The Mandela Dialogues in Bosnia

We land in Sarajevo on a balmy summer day on 7 June. It's slightly cooler than I had been made to expect by the forecasts and the colleagues who are organising the conference we are in the city for. The conference is the next leg in the Mandela Dialogues on Transitional Justice and Memory Work. The dialogues have been going on since 2013, bringing together 26 human rights activists, lawyers, academics, archivists and museum professionals to work through the challenges we face in our work on overcoming oppressive pasts and their legacies.

Over the next five days, the temperature rises quite considerably. More than the weather, it is the emotional intensity of being immersed in the lingering difficult legacies of the 1992 to 1995 war in the Balkans region. The first two days are spent on a study trip. We visit the town of Mostar in the south. Divisions between people who define themselves as Bosniaks (and are Muslim in the main) and those who define themselves as Serbs (and followers of the Serbian Orthodox Church) are quite evident. 

The East and the West of the town are divided and have been since the war. It has only been in recent years that people have dared to begin to even cross the main boulevard that divides the two sides of the city. Even schools are segregated; some attended by Serbs in the morning and Bosniaks in the afternoon or having separate entrances for Serbs and Bosniaks who attend separate classes.

The conference itself considers topics such as, “What helps heal post-conflict societies?” and “The Balkan Example: Did we get stuck in dealing with the past?” The second day of the conference is a further immersion into the very difficult Balkan context. We visit Potocari and the site of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. A total of 8372 Bosniak Muslim men (according to current figures) were killed and buried in mass graves by Rublica Srpska forces at the end of a long siege of the town of Potocari. 

What is most disturbing about the massacre is that the United Nations force that was stationed in the disused battery factory that is now part of the memorial did little to protect the more than 30,000 residents of the town when they were driven to the gates of the barracks complex once the Republica Srpska forces decided to advance on the town. 

The UN soldiers initially allowed between 5000 and 6000 people to shelter in a building on their base and left the rest outside. Men of fighting age were separated off from women and children and taken away to be killed. The women and children were bussed off to the Bosniak side of the front line. A few days later those sheltering in the UN base were kicked out. Again the men were taken away to be executed, and women and children sent to the Bosniak side. 

The work of excavating the mass graves continues. Each year bodies that have been reconstructed are buried in the cemetery across the road from the former UN army base. The cemetery is a haunting place with neat rows and rows of identical white headstones. The work of reconstructing the bodies is difficult because towards the end of the war the bodies were dug up from the initial mass graves in which they had originally been buried and reburied in secondary mass graves. This was in an attempt to hide the scale of the massacre. 

On the final day of the conference we dialogue with war veterans who fought on different sides. They have been working together through a slow process facilitated by the Centre for Non-violent Action (CNA) to bring together people from the three different sides of the conflict that remain at loggerheads – Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats. They speak of the difficulties they face in a society where the Serb parts of the country do not recognise the Bosnian state and consider themselves part of Serbia and the Croat parts consider themselves part of Croatia. The veterans are inspiring. 

We leave with both heavy hearts and new inspiration to carry on. I go on to spend four days immersed in conversations in Belgrade about the region and the methodologies the CNA has developed. In the end, I leave the Balkans confused about the divisions in the societies and frightened that another war may not be too far away, yet more inspired to think about South Africa in new ways.