The memorial at Srebrenica: Gender and the social meanings of collective memory in Bosnia-Herzegovina

The 1990s conflict: a historical and cultural overview

Between 1992 and 1995, the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina came under attack by the Serb military. Although the violence was widespread and included, among other regions, the areas of Foca, Prijedor, and the siege of Sarajevo, the genocide that took place in the Potocari region of Srebrenica has been marked as the most violent epoch of the Balkan conflict and the worst European genocide since the Holocaust of World War II. The massacre, which took place in 1995, was therefore a major factor in bringing the war to a close through international involvement. As a refuge for close to 40,000 Muslims who were fleeing the Serbian forces, Srebrenica was one of six United Nations (UN) “safe zones” that had been established by a UN resolution in 1993. ² Following the resolution, Srebrenica was placed under the protection of UN peacekeeping forces, the first of which were Canadian troops and the second of which were Dutch military. The Dutch troops in Srebrenica were based in a large and sprawling battery factory where the refugees took shelter from the Serbians. Despite being designated as a safe zone, the Dutch military forces failed to intervene at Srebrenica when the Serbs invaded the area and have since been held responsible for allowing the Serbs to take control over the region.

Once under Serbian control, Muslim men at Srebrenica were taken away from their families and at least 8000 were murdered, their bodies left in mass graves throughout the Srebrenica countryside. A portion of the women were herded into busses and taken away, many of whom survived under horrific conditions, including rape and physical abuse (Leydesdorff, 2011). Within months of the massacre, the Dayton Peace Accords (brokered by the United States) put an end to the war through the creation of a complicated geo-political entity that today comprises the country of Bosnia-Herzegovina. As a result of the war and the peace process that followed, the nation is now divided into two geographic sectors with three rotating governing bodies. One sector includes the region where Bosnian Muslims and Croatians primarily reside and the other sector includes the region dominated by Serbs. The Serbian region, designated as the Republika Srpska, includes the territory where Srebrenica-Potocari is located (Pollack, 2003a, 2003b; Simic, 2009; Stiglmayer, 1994).

The targeting of Bosnian Muslims by the Serbs and the ensuing 1990s conflict grew out of a Serbian nationalist agenda that, with dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, laid claim to the southern Slavic region of Bosnia that is home to Bosnian Muslims, the majority ethnic group; Croatians of Catholic origin; and Serbs who identify as Eastern Orthodox. Fueled by Serbian nationalist narratives, the Serbs portrayed the Bosnian Muslims as a threat to Serbian nationhood. In this discourse, aggression against Bosnian Muslims was justified by a past history of Ottoman oppression and the construction of Bosnian Muslims as both religious and racial outsiders who share biological and cultural links to the alien and conquering Turks from earlier centuries (Bax, 2000; Powers, 1996; Sells, 1996; Sofos, 1996). Although Bosnian Muslims are for the most part secular, the emphasis on religious differences during the conflict was a response to the absence of other ethnic markers—language, physiology, territory—that might otherwise provide a basis for a distinctive nationalized identity among diverse groups of people. In the case of Bosnia, such differences were difficult to substantiate or determine, resulting in the conflation of religion, ethnicity, and nationalism in the Serbian construction of the Bosnian Muslim population. This blurring of identity categories by Serbian forces was fostered by political leaders, the media, and religious figures who warned of the dangers of Bosnian Muslim domination (Bax, 2000; Bougarel, 2007; Ivekovic, 2002; Oddie, 2012; Powers, 1996; Swimelar, 2012).

