650485

research-article2016
MSS0010.1177/1750698016650485Memory StudiesJacobs

Article

Memory Studies

The memorial at Srebrenica:

1–17
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
Gender and the social meanings sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1750698016650485
of collective memory in mss.sagepub.com

Bosnia-Herzegovina

Janet Jacobs
University of Colorado Boulder, USA

Abstract
This research examines the way in which the collective memory of the 1990s conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina
has been established and preserved at the memorial to genocide at Srebrenica. Based on extensive fieldwork
at the site and in other regions of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the study explores the ways in which gender is
represented at Srebrenica in the narratives and texts that commemorate Serbian aggression against Bosnian
Muslim populations. Within the structures of memory that Srebrenica represents, the findings reveal the ways
in which fathers and sons are recalled as victims of Serbian genocide and the importance of maternal tropes
of memory for post-war nation building. Furthermore, the study reveals the absence of a rape discourse
in the memorialization of war and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the challenges of commemorating
sexual atrocities in the aftermath of mass trauma. The work that is presented here contributes to the
emerging literature on gender and collective memory and the ways in which women’s experiences are
represented in structures of memorialization.

Keywords
collective memory, ethnonationalism, gender, genocide, religion, Srebrenica

The study of collective memory embraces a wide field of research that includes the role of memori-
als and monuments in the cultural and political constructions of the past. In particular, the ground-
breaking work of James Young (1993) on Holocaust memorials challenges scholars to consider
how landscapes of terror shape a shared memory of historical events that inform the social and
political meanings of genocide for present and future generations. Expanding on the work of
Young, the study that is presented here considers the memorial at Srebrenica from the perspective
of what is remembered, what is forgotten, and whose narratives of suffering become the collective
lens for the commemoration of the genocide that took place during the Balkan conflict of the
1990s. As the central memory frame for Serbian aggression against Bosnian Muslims,1 Srebrenica
stands as the emblem of late twentieth century crimes against humanity in Eastern Europe. An

Corresponding author:
Janet Jacobs, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
Email: Jacobsjl@colorado.edu

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

2 Memory Studies

important site of collective memory and collective mourning, Srebrenica provides a significant
window into how histories of contemporary genocide are recalled—which events of terror become
inscribed into public consciousness and which are erased from public view. Since this period of
modern warfare included massacres as well as mass rape, the memorial at Srebrenica offers a
poignant but powerful study of monumentalism, the politics of memory, and the role that gender
plays in constructing memories of a terrible past.
As a study of memorialization, this research contributes to the growing body of literature on collec-
tive memory that has proliferated over the last two decades (Alexander, 2004; Confino, 1997;
Koselleck, 2006; Olick et al., 2011; Ricouer, 2004; Schramm, 2011). In this regard, the work of Alon
Confino (1997), for example, addresses the various meanings that the study of memory brings to inter-
pretations of history. Confino argues that social frames of memory are embedded in the politics of
culture and history, and as such, collective representations cannot be understood apart from the social
relations of power and control that inform the “memory carriers” (i.e. memorials and monuments) that
transmit and mediate historical events for the larger society. Calling for a study of memory in which
representations of the past are examined through the lens of socio-cultural relationships, Confino’s
analysis resonates with contemporary feminist scholarship on collective memory (Hirsch and Smith,
2002; Zelizer, 2001). Among others, Joan Ringelheim (1997) has challenged the institutions of geno-
cidal memory, such as museums and memorials to the Holocaust, that privilege men’s experiences of
suffering, torment, and survival over narratives that recall gender specific forms of violence such as
sexual exploitation and rape. Ringelheim thus argues for the inclusion of women-centered perspectives
that focus on gender-based traumas that make visible the abuse of women in war time conflict.
Following Confino and Ringelheim, my research examines the representation of both women
and men at Srebrenica and the post-war culture out of which the site emerged. Between 2011 and
2012, I traveled extensively throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina visiting the memorial at Srebrenica,
as well as sites in Sarajevo and Mostar. The main focus of my fieldwork was on the ways in which
narratives of war and genocide reflect the different contexts of mass violence that characterized the
ethnic cleansing that took place during the 1990s conflict. In researching the memorial landscape
of the recovering nation, I studied the imagery and symbolism of historical markers among a
diverse set of memorial structures that signified and preserved the memory of violence that ended
with the peace accords in 1995. In addition, my fieldwork included formal and informal interviews
with a number of significant actors who have been involved in the preservation of memory for
Bosnia-Herzegovina, including guides at memorial sites, social activists, and Bosnian scholars.
The overall findings of my research indicate that the memoryscape of post-war Bosnia is limited
both in scope and in the demarcation of places of remembrance. Within a somewhat narrow frame-
work of nationalist memorialization, there are relatively few markers of a terrible past, an absence
of commemorative spaces that gives further importance to the narratives of collective memory that
have been constructed at Srebrenica (Halilovich, 2011). In addition, my research also points to the
difficulties of commemorating a genocidal history that is marked both by the tragic loss of men and
the sexual victimization of women, as each of these forms of terror reveals the suffering of a vic-
timized people. To situate these findings within the political and social contexts of post-war
Bosnia-Herzegovina, I begin my discussion with a brief overview of the Bosnian Muslim genocide
and the significant role that Serbian nationalism and ethno-religious differences played in the
enactment of Serbian aggression.

