My Sarajevo, My Story (August 13-19)

This week’s snapshots:

Happy Saturday, dear humans!

I didn’t even realize until I was boarding the plane to Frankfurt that I hadn’t been to Europe since before the pandemic. 3 years! 3 years since I had eaten a schnitzel, wandered through the Schengen zone, or been on the Autobahn. That’s too many years, y’all. As someone who was normally in Europe 1-3 times a year every year pre-pandemic, I have been experiencing so. much. peace. that I didn’t even realize was missing from my life this week.

All right, part of that could be because I ignored anything work-related and not because I am on another continent. But this continent really helps! It is, to my heart, superior in every way except for the megalomaniacs in the East causing violence. Which is thematically consistent with everyday life in Bosnia 😅

I happened to land in Sarajevo the week of her 29th film festival (themed: My Sarajevo, My Story) So of course: we went and saw some films! My parents chose documentaries in an attempt to avoid becoming too depressed; most festival films are aggressively artsy depictions of the effects of human violence on life, and the Bosnian war provided their filmmakers with altogether more violence than can be dealt with in film.

For context (since the news probably never recapped the conflict for you) Bosnia, the only primarily-Muslim nation in Europe, was invaded by Serbia during the breakup of Yugoslavia for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. Serbians besieged Sarajevo from 1992-1995. Snipers lined the hills of the capital and shot anyone leaving the city, and any help coming into the city. Worse, these snipers liberally murdered anyone: old men still-limping from WWII, mothers trying to get water for their children, actual children themselves. In the city of Srebrnica, where the UN had posted up to help feed refugees, 8,000 Muslim men and boys were rounded up and shot in what is now remembered as the Srebrenica massacre. 

Both documentaries were about the war. “Searching for Justice” followed a group of law students from Leiden and Sarajevo universities who conducted interviews with survivors of the massacre. “My Home” was a performative remembering of the life of the director’s grandma, and how she survived so much war in Bosnia.

“People say that justice has been partially served,” Alma shook her head with quiet rage in Searching for Justice. Her father, grandfather, uncles on both sides, and cousins on both sides died in the massacre. “Justice served partially is not justice at all.”

Injustice remains for those UN “peacekeepers” who watched and did nothing. It felt incriminating to watch these stories and have nothing to do for it. Am I, too, just another participant of injustice?

The director of My Home didn’t think so. After telling her grandma’s story - how she was born to a Turkish immigrant who made his way to Bosnia before the Second World War, how she survived that war and then the ethnic cleansing by fleeing to Turkey, then to Czechoslovakia, then to Germany, before finally being able to return home - she and her sister declared that, “in telling our story, we transformed our wounds and gave healing to them.”

The director of Searching for Justice agreed that part of completing justice for survivors is simply telling their stories, and announcing their injustice. He has been making films about the survivors for over ten years now as part of his own path to healing.

As useless as it feels to watch Ukraine be infiltrated by the megalomaniacs in the East, as much “nothing” as I can do about it… If we listen to Bosnia’s survivors, we can still give Ukraine our attention. Bearing witness to the injustice counts for something - it is better than looking the other way.

And I suspect that while you probably could care less for the international drama of a former Yugoslavian nation, there is someone’s story that you could listen to. We may not be able to complete justice to all the bystanders watching crimes happen under their noses, but we can pay attention when the suffering ask for it and let them find some healing in transforming their wounds through story.

Do you have any stories you’d like to tell? Whether they’re yours or someone you know’s, I think this is as good a place as any to transform some wounds or at least to add to the completion of justice.

Or just tell me about your relationship to international catastrophe and how you deal with Ukraine, Yemen, Taiwan, and Hawaii being in trouble while you watch,

—Beth