The massacre that took place at Srebrenica thus represented the culmination of a Serbian policy of ethnic cleansing that, since the war’s beginning, had been an on-going strategy of Serbian nationalist domination and ethnic destruction. Within the Serbian project of cultural and biological annihilation, gender informed the goals of genocide in a number of specific ways. While Bosnian Muslim men were enslaved, tortured, mutilated, and killed, women were enslaved, raped, tortured, mutilated, impregnated, and, in some cases, murdered. Rape and forced pregnancy were carried out as a means to expand the Serbian nation through the birth of Serbian soldiers whose paternity, under the patriarchal norms of Serbian society, would define their ethnic superiority and strength (Boose, 2002; Mostov, 1995; Olujic, 1998; Stiglmayer, 1994). Within the post-war feminist analysis of these events, both the death of men and the brutalizing rape of women have been considered acts of genocide, even when the women survived. Because the intent of mass rape was to destroy the culture and the family and to control the biological production of Bosnian Muslim women, Catherine MacKinnon (1994) and Rhonda Copleon (1994) both use the term genocidal rape to describe this form of gendered violence, a term I have adopted here.

The memorial at Srebrenica: gender, memory, and representation

On 25 October 2000, the Office of the High Representative (OHR), the international governing body overseeing the administration of Bosnia-Herzegovina, designated land in Potocari in the municipality of Srebrenica for a memorial “to those who met their deaths in the July 1995 slaughter” (OHR, 2000). The decision emerged out of a politically charged post-war environment in which Bosnian Serbs, maintaining that that they had acted in self-defense, resisted the creation of a memorial to genocide (especially within Serbian territory) which commemorated Muslim victimhood and Serbian criminality (Kontsevaia, 2013; Pollack, 2003a; Selimovic, 2013). Serbian resistance to the site led to a stalemate in choosing a burial ground for those whose bodies had been recovered and were awaiting a proper burial. The stalemate ended with the OHR’s decision to create a national memorial cemetery in Srebrenica to provide “the final resting place and a site for those who perished.”

The establishment of Srebrenica as a memorial space has its roots in women’s activism. The decision of the OHR was largely informed by the demands of the women who had survived the massacre and who were represented by the activist organization, the Mothers of Srebrenica and Zepa Enclaves, two of the six safe zones that had been designated by the UN. ³ In the years immediately following the war, women began to demonstrate every month to bring attention to the missing men. In adopting this form of activism, the Srebrenica women drew inspiration from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina who, during the repressive years of the post-Peron military regime, engaged in regular protests to demand information about the disappearance of their children. Following the example of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the Mothers of Srebrenica routinely engaged in protests, demanding both answers and actions with regard to the recovery and burial of their missing family members (Leydesdorff, 2011). As a catalyst for the establishment and creation of a memorial at Srebrenica, the Mothers represented a powerful voice in the memorial debate, their status as widows and bereaved mothers lending significant weight to the importance of the Srebrenica site as a place of maternal and familial suffering. In this regard, tragic motherhood, a trope of remembrance that would later inform the structures of memory within the memorial, helped to situate their demands within a value-laden context of family and maternalism.

In addition to the protests and demonstrations, the Mothers also conducted an extensive poll in which a vast majority of the respondents supported the creation of a national cemetery in Srebrenica where the remains of their loved ones, once recovered, could be buried (Pollack, 2003a). Research on the women survivors who advocated for Srebrenica found that this landscape held a particular meaning for the women because of the land’s connection to violence, loss, and death, “the place where everything happened and where nothing would ever be the same” (Pollack, 2003a: 796). In demanding that Srebrenica be designated as the burial site, the activist mothers sought a “home land” for their dead to which they too could return and reclaim the land on which the Serbs had sought to destroy their families and the Bosnian Muslim people (Simic, 2009). Furthermore, in establishing a memorial in this memory-ridden landscape, the Mothers of Srebrenica sought to create a “monument over failure of the international community,” choosing a site that would be a persistent reminder of the UN presence during the genocide and the abandonment of the Bosnian Muslims by the Dutch UN forces (Selimovic, 2013). ⁴ After nearly a decade of women’s activism, the memorial at Srebrenica officially opened in 2003. My fieldwork at the site began 8 years later when more than half of those who had been massacred at Srebrenica were now buried there. ⁵

