Article Memory Studies4(1) 42 52 The Author(s) 2011 Beyond the sadness:Memories Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.

.nav and homecomings among DOI: 10.1177/1750698010382160http://mss.sagepub.com survivors of ethnic cleansing in a Bosnian village Hariz Halilovich University of Melbourne,Australia Abstract The 11 new marble headstones erected at the small village cemetery at the outski rts of Hegic.i in late July 2007 outnumbered the number of people who had returned to the village.Only the d ates of death engraved on the white headstones revealed that most of the people buried that day died to gether on the same day in July 1992.The small congregation of some 50 people,made up of surviving relative s and neighbours coming from afar,mourned in dignity and prayed for the souls of the victims of the mass acre.Through ethnography of a collective funeral for the victims of ethnic cleansing in a small Bosnian vil lage,and reflexive narrative analysis of the past and present realities of the survivors,this article explore s the complex relationship between memory, place and reconciliation in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. Keywords displacement, ethics, mass violence, memory research Memoryscholarsresearchingactsofmassviolenceandtraumahaveachallengingtasktonegoti ate between the demands of the disciplinary rigour and the pressing ethical and poli tical questions intrinsic to their research. Anthropologist Thomas Cushman (2004:7) argues that the scholars are . izes the accounts of perpetrators of mass violence; and, second, to avoid produc ing accounts that deny the phenomenological realities of social suffering. In line with Cushman, I have attempted to turn raw memories of mass violence into a scholarly article that does not ration alize what happened nor in any way deny or diminish the suffering of those I write about. This artic le discusses how . formed and rendered meaningful as identity (re)constructions among survivors fro

m an ethnically cleansed village in north-western Bosnia.1. monies of horrific war crimes and information about war criminals who continue t o benefit from their actions during the war. Some of these testimonies were first-hand witness accounts, while other stories were recollections of narratives told and remembered by others. Th is article, like Corresponding author: Hariz Halilovich, General Practice & Primary Health Care Academic Centre,The Uni versity of Melbourne, 200 Berkeley Email: hha@unimelb.edu.au

Halilovich 43 much of my other work, is above all a reminder, a written memorial to all those who perished and an affirmation of those who survived but whose stories would not have been other wise heard and remembered. As an anthropologist living in Australia, I am a professional outsider in relati on to my informants, who, in many cases, ask themselves why a scholar from so far away would be inter ested in their stories? However, regardless of my professional positioning, as someone wh o was born and raised in Bosnia I will always be perceived as a cultural insider which indeed I am. More importantly, I will also always be an insider when it comes to my relationship with the 1992 95 w ar in Bosnia in which my intimate world was shattered and many of my relatives and fri ends perished. I will never deny the relationship with my dead relatives and the suffering they and many other innocent people went through. Any other approach would be unethical and impossib le. Personal experiences of war have had a profound impact on me as a person and made me more receptive to human suffering and issues of social justice. The scholar witness role I have adop ted in my work raises many challenges, including the internal struggles I face as a survivor in my own right. Narrating displacement and remembering home Forced displacement has profoundly influenced and sometimes radically reshaped t he identities of some 2.2 million Bosnians who fled the 1992 95 campaign of violence and ethnic c leansing . As Val Colic-Peisker (2003: 3) observed, this goes beyond the experience of the s pecial displacement of refugees or internally displaced people: it was, and has been, a displacement of identity as well . In some instances, the identities of the displaced have been partially or c ompletely replaced, adapted, hybridized and entangled with new identities, roles and places, while in other instances there is a prevalent feeling of permanent misplacement underpinned by an inability to reconstruct a sense of belonging in a new sociocultural environment. However, when referring to displacement, I do not suggest that the experience of emplacement is a natural human condition and that identities placed or rooted in a particular place are static and unchangeable. For many families and local communities stories of forced displacement and its a ftermath continue to be told, retold and remembered, in many different ways because of its catacly smic proportions. In fact, displacement has played the central role in (post-)war memory construct ion for

Bosnians unable to remain in their homeland. Many survivors, including those des cribed in this article, refer to displacement as a memory of a previous life. Yet, while talkin g about who they are now , they do so in relation to their memories of places, past experiences and soc ial histories. In the absence of a homeland and old social networks, memory of not only who I once w as, but also who I now am often becomes the quintessential aspect of the individual and group identity of the displaced. The loss of place as an important anchor of social identity gets compensated for or kept alive by the memories and stories of the place lost. Contested memories In 2009, while revisiting the Prijedor region in north-western Bosnia, where I c onducted extensive fieldwork as a part my PhD in social anthropology, I was directly confronted wit h conflicting memories of the events that took place in the area during the 1992 95 war.2 Sevent een years after ethnic cleansing was committed in this area, clear remnants of the war were also p resent in the competing narratives about violence that took place in this once multicultural t own. In the minds of many people, what happened in their hometowns and villages was accounted for by the dominant post-war nationalist narratives. As Aleida Assmann (2006: 71) put it, for as long as the painful

