Towns, forgetting and thorns

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Continuation of the activity “Marking Atrocity Sites” in Podrinje and Herzegovina, 17 - 18 May 2016
06/13/2016
13. June 2016

Continuing activities started in the autumn of 2015, the three of us activists, Čedomir Glavaš, Amer Delić and Dalmir Mišković, connected by a common wish to change how we relate to the past, set off on a journey to remind local communities and the whole of BiH society that there were still sites of suffering and crimes around us that have been forgotten and that this attitude of oblivion is an unfair relation to the past. Our fieldwork was preceded by researching the locations and gathering information about events and facts determined by courts.

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On the morning of 17 May, we set off towards Podrinje, an area in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) that was particularly hard hit by the war and where there were many casualties. The first site we planned to mark was the former camp Sušica in the Vlasenica Municipality where Bosniaks were detained in 1992. Before the war, the buildings were part of a military agricultural cooperative. They are now abandoned and for the most part dilapidated. We had contacted locals in Vlasenica who took us to the site. (Since they are returnees and, as we found out from one of them, the situation in Vlasenica is not good, with increased inter-ethnic tensions following last year’s terrorist attack on the police station in Zvornik, we will be maintaining their anonymity.) It is interesting that after we had put up signs in Cyrillic on the buildings of the former camp and continued on towards Bratunac, we received a phone call from one of them expressing his disapproval that the signs were only in Cyrillic. He was excited, citing constitutional provisions about the use of different alphabets in BiH and the entities, saying we had committed a breach. We explained that we had done so precisely to shield local returnee and usually minority communities from additional pressure, but he was steadfast and calmed down only when we promised we would also put up signs in the Latin alphabet, which we did on our way back.

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Our next location was the former agricultural cooperative in Kravica near Bratunac where in July 1995, forces of the Army of Republika Sroska (VRS) executed more than 1000 Bosniaks, captured after the fall of Srebrenica. The location became publicly known after an incident on 13 July 2013 when police officers of the RS Ministry of Interior physically prevented representatives from the Association of Mothers of Srebrenica and Žepa Enclaves from laying wreaths and honouring the victims. We found the buildings eerily deserted, and our arrival was witnessed by only a few curious passers-by and the local villagers working in their fields. This gave us confidence that we could complete our activity without problems, which we did. The location is specific because in the immediate vicinity of this site is a memorial to Serb victims of central Podrinje and Birč with a large cross that dominates the landscape.

After Kravica, we continued on to Srebrenica. The plan was to mark the former police station building in Srebrenica, which during the time Srebrenica was under the control of the Army of the Republic of BiH (ARBiH) served as a detention facility for Serbs and a place of torture and summary executions. The building currently houses a number of social organisations, including the local branch of the political party Union of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) and the Naša prava association, as well as the Youth Council of the Srebrenica Municipality. One side of the building features a mural with multiethnic (at least in our view) names of children and a tree under which it says “TOLERANCE IS NOT A FOREIGN WORD”.

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We continued on to Zvornik. We first planned to mark the site of the Čelopek Cultural Centre, which had been demolished after the war. However, after driving around Čelopek a few times, we could not even approximately locate the site where the Cultural Centre used to be. We were equally unsuccessful in finding the buildings we planned to mark at our next location, the Branjevo Farm, which had been the final stop for more than 1200 Bosniaks from Srebrenica and which had also been lost in the economic, building and social developments after the war. Among the members of the 10th Sabotage Detachment of VRS convicted for the crimes at the Branjevo Farm was the first penitent at the ICTY, Dražen Erdemović. In his testimony before the ICTY, he stated that “exhausted by the execution of 1200 Bosniaks at the Branjevo Farm, he went to a bar in the neighbouring village of Pilica to rest from the executions and refused the order to continue the work because there are another 500 Bosniaks waiting for him at the Cultural Centre.” We cite these details from his testimony because our next location was the Cultural Centre in Pilica, the site where the “work” had subsequently been completed. The dilapidated building was the site of the execution of 500 Bosniaks. Across from the Cultural Centre was the bar from which curious customers watched us, probably much like Erdemović watched the continuation of the slaughter. There are two monuments in front of the Cultural Centre, one dedicated to the People’s Liberation Struggle of 1941-1945, and the other dedicated to the Army of Republika Srpska and the victims from the recent war.