As the defining space of traumatic memory, the memorial at Srebrenica includes a national cemetery and Memorial Room/Museum. Approaching the site from the surrounding towns and villages, the ruins of war are still evident in the remnants of bombed-out houses whose walls enclose the former living spaces from which the Muslim population fled. Roofless and open to the sky, these concrete skeletons of a lost domestic life are themselves memorials to war—roadside monuments that, ghostly in appearance, recall at best a family that has been displaced and at worst a family that has been destroyed (Figure 1). From the road, it is possible to see through the gaping holes that the war left behind, revealing empty and vacant rooms where grass and trees have taken root. Within this landscape of memory and violence, the ruins signify the destruction of ethnic cleansing, a powerful reminder of Serbian aggression that is also evident in the bombed out and bullet-ridden buildings in Sarajevo and Mostar. In the areas surrounding Srebrenica, however, the ruins of war seem more humanized, linking the vacant buildings to the death of those who are buried in the nearby national cemetery. Accordingly, the remnant homes appear as shrines to terror and loss (Yaeger, 2003), haunting buildings that foreground the memory of death that Srebrenica commemorates.

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Figure 1.

Ruins in the Bosnian countryside.

On arriving at the national monument, the memorial is entered through a gravel parking lot that leads to the national cemetery where the men and boys have been laid to rest. Each of the more than 6000 grave sites bears identical marble obelisks in the tradition of Islamic grave stones, the religious symbolism a signifier of ethnicity and Muslim identity (Figure 2). Because only men are buried here, the memory that is conveyed is one of male sacrifice for the Bosnian Muslim people, the vast sea of identical grave stones reminiscent of markers that a nation might erect for war heroes or soldiers who died in battle. The imagery of the soldier styled graves, however, exists alongside other narratives that recall the vulnerability of the civilian men and boys who are buried there. This trope of commemoration, which invokes the memory of defenseless fathers and sons, was perhaps best illustrated by the tour guide who, a child survivor of the massacre, related his own story along with that of the history of Srebrenica. Recollecting the death of his father and brother, the guide described his narrow escape from the hills where he, his father, and brother had been taken to be executed and from which only he escaped. In my conversation with him, he offered this account of the site’s history:

Inside there were at least 5,000 or 6,000 people who had been taken there to the UN premises and the Dutch came inside and they told those people they had to go that they had to leave the Dutch base and they were kicked out of there and they were handed over to the Serbs who were waiting. So the Serbs waited for those guys at the same checkpoint and the procedure was the same and the refugees were handed over. So the same thing happened to all the refugees who were here. Those who were outside and those who were inside. The Dutch story here is nothing. They were like observers. They just watched. The separation of the families was not supposed to happen—the women from the men and boys was not supposed to happen because all who came down here were all civilians. But you can watch on u tube the negotiations with the Dutch commander and Mladic who was yelling at him and threatening him and saying how the men and boys had to be separated because he claimed he had a list of suspects and they were all suspects. But that was just his trick and the Dutch let them go. They didn’t stop them and then we were all taken away to be killed. (2011)

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Figure 2.

Grave stones at the memorial cemetery.

This narrative of paternal and brotherly loss reifies themes of genocide in which men and boys are remembered as the powerless victims of the Serbs, unprotected by the UN and unable to protect themselves or their families. The account of the tour guide thus situates Srebrenica within a political-historical discourse of Serbian aggression and international complicity, a trope of memorialization that is further explicated in a striking banner that stands on the hillside overlooking the Srebrenica site (Figure 3). Designed with the symbolism of a mathematical equation, the banner establishes a causal relationship between the aggression against the Bosnian Muslims and Serbian genocide; the imposition of the Dayton accords; and the establishment of the Republika Srpska within the post-war re-organization of Bosnia-Herzegovina. As a text of memory that rises above the thousands of graves, the banner offers an additional frame of remembrance that links the young guide’s story of the past to a geography and history of Serbian terror, international betrayal, and male sacrifice. This theme of men’s destruction is further elaborated and represented in the Memorial Room, the museum that is adjacent to the cemetery and which displays the objects of memory, the texts of historical events, and the imagery of the Srebrenica catastrophe.

