'Giving Memory a Future': Confronting the Legacy of Mass Rape in Post-Conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina

Abstract Responses to the prevalence of wartime rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1990s civil war has been characterised by a conflicting paradox between the international legal attempts by the ICTY to prosecute perpetrators, and Bosnian society's silence, marginalisation of individual victims, and the pronounced desire to "forget" about certain aspects of wartime victimisation. Given that the contemporary prospects of retributive justice and inter-ethnic reconciliation in Bosnia-Herzegovina remain a distant prospect, the question of what can be done to reassert the ethical value of the victims of mass rape and violence continues to be of great importance. Minow's response to this question is that even 'if the rigor of prosecution and punishment are not pursued, some other form of public acknowledgement, overcoming communal denial, is the very least that can be done to restore dignity to victims' (1998: 17). Pertaining to this, women's testimonies of wartime violation have resulted in the conception of critical and reflective cultural texts such as the two analysed in this paper. As if I Am Not There (Drakilid, 1999) and Esma's Secret (Zbanic, 2006) attempt to confront Bosnian society about its neglect of the women who suffered wartime rape. The texts further broach the subject of the social significance of the children who were born as a result of these rapes. The underlying focus of these texts is an attempt to propose and work towards a vision of post-conflict Bosnian society based on a future of reconciliation and the refusal to differentiate along ethnic lines. Keywords: post-conflict, narrative, reconciliation WINNER OF THE FWSA ANNUAL ESSAY COMPETITION Introduction Despite the centrality of prosecutions for sexual violence and rape in ICTY (2) indictments (Engle, 2005), the post-conflict communal response to the estimated 20,000 Bosnian women who survived rape and sexual torture in the numerous detention camps across Bosnia during the Balkan Civil War (1992--1995) has been characterised by amnesia and silence on the subject (Helms, 2007). Given the symbolic significance of 'rape stories' for the wartime construction of the post-conflict Bosniak (3) identity, the ensuing silence on mass rape, which has been argued, is necessary for future reconciliation and the establishment of an inclusive Bosnian (4) national identity, has left many pressing questions unanswered. These questions relate to Bosnian society's response to the legacy of wartime rape, namely the children that were born as a result of inter-communal violence. Are these children Bosniak, like their mothers, or Serbian, like their fathers? Are they "the enemy within", as the men who conceived them intended them to be, or are these children Bosnian? And if so, what does it mean to be a Bosnian in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina? What cultural legacy should Bosnian children inherit in order to ensure that the violent past does not revisit the future? These questions and others will be broached by way of an analysis of a post-conflict novel which deals with the subject of mass rape in detention: Slavenka Drakulic's As If I Am Not There (1999). Jasmila Zbanic's Esma's Secret (2006), a post-conflict film about the legacy of the wartime victimisation of Bosnian women, will also be analysed (5). To many observers the 1992-1995 inter-ethnic Civil War that raged across Bosnia-Herzegovina resembled a throwback to a bygone era. The news that Bosnian Muslim civilians were being herded onto busses and trains and transported away from their homes to makeshift detention camps, which doubled up as sinister locations of routine rape and torture by Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces, were reminiscent of the genocidal Nazi concentration camps in 1940s Europe (Gutman, 1993). Moreover, the emergence of witness accounts and the publication of news reports of the widespread use of mass rape against Bosnian Muslim women, as one of the tactics deployed by Serb forces to intimidate and terrorise the Muslim population in order to 'ethnically cleanse' Bosnian territories for secession to 'Greater Serbia', led some contemporary observers to label the conflict 'a war against women' (Stiglmayer, 1994). …