44 Memory Studies 4(1) asymmetry of memory persists, the war continues to be present in both people s real ity and imagination. 3 The memory making and unmaking process being as much about forgetting as about remembering (Ricoeur, 2006) has been one of the main preoccupations of the ethno -nationalist political elites dominating the politics in the country. The control over public ly articulated and transmitted memory is integral to power relations as, to paraphrase George Orwel l (1961), quite literally, those who control the present control the past. As in many other plac es in BiH, the official nationalist discourse in Prijedor has appropriated and ethnicized personal memorie s, with individuals expected to selectively remember and forget different parts of the town s recent h istory that do (or do not) fit the prescribed ethnic history. The official history of the Re publika Srpska (RS) government is diametrically opposed to the popular memory of those who were ethni cally cleansed from Prijedor. In fact, the RS government has been actively denying and ignoring both the memories of the victims and judicial rulings about crimes committed in Prije dor during the war.4 The same political imperatives have also hegemonized the public memory of t heir own people , Serbs, excluding all individuals and events that do not fit the exclusive nationalist framework. There is, for instance, no mention of Serbs who rejected participating in the 19 92 95 ethnic cleansing of their town. Some of these brave, now forgotten, individuals died at the hands of their ethnic compatriots (Lippman 2010). While forgetting those who do not qualify for i ts version of history, the RS government has been inscribing the official memory in public spa ce, renaming streets and squares to represent and remember some of the fiercest nationalists such as Zoran Karlica, Jovan Raskovic or Nikola Pasic, as well as erecting grandiose monuments in the form of exclusive religious symbols and introducing new public holidays and commemoratio ns. The town s official holiday, Prijedor s Liberation Day, celebrated on 30 April, is the same d ay the Serb militias started the campaign of ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs from the area in 1992.5 Public expression of the popular memory of ethnically cleansed Bosniaks and Croa ts in the Prijedor region has been reduced to low-key commemorations and burials of identified vict ims recovered from mass graves in the region (cf. Tochman, 2008; Wesselingh and Vaulerin, 2005). Fo r many of the displaced survivors, returning to their destroyed villages to bury their dead is seen as a n act of reaffirming the continuity of their local identities as well as an act of resistance and def iance. For survivors, these are crucial steps in regaining control over their memories in place, even if the

y now live thousands of kilometers away. The return of the dead becomes a symbolic return of those wh o survived. By re-burying the dead, survivors are re-grounding themselves their identities, lif e-stories and communities in the place that was taken away from them. In this context, the fun erals and commemorations act as a catalyst for stories that need to be told and remembered. On behalf of and through the dead the survivors are reclaiming their own past and their right to the place in the present and future, while their transient return is the eternal return of those who shared that past with them. My exploration of survivor stories and memories will take the reader to two diff erent geographical locations, both of them central to the experiences and memories of a survivor fr om a village near Prijedor, in ways that enmesh place and life-story. As Leslie van Gelder (2 008: 4) puts it: beneath our capacity to story is our deeper comprehension of the concept of plac e. We are always somewhere, and it is through place that we are able to root our sense of story and our sens e of self. Our stories make places important to us, and places become vessels for holding and keeping o ur stories. However, it s also clear that for those who have experienced forced displacement, this relationship can be reversed so that stories become vessels for holding and keeping places. W e are able to root our sense of place and our sense of self through story. There is, in fact, an active interplay between places and stories or memories of places especially when places, such as those with