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The second day of our action, on 18 May, we headed south to Herzegovina. The first location we planned to visit was the former Vojno detention camp in northern Mostar. This site comprised three houses with garages that were turned by the Croat Defence Council (HVO) into detention facilities for Bosniaks from the Mostar area during the war. However, once we were in the area, we found that all the houses in that part of the city had been reconstructed after the war, so it was very difficult to determine where the facilities we were looking for were located, and we also decided that it would be problematic to trespass on private property, walking into people’s yards to put up our signs on private family homes.

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In Široki Brijeg, the site we were planning to mark was the building of the former Tobacco Station that served as the wartime headquarters for the infamous Convicts’ Battalion under the leadership of Mladen Naletilić Tuta. The building had been caught in a fire a few years ago, and was now completely in ruins, so marking was unproblematic and without many curious bystanders.

After Široki Brijeg, we continued on towards Čapljina where, as it would turn out, we would meet with numerous unforeseen problems. Of the three sites we planned to mark in this town, all three were former JNA bases. While we were researching the locations, we used the names they had before the war, and our local contacts informed us that they had not heard of an active military base in Dretelj or of a barracks by the name of Grabovine. When we arrived at Grabovine (using GPS), we found there a large military facility now called Božan Šimović Barracks. The heightened security measures, following the murder of two soldiers of the Armed Forces of BiH on 18 November 2015 in Rajlovac near Sarajevo, meant that we could not mark this site. The site had been used in 1993 and 1994 as a detention centre for Bosniaks from Herzegovina under the control of the HVO. Our next destination was the village of Gabela. The information we had at our disposal indicated that this was a military storehouse, dug into the hillside, which during the war served as a detention site for a large number of Bosniaks from Herzegovina. When we searched the sites of the BiH Defence Ministry, we found that the facility in Gabela was on the list of obsolete military facilities, which gave us hope that we would be able to mark it. When we got to the location, however, we found that the security measures were even more strict than at the Božan Šimović Barracks in Čapljina. Three guards with long barrelled firearms and a sign prohibiting the taking of photographs prevented out from implementing our action at this site.

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We then went on to Dretelj, a village to the north of Čapljina. Along with the Heliodrom from Mostar, Dretelj is a symbol of suffering in this part of Herzegovina. When we arrived, we found that the building was being guarded by members of the Armed Forces, even though it had been designated as “obsolete”. At the time of our arrival, only one guard was present and he was on the opposite side of the spot we thought would be a good place to put up our signs. After deciding that it was worth the risk, we prepared the sign and expediently put it up and took a photograph. Patrons of the cafe across the street watched disinterestedly, while the guard remained sitting in the shade.

The site of suffering in Dretelj was a dual camp. During 1992 it had been under the control of the paramilitary Ustasha-sympathising Croat Defence Forces (HOS) and Herzegovina Serbs had been detained there. For a time, the facility was under the command of the infamous serial killer Edib Buljubašić, shortly after he escaped from the Zenica prison where he had been serving a twenty-year sentence for double murder. The facility was closed down in August 1992, only to be reopened by HVO forces during the conflict between the Army of RBiH and the HVO for the purpose of detaining more than 2000 Bosniaks from Herzegovina.

On the way to Mostar we decided to scout out and possibly try to mark the building of the Heliodrom military base near Mostar. We had been informed that it was still an active military base, now called “Stanislav Kraljević Baja” after an HVO soldier killed in the battle to capture that base in 1992. Based on satellite images we had seen, we know that this would be a sprawling compound and we hoped to have the same luck as in Dretelj. Unfortunately, one side of the base shared a fence with the Aluminij Mostar industrial complex, and the on the other side was a field we could not drive across in our car. After we had circled the base and our GPS led us to the entrance gate, we were again greeted by long barrels and the forbidding looks of armed guards. We decided it would be too much of a risk.

Somewhat disappointed, we drove away and did some research on the road, finding out that in the northern part of Mostar there was a court adjudicated site of suffering, the Primary School in Potoci. We reach it at an inopportune moment, right in the middle of recess, and decide that photographing this many children in front of the reinstated school would not be the right thing to do, so we give up and drive on to Sarajevo.

The next steps of this activity include posting the photographs and information on sites of suffering on our Facebook page „Neobilježena mjesta stradanja“ and promoting these posts through the social network in local communities and at the level of BiH to encourage discussion.

The action was followed by many responses and comments of support, as well as criticism, but we also received new information about unmarked sites of suffering in other towns and proposals for cooperation.

We would like to thank the Centre for Nonviolent Action for supporting this activity and making possible what we believe is indispensable.

All the best from the Three Musketeers of Peace!

Dalmir Mišković

 

Statistics on the Facebook action available at:  rezultati facebook

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