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Reclaiming erased lives: archives, records and memories in post-war Bosnia

and the Bosnian diaspora

Article in Archives and Museum Informatics · October 2014

DOI: 10.1007/s10502-014-9227-z

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Reclaiming erased lives: archives, records
and memories in post-war Bosnia and the
Bosnian diaspora

Hariz Halilovich

Archival Science
International Journal on Recorded
Information

ISSN 1389-0166
Volume 14
Combined 3-4

Arch Sci (2014) 14:231-247

DOI 10.1007/s10502-014-9227-z

1 23
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 Author's personal copy
Arch Sci (2014) 14:231–247
DOI 10.1007/s10502-014-9227-z

ORIGINAL PAPER

Reclaiming erased lives: archives, records

and memories in post-war Bosnia
and the Bosnian diaspora

Hariz Halilovich

Published online: 1 August 2014

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract In this paper, based on conventional and digital ethnography, I first

identify three dominant research areas relating to the issues of destruction, use and
abuse of archives and records in post-war Bosnia, and discuss their legal, political
and ethical dimensions. I then go on to present two ethnographies describing how
survivors of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide in Bosnia and in the Bosnian refugee
diaspora perceive, experience and deal with missing personal records and material
evidence of their histories, as well as how they (re)create their own archives and
memories, and in the process reassert their ‘erased’ identities in both real and cyber
space. This paper also describes how contemporary technologies—including bio-
medical technology and information and communication technology—impact the
reconstruction of individual and collective identities in shattered Bosnian families
and communities in the aftermath of genocide. The ethnographies described point to
the novel contribution that these technologies have made to re-humanising both
those who perished and the survivors of the war in Bosnia.

Keywords Bosnia
Genocide
Archives
Diaspora
DNA
Cyber villages

The 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina—which involved systematic

violence against the ethnic ‘other’ through the genocidal campaigns of ‘ethnic
cleansing’—resulted in more than 100,000 deaths, some 2.5 million displaced,
800,000 destroyed homes and the widespread abuse of human rights (Becirevic
2014). The war will also be remembered for the systematic annihilation of material
culture, ranging from the destruction of sacred buildings, historical monuments and
bridges, libraries, museums and archives to historical documents, unique

H. Halilovich (&)
Office of the Vice-Provost (Learning and Teaching), Monash University,
PO Box 197, Caulfield East, VIC 3145, Australia
e-mail: hariz.halilovich@monash.edu

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manuscripts and official records held at various local government and state
institutions. The violence behind the destruction was not some spontaneous
rampage, but a diligently planned and executed military campaign aimed at erasing
any evidence that those who were ethnically cleansed once existed. Parallel to this,
the perpetrators paid close attention to hiding and destroying the evidence about the
crimes they committed. It was not only the loss of life and destruction of
infrastructure by war’s end, but also the obliteration of culture and the disappear-
ance of official records that created massive obstacles for intending returnees. Those
who had been ‘erased’ now were required to produce documents in order to reclaim
their property, school qualifications, and even birth and death certificates.
While the records at a local level were largely irretrievable, at a higher level, the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) managed to
obtain access to highly classified records about the war crimes and how the whole
chain of command of the Serbian army operated during the war in Bosnia
(Nettelfield 2010). However, before handing over the records, the Serbian
government made a deal with the ICTY that the records could only be used in
the trial against Slobodan Milošević, Serbia’s wartime president. Even after
Milošević died in custody, before his trial was finished, the ICTY has continued to
honour this agreement, which de facto retrospectively gives immunity to the Serbian
government for the war crimes and genocide committed in Bosnia.

Stolen, hidden and destroyed memories, archives and records

When discussing the issues of missing, destroyed, hidden and misappropriated

records and archival material in Bosnia–Herzegovina during the 1990 war and in its
aftermath, much of the research thus far has been focused on the systematic
destruction of archives and cultural heritage, which was directly targeted by the
Serbian military, such as the 1992 burning of Bosnia’s National Library (the famous
Vijećnica), the destruction of the Oriental Institute and the shelling of museums and
archives across the country (Riedlmayer 2001, 2002, 2007; Bakaršić 1994;
Lovrenović 1994; Sarić 1999; Supple 2005). Almost every book on the conflict
in Bosnia has, in some way, referred to the act of destruction of the Vijećnica and
burning of places symbolising or keeping the cultural memory of the country and its
people. The brutality and eagerness to completely obliterate the most important
collections of Bosnia’s cultural memory, as well as the consequences of these
actions, or ‘memoricide’ as Lovrenović called it, provide valid reasons for the
researchers’ ongoing preoccupation with these barbaric acts unseen in Europe since
WWII (1994). While there has been a considerable interest in the destruction of
Vijećnica, many other archival centres, museums, libraries, galleries and registry
offices destroyed during the war have not had so much written about them, in spite
the fact that, as Sarić points out, in some of these places up to 90 % of their archival
sources were completely destroyed (1999).
Another area that has been of interest to researchers and particularly popular
among local investigative journalists relates to the confidential archives of the
former Yugoslav state apparatus, especially those of the secret police and security

