans, she thought). Hamidas daughter reacted angrily, com-
plaining that Hamida had never explained the scar before. On a less painful topic,
Hamida also revealed to her surprised daughter that she had had a secret Sharia
wedding in the socialist era in addition to the secular state ceremony. A large part of
the reason for Hamidas silence on the events of the Second World War seems to have
been a desire to protect her children from distressing thoughts: a child what do
children need with that? (dijete sta e im?), she replied when I asked her why she
had not told them. This is not to say, of course, that her children would not have
inferred anything from her silences. Describing the effect of silences, the psychologist
Daniel Bar-On, citing Spence, offers the analogy of the young man trying to avoid
looking at the picture of a naked woman on the wall; in so doing he offers bodily evi-
dence of his avoidance to onlookers (Bar-On I,,,: I,,). Perhaps Hamidas avoidance
of the topic, combined with socialist Bosnias periodic vilications and purges of
people suspected of Serb, Croat, or Bosniac nationalism, had the effect for children of
a large nger pointing towards the unseen and unspoken horror.
16
What I want to consider in conclusion is whether and how explicit, narrated mem-
ories may be handed undiluted down the generations in the manner Simi suggested
in his Nationalism as a folk ideology article referred to in the opening section of this
article. Hamidas children did not, I believe, hear about the Second World War from
her, but they had not been completely shielded from tales of wartime violence.
Hamidas mother-in-law used to tell stories in front of the children not only of the two
World Wars but also of the Balkan wars of I,I: and I,I,. In her village in the I,8os I
encountered the only person I have ever met who might be used as evidence of a land
deeply divided and steeped for generations in tales of heroism and imbued with a
quasi-religious ethos of revenge and retribution (Simi :ooo: II,). Tarik was an elderly
but lively man whose wife, four children, parents, sisters, and several other relatives
had all been burned alive by Chetniks in one of the village houses during the Second
World War. He did not speak of Serbs with venom, but freely claimed that it would be
a mistake to trust them or differentiate between them: if you seated one Serb at your
table and tied another in a sack and sat on him, both would think just the same of
you. He made no secret of this opinion to his son (he had remarried), to me, or to the
neighbours. He told me of the past and of his views while walking through the very
landscape where the killings had occurred, and presumably this was also the major
context in which he had narrated events to his son.
Work by Maurice Bloch (I,,o) on the process of memory transmission merits
discussion in the context of Southeastern Europe, where it might be read as lending
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support to claims that members of contemporary nations have the exact same
memories of past wrongs as the memories of long-dead ancestors who actually expe-
rienced those wrongs. Bloch considers a Zaminary village in Madagascar which had
been burned down by the French army in response to the I,, rebellion. Three vil-
lagers had died en route to a concentration camp, while the rest had ed to the forests,
where they had hidden out for two and a half years. The terrible events were recounted
to the anthropologist not only by a man who had personally witnessed them but also
by Zaminary children who had not been alive in I,, but who had heard narratives
of the past. The children used the ambiguous pronoun we, making it unclear whether
they wanted to convey that they themselves had been present in I,,, or that family
members had been, or that the whole moral community of we had been.
Did the children really have the same memories as their parents? Bloch suggests this
was the case in the nature, if not the content (I,,o: I:): Their memory of the period
of hiding was not of a fundamentally different kind to that of those who had lived
then (I,,o: I:I). Underlying his assertion is the argument that what psychologists call
autobiographical or episodic memory (i.e. memory of episodes in ones own life) and
what they call semantic memory (i.e. memory of learned facts) are not as different as
is often thought. Bloch argues that the children did not learn about I,, by remem-
bering their elders narratives as narratives, in the way one might remember a phone
number or the text of a poem. Rather, they listened to the narratives and then men-
tally eshed them out with inferences they themselves made on the basis of features
of the landscape they knew so well the landscape in which they had listened to the
narratives and in which the traumatic events had originally occurred and with infer-
ences based on the emotions they perceived as belonging to the elders from whom they
heard the tales. Bloch therefore argues that we should not imagine a gulf between elders
and offspring in which the former have an endless store of memories which they recall
in their minds eye (autobiographical memory) while the latter have but a bare text
(semantic memory), because the children in spite of the poverty of the original input
can, when remembering, search an almost unlimited and vivid memory of the
events contained in the story in exactly the way that an individual can do this when
recalling autobiographical memories (I,,o: I:,).
This argument initially appears to imply that, as Francesca Cappelletto has phrased
it in the context of the memory of the Second World War massacres in Tuscany, there
is no difference between the representations of autobiographical memory and those of
historical accounts (:oo,: :I, my emphasis). A close reading of Blochs argument,
however, makes it clear that this implication does not hold. Blochs suggestion is not
that the content of the childrens memories is the same as that of the elders who lived
through the events of I,, but that the process by which they search their minds is the
same. Within those minds they have a rich store of images and emotions on which to
draw when thinking about I,,, just as their parents have. This argument does not
have the same implications as the same content argument.