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Figure 3.

Banner at Srebrenica.

The Memorial Room at Srebrenica

The Memorial Room at Srebrenica is housed in the original battery factory where the refugees were given “safe haven” before being taken by the Serbs. To preserve the original structure, the factory/memorial has retained the large machinery in which the batteries were made (Figure 4), the authenticity of which lends a mechanistic and somewhat futuristic feel to this site of history. The installations within this cavernous and somewhat open space are designed around traditional tropes of gendered memory that take as their focal point the atrocities committed against murdered fathers and sons and the subsequent suffering and losses of surviving mothers. In the first trope of memory, the lives and deaths of 20 men and boys are featured. Glass cases contain the personal belongings of those who died, including clothes and other objects that personalize the memory of the deceased. Each installation includes the life story of the victim, an individualized approach to memorialization that humanizes the objects that commemorate both life and death (Simic, 2009). Using visual imagery, other installations narrate the atrocities that were committed against the boys and men, showing, for example, the remains of an exhumed hand that appears to have been bound before death. It is through these memory frames that the story of genocide is told in the artifacts and biographies of this lost generation.

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Figure 4.

Memorial Room factory.

By comparison, the memory of the women represents a different narrative of mass trauma. Because comparatively few of the women were singled out for death, the gendered narrative within the factory space highlights the frightened women and children who had been separated from their husbands and sons. One wall of the factory contains a series of photographs that show women sitting together in groups, standing alone with children, and being forced to leave the safety of the factory compound. Among these images, two photographs stand out as traditional representations of maternal memory such as those found in Israeli commemorations of the Holocaust (Baumel, 1997; Jacobs, 2010). The first photo shows a group of rural women being taken away by Serbian forces, their children and their belongings in their arms. In this image, a crying older child captures the fear and vulnerability of the women and children who have been separated from their husbands and fathers. The second image is a portrait of mother and child. In this photograph, a tall and stately woman directly faces the photographer, a scarf wrapped around her head and a swaddled baby in her arms (Figure 5). As an iconic representation of war time maternity, this visual text, along with those of mothers being herded into busses, conveys the destruction of the family and the disruption to the gender norm of male protection, motifs of memory that link Srebrenica to the Holocaust imagery of gender separation at death and at concentration camp sites. These visual texts of maternal vulnerability are accompanied by films in which women survivors, in the aftermath of the tragedy, recount their struggle to survive alone and the tragic loss of their husbands and sons. The commemorative motifs of the women victims are thus framed through either endangered motherhood or the sorrow that persists in post-war widowhood and maternal loss, themes which remember the survivors in terms of their relationship to their husbands and children (Simic, 2008).

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Figure 5.

Image of mother and child at Srebrenica memorial.

As in the case of Holocaust remembrance, women’s victimhood is very much a part of the memory frames of Srebrenica—their survival, their losses, and their post-war trauma set against the sacrifice and deaths of their husbands and sons. At this memorial site, the women’s images and collective stories have become the public face of Serbian criminality and the emotional lens through which the genocide of men is recalled and commemorated. In this regard, Elissa Helms (2012) interrogates the use of maternal imagery in the memorialization of Srebrenica. In her work, Helms references the art of Tarik Samarah who, at the opening of the Srebrenica memorial in 2003, placed billboards throughout the country featuring the “Srebrenica Mother” who in this vision of the past is portrayed through the picture of an elderly rural survivor whose dress and headscarf signify her traditional role and Muslim ethnicity. Like the photograph of the young mother in the Memorial Room, Samarah’s memorializing image invokes the symbol of tragic motherhood as the primary trope of Srebrenica remembrance.

