Incompatible memories?

This week I’ve been working on a paper for a workshop on War and Memory. I read back through my writing on memorials I visited last year in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including this one for killed children; I wondered about my friend Amar who lives in Banja Luka, in Republika Srpska, and works so hard for an advocacy organisation that pushes for public recognition of war atrocities; and I thought about the parents of killed children in Prijedor, who are still fighting for a memorial over twenty years after the war ended. And then I was so wrapped up in trying to figure out what I wanted to say about the importance of remembering, that I decided to read David Rieff’s 2016 book In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies.

I’ve not finished Rieff’s book yet, so I can’t tell you if it concludes with an ode to amnesia, but I keep thinking of a particular line:

Historically, it is only when there is no clear winner that both sides may be able to sustain their own incompatible memories. pp.13

Rieff suggests that Bosnia and Herzegovina after the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords is an example of this situation. What’s been bugging me is trying to elucidate the particular incompatibilities of public memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It’s not simply that each “side” has come to different figures for numbers killed, or different explanations for war crimes, though that’s certainly the case. A more striking incompatibility to me lies not in disputing claims, but rather choosing to commemorate particular historic atrocities while ignoring recent events.

For example, there is ample evidence that in 1992 many people were detained in concentration camps in Bosnia. In August that year the International Committee for the Red Cross visited the Banja Luka region and found 3718 prisoners in the Manjaca concentration camp and approximately 1435 at Trnopolje. Last year I went to the Museum of Republika Srpska to see if I could find any mention there of the camps. I did find an exhibition about a concentration camp, but it was about Jasenovac, the Nazi concentration camp that, according to the museum exhibition, killed 700,000 Serbs during World War Two. Ben Lieberman argues that the 1970s and 1980s saw a revival of a narrative of Serb victimhood which included crimes such as Jacenovac.

What was striking to me was not the fact that Jacenovac is held in collective memory, but the way in which the exhibition incorporated the stories of the Nuremburg trials with the word “genocide” used in the descriptions. When I looked around the same museum for an exhibition about war crimes and genocide committed against local residents in the 1990s, there was nothing.

Returning to Rieff’s line about “incompatible memories”, I wonder if the incompatibility here is not between different accounts of events at Jasenovac as such, but rather the jarring contrast between acknowledgement of this camp and the total lack of representation of other more recent camps. It is not that one “side” has chosen to represent Jasenovac in a different way to the other “side”, nor would it have been incompatible to have exhibitions about both Jasenovac and the camps of the 1990s. In this case, the incompatibility lies between the Jasenovac exhibition and the dreadful silence that accompanies it, making the museum look outdated under the most generous of interpretations, and wilfully exclusive under a more realistic one.