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organisations such as UDBA, KOS and DB. During the break-up of Yugoslavia,
much of the confidential archival material was appropriated by different suspect
characters and semi-clandestine security agencies of the newly created states and
political parties. In a number of instances, as it has been covered in various media
outlets including independent magazines Slobodna Bosna, BH Dani and Nezavisne
novine, the information from those sources was used to discredit prominent public
figures such as politicians, businessmen and religious leaders. The book The
Guardians of Yugoslavia (Čuvari Jugoslavije) edited by Ivan Bešlić and published
in three volumes—and three colours: red, green and blue—lists thousands of names
and documents about the Bosnian informers and collaborators of the notorious
Yugoslav secret and intelligence agencies (2003). Each colour of the book stands
for a respective ethnicity: red for Serbs, green for Bosniaks and blue for Croats.
(Meanwhile, the lists are freely available online at archive.org http://archive.org/
details/cuvari_jugoslavije_hrvati).
While gaining access to the records representing a secret past of the now non-
existent communist state may look like an interesting and useful piece of detective
work aimed at confronting a problematic collective past in order to move forward, a
process that many other post-communist countries have gone through (Ash 1998),
researching—and searching for—various documents and records relating to crimes
committed during the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia certainly represents a much more
challenging and risky area for researchers.
Despite the fact that, between 1992 and 1995, many war crimes, crimes against
humanity and gross violations of human rights were literally taking place in broad
daylight and sometimes in front of TV cameras, those who ordered and executed
these crimes did not leave behind much evidence in written or other forms that
would prove ‘without reasonable doubt’ their involvement in the crimes. Rare finds
such as General Mladić’s wartime diaries, discovered in 2010, provide extraordi-
nary glimpses into the day-to-day running of a joint criminal enterprise and the
people who issued or approved the most heinous orders, involving summary
executions, shelling of residential areas and forced deportations of the civilian
population. After the war, such specific and hardcore evidence became more than
just of symbolic importance because in order to pronounce the alleged war criminals
guilty, the ICTY in The Hague required original documents, written orders,
signatures, dates, etc.,—as if those perpetrating crimes would have willingly left
such a paper trail behind.
The so-called Mladić diaries, comprising 3,500 pages in 18 notebooks, have been
described as the single most important source of solid prosecution evidence in the
war crimes trials before the ICTY (Milutinovic 2011). However, a much larger set
of classified documents relating to the army General Mladić was in charge of, and
the crimes this army committed in Bosnia were handed over to the ICTY by the
Serbian government seven years earlier (Hartman 2007). These documents also
included Stenographic records of the sessions of the FRY [i.e. Serbia’s] Supreme
Defense Council (‘Zapisnik Vrhovnog Saveta Odbrane Jugoslavije’), the crucial
piece of evidence proving the direct link between the Serbian government and
Mladić’s army, which practically operated as a part of Serbia’s armed forces
fighting in neighbouring Bosnia. Two ICTY insiders, Sir Geoffrey Nice, a former

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leading prosecutor at the ICTY responsible for prosecuting the late Slobodan
Milošević, and Florence Hartman, spokesperson and adviser to the Chief Prosecutor
at the ICTY, Carla Del Ponte, between 1999 and 2008, have in the meantime blown
the whistle alleging that Carla Del Ponte, who was the Chief Prosecutor at the ICTY
between 1999 and 2008, made a secret deal with the Serbian government that the
documents they handed over to the ICTY would remain under an embargo for any
other trials apart from the proceedings against Milošević. As is known, Slobodan
Milošević died in the ICTY custody in 2006, before his trial was finished, and with
his death, the valuable documents about war crimes in Bosnia and Serbia’s role in
them became off-limits to the prosecutors and the victims of those crimes. It has
been argued that because of the fact that key evidence of Serbia’s guilt was covered
up (Hoare 2008) that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Serbia was
not guilty of participating in genocide in Bosnia in the 2007 Bosnia and
Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro case (The Application of the Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide). Notwithstanding the
outcome of that case, the ICJ did confirm that genocide in Srebrenica took place and
that Serbia failed to take necessary steps to prevent it. The survivors and the public
in Bosnia were appalled by this ruling and could not understand how and why this
legal battle could be so easily lost. It remains to be seen how much evidence from
various protected sources will be used in the still ongoing proceedings against the
Serb wartime leaders Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić charged with genocide
and crimes against humanity at the ICTY.

Bosnian archives torn between politics, justice, ethics and ethnics

The three primary areas relating to destruction, appropriation and use of archival
material, records and memory artifacts in post-war Bosnia remain highly political
and differently interpreted by various parties within and outside of the country.
While, for instance, many Bosnians—and Bosnian Muslims in particular—regard
the shelling and burning of Vijećnica as a barbaric act aimed at destroying common
cultural memory of all Bosnian citizens, the Serb nationalists still see it as
destruction of a primary Muslim cultural symbol built during the Austro-Hungarian
occupation. Divided memories reflect the division of the country and public spheres
and fall along the ethnic lines that were created during the 1992–1995 war. These
divided memories are also reflected in the separation and renaming of the old and
formation of the new archival centres. In addition to the Central Archive of BiH
based in Sarajevo, before the war there also existed eight regional archival centres,
operating within the same organisational system (Sarić 1999). Today, many of the
centres do not exist any more, while others have become ethnically exclusive
institutions. For instance, the former Archival Centre of Bosnian Krajina, based in
Banja Luka, became the central Archive of Republika Srpska, while another ‘Serb’
archival centre was established in Bijeljina.
Separation of the archives and establishment of the new ethnicised bureaucracy
dealing with the archival material and personal records have resulted in making it
more difficult to access the existing sources, preventing the return of the forcibly