As a number of scholars (Leydesdorff, 2007; Simic, 2009), including Helms, have pointed out, the inclusion of women-centered images in these public spaces and social texts of memory, while creating empathic bonds with the victim population, creates a mono-dimensional memory of female victimhood in which traditional gender roles are idealized in the imagery of the sacrificial mother and the absent son and father. Within these varied public and cultural narratives, women are rarely treated as individuals, with personal identities and perspectives. Rather it is the collective representation of maternal widowhood that has become the face of Serbian acts of genocide. Furthermore, as Srebrenica stands as the symbol of Muslim suffering and victimization, the massacre of this group of men and boys and the loss suffered by this group of women have become the focal points for both national and international remembrance. Within this site-based memorial culture, other places and forms of ethnic cleansing and genocidal tragedy have thus been rendered invisible in the post-war reconstruction of a terrible past.

Genocidal rape: the missing text of memory

As the analysis of the memorial at Srebrenica thus far suggests, gender is central to the construction of Bosnian Muslim victimhood and survival. While men are recalled through their deaths, their remains, and the cemetery that commemorates their loss and sacrifice, women are remembered as tragic figures of motherhood, many of whom are in search of or who have worked to recover the bodies of the “disappeared.” In this representation, the women have become symbols not only of tragedy and suffering but also of a particular kind of female survivor, one who personifies the norms of patriarchy in which women represent traditional maternal values of family and domesticity.

Srebrenica then as a space of collective remembrance exemplifies what Ringelheim (1997) has termed “split memory” in which the trauma of war and genocide is recalled differently for men and women. This phenomenon is perhaps most evident in the absence of the memorialization of the approximately 50,000 (mostly Muslim) victims of mass rape. As discussed earlier, much has been written about the mass rapes in Bosnia and the role of forced pregnancy and brutalized sexual violence as a strategy for achieving ethnic cleansing. In addition, Copleon (1994) further defines genocidal rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a policy of systematic assault and gang rapes that drove women from their homes and families and that forced children to witness the violation of their mothers and grandmothers, while mothers were forced to witness the violation of their daughters. The memorial at Srebrenica, however, makes no reference to the sexual crimes and atrocities that took place there and elsewhere, maintaining instead a culture of remembrance in which “experiences of war time rape have been marginalized and silenced” (Todorova, 2011: 5). This silence is evident even among women activists, such as the Mothers of Srebrenica who, while speaking out on issues of poverty and displacement, remain reluctant to situate the status of refugee women within this history of sexual violence.

Outside this culture of silence, The Association of Women Victims of War (hereafter referred to as the Association) is one of the few women’s organizations that focuses on rape victims and the importance of bringing perpetrators to justice. During my fieldwork at the organization’s Sarajevo office, I conducted in-depth interviews with the organization’s administrator and staff. Citing the history of sexual assaults that occurred in rape camps, villages, and in homes, my interviewees described how their attempts to create memorials to crimes against women were for the most part ignored by government officials as well as others who were reticent to establish reminders of the shame and humiliation that women and the Muslim community had endured. Despite the lack of support, the Association, which was founded in 2003, persists in its work. A pamphlet written in both English and Bosnian clearly states its on-going goals and objectives:

Our association’s main tasks are to collect documents and archive materials, to analyze information and data on every aspect of female suffering during the recent war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We also undertake analysis of all forms, causes and consequences of this suffering in order to make adequate plans and programmes in relation to the activities and ways to help women and children who are victims of the war.

We have established a database and archiving system on the population which is available to all kinds of projects: legal, research-based, or those of scientific character. It is also open to educating the rest of the population on this issue, especially the young people. (The Association “Women Victims of War,” 2010)

In its role as archivist and memory keeper, the small organization stands as a kind of counter-memorial to Srebrenica. Here, in an obscure building on the outskirts of Sarajevo, the “missing texts” of rape memory are plastered on the walls and doors of this small office. Photographs of accused perpetrators exist alongside the few victims who have not been afraid to go public or speak out. Other photographs highlight pictures from the international war crimes tribunal and the sites where many rapes were known to have taken place. Yellowed newspaper articles tell the stories of perpetrators living comfortably in their pre-war homes, while their victims have become impoverished refugees in the cities to which they fled in a post-war search for safety and normalization. A huge map marks the towns and places where mass rapes occurred and where there are no public markers to commemorate these crimes.