The 1990s conflict: a historical and cultural overview

Between 1992 and 1995, the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina came under attack by the Serb mili-
tary. Although the violence was widespread and included, among other regions, the areas of Foca,

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

Jacobs 3

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 country-
side. 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 south-
ern 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 nar-
ratives, the Serbs portrayed the Bosnian Muslims as a threat to Serbian nationhood. In this dis-
course, 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 biologi-
cal 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 national-
ism in the Serbian construction of the Bosnian Muslim population. This blurring of identity catego-
ries 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,

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

4 Memory Studies

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 analy-
sis 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 slaugh-
ter” (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 victim-
hood and Serbian criminality (Kontsevaia, 2013; Pollack, 2003a; Selimovic, 2013). Serbian resist-
ance 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 imme-
diately following the war, women began to demonstrate every month to bring attention to the miss-
ing 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 mili-
tary 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 mother-
hood, a trope of remembrance that would later inform the structures of memory within the memo-
rial, 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 cre-
ate a “monument over failure of the international community,” choosing a site that would be a

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

Jacobs 5

Figure 1. Ruins in the Bosnian countryside.

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.
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 reli-
gious 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,

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

6 Memory Studies

Figure 2. Grave stones at the memorial cemetery.

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

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

Jacobs 7

Figure 3. Banner at Srebrenica.

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)

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 politi-
cal-historical discourse of Serbian aggression and international complicity, a trope of memorializa-
tion 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.

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,

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

8 Memory Studies

Figure 4. Memorial Room factory.

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 memorializa-
tion 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 biog-
raphies of this lost generation.
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 con-
centration 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

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

Jacobs 9

Figure 5. Image of mother and child at Srebrenica memorial.

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 relation-
ship to their husbands and children (Simic, 2008).
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 mas-
sacre 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.

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

10 Memory Studies

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 vio-
lence 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 “experi-
ences 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

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

Jacobs 11

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 impover-
ished 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 sur-
vivors, 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 survi-
vors 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 produc-
tion 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 frame-
work, 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

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

12 Memory Studies

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 construc-
tions 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 strat-
egy 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 con-
nectivity. 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 atroci-
ties 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 vio-
lence 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.

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

Jacobs 13

Conclusion: collective memory and the future of rape discourse

Given the goals of ethnic nation building and the precarious and vulnerable place that rape survi-
vors 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 fur-
ther 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 perpetu-
ates 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 memori-
alization, 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 mem-
ories 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 remem-
brance 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 struc-
tures 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 envi-
ronments in which landscapes of memory include multiple discourses that are housed in one site,

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

14 Memory Studies

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 gen-
dercide 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 vio-
lated 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 monu-
ments and representations that reside at the intersection of history, politics, and culture.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and insightful suggestions and
comments.

Notes
1. In the years following the conflict, Bosnian Muslims have also adopted the term Bosniak to delineate
their separate ethnic-religious heritage.
2. The other designated safe zones were Sarajevo, Zepa, Gorazde, Tuzla, and Bihac.