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displaced, as is described later in this article. In some instances, archival matters in

Bosnia have legal implications, from those relating to ordinary people wanting to
reclaim their property to the evidence used in local and international courts. In post-
war BiH, like in other post-genocide societies where documentary evidence is used
in judicial proceedings involving war crimes, documents, records and archives are
often used as primary documentary evidence for establishment of truth. In her
article discussing the trial of the Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia, Michelle
Caswell calls for the assumptions of epistemological authority of archives over the
oral testimony of survivors into question and examines how archives could provide
extrajudicial space for the voices of survivors to be heard (2010, p 27). In Bosnia, in
addition to forensic evidence, the survivors’ testimonies have often been the only
evidence about numerous war crimes committed in the country, while the scarce
documents from the 1990s war have provided sanitized and incomplete versions of
such events (Halilovich 2013a). Nonetheless, in both court and public arenas, the
written evidence is still perceived as more reliable evidence than oral accounts of
the survivors and witnesses.
While much of the documentary evidence remains scarce, incomplete and
controversial, there are also many unanswered questions about ethical dimensions,
legality, authenticity and ownership of some of the existing archival material. As in
the case of the former secret police records, privileged information is often used
strategically to discredit and defame those active in public life in post-war Bosnia.
Other issues are connected to the fine line between protecting individuals’
confidentiality (for example, those recorded in the Yugoslav secret police files) and
the right of the public to know about the secret past (for example about state
guarded records relating to injustices and war crimes). All this suggests that as much
as the archives, records and cultural memory institutions were subjected to
systematic destruction during the war, their reconstruction continues to play an
important role in social healing, restoration of justice and the reconciliation process
in post-war Bosnia. In fact, as Terry Cook argues, archives and recordkeeping
systems have the potential to prevent future abuses and to promote better
accountability for public affairs and governance (2013, p 111). Similarly, Anne
Gilliland concludes that, rather than being neutral and oblivious to their social
surroundings, archives and archival work must ultimately serve social justice (2011,
p 198).

(Re)creating records of shredded memories using ethnography

Unlike the high profile cases—like those that led to the arrests of army generals,
created diplomatic tensions or disclosed names of some amateur spies who were
denouncing their colleagues and neighbours thirty or more years ago—in post-war
Bosnia there are many other issues with the archives, memories and records which
have been less well documented, including the most recent destruction of
irreplaceable records burned in the Bosnia’s Central Archive during the riots in
February 2014 (Oltermann 2014). An area that has been of particular interest to me
involves mundane records relating to ordinary people, their memories and identities

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and what it means to these ordinary people when the records of their existence are
erased. As I argue here, despite attempts to erase them physically, symbolically and
bureaucratically, the survivors have been able to use their own memory resources to
reconstruct their identities and places in both real and cyber space.
The stories described in this paper come from my ethnographic research,
involving both conventional and digital ethnography in Bosnian war-torn commu-
nities. Ethnography has for long been closely aligned with anthropological
fieldwork and even with anthropologists’ identities; however, this research method
has become increasingly popular among memory scholars from various disciplines
(Halilovich 2011). Defined as a holistic qualitative method, ethnography applies a
variety of approaches and techniques to studying human actors in a social context.
As such, ethnography is actor-centred in it puts an emphasis on practice and agency,
that is, the experiences, feelings, meanings, imagination, narratives, metaphors and
social networks of the people who are the subjects of scholarly inquiry. The most
common ethnographic approaches involve participant observation, in-depth inter-
views and participating in the everyday realities of research participants as well as a
reflexive engagement with the subject of study—i.e. people, their stories and their
respective material and non-material cultures.
One of the crucial elements of ethnography is time, as most good ethnographies
take months, and more often years, to be conducted and written. While being a
method, or a process, involving a long-term engagement in the field, ethnography is
also an outcome—or the end product (usually text based)—of ethnographic
research; one conducts, writes and reads ethnography—another holistic quality,
keen ethnographers may insist.
Sociocultural anthropology (my home discipline), which relies heavily on
ethnography, has long been regarded as the ‘science of the other,’ where the
researcher is one of ‘us’ and the researched are ‘them’—the ‘other,’ members of the
exotic foreign cultures, those different from ‘us’ about whom ‘we’ want to learn and
understand more. In other to produce ‘thick description’ of the cultural phenomena
explored, i.e. to unveil the meanings of the informants’ actions, ethnographers are
required to engage with those they research at a very close, personal level (Geertz
1973). In the process, the researcher gradually moves from the purely etic, or
‘culturally neutral’, outsider’s perspective to the one of an insider, adopting at least
to some extent an emic perspective, i.e. a view and understanding of a person from
within the culture being studied. However, more recently anthropological research
has increasingly been done ‘at home’, i.e. in the researcher’s own cultural setting;
thus, turning anthropology from the ‘science of the other’ to the one of the familiar
or proximate. This anthropological turn has not stopped there; a number of
researchers have also used themselves as their primary research subjects, focusing
on and describing their personal experiences relating to the topic under investiga-
tion. Unlike the traditional ethnographies of the ‘other’, these researchers have
produced ethnographies of the ‘self’, or autoethnographies (Halilovich 2013b).
More recently, ethnography has also gone digital, with terms such as ‘digital
ethnography’, ‘netnography, ‘online ethnography’ and ‘cyber ethnography’ becom-
ing methodological neologisms used interchangeably to describe ethnographers’
research in the cyber world. As Murthy points out, ‘ethnography is about telling