Tarik recounted Second World War events to his son in the landscape where they
occurred and, in this respect, the way in which he conveyed his memories was similar
to that of the Zaminary witnesses of the I,, atrocities. Following Cappelletto, there
should be no difference between the memories of Tarik and of his son. However,
the cognitive evidence marshalled by Bloch does not suggest the possibility of identi-
cal content of memories down the generations. While Tariks son may have been
able to imagine (or recall) the past events richly and without great deviation from
12 Cornelia Sorabji
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factual accuracy, his imaginings or recollections would also have been partially
constructed from other images and ideas which formed part of his experience, and not
of Tariks. His contemplation and relation of memories would have depended on his
own memory management techniques, not on Tariks. In practice Tariks son did not
appear to have what could be called the same memories as his father, and he certainly
was not imbued with a quasi-religious ethos of revenge and retribution. Like other
villagers, he seemed to understand why a man who had suffered such devastating
losses might feel the way Tarik did about Serbs, but he also viewed his fathers con-
victions and open expression of them with some amusement (see also Stoler & Strassler
:ooo: I,).
In conclusion: the possibility of reconciliation
One compelling question arising from this discussion is of whether a focus on indi-
viduals can shed light on the prospects for reconciliation of some sort in Bosnia in
general, or in Sarajevo in particular?
17
It is often thought that a major obstacle to rec-
onciliation, however dened, lies in the fact that Bosnians now have xed memories
and generic, blanket interpretations of the nature of the enemy which tend to militate
against reintegration. In earlier work (Sorabji I,,; I,,,) I argued that the brutal, per-
sonalized face-to-face atrocities inicted by neighbours upon neighbours, particularly
but not exclusively in villages, served not only the immediate purpose of removing
unwanted people from the territory to be cleansed, but also the longer-term purpose
of impressing on victims (and perpetrators) a simple, hardened, ashbulb-type
memory of a familiar place transformed into a wholly unfamiliar nightmare. Leaving
expellees with this nal image so different from all their previous experiences of the
landscape and the neighbours could in some cases, I suggested, prompt a mental re-
interpretation of the pre-war past. Thus, instead of concluding that we all used to live
happily together but then they changed, some would draw the conclusion that they
always hated us, they were always waiting to be rid of us. I suggested that this sort of
re-evaluation of the pre-war past might pose even greater obstacles to subsequent re-
integration than a they changed model.
A decade on, the Sarajevo material I have presented here highlights that interpre-
tations are only one of the obstacles to reconciliation or re-integration. Parts of the
city like Grbavica, Stup, Dobrinja, and Ilid a did witness face-to-face ethnic cleansing,
but the neighbourhoods where Amra, Omer, and Hamida lived were never under the
control of Serb forces and it is possible to speculate that this may make it slightly easier
to re-assess and re-interpret the past over time. I think that there have indeed been
gradual changes to common interpretations of the meaning, motivations, and portents
of the violence. For example, in the early days of the war many Sarajevo Bosniacs had
espoused a view of the conict as one between urban civility and rural aggression
(Sorabji I,,,: ,,). As the war progressed and in its immediate aftermath, more Sara-
jevo Bosniacs entertained theories about the innate or semi-innate aggression of Serbs,
speculating, for example, that there could be something in Serb culture or child-rearing
patterns that made them prone to violence. Since :ooo I have witnessed a growing
tendency to view Serbs, including even the wartime Serbian President Slobodan
Milosevi , as mere dupes and instruments of greater global powers; prone to stupid-
ity and greed but not necessarily to evil.
Despite changing interpretations there remains widespread popular reluctance
among Sarajevo Bosniacs to see Serbs return to the city. The material I have presented
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in this article points to an additional, important reason for this reluctance which lies
not in xed ideas or interpretations but in the simple unpleasantness of the memory
management process itself (Omer: You cant forget but you try to wipe it away). A
typical Sarajevo Bosniac response to returnees in the workplace or (less frequently) the
neighbourhood is to feel deeply uncomfortable, to make no overtly hostile gesture, and
to keep interaction to a minimum. As one acquaintance, Mirsada, put it: I will tell my
son that it is OK to talk to them but that they can never be household friends (ku ni
prijatelji). Mirsada, Amra, and others are aware that not all Serbs who were na njihovoj
strani on their side were hostile to Bosniacs and believe that, in purely moral terms,
every individual must be judged individually. However, in many individual cases they
lack specic knowledge on which to base such judgements, and even thinking about
the Serbs who left raises such painful memory management issues that, like Amra, who
was relieved that Biljana would not be returning to Sarajevo (see above), many would
rather avoid having to do so.