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

Jacobs 15

3. This organization which is a Dutch-supported non-governmental organization (NGO) has variously been
referred to as the Mothers of Srebrenica and the Women of Srebrenica (see Leydesdorff, 2011).
4. In 2007, the Mothers brought claims against the Netherlands in the European Court of Human Rights for
failing to carry out their responsibilities to protect the Bosnian Muslims under United Nations interna-
tional law. In 2013, their case was rejected and dismissed by the international courts (see Cogan, 2013).
5. Today over 6000 bodies have been recovered and have been buried at the site.

References
Alexander J (2004) On the social construction of moral universes: the Holocaust from war crime to trauma
drama. In: Alexander J, Eyerman R, Giesen B, et al. (eds) Cultural Trauma and Collective Memory.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 192–263.
Baumel J (1997) Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust. London: Valentine Mitchell.
Bax M (2000) Warlords, priests and the politics of ethnic cleansing: a case-study from rural Bosnia
Hercegovina. Ethnic and Racial Studies 23(1): 16–36.
Boose L (2002) Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian rape camps, Turkish impalement, and Serb cultural mem-
ory. Signs: A Journal of Women, Culture and Society 28(1): 20–38.
Bosco F (2004) Human rights politics and scaled performances of memory: conflicts among the Madres de
Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. Social &Cultural Geography 5(3): 381–402.
Bougarel X (2007) Death and the nationalist: martyrdom, War Memory and Veteran Identity among
Bosnian Muslims. In: Bougarel X, Helms E and Duijzings G (eds) The New Bosnian Mosaic:
Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing
Company, pp. 167–191.
Carpenter C (ed.) (2007) Protecting Children of Sexual Violence Survivors in Conflict Zones. Bloomfield,
CT: Kumarian Press.
Cogan JK (2013) The stitching mothers of Srebrenica v. Netherlands. American Society of International Law
104(4): 884–890.
Confino A (1997) Collective memory and cultural history: problems and method. American Historical Review
102(5): 1386–1403.
Copleon R (1994) Surfacing gender: reconceptualizing crimes against women in time of war. In: Stiglmayer A
(ed.) Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska
Press, pp. 197–218.
Daniel-Wrabetz J (2007) Children born of rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the convention on the rights of
the child. In: Carpenter C (ed.) Protecting Children of Sexual Violence Survivors in Conflict Zones.
Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, pp. 21–39.
Ericsson K (2010) Rape, love and war—personal or political? Theoretical Criminology 15(1): 67–82.
Erjavec K and Volcic Z (2010) Living with the sins of their fathers: an analysis of self-representation of ado-
lescents born of war rape. Journal of Adolescent Research 25(3): 359–386.
Halilovich H (2011) Beyond the sadness: memories and homecomings among survivors of “ethnic cleansing”
in a Bosnian village. Memory Studies 4(1): 42–52.
Helms E (2007) “Politics is a whore”: women, morality and victimhood in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina. In:
Bougarel X, Helms E and Duijzings G (eds) The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral
Claims in a Post-War Society. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, pp. 235–253.
Helms E (2012) Bosnian girl: nationalism and innocence through images of women. In: Suber D and
Karamanic S (eds) Retracing Images: Visual Culture after Yugoslavia. London: Brill, pp. 195–222.
Hirsch M and Smith V (2002) Feminism and cultural memory: an introduction. Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society 28(1): 1–19.
Ivekovic I (2002) Nationalism and the political use and abuse of religion: the politicization of orthodoxy,
Catholicism and Islam in Yugoslav successor states. Social Compass 49(4): 523–536.
Jacobs J (2010) Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory. London: I.B.
Tauris.
Jones A (2000) Gender and genocide. Journal of Genocide Research 2(2): 185–211.