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social stories’, and while ‘ethnography goes digital, its epistemological remit
remains much the same’ (2008, p 837). While digital ethnography, as a research
method, takes the ethnographer beyond the geographically situated places into the
domain of cyber space and digital media, it ultimately expands beyond mere data
collection on the Internet, becoming also the media through which narratives of
mixed forms of existence—real/virtual, now/then and here/there—are being told
and created (Halilovich 2013b). As an end product, digital ethnography enables the
ethnographer to move beyond text-based ethnography by presenting their findings in
a multimedia form involving not only text, but also video, sounds, pictures
(Underberg and Zorn 2013). All these different forms of ethnography, as I attempt
to demonstrate in this paper, can be valuable methods in archival and memory
research, a field that has itself been undergoing significant changes and challenges
in recent years.
The first ethnography described here explores an individual, and the second, a
collective story about how Bosnian survivors of ethnic cleansing and genocide have
struggled to reclaim their erased lives and their own identities as well as the
identities of their loved ones who perished. Now, I will turn to the story of Fatima
(not her real name) in order to illustrate the importance of records in the recovery of
memory and identity to displaced war widows in post-war Bosnia and in the
diaspora.

(Re)creating records: ‘Temporary’ war widows remarrying dead husbands

Fatima’s living room in the St. Louis’ suburb of Bevo looks very much like most
other living rooms in Bosnian homes I have been in—in Bosnia as well as in the
Bosnian refugee diaspora in Australia, Sweden, Austria and the USA. What makes
her household recognisably ‘Bosnian’ is not only the distinct coffee cups (fildžani),
copper coffee pots (džezve) and crystal glasses and ornaments displayed in the large
credenza dominating the living room, but also the framed photos of her family
members.
One of the photos is of a young man, a teenager, dressed in an olive green shirt
and a Titovka cap with a red star on his head, a Jugoslav People’s Army uniform.
The young recruit is in a serious pose, his eyes directed somewhere in the distance,
but one could easily recognise an adolescent who only recently might have finished
high school and is still learning how to look like a serious adult, a JNA soldier. In
another photo, one can see a moustached man, probably in his thirties, hugging a
school-age boy: both are smiling happily. Next to them, in the same photo, is a red
car, a 101 Stojadin, which seems to have been the main reason for the photo
opportunity. Both photos were taken during the 1980s, when Fatima’s life looked
fairly ordinary and when it was impossible for her to imagine that some two decades
later she would become a refugee, a migrant living in the USA, while all three
people in the pictures, her husband and two of her sons, would be dead, killed in the
Srebrenica genocide in 1995. Her youngest son and her daughter, who at the time
were 12 and 14, respectively, survived. Almost apologetically, Fatima explains that
it was only because of them, her remaining children, that she decided to migrate to

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the USA in 1999, hoping that they would have a better future there than they would
have in war-torn Bosnia.
The pictures in her living room are some of the few material records of Fatima’s
past life. She tells how in 1992, before escaping to the nearest safe village, she only
managed to fetch a photo album and a handful of documents from her burning
home. Among the photos were the two now standing on top of her credenza in her
house near St. Louis. The documents she saved back then included her children’s
school certificates and the family’s healthcare booklets. She believed they would
need them as soon as the madness they ended up in would come to a halt. But the
madness did not stop then and even today it affects Fatima’s life on a daily basis.
When her two sons and husband ‘did not come out of the woods’—an expression
which has become a synonym for the ‘march of death’ referring to the route men
and boys from Srebrenica took in July 1995, hoping to escape the onslaught of the
Serbian army—Fatima and her two surviving children became internally displaced
persons (IDPs), moving from one refugee centre to another and she experienced all
the hardships of a war widow and of single parenthood, until four years later,
encouraged by her former neighbours who were in a similar situation, she decided to
migrate to the USA.
She recalls, among the many difficulties affecting her life as an IDP in post-war
Bosnia, the difficulty of getting basic identity documents such as birth certificates
(for her living and missing family members), a marriage certificate (even though she
now was a war widow), employment history (to claim her late husband’s pension),
written confirmation of missing persons (her two sons and husband), evidence of
property ownership (for the property she and her husband once owned), a written
statement confirming displacement (in order to be eligible for support and
healthcare for IDPs) and many other papers proving that she once really existed and
that she was who she claimed to be. For Fatima, who lacked most of these
documents because they were destroyed in the local municipality when her town
was raided or evaporated in smoke when her house burned down, the constant chase
after the papers—from one office to another, from one part of the country
to another, finding two willing witnesses who would sign legally binding statutory
declarations in order to get at least basic temporary documents valid for
six months—came on top of all the other hardships.
‘It was a constant humiliation and no one seemed to care’, she states. ‘It
became too much when I had to ‘‘marry’’ my dead husband in order to claim a
widow’s pension’, she continues, ‘I felt like using my dead husband, putting a
price on his dead head’.
The ‘re-marrying’ was a standard procedure after the war and applied to tens of
thousands of war widows who lacked written evidence that they were married to the
men who were now dead or missing.
Chasing the papers (ganjanje papira), as she calls it, was not only time-
consuming and humiliating, but it also cost money required for various adminis-
tration fees and transportation. At the same time, Fatima had to take care of her
children and support her elderly in-laws who were accommodated in a collective
centre for IDPs, as well as search for the truth about what happened to the other