Because these visual texts cover almost all of the available wall space, the office takes on the appearance of a small museum to sexual violence, the visual imagery enhanced by numerous book cases that are filled with documents that contain legal briefs and testimonies of rape victims. Here, it is not the memory of fathers and sons that is recalled but of mothers and daughters who, as survivors, live with physical pain, social stigma, and unresolved trauma. This small space of activist work thus represents a powerful but nearly invisible place of collective memory where the history and events surrounding genocidal rape have not been forgotten or trivialized. At the same time, the marginalized and obscure position that this organization occupies in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina illuminates the ways in which collective memory is controlled and structured around events and atrocities that overlook the trauma of women’s violation. Given the absence of rape memory in the culture as a whole, my analysis now turns to a discussion of the socio-political forces that inform memorialization in post-war Bosnian society.

Cultural and nationalist forces and the suppression of rape memory

At the war’s end in 1996, two documentary films, Calling the Ghosts and Rape: A Crime of War, were produced internationally. These documentaries, which included interviews with rape survivors and survivor activists, filmed the places where the sexual atrocities occurred as well as the international tribunal that attempted to prosecute perpetrators of war time rape. As powerful agents of memory, the making of the documentaries was remarkable both for the timing of their production and for the openness with which survivors told their stories. In the two decades since the release and distribution of these films, however, rape survivors in Bosnia-Herzegovina have retreated from public view and the sites of their suffering have been mostly forgotten. In response to this troubling phenomenon, a small but significant literature on rape and warfare has focused on the silencing of rape victims in the aftermath of war. These studies attribute the repression of rape memory to a wide spectrum of cultural norms that vilify the victim, dishonor the victim’s family, and bring shame upon the larger ethnic community in which the victim resides (Ericsson, 2010; Helms, 2007; Olujic, 1998).

In the first instance, Kjersti Ericsson (2010) points out that in the war time rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, women were often blamed for their assault, having in some way brought the attack upon themselves because of a lack of virtue. In the second instance, Maria Olujic (1998), among others, relates the silencing of victims to traditional beliefs within Slavic culture that associates the sexuality of women with the honor and dignity of the patriarchal family. Within this cultural framework, the violation of a daughter or wife is thus construed as the violation of a husband or father. Joana Daniel-Wrabetz thus reports that in the post war family “the taboo” surrounding sexual assulat and forcible impregnantion was especially strong among fathers and brothers, resulting in the rejection of both the rape victim and the children born of rape (Daniel-Wrabetz, 2007). Finally, other scholars (Helms, 2007; Van Boeschoten, 2010) maintain that because Muslim wives and mothers symbolize the moral center of the ethnic/religious community, their violation represents the defilement not only of the individual and the family but of the Muslim collectivity. As these patriarchal values and beliefs have simultaneously acted to maintain secrecy and invoke shame among survivors and their families, the gathering of narratives for the purposes of memorialization has been made difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

In addition, the rise of ethnic nationalism in the contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina has created other socio-political pressures that have further reinforced the absence of a rape discourse in the remembrance of Serbian genocide and crimes against humanity. These social forces, like those described above, are embedded in traditional cultural systems that valorize patriarchal constructions of nationhood and masculinity. Within the ethno-religious climate that today characterizes the post-war nationalist movements in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the divisions between Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Muslims are being played out across a number of cultural terrains in which control over memory and historical interpretation is central. Srebrenica and other arenas of collective memory are therefore important markers of nationalist identities. While gender is only one meaning system through which post-war ethnonationalism is being constructed, the representation of men and women in the narratives of genocide is important for solidifying a nationalist identity among Bosnian Muslims within this contentious political climate.