It is not uncommon to hear from a Sarajevo Bosniac the story (perhaps urban
legend) of how, riding the tram or walking the street, they or an acquaintance spotted
a Serb returnee known to have been an ardent wartime enemy of the city and its
inhabitants. In these narratives the witness breaks into a sweat, is frozen to the spot,
or feels sick to the stomach. The prevalence of such stories helps illustrate that,
from the perspective of many Sarajevo Bosniacs, the challenge posed by returning
Serbs is not or is not only one of an interpretative scheme about what Serbs are
supposedly like as a group. It lies in the fact that it is often not possible to make
an individual judgement about who might be guilty of what; behaving with social
warmth towards a returnee whose wartime pedigree is unknown therefore risks giving
an unwitting welcome to a willing participant in sniping, shelling, looting, or worse.
The returnee whom one Sarajevan treats with warmth could be the same returnee
whose presence in the tram caused another Sarajevan to creep home trembling like a
leaf. The possible implications of this fact for judicial, economic, or other measures
that should be taken by local or international authorities lie beyond the scope of this
article.
NOTES
This article is based on eldwork done before, during and after the war, from I,8, to :oo,. That work has
been supported, inter alia, by grants from the Economic & Social Research Council and the British Academy.
I am grateful to the Foreign & Commonwealth Ofce for allowing me time to write up this material. The
views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reect those of the FCO. Three academic institutions
have hosted my efforts: the Centre for Policy Studies, Central European University; the Department of War
Studies, Kings College London; and the Anthropology Department of University College London.
I owe debts to Xavier Bougarel, Christian Moe, Frances Pine, and Michael Stewart for conversations and
comments, as well as to the JRAIs editor and four anonymous reviewers and to Omer, Amra, and Hamida.
I alone am responsible for the result.
1
The ofcial name of the country is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, but this is unwieldy and I have used
plain Bosnia instead. In late I,,, a decision was made by the Congress of Bosnian Muslim/Bosniac Intel-
lectuals to ofcially rename the former Muslim population Bosniac. This decision was internationally
reected in the Washington Agreement in March I,,, and later enshrined in the General Framework Agree-
ment on Peace (GFAP, commonly known as Dayton after the place where the peace was negotiated). I use
Bosniac except in those cases where I am indicating specically religious afliation, but readers should bear
in mind that prior to the war Muslim was the correct terminology and that even today it is common in
ordinary conversation.
2
For the May :oo, Training in Trauma Recovery slogan see the Bosnia/Munich website initiative (Psih.org
n.d.). Some psychological and psychiatric work has disputed the value of psycho-social aid programmes for
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14 Cornelia Sorabji
J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) , :-:8
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victims of war (see, e.g., Summereld :oooa and contributions to Losi :ooo). The proposition that war-
provoked mental disorders may be transmitted down the generations is disputed in Summereld (:ooob).
Stubbs (I,,,) describes the rise and fall of the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) movement in Bosnia
and Croatia in the I,,os.
3
For further information on education see OHR (n.d), OSCE (n.d.), and Perry (:oo,).
4
For a critique of this approach see Bougarel (I,,,).
5
Mortality gure cited in Ajnadzi (:oo:: :,o). Some details of the genesis and operation of the ARBiH,
and the relationships between its formative constituent parts, remain unknown or controversial. The question
of the relative contributions to defence made by the Patriotic League and by the Territorial Defence remains
contested. See Divjak (:ooI); Gow (:oo,: :I-,o); Halilovi (I,,,); Hoare (:ooI; :oo), Lu arevi (:ooo).
6
Many other phrases from Loizoss poignantly entitled The heart grown bitter ring bells in Sarajevo. Loizos
says that listening to Turkish television was another obsessive strand of their relationship with the enemy
(I,8I: I,) and notes the inner compulsion of DPs to talk of the past although it distressed them to do so
(I,8I: I:,). The Cypriot view that Western powers have manipulated our differences (I,8I: I:) was increas-
ingly echoed by Bosniacs after :ooo.
7
Alija Izetbegovi was the founding leader of the Bosniac political party, SDA, and after the I,,o elec-
tions became President of the Presidency of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Geneva was the site
of I,,, peace negotiations conducted by the EC- and UN-chaired International Conference on Former
Yugoslavia (ICFY).
8
In the Sarajevo context Serbs rather than Croats are viewed by Bosniacs as the major aggressors and
betrayers, but this view does not hold, for example, among Mostar Bosniacs.
9
In a detailed study of wartime Sarajevo Ma ek outlines three coping modes those of soldier, civilian,
and deserter and presents the deserters as the morally astute who feel personally and morally responsi-
ble for their acts (:ooo: :,8-o). This interpretation clashes with the Sarajevo Bosniac critique, which sees
deserters as having left others to carry responsibility for the protection of their homes and families.