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three members of her family, her husband and two sons, who were among some
forty thousand missing presumably killed persons when the war ended. The hopes
that her missing sons and husband and several other members of her extended
family might have been still alive were severely diminished when the evidence of
mass executions of Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica emerged shortly after the
atrocities took place. One of her sons was 25 and another 21. Her husband was 46.

Bodies of living women as archives of the dead men’s identities

As the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre, the International

Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), the BiH Missing Persons’ Institute and
many other sources have confirmed, mostly men perished during the war in Bosnia;
their executions were systematically planned and carried out in Srebrenica, Prijedor,
Zvornik, Višegrad and across the country. Killing male members of these
communities was intended to destroy social groups ‘in whole or in part’, and in
most cases, this was partly or completely achieved. While mostly men were killed, it
should not be forgotten that women’s men were killed: husbands, sons, fathers,
brothers and lovers. Adam Jones, the Canadian scholar who specialises in
researching gender–selective mass killings, calls such killings ‘gendercide’, a
particular form of genocide (2004, 2006). As Raphaël Lemkin put it, genocide
signifies ‘a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of
essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the
groups themselves’ (2002, p 27). Through the physical elimination of men in the
‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns in Bosnia, it was the essential foundations of
communities—namely, families as primary units of communal structure—that were
severely affected and in many cases completely destroyed (Halilovich 2011, 2013b).
According to the Research and Documentation Centre (2007), only 10 %—or
10,000 war casualties—were women. However, 96 % of the women killed were
civilians. The figure of 10 % of overall casualties, or any other attempt to quantify
the depth and continuing significance of women’s suffering, is simply inadequate.
The reality I have encountered ‘in the field’ during my research in Bosnia and the
Bosnian diaspora tells a different story from the statistics: women have been
severely affected by both forced migration and direct and indirect violence against
them. Nonetheless, the full scale of women’s suffering, during and after the war, has
been under-represented, including the fact that a considerable burden of the war and
its aftermath was carried and continues to be carried by women. As ICTY
judgments have confirmed, women were not merely collateral damage of the war,
but in most cases, primary targets of organised violence—including sexual
violence—by armed men (ICTY 1996). In addition to the 10,000 killed, it is
estimated that between 20,000 and 50,000 women and girls were raped and
systematically abused during the war (Orentlicher 1997). But even the worst crimes
against women committed in the notorious rape camps—for which a number of war
criminals faced trial by the ICTY—remain ‘invisible’, under-reported and
un(der)documented. The reason for this can be found in the stigma and the
individual and communal shame associated with victims of such violence, resulting

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in a silent ‘collective denial’ of the war crimes committed against women. These
crimes may, therefore, not be remembered and memorialised in the same way as
some other crimes. In the collective memory of victimised groups, there is a
hierarchy of events and suffering that gets remembered and memorialised; clearly,
in this hierarchy, crimes against women do not feature prominently—if at all. As
Xavier Bougarel points out, ‘[the] image of a male hero defending his nation and his
family is often complemented by that of the passive and powerless female victim
(žrtva)’ (2007, p 171). Nonetheless, the crucial role women have had in identifying
the remains of the men who perished, their relatives, has been widely recognised
and cannot be denied (Wagner 2008). They have been the embodiment of the search
for and identification of the missing in more than one way.
As Fatima’s story demonstrates, the magnitude of the direct and indirect crimes
against women (and their men) has irrevocably affected the memories and identities
of women survivors, their families and communities. It is also a poignant example
of how women have preserved a link between those who perished and those who
survived, not only through their narrated and documented memories of the missing
men, but also though their bodies, their own DNA, which proved to be the most
important piece of data required to give identities to the missing.
Like thousands of other war widows and survivors whose family members
‘disappeared’ during the war, Fatima’s search for her missing relatives turned into a
search for their remains. As the dental records, medical histories and other ‘ante-
mortem data’ of Fatima’s husband and sons were destroyed during the war, the
biographical and physical facts she could provide about them as well as her own and
her surviving children’s DNA extracted from the blood samples they gave, helped
the ICMP create the first post-war records of her missing family members. Now, the
remains of the dead could be matched with the DNA of the living, linking them
again more than just symbolically, even if this only meant that, once identified,
those who perished would not be counted as missing anymore and would be given
their names back and a dignified burial in a marked grave. As Sarah Wagner has
written in her groundbreaking book To Know Where He Lies, ‘the absence of
knowledge—not knowing where their missing lie—plagues the surviving families’,
as ‘to be absent is to be missing in both time and space’ (2008, p 156). Use of DNA-
based identification technology in the identification process of the missing whose
bones were exhumed from mass graves in Bosnia has changed the way that the
identities of the victims after mass atrocities get re-established. DNA technology, as
Nettelfield and Wagner argue, has changed the nature of the discussion about what
really happened in Bosnia, as truth-telling has assumed a more scientifically backed,
rigorous tone (2011).
The DNA matching and kinship software also demonstrate how violence is
capable of restructuring kinship, how categories of persons are defined and relations
between them ordered. While blood as the ‘shared essence’ through which kinship is
defined is one of the ways through which relations between individuals are
imagined, DNA matching links not only parents and siblings in a direct blood
relation, but also husbands and wives. It is not unusual that missing/dead husbands
get identified thanks to DNA donated by their wives. In the process, DNA of their
common child (or children) is a crucial component in the matching. This then can