In a discussion of nationalist communities in the former Yugoslavia, Spyros Sofos (1996) insightfully links imagined communities to notions of maleness, brotherhood, and fraternity. Here Sofos (1996) argues that “it is the intensity of the link between national identity and masculinism, and the particular ways in which this is being asserted in the case of ethnic conflict in former Yugoslavia that seems to be of particular interest” (p. 74). In extending Sofos’ analysis to the memorialization of ethnic conflict in a fragmented nationalist environment, the representations of gender at Srebrenica and the simultaneous repression of rape memory can be understood as a strategy for building ethnonationalism through the restoration of Bosnian Muslim brotherhood and community in the face of Serbian aggression.

In this gendered reading of memorial structures, the cemetery represents the resting place of Bosnian Muslim fathers and sons who, in their loss, have come to symbolize the bonds of family, community, and ethnicity in the aftermath of war and devastation. The public and well-publicized burials make visible the sacrifice of men and boys, their grave stones a link to those who are no longer here and who in their absence invoke ideals of Muslim paternity, solidarity, and family. As a memorial space, the cemetery at Srebrenica therefore functions as a site of ethno-familial connectivity. At both the cemetery and in the narratives of the Memorial Room, the lives and memories of fathers and sons are at the center of public remembrance, invoking an idealized imaginary of Muslim paternalism and fatherhood that has come to signify the cultural expression and values of the post-genocide Bosnian Muslim nation.

Within this ethnonationalist discourse, the place of women has been confined to that of the grieving mother and wife, survivors who demand an honored place of rest for their husbands and children and who carry the burden of loss both for themselves and for the country. As the tropes of virtue and goodness underlie the gendered representations of both the dead (men and boys) and the survivors (women and girls) at Srebrenica, it is not surprising then that the memory of genocidal rape has found no place at this memorial or in other places of terror where these atrocities occurred. Because the memory of the raped body is marked by personal, familial, and national degradation, memorializing this suffering and honoring those who survived the violence are antithetical to the project of nation building and ethnic pride. Remembering rape brings to public consciousness the specter of thousands of “spoiled bodies” and the loss of virtue among Bosnian Muslim women, threatening the viability of an ethnonationalist movement upon which notions of women’s goodness and men’s protective manhood rely. In the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the absence of sexual crimes as a trope of national remembrance thus illuminates a politics of memory that is entwined with the restoring of patriarchal order and the revitalization of traditional Muslim society.

Conclusion: collective memory and the future of rape discourse

Given the goals of ethnic nation building and the precarious and vulnerable place that rape survivors occupy in post-war society, it is clear that a collective memory of genocidal rape is difficult to establish within a strongly divided Bosnia-Herzegovina where the cultural norms of a European Slavic patriarchy remain a dominant force for the articulation of imagery and narratives of Serbian aggression and criminality. While, as Ericsson (2010) points out, it might be possible to reframe rape victims as ethnic martyrs within the tropes of memory that surround the death of men, there is little evidence to suggest that such an approach is feasible in light of the stigma that raped women bear in the contemporary post-war culture. Based both on this research and the work of others “bringing rape out into the open” through memorialization may put victims at greater risk for further stigmatization, increasing both their marginalization and that of the children who were born of these violent acts (Erjavec and Volcic, 2010). At the same time, the on-going suppression of rape memory contributes to the reproduction of silence and post-traumatic suffering that, because of cultural norms and political goals, revictimize the already violated women and further villifies the children born of these war time atrocities (Carpenter, 2007).

By erasing rape from public consciousness, the memorial culture of Bosnia-Herzegovina perpetuates the trivialization of gendered war atrocities, a dimension of collective remembrance that has a long and persistent history in the construction of war memory worldwide. To counter this trend in memorialization, celebrities such as Angelina Jolie have recently attended the commemoration ceremonies at Srebrenica to raise awareness about the past and on-going implementation of rape as a tool of war. Using the remembrance of Srebrenica as a public platform in 2014, Jolie spoke out on the mass rape of women in ethnic and genocidal violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere throughout the world. The gap, however, between the celebrity discourse at this internationally attended event and the lived experiences of the survivors in Bosnia-Herzegovina point to the difficulty with which such memories can be recalled and acknowledged within an on-going culture of stigma and shame.

