Sara Elizabeth Williams

Several weeks ago I attended a typically, irritatingly thought-provoking discussion at the Frontline Club. I am a huge supporter of the club — indeed I am applying for membership — but the one down side to the mind-bendingly intelligent debate I get to absorb at the club is this panging, demi-nostalgic sneak of a yearn that goes something like, “What would my life be like if I had become a war reporter/foreign affairs correspondent/listened to my aunties and done that Master’s degree after all?”

— but I digress.

Bosnia: Will the uncertain peace deal hold? was a fundraising event for Most Mira, a Bosnian charity founded by Kemal Pervanic, a thirtysomething Bosnian man who has truly lived through hell: he is a survivor of the Omarska concentration camps, and he has grown to forgive those who imprisoned and tortured him. 

Pervanic was joined on the panel by Lord Paddy Ashdown, the former High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina and an authority on the politics and policies of the region. Allan Little, a BBC correspondent whose beat for a long time included Yugoslavia, chaired the event (and did an exceptional job of it).

In keeping with the theme of this blog — social change and the ideals and mechanisms that enable it — I’d like to pick up on some of the personal and political issues (not now, feminists) that emerged during the panel, and explore them on their own and through the prism of Sunday’s 15th anniversary of the genocide at Srebenica. I will do this in two posts — this is the first.

The personal experience: conflict and reconciliation 

Ashdown’s first memory, which he shared at the Frontline, is as an observer of conflict — doubtless it speaks to his eventual career path. On a family trip through India, where he was born, he caught sight of a mound of dismembered bodies, evidence of conflict, lawlessness and the breathtaking power of human cruelty, all just a stone’s throw from his home. This shaped him; he did not forget it.

For Pervanic, it is the the adult memories that burn: taken away from home and family as a young man, rounded up with friends and neighbours and herded into a concentration camp, only to find familiarity amidst the horror:

“One of my schoolmates was a camp guard.”

I cannot begin to imagine the surreality of such an experience, nor can I quite wrap my head around this happening in Europe, in the nineties, after so many insisted — and still insist — ‘never again’. Yet it did happen, and it will doubtless happen again. We are cruel beasts when we bend reason to our will. 

Pervanic’s experience as a victim of war — or survivor, the difference is moot here — overlaps with Ashdown’s experience as an observer of conflict and a party to — albeit patchy — peacemaking. He experienced sadism and humiliation as weapons of war. He went through hell only to find out that life goes on afterwards without pause for readjustment. He describes life in peacetime, the charged connections with people from his wartime past just left to burn as the people around him moved on:

“The personal nature of the whole thing is the worst thing… and when you go back, you come across these people all the time.”

Pervanic speaks of wanting to forgive or move on — to do something — but of feeling trapped in the aftermath of war. He describes chasing someone who had humiliated and interrogated him, demanding to know why, asserting his right to know: “But you interrogated me, too,” he insisted.

For Pervanic, coming to terms with what actually happened was a necessary prerequisite to forgiveness: historical accuracy as a condition and facet of reconciliation. In his words, it is about “[establishing] the closest thing to the truth in order to move forward”. 

He did move forward, looking the past in the eye and founding Most Mira, but yesterday, on the 15th anniversary of the massacre of so many men and boys at Srebenica, it was hard to shake the feeling that the rest of Europe hasn’t. The Balkan conflict sits uneasily on our collective conscience. 

A massacre that should have been acknowledged, mourned and widely, productively discussed… simply wasn’t. Scant news coverage of the anniversary — in Britain, at least — demonstrates not that we’ve learned from it and moved on, but that we still don’t know what to make of large-scale, nationalistic violence and our paralysis in the face of it. We failed to act, we failed to learn, and we’re failing to remember.

Identity and the act of bearing witness

Ashdown spoke of the biblical phrase “the act of bearing witness” as a fundamental aspect of humanity. This is the function that is performed by the press: witnessing evil, documenting it — making it real to those who weren’t there — and telling it to the world, so those who weren’t there can learn from it. (Something we still haven’t done: in Ashdown’s words, “we keep on committing the same mistakes again and again, and I watch them committed with loving stupidity”.)

But the act of bearing witness is tied closely to identity. Pervanic says that his escape out of the lowest depth of misery came when he was transferred to a second camp, where members of the Red Cross wrote down his name:

“I came back to life. That act of writing down my name, having a name, it gave me back my life.”

Ashdown and Pervanic are agreed that reconciliation is a process. For Pervanic, the process of documenting his experiences, writing them down, enabled him to let them go. He is building his life anew. Yet for the broader European community, Bosnia has become something politically loaded and heavy with guilt. We didn’t act, and we don’t want to look our failure in the eye. And so we sidle along beside it, and Bosnia stumbles on.

Photo credit: Marta Schaaf via Flickr courtesy of a Creative Commons licence