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subsequently lead to identification of other missing ‘non-blood’ relatives (Wagner

2008, p 115).
However, as Wagner points out, ‘DNA evidence does not exist in a vacuum;
rather, its success depends on other manifestations of individual lives, social ties and
everyday practice. Family members holding a piece of cloth, touching its fabric,
whose pattern and stitching are indelibly etched into their memory, use their own
recollections to help retrieve their missing relatives’ remains’ (2008, p 268). When
there is a complete absence of any identifiable material belonging to identify
victims, the survivors use their own imagination to fill the gaps and integrate it in
the memory of perished relatives.

No country for old memories

For Fatima, giving her blood at the ICMP office was the last duty she felt she had to
do before joining tens of thousands of other displaced Bosnians looking for a safer
place under the sun when the war in their homeland was officially over. It proved
easier to get all the documentation required for migration to the USA than to keep
prolonging her many temporary statuses: as an IDP, a war widow, a fallen
defender’s family (šehidska porodica), a sole parent, a mother who lost two sons, a
civilian victim of war and other bureaucratic categories imposed upon people who
lost their homes and their family members and who were now required to renew the
documents proving these known facts every six months. ‘I was not even given time
to mourn my losses’, Fatima says with sadness. The migration process took about
three months and went through via neighbouring Croatia where a distant relative
assisted her with the logistics. The migration officers who interviewed her in Zagreb
showed understanding and accepted all the documents she had even though some
were close to expiration. On 18 November 1999, she and her children landed in the
USA, in St. Louis. But the cliché about migrants and refugees starting a new life in a
new country only partly applied to Fatima and many other Bosnian refugees settling
in this and other places; the legacy of the war and the social, cultural and emotional
burden of what it meant to be a war widow did not vanish overnight, nor was it gone
14 years later when I met Fatima for the second time, in November 2013.
Thanks to the DNA matching, in 2004, the remains of Fatima’s oldest son
recovered from a mass grave were positively identified. Accompanied by her son
and daughter, Fatima travelled to Bosnia to attend the collective burial of her son
and several hundred other identified genocide victims at Srebrenica Memorial
Cemetery, the same place she was deported from nine years earlier. Then, in 2006,
Fatima was notified that both her younger son and her husband had also been
identified via the DNA matching system. Fatima and her children returned for
another burial of their family members.
This time Fatima asked the ICMP officials about any material belongings that
might have been found at the sites where her family members were exhumed. She
remembered her husband’s pocket watch, wedding ring and cigarette holder as well
as a silver necklace her younger son was wearing. But she also thought of the
personal ID cards they had in their pockets as well as the clothing they had on, the

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very jackets and trousers she had patched and stitched during the war. She was
hoping that some of these material artefacts would have been identified and handed
over to the relatives. However, she accepted the official’s explanation that these
personal belongings now represented important pieces of forensic evidence to be
used by the ICTY and that one day all the artefacts would be returned to Bosnia and
then relatives would be asked to identify each item which thereafter might form a
part of a genocide museum collection or be appropriated by the surviving relatives.
This is why she, like many other Srebrenica survivors, felt betrayed and robbed
of their pieces of memories again in 2009, when she learned that the ICTY officials
had destroyed material recovered from the mass graves of the Srebrenica genocide,
comprising some 1,000 pieces of identification, photographs and articles of clothing
belonging to the victims found in the graves (Simic 2012). Confronted with the
survivors’ requests to clarify why the ICTY did this, the official explanation was
cold and sanitised: the destruction of material from gravesites is standard procedure
if the material is no longer being used as evidence during UN court proceedings and
if it poses a risk to public health (Meer 2009). Fatima now lost every hope that any
of the personal belongings her family members last wore would be ever returned to
her. This is why she treasures even more the two framed photographs in her living
room. ‘These pictures’, she concludes, ‘bring a bit of the old home here…without
them I would feel like a complete stranger in this foreign world’.
Attachment to photographs and identifying them with home is not unique to
Fatima’s experience. As Belaj writes, family photography can be understood as a
ritual of home culture in which family is both an object and subject (2008).
Photography becomes evidence of something that really happened, something that
exists as part of human experience and as such photography serves as memory and
archiving of reality. For Fatima, family photography evokes the imaginary
connection between her family members across time and space and provides her
with a platform from where to create her oral history about the exodus and the
tragedy of her family. In the absence of archival records, as Swain argues, oral
histories are the only remaining way to gain information about particular events and
create the actual records based on testimonies of eyewitnesses and survivors (2003).
Similarly, Sue McKemmish, Anne Gilliland and Eric Ketelaar point to the
importance of the cultural dimension of oral histories in groups in which memories
are passed down through narrative forms, including storytelling, rather than written
or photographic records (2005). They describe an example from Tasmania when, in
a legal process, oral testimony of Aboriginal ancestry prevailed over documentary
evidence located in government archives and births, deaths and marriages records
(McKemmish et al. 2005, p 150).