In looking toward the future of memorialization, the issue then becomes how to break the silence surrounding rape memory while still protecting and respecting the lives of those for whom these acts of memorialization are intended to honor. This dilemma of memorialization is further complicated by the diverse cultural environments in which genocidal rape is committed and the importance of attending to the culturally and psychologically specific needs of victim populations. Given that there are no universal resolutions to the challenges of commemorating sexual violence, I would like to offer some thoughts on the possible inclusion of rape memory in the memorial landscape. In this respect, I turn first to a transnationalist feminist approach in which the remembrance of genocidal rape is represented not as the violation of any one ethnic group or nation but as a crime of gender that both historically and contemporarily crosses the borders and boundaries of territory and nation states. Here, the example of Women in Black in Belgrade and the Center for Women Victims of War in Zagreb may be useful models for the establishment of memorial structures and commemorative events that bring together women from both perpetrator and victim nations to remember and honor the tragedy and trauma of rape in warfare. In this respect, Julie Mostov (1995) credits these organizations:

as political actors, and as participants in the economic life of their communities. At the same time, they hope to prevent the instrumentalization of women’s bodies in the service of the nation and stop the violence committed in their defense. (p. 526)

A second approach might be found in treating memorial spaces such as Srebrenica as built environments in which landscapes of memory include multiple discourses that are housed in one site, each discourse representing a collective remembrance of shared suffering among and within groups of individuals (Bosco, 2004). These discourses, rather than universalizing genocide as a memory frame, might draw on Adam Jones’ (2000) concept of gendercide as a more nuanced descriptor of gender-selective forms of violence and death. Referring specifically to the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Jones suggests that gendercide is perhaps a better way to understand and distinguish the types of violence that men and women experience under genocidal threat. Following Jones’ argument, monuments that shape collective memory in post-genocide societies could adopt a gendercide approach that illuminates the history of gender selectivity in the implementation of ethnic violence and atrocities. This approach could incorporate multiple themes of remembrance that include but are not limited to the death of men and boys; the plight of mothers and widows; and the use of rape to destroy the family, the culture, and the reproductive future of an ethnic or racialized group. Since this last representation has yet to be realized and is the most politicized, there are few examples of memorialization from which to draw.

One exception is the exhibit on the Nazi’s use of forced prostitution during World War II. This exhibit, which was first created in Vienna by university students and then traveled to Germany, tells the story of women who were forced into prostitution at men’s camps to meet the sexual demands of officers and elite prisoners. Rather than highlight the identities and bodies of the violated women, the exhibit refers to a map that designates the labor and death camps where the women were taken, the military personnel who had access to the women, and the history of secrecy that has until very recently surrounded this use of gendered violence and forced prostitution by the Nazi regime (Jacobs, 2010). Similarly, the history of mass rape might be commemorated through installations that (1) map out the sites of genocidal rape, (2) portray the perpetrators who have been charged with rape crimes, and (3) present anonymous accounts of written testimonies. Such a memorial exhibit might call on the structures of collective memory that have already been brought together in the office of the Association of Women Victims of War in Sarajevo.

Finally, in posing future discourses on gendercide and especially genocidal rape, the question of purpose must also be addressed. As in the case of the Holocaust, the remembrance of atrocities and the annihilation of a people has multiple functions and meanings. In this respect, some scholars claim that atrocity memory can and should be used as a deterrent to future violence (Koontz, 1994). Others point to the value of memorialization as means to honor those who have suffered and to make visible the tragedies of war and other past events on which a people’s history is founded (Nora, 1989). Still other analyses, like the research presented here, highlight the ways in which memory is used to sustain traditional gender norms in the aftermath of war and to further the rebuilding of ethnonationalist identities through the reproduction of gendered narratives of death, widowhood, and maternal suffering. In recognizing and exploring the social meanings of visible and invisible texts of memory, future scholarship, including my own, must therefore take into account these multiple uses of memory and the intended and unintended consequences of monuments and representations that reside at the intersection of history, politics, and culture.