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

16 Memory Studies

Kontsevaia D (2013) Mass graves and the politics of reconciliation: construction of memorial sites after the
Srebrenica Massacre. Totem: The University of Western Ontario Journal of Anthropology 21(1): 15–31.
Koontz C (1994) Between memory and oblivion: concentration camps in German memory. In: Gillis J (ed.)
Commemorations: The Politics of National Memory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp.
258–280.
Koselleck R (2006) Memory, and identity. Contributions to the History of Concepts 2(1): 99–127.
Leydesdorff S (2007) Stories from no land: the women of Srebrenica speak out. Human Rights Review 8(3):
187–198.
Leydesdorff S (2011) Surviving the Bosnian Genocide. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
MacKinnon C (1994) Rape, genocide and women’s human rights. In: Stiglmayer A (ed.) Mass Rape: The War
Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 73–81.
Mostov J (1995) “OUR WOMENs”/“THEIR WOMENs”: symbolic boundaries, territorial markers, and vio-
lence in the Balkans. Peace &Change 20(4): 515–529.
Nora P (1989) Between memory and history: les liex de memoire. Representations 26: 7–24.
Oddie M (2012) The relationship of religion and ethnic nationalism in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Religion in
Eastern Europe XXXII(1): 34–42.
Office of the High Representative (OHR) (2000) Decisions on the location of a cemetery and monument
for the victims of Srebrenica. Available at: http://www.ohre.int/decisions/plipdec/default.asp?content_
id=219 (accessed November 2015).
Olick J, Vinitzky-Seroussi V and Levy D (eds) (2011) The Collective Memory Reader. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Olujic M (1998) Embodiment of terror: gendered violence in peacetime and wartime in Croatia and Bosnia–
Herzegovina. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 12(1): 31–50.
Pollack C (2003a) Burial at Srebrenica: linking place and trauma. Social Science & Medicine 56(4): 793–801.
Pollack C (2003b) Intentions of burial: mourning, politics, and memorials following the massacre at
Srebrenica. Death Studies 27(2): 125–142.
Powers G (1996) Religion, conflict and prospects for peace in Bosnia, Croatia and Yugoslavia. Journal of
International Affairs 50(1): 22–40.
Ricouer P (2004) Memory, History and Forgetting. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Ringelheim J (1997) Gender and genocide: a split memory. In: Lentin R (ed.) Gender and Catastrophe.
London: Zed Books, pp. 18–33.
Schramm K (2011) Introduction: landscapes of violence: memory and sacred space. History & Memory 23(1):
5–22.
Selimovic J (2013) Making peace, making memory: peacebuilding and politics of remembrance at memorials
of mass atrocities. Peacebuilding 1(3): 334–348.
Sells M (1996) The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Simic O (2008) A tour of a site of genocide: mothers, bones and borders. Journal of International Women’s
Studies 9(3): 320–330.
Simic O (2009) Remembering and placing the dead: law, authority and genocide in Srebrenica. Law Text
Culture 13(1): 273–310.
Sofos S (1996) Inter-ethnic violence and gendered constructions of ethnicity in Former Yugoslavia. Social
Identities 2(1): 73–92.
Stiglmayer A (ed.) (1994) Mass Rape: The war against women in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press.
Swimelar S (2012) Education in post-war Bosnia: the nexus of social security, identity and nationalism.
Ethnopolitics: Formerly Global Review of Ethnopolitics 12(2): 161–182.
The Association of Women Victims of War (2011) Personal interview.
Todorova T (2011) “Giving memory a future”: confronting the legacy of mass rape in post-conflict Bosnia-
Herzegovina. Journal of International Women Studies 12(2): 3–15.
Van Boeschoten R (2010) The trauma of war rape: a comparative view on the Bosnian conflict and the Greek
civil war. History and Anthropology 14(1): 41–54.

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016

Jacobs 17

Yaeger P (2003) Rubble as archive, or 9/11 as dust, debris, and bodily vanishing. In: Greenberg J (ed.)
Trauma at Home after 9/11. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Young J (1993) The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meanings. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Zelizer B (2001) Women in Holocaust Photography. In: Zelizer B (ed.) Visual Culture and the Holocaust.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 247–271.

Author biography
Janet Jacobs is Professor of Sociology and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her
research focuses on ethnic and religious violence, gender, mass trauma, and collective memory. She is author of
numerous books and journal articles, including Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective
Memory (2010) and The Holocaust Across Generations: Trauma and Its Inheritance Among Descendants of
Survivors (2016). Her current work is on genocide and collective memory in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at Freie Universitaet Berlin on October 17, 2016