Žep@ online: from ethnically cleansed villages to ‘cyber villages’

In a similar fashion, like Fatima recreating her ‘old’ home in her new living room in
the place she resettled in, many other survivors of ethnic cleansing and genocide
have been imagining and imaging their old homes and hometowns in their new
living rooms via the Internet. The Internet and ‘technologies of self’, as Jose van

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Dijck calls them, ‘are in and of themselves social and cultural tools; they are means
of reflection and self-representation as well as communication’ (2007, p 39).
Usually starting in the beginning as an individual exchange of scanned photographs,
documents and other records between people coming from the same place or
neighbourhood, many such grassroots initiatives have grown into sophisticated
portals and online repositories of documents, images and stories about local places.
In fact, some of the places destroyed during the 1992–1995 war now only exist in
cyberspace and as a part of the social relations of those who identify with the lost
places (Halilovich 2013a).
In order to engage with the Bosnian ‘cyber villages’, I was required to modify my
research approach and expand my fieldwork beyond the real space, effectively
practising digital ethnography. As with the people described here, for many refugees
cyber space and digital social networks do not only act as an extension of the places
and networks in real space, but as often their replica and the only possible
alternative. Hence, I argue that research into contemporary forced displacement
very often requires elements of both conventional and digital ethnography—or ‘on-
site and online fieldwork’. The approach I have adopted is to position and interpret
my ‘sites’ and interactions in cyber space in relation to actual places and actors in
real space.
Ideally, the reader would now follow the inserted hyperlinks, tap into online
forums and discussions and watch YouTube videos to get a sense of what kind of
places, stories and archives I am exploring here.
Žepa Online (http://www.zepa-online.com/) offers one such story and an alter-
nate place which has been a site of my digital ethnography, but I have also visited
real Žepa, or what is left of it, and met with people from Žepa living in diaspora,
including St. Louis.
Žepa is a village, or more precisely a cluster of villages in hamlets, nested in the
mountainous region along the river Drina, in eastern Bosnia, some 40 km from
Srebrenica and 20 km from Višegrad—or this is what and where Žepa used to be
before the war in Bosnia. It was one of many picturesque Bosnian places with long
traditions and a rich history as well as its own local cultural norms, dialect and a
distinct way of life. Known as proud highlanders, the people of Žepa are still
associated with many positive stereotypes. With his historical novel The Bridge in
Žepa, the Nobel Prize winning author Ivo Andrić might have contributed to such
somewhat exotic perceptions of people from Žepa that still persist within and
beyond Bosnia. In terms of ethnicity and religion, Žepa residents or Žepljaci are
Bosniaks and Muslims.
Bordering Serbia and being inhabited by non-Serbs sealed Žepa’s fate in 1992,
when Žepa was attacked by heavy artillery and bombed by Serbian jets (Nuhanović
2012). Many villagers of Žepa lost their lives during these attacks and many were
forced to abandon their homes and look for safety in the mountains. Between 1992
and 1995, Žepa was completely besieged by the Serb forces, separated from
Bosnian government territories and practically cut off from the rest of the world
(Kurtić 2006). Like Srebrenica, in July 1995, Žepa was overrun by Serb troops, with
General Mladić personally commanding the operation. However, unlike the mass
executions of men and boys at Srebrenica, most Žepa men survived, some by