10
Serb propaganda claims of a Bosniac- or Islamically inspired programme of ethnic cleansing of
Sarajevo were not founded, but there were killings of a still unknown number of Sarajevo Serbs, most
notably by members of the Tenth Mountain Brigade commanded by Mu an Topalovi Caco (see AIM
[Alternative Information Network] of I8.II.,, at AIM n.d.; Dani magazine, ,.I.:ooo and .:.:ooo).
11
In March :oo Bosnias Constitutional Court declared unconstitutional the use of the prex Serb
attached to place names, including Sarajevo.
12
See Denich (I,,) and Hayden (I,,) for accounts of how the I,,o and I,,I exhumations and re-burials
of Croat and Slovene victims of the Partisans and of Serb victims of the Croatian Ustashe provided grist to
Croat, Slovene, and Serb nationalist mills.
13
On I, December :oo: Biljana Plav i , one of the leaders of the wartime Bosnian Serb polity, told the
ICTY that she had now come to the belief and accept the fact that many thousands of innocent people were
the victims of an organized, systematic effort to remove Muslims and Croats from the territories claimed
by Serbs (see UNICTY :oo,: :,; for a full English-language translation of her statement see Plavsi :oo:).
So far one indictee, Gen. Radislav Krsti , has been convicted by the ICTY for aiding and abetting genocide
(see UNICTY :oo).
14
The rst of Spahi s ten genocides is the period Io8,-,,, after the Ottoman defeat at Vienna. Not all of
the ten were perpetrated by Serbs or against specically Bosniac Muslims, and most are not what might
widely be termed genocide.
15
Emotions other than those of contemplative old age may also be the catalyst for renewed narration of
memories after long silence. The emotion of fear, prompted by a new set of political circumstances, is high-
lighted in Jennifer Coles examination of the Madagascan Betsimisaraka and their memories of the I,,
rebellion (:ooI: ::,-,,) and in Michael Stewarts work on the re-evocation of Hungarian Roma memories
of the Holocaust (:oo: ,o,).
16
The exact manner in which such nger-pointing might operate in the complete absence of any narra-
tion remains something of a theoretically unelaborated black box. Michael Taussig has proposed the phrase
implicit social knowledge to denote a non-discursive, essentially inarticulable and imageric knowing (I,8,:
,o,; taken up by van der Port I,,8: Ioo; I,,,, in the context of Serbia) while Valentin Volo inov (I,,o) has
written of an unofcial conscious (explored by Cole :ooI: :8:- in the Betsimisiraka context), but in each
instance the extent to which second generations could be said to share in a conscious or knowledge without
having heard at least some scraps of narrative remains unclear.
17
A discussion of reconciliation lies beyond the scope of this article, but see Borneman (:oo:; :oo,), Falk
(:oo,), Nader (:oo,), Sampson (:oo,), and Wilson (:oo,) for debates on the issue.
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Rsum
Aprs la guerre de 1992-5 en Bosnie, les anthropologues ont t nombreux se pencher sur le rle de la
mmoire dans la cration et lentretien de lhostilit dans les Balkans. Une premire cole de pense se
concentre sur lauthenticit et la puissance des souvenirs personnels de violences pendant la seconde
Guerre Mondiale et sur la possibilit de les transmettre au l des gnrations jusquaux annes 1990. Une
seconde sintresse moins la mmoire comme phnomne dterminant laction humaine qu la poli-
tique de la mmoire , la dynamique politique agissant sur les souvenirs individuels et canalisant ceux-
ci. partir de lexemple de trois Bosniaques de Sarajevo quelle connat depuis les annes I,8o,
avant-guerre, lauteur souhaite mettre en avant les mrites dune troisime approche complmentaire,
centre sur lindividu en tant que gestionnaire actif de ses propres souvenirs. Elle aborde rapidement la
question de savoir si les travaux de Maurice Bloch sur la nature de la mmoire smantique et autobi-
ographique peuvent aller dans le sens dune version forte de la premire tendance interprtative ou si,
comme elle le suggre, leurs conclusions laissent une marge dlaboration des souvenirs individuels et de
changement entre les gnrations.
Cornelia Sorabji did her Ph.D. eldwork in socialist Bosnia in the mid-I,8os and received her doctorate,
supervised by the late Ernest Gellner, in I,8,. Her research interests include political ideologies, conict
and violence, religious belief, Islam, and the role of social sciences in policy-making. She is currently an hon-
orary fellow at University College London and a research analyst at the Foreign & Commonwealth Ofce.
Department of Anthropology, University College London, Gower St, London WC:E oBT, UK. c.sorabji@ucl.ac.uk
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J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) , :-:8
Royal Anthropological Institute :ooo