Bosnia War Memorials Debate

Memorials in Bosnia should be built to all victims, regardless of their ethnicity, and for that to happen politicians should pass state-level legislation regulating the process, concluded a recent IWPR round table in Sarajevo.

The event, at the Faculty of Criminal Justice Sciences in Sarajevo, followed the publication of a special IWPR report exploring controversies around the building of memorials for the victims of the Bosnian war.

"We [in Bosnia] are wrong if we think that not marking sites of suffering will aid coexistence in our country. We must face our past, each one in their own way."
Satko Mujagic, a former prisoner at the Omarska camp

The round table was attended by representatives of victims' associations from Bosnia, international experts, academics, Bosnian officials as well as students.

"One of the problems identified by our journalists in this report is that the building of memorials is not regulated properly by current Bosnian legislation, and the result is political manipulation of the issue," said Merdijana Sadovic, IWPR’s Hague tribunal programme manager, during a short presentation of the special report.

Sadovic pointed out that all those that IWPR spoke to in its special report agreed that it is next to impossible to build monuments to the victims of war in places where their respective ethnic group is a minority. Consequently, there are very few monuments for Bosniak and Croat victims in Republika Srspka, and even fewer to Serb victims in the Bosniak-Croat Federation.

Adnan Jasikovac from the Bosnian ministry for human rights and refugees, said there is no uniform strategy on memorials at state level, but there are signs of progress.

"Since 2008," he explained, "things have started to change and now we have a working group on transitional justice, which holds regular meetings at which [the question of regulation]should be defined.”

A transitional justice strategy is being undertaken by the ministry of human rights and refugees together with the United Nations Development Programme, the ministry of justice and victims’ associations around the country.

Currently, there are ongoing consultations on how to define key areas of the strategy, including memorials.

"What the participants in the consultations for the national strategy on transitional justice pointed out is the lack of criteria when it comes to setting up memorials, memorial centres and commemorational activities,” said Nela Porobic-Isakovic of UNDP.

“They agree that it is necessary to establish a legal framework to regulate questions about this issue, so that no blank space for manipulation would be left.”

Satko Mujagic, a former prisoner at the Omarska camp near Prijedor, said commemorating places of suffering was key to future coexistence.

"We [in Bosnia] are wrong if we think that not marking sites of suffering will aid coexistence in our country," Mujagic said.

"We must face our past, each one in their own way. Maybe I'm subjective, but I think the Omarska camp deserves to be marked, not only by a plaque, but by a museum, which will warn the new generations, so that such evil may never happen again."

During the round-table discussion, there was debate about the question of whether memorials should honour victims or have an educational character – an issue that was explored in the IWPR special report.

“A lot of people IWPR reporters spoke to said that proper memorials should be built at places where mass war crimes were committed, not just plaques inscribed with the names of people who were killed there, so that future generations could learn what actually happened at those sites," Sadovic said.

Kenan Suljevic, a student at the Faculty of Criminal Justice Sciences, urged participants at the IWPR event to keep putting pressure on politicians to start working on the adoption of Bosnia-wide legislation on memorials to war victims.

Representatives of victims’ associations said that they have been putting pressure on the government for such a law, but said they cannot do it on their own – they need support from the general public in Bosnia, as well as from the international community.