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fighting their way through until reaching the distant town of Kladanj, others by
crossing into Serbia and surrendering themselves to Serbia’s army and police rather
than to Mladić’s troops. Those who crossed into Serbia were detained in improvised
prisons by the Serbian police, and many were tortured and abused (Kurtić 2006).
After being registered by the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC), they
were allowed to resettle ‘in third countries’, but not allowed to return to Bosnia and
their native Žepa. The USA was willing to accept the detainees and most of the
surviving men from Žepa ended up in St. Louis and Atlanta. In the following
months and years, many members of their families who remained in Bosnia joined
them. This effectively created a chain migration, with relatives, friends and
neighbours sponsoring more fellow Žepljaci to migrate to the US. Today, St. Louis
probably has the largest concentration of people from Žepa anywhere in the world.
Often the only surviving records of their pre-migration lives have been their
ICRC cards that enabled them to migrate to the USA. While most villagers survived,
their village did not exist anymore as a social place; during the Serb offensive in
July 1995, Žepa was completely ‘ethnically cleansed’, depopulated and the place
literally erased from the map; all houses, administrative buildings and mosques
were destroyed. Nonetheless, the survivors from Žepa now living thousands of miles
from their original village proved that places are made of people and their social
relations rather than of bricks and mortar. They recreated their sense of belonging to
their local place through their relationships with each other as well as by sharing
their memories in forms of photographs, documents and stories of their old home
village with other fellow Žepa residents (Žepljaci) now living in St. Louis, Atlanta
and worldwide.
As I personally witnessed in August 2013, Žepa remains largely in ruins, and
many destroyed houses, and sometimes whole hamlets, are completely overgrown
with vegetation, so that it is even hard to recognise that people lived there until two
decades ago. However, there is another reality of Žepa; for anyone interested in
finding out about Žepa on the internet, Žepa Online will appear representing an
intact and vibrant village full of human activity, a place one would love to visit or
live in. There are pictures of the village’s iconic buildings and houses, the legendary
Žepa bridge, monuments and cultural symbols as well as the photos of the pristine
nature. One can engage in chats and discussion forums with residents of this online
village, as well as read opinion pieces posted by renowned Žepa intellectuals living
in different places, but regarding Žepa Online portal as their home(page).
Along embedded videos with local music and satirical prose, there are also
political discussions going on as well as options for conducting more one-to-one
conversations in divanhana or a group chat in žepsko sijelo. There is also an online
library hosting a free collection of e-books about Žepa as well as references about
other relevant books and how they can be ordered.
Žepa Online contains an archive on the history of the village, including extensive
records of what happened there during the Serbian aggression of 1992–1995. One
can visit an online memorial and read about those who lost their lives during the
war. Next to it is an obituary for Žepljaci who died more recently in various corners
of the globe. The names, nicknames, dates and places of births and deaths, and
photos of the deceased included in the obituaries tell a story about a community,

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kinship and identity of Žepljaci ‘back then and there’ as well as about the ‘here and
now’, the places where they live (and die) today.
In recent years, since a handful of Žepljaci started returning to their home village,
Žepa Online regularly includes updates about individual and communal projects
taking place in ‘real’ Žepa, and acts as a hub through which people can get involved
in humanitarian and community work aimed at supporting their fellow Žepljaci
either back in Bosnia, in St. Louis or elsewhere. Today, Žepa Online is more than a
resource for people with origins in a village in eastern Bosnia; it is a communal
archive, but also a place where Žepa identity is asserted and performed in a variety
of ways. No less importantly, by recreating collective memory about and for
themselves, the survivors from Žepa have created an archive including the records
of the grave human rights violations and of the suffering of their village that would
otherwise have gone unrecorded. As McKemmish et. al have recognised, ‘available
technologies and prevailing literacies play a formative role in shaping the archives
and the formation of collective memory’ (2005, p 146). As the Online Žepa
demonstrates, the digitally mediated collective memories provide an opportunity for
new forms of communal archiving, which—as Cook argues—‘as concept and
reality, evidently makes us think differently about ownership of records, replevin,
oral and written traditions, the localism-globalism and margins-centre nexus,
multiple viewpoints and multiple realities about recordkeeping, and so much else,
including evidence, memory, and obviously identity, and, depending on our
responses, around deeper ethical issues of control, status, power…’’(2013, p 116).

Conclusion

Starting as a response to forced displacement and systematic erasure of local

memories and identities, Bosnian ‘cyber villages’ now flourish on the internet acting
as digital museums, archives and online shrines to the places lost, but also as
alternate worlds and places of defiance as well as vibrant social hubs for interactions
and performances of distinct local identities, memories and spatial practices. The
existence of ‘cyber villages’ demonstrates that, even when it is reduced down—or
elevated—to the level of an idea(l), the place called home remains a ‘symbolic
anchor’, a metaphor around which narratives of belonging and memories of home
are constructed and performed.
In the era of genocides, politically motivated violence and other widespread
human rights crises, when exploring the complex political, ethical, legal and cultural
challenges faced in the creation, preservation and use of records documenting
violence, it is important to recognise both the impact of such documents (or lack of
them) on ordinary people directly affected by violence as well as to acknowledge
the resilience and resourcefulness of ordinary people in recreating, repurposing and
preserving their records and memories of suffering. Such ‘popular records’ of
ordinary people can indeed be valuable and are sometimes the only existing
resource for researchers interested in uncovering the human dimension of great
crimes committed in some small places like Žepa, or against some ‘small’ people
like Fatima. Such mundane records are not merely the old photographs in Fatima’s

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home in St. Louis, but the stories and meaning she attaches to the pictures of her
killed relatives. Fatima is (still) a walking and breathing archive holding the story of
her past life and the records of injustices against her family and her community.
Witnessing her story and allowing her to put it on record, as I have attempted to do
here, is not just a methodological challenge, but also, I would argue, the ultimate
ethical responsibility of scholars involved in memory research. So is the
engagement with the ‘cyber village’ Žepa Online.

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Hariz Halilovich is a sociocultural anthropologist and author, currently working as a Senior Lecturer at
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He has widely researched and written on the issues of genocide
in Bosnia and the long-term effects of politically motivated violence on individuals, families and
communities. His current research project ‘Gendered displacement, memory and identity in Bosnian
refugee diaspora’ (funded by the Australian Research Council) explores experiences of Bosnian war
widows in three diaspora contexts in Europe, Australia and the USA. His book Places of Pain: Forced
Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-local Identities in Bosnian War-torn Communities was
published by Berghahn: New York–Oxford (2013a).

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