Over twenty-five years have passed since the tragic days that changed the history of the Southern Balkans. On July 11th, 1995, the urban area of Srebrenica became the backdrop to the final act in a cycle of violence during the armed conflict that had been plaguing the border between Serbia and Bosnia for over three years. The declarations made at the time by Serb general Ratko Mladić left little to the imagination: this was full-fledged ‘ethnic cleansing’. Over the following years, the international community would even condemn it as genocide [1].

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But the technical definition is the only thing that distinguishes the Srebrenica massacre from other vicious acts perpetrated on Bosnian land during the early Nineties. The ‘Srebrenica model’ was replicated in equally brutal fashion in Prijedor, Visegrad, and Ahmici, just to mention the deadliest and most widely reported massacres. Though the Bosniak population was certainly the hardest hit, none of the peoples constituting present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina can plead innocent of ‘exclusion’ and ‘eradication’ projects against other specific social groups. Even the verdicts reached by the International Court of Justice in the Hague during the reconciliation process have been rather controversial. Indeed, the Court mostly sentenced Serbian war criminals, while often turning a blind eye even to blatant crimes committed by other figures of the Bosnian tragedy, spurring discontent over its perceived ‘ethnic bias’.

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Furthermore, there was little to no investigation into the ‘world after Srebrenica’—the lives of people, mostly women, who had survived those episodes of inhumane complexity. Over the last ten years, I have been collecting the stories of those who tried (and not always managed) to find their place in the present. The path of ethnographic research is often long and winding, and the most eye-opening encounters often seem to happen by chance. This is exactly how I met Dževa Avdić.

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I was browsing a famous social network, looking for pages about the Srebrenica events, and, almost by coincidence, I stumbled upon some comments by a girl named Dževa, whose balanced opinions struck my curiosity. I contacted her and, during one of the many online chats that ensued, she told me about a book she had written – My Smile is My Revenge – in which she tells about the difficulties she faced trying to find her place in the world after Srebrenica, and most importantly, her struggle against prejudice coming from her own side—the Muslim Bosniak community that, after all, still perceives these women survivors as a weight, a problem, a cause for shame [2].

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I felt the need to meet Dževa in person, and stand before ‘the pain of others’, to quote Susan Sontag. We finally met during the cold November of 2017. There were some awkward moments and some language misunderstandings, but nonetheless, Dževa really opened up about her story. She was just six years old when, after being separated from her father in Srebrenica, she was forced to flee along with her mother and younger brother, walking along the trails of the so-called ‘death march’, a gruelling and perilous hike in the woods leading to the safe city of Tuzla. As if surviving the death march was not enough, Dževa was immediately faced with another ordeal—the laborious and often frustrating effort to regain control over her life. As for many other victims of armed conflict, Dževa and her family were forced to live in ‘other people’s homes’ that still bore the traces of those who had once lived there—members of the other ‘faction’ [3]. After countless address changes, Dževa’s family finally found permanent shelter in Vogošća, a small town in the Sarajevo area.

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“Through writing” Dževa tells us in her book “I have found inner peace, a cure for my heart and a punishment for the evil I had endured”. Her words depict a life of constant and painful self-reconstruction, first at school, with friends, and later in the University, where many people, including some teachers, labelled her as one “only capable of wailing and begging”, like so many other women in the same situation. She was the victim of prejudice kindled by the very people who shared the same religious and cultural background as her. Dževa felt especially betrayed by people who, in theory, should have shown her solidarity and understanding, even though they had not experienced the tragedy of eviction and exclusion on their own skin.

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“July usually means summer, sunlight, warmth, energy… but for me, July means sadness… cold at the heart of summer”, Dževa writes. During an interview, she told me that, for many years, she could not bring herself to return to Srebrenica and the Potočari memorial site, until the day her mother almost forced her to step on the bus and go there. It was July 11th, 2013. She describes those moments in her book: “Never before had I had the courage to step foot into the Memorial site. It felt strange, but I simply could not… The first step was very hard to take, I felt as my legs didn’t belong to me… Silence was speaking… I felt an excruciating pain in my chest… I couldn’t control myself and I really didn’t even try to… I couldn’t stay there forever, I had to do something… I had to speak… Pay back my debt with those who were not there anymore… And then I decided to start writing…” – it was a sort of catharsis. Since then, Dževa’s life has changed. Her smile and her vengeance against those who wanted her to disappear have turned into strength, courage, and a strong belief in her own ideas and in her place in the world.

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With time, many more women have been finding the strength to tell their stories, trying to come to terms with the ghosts of their past. One of them is Bakira Hasečić, whose story encompasses the personal, community and gender drama experienced in many areas of Herzegovina. I had the opportunity of meeting Bakira in Pionirska Ulica—a still half-unpaved road in Visegrad’s outskirts—during one of the memorial days remembering the massacres perpetrated in that area. This apparently nondescript road is sadly known for the tragic events of June 14th, 1992. Seventy Bosniak women, children, and elderly people were abducted near the Koritnik village and taken into a cellar. All exits were blocked, including windows. The cellar was then set ablaze with fuel and explosives. Fifty-nine people died in the fire. The few survivors fled the scene by the skin of their teeth, and managed to testify against the instigators, cousins Milan and Sredoje Lukić, who were later sentenced to thirty years in prison by the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

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The Visegrad area saw many such episodes, and Bakira has unwittingly and tragically become an intersection in this map of violence. A few miles away from the city of the Bridge on the Drina, described by the Jugoslav Nobel prize winner Ivo Andrić, there is a hotel called Vilina Vlas. During the fights of the early Nineties, Serbian Bosnian troops used the hotel’s spa to kidnap a number of women, whom they raped repeatedly. They even took some of the women back home for a few hours, only to be kidnap them again, as part of a grotesque and sadistic game. The Vilina Vlas hotel was made into a prison, where Bakira herself was raped multiple times, and survived. Her sister did not make it and died as a result of the abuse. A report from 1994, issued by an inquiry committee instituted with UN resolution 780, and confirmed by another report made by the Association of Women Victims of War (Udruzenje žene-žrtve rata) [4], coordinated by Bakira, estimated that, between 1992 and 1993, about 200 women were raped, some of whom under 14 years of age. The exact number of women who died because of the abuse is unknown to this day. The hotel is still open today and even offers wellness services, but there is no headstone or memorial to remind visitors of the atrocities that took place there.

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If, on the one hand, the instigators and perpetrators of those massacres are paying the price for their violence, the soldiers and paramilitaries who acted as willing executioners have enjoyed almost total impunity, and Bakira was thus forced to meet them in her everyday life afterwards. Some of them even became policemen in Višegrad, as well as Prijedor and Srebrenica, while others obtained important roles in the local administration, all the while remaining neighbours with their very victims. Bakira, confronting her pain and fear, asked them many times why they did what they did. The answer was baffling in its banality: “It was war”.

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Due to this state of impunity and injustice, many women have been living through their pain in silence, in order to avoid the ‘shame’ of what happened to them. At the same time though, many women have tried to dispel their fears and give meaning to their suffering through daily activism. An example is the Orhideja association (Udruženje žena orhideja Stolac), founded in 2004 in Stolac. The association manages a hostel and a shop that sells products made by women of different religions and ethnic groups, and also promotes campaigns about the danger of abandoned landmines, which litter the woods in the area.

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One initiative I found particularly interesting, not least for its symbolic value, is that of the women of Konjević Polje, a small village lying along the road to Bratunac and Srebrenica, once a strategic route for Serbian-Bosnian troops. This place witnessed relentless ethnic cleansing, and in April of 1993, most of its refugees found temporary shelter in Srebrenica. Today, about two thousand people live in Konjević Polje, mostly Muslims. The Jadar association, founded in September 2003, works in this context, with the goal of making abandoned fields fertile again, and promote cooperation between different groups of people, overcoming mutual distrust. In an area where it is almost impossible for women to find jobs, this initiative has granted stable employment to fifty women of different ages, religions, ethnicity, cultural background and education levels. The association’s headquarters, a small country house, is located right next to a place that well represents the absurdity of the wars that ravaged these lands. After the war, in 1996, the Serbian Republic (Republika Srpska) allowed the construction of a small Orthodox church right on a plot of land that had belonged to Fata Orlovic, a Bosniak woman who had been evacuated with her entire family back in 1992.

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She returned to Konjević Polje in late 1999 and, despite lacking the help of her husband, who died in Srebrenica, in 2000 she began a long legal battle. She demanded that local religious and civic authorities remove the church, but received no response, so she turned to ECHR (European Court of Human Rights). On October 1st, 2019 the Court issued a sentence that required the Konjevic Polje authorities to demolish the building (which they did on June 4th, 2021), and pay the damage compensation [5].

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In Konjević Polje, another serious national issue has become apparent, and also in this case, women have been leading the action for change. In November 2013, about forty people, families with children, set up tents outside the office of the EU High Representative for Bosnia in Sarajevo, to protest against the local school teaching practices. Although the inhabitants of Konjević Polje are almost all Bosniak, the town lies in an area administrated by the Republika Srpska (the Serb Republic within Bosnia), which mandates the teaching programme. As a result, there is subject of the Bosniak tradition up to the sixth year. Clearly, the teaching of history is one of the main obstacles to the complicated integration between the different communities.

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Jovan Divijak, a Serbian general who openly sided for the victims during the Sarajevo siege, has always stressed the importance of dialogue and remembrance through education. He promoted these values right until his passing in 2021, and his association Obrazovanje gradi BiH (‘Education builds Bosnia’) continues his work. I had the opportunity to meet him in 2017. During our conversation, he pointed out that a crucial step in building a common Bosnian future was the impartial narration of what had occurred in the whole country, and not just in Srebrenica. One of the goals of his association is to abolish the three different school programmes that, as in Srebrenica’s case, tell three contrasting and partial stories. In the school context, women are assuming a crucial role in the reconciliation of a country that is still very much disunited. Dževa Avdic decided to bring her testimony into school classes, to help students develop a deeper awareness about events that are relatively recent, many people actually feel as if they belonged to a distant past.

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In a country that is still tormented by the ghost of past violence, the tragedies and struggles of the women of Srebrenica, Visegrad, and Prijedor have a cultural value that goes beyond mere memory. Their experiences demonstrate once again how important it is to give voice to those who were scarred by violence. Without shared consciousness, achieved through first-person testimonies, it would be impossible to process hate—both in its explicit and more subtle forms. This is especially true for a society that, despite the tragedy it has experienced, insists on trying to make different national groups coexist within the same country.

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On the one hand, men are to blame for the hostilities, violence and devastation that laid a whole region to waste, while women, on the other hand, should be praised for the courage and hard work they have been devoting to social and cultural regeneration. By disclosing their physical and spiritual wounds, they picked up the thread of memory and dialogue into their hands, and day by day they weave a new canvas with it, trying to unite the different sensibilities of a still fragile country.