which I m concerned in this article, are vandalized, butchered, divided up and sca rred. That kind of place, evoked, narrated and remembered, can become a constant reminder of hum iliation and suffering, a space filled with trauma that triggers psychic and visceral reactio ns on the part of expellees, but it also remains a place of desire, with those who once lived ther e propelled by a sense of obligation to keep telling its stories. Placing Edita s story Established in 1902, the hairdressing salon Bachinger s has been in business for m ore than a century. Located in the Second Bezirk in the historical part of Vienna, the salon has ret ained many elements of the glorious Austrian past within its walls. The salon s furniture and interior itself would fit well into a museum collection from the late 1800s or early 1900s. A fr amed picture of the once much-loved Kaiserin Sisi that dominates the room might well have been hangi ng there for most of the previous century.6 High ceilings, typical of the Viennese Altbau, ha ve retained the same ornamental design, and antique, ice-like crystal chandeliers hanging above clien ts heads.7 The display of hairdressing tools, lotions and pumps along with the dimmed light and the pleasant smell of freshly washed hair, evoke a tranquil, decadent atmosphere of times long gone . The whole setting radiates continuity, stability and harmony, with everything and everyone in the right place. It does not look a likely place in which to find a Bosnian refugee who survived a m assacre. In Bachinger s salon everything is Viennese: the interior, the clients, the local stories and the town gossip being told and retold again and again. Even the language spoken is a distinct local dialect of German, the so-called wienerisch or Viennese. Meisterin Edita, the ha irdresser in charge of the salon, is popular with the regular clientele for her conversational skill s and good sense of humour. Her wienerisch is as fine as that of any Viennese woman who grew up in t he vicinity of the Stephans Platz, going to the Marien Kirche or Prater on Sundays and enjoying the Neujahrskonzert on the first day of January.8 For Edita, Bachinger s salon has been more than a job. It has become a part of who she is, a place where she belongs and is respected for what she does. Those who come regul arly to the salon have learned that Edita is the backbone of Bachinger s. But not many know or have ever asked who Edita really is and where she comes from mainly because there is no suggestion t hat Edita might not be Viennese by birth. Her first name is not uncommon in Vienna, nor is her a ppearance distinctive.

She looks like any ordinary young Viennese woman, maybe slightly too enthusiasti c about her job, which is another Germanic virtue, some might say. And this is who Edita has b een for many years now: an excellent hairdresser at Bachinger s, a jolly Viennese Fraulein, an Austrian citizen. But her acculturated belonging conceals her ever-present sadness and her immense personal loss. Only a few people in Vienna know that some 18 years ago, when she was still a ch ild, Edita lived a completely different life, in a different country, in a small village with man y relatives. And then she became a refugee, and grew up in a matter of months. Mapping Edita s memories of lost home Until summer 1992, Edita Hegic, who was 13 years old at the time, lived with her family her 17-year-old brother Fikret, her mother Enisa, her father Alija and her grandfath er Smajo in the hamlet of Hegici, which belonged to a cluster of smaller villages attached to th e larger village of Biscani, 7 kilometers from the city of Prijedor, in north-western Bosnia. Most o f the 48 houses in the hamlet belonged to other members of the extended Hegic family, Bosnian Musli ms (Bosniaks) who had inhabited the area for generations. In fact, the hamlet, as its name rev eals, was founded by

a Hegic ancestor many years ago. Apart from four Orthodox Christian (Serb) famil ies, there were few families to which the Hegics were not directly related living in the hamlet. Edita and her brother Fikret were attending the secondary trade school in Prijed or. Their mother Enisa was a housewife and their widowed grandfather Smajo helped in the garden. Edita s father Alija was a postman, delivering mail in the local area. Like most other governme nt jobs in the former Yugoslavia, especially those that involved an official uniform, a postman held a wellrespected position in the community. Alija Hegic proudly wore his blue postman s u niform, which very much resembled that of a pilot or an air force officer. The post office als o provided a reliable motorbike, which Alija was free to use and look after as his own. He loved his j ob, riding on his motorbike between villages and from house to house, exchanging the news and maki ng many friends. He was popular and respected for his reliability, honesty and a good se nse of humour. He was always ready to crack a joke without insulting anyone. It seemed that everyo ne loved Postman Ale , as they fondly called him. Edita and her brother Fikret especially loved him and were very proud of their Dad. He would put them on his motorbike and they would hold him f irm while riding around, feeling excited and safe behind his back. By any standards they could be considered a happy family, living their ordinary lives in the small village. This is how Edit a likes to remember her childhood which abruptly ended in summer of 1992. Massacre in Hegic.i Even when, in the spring of 1992, most of the Bosniak and Croat villages around Prijedor were destroyed and ethnically cleansed by various Serb militias controlled by Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, Hegici hoped that they would be spared as they didn t have any a rmed groups in the village to provoke a conflict with the Serbs.9 Their relations with their Serb neighbours became progressively less cordial and in most cases limited to essential greetin gs when they crossed paths. Edita remembers that only Ljubica, a Serb woman living in the vil lage, remained friendly with other Bosniaks. Rising tensions between the two groups were palpab le but no one did anything provoke the other side. While Bosniaks limited their movements to essen tial work in the fields and tending to animals, Serb neighbours would frequently leave the villag e and on many nights would not return to their homes. This particularly worried the Bosniaks i n Hegici as they suspected their neighbours of plotting against them with other Serbs outside the village.

On the night of 19 July 1992, none of the Serb villagers stayed in Hegici. The n ext morning two trucks and four armed transport personnel carriers packed with armed, uniformed men hastily entered the village. They quickly blocked all the exits from the small village. The armed men identified themselves as Serb military police searching for Muslim extremists , members of the Muslim SDA political party and weapons. The police commander, barking orders ove r a megaphone, gave an ultimatum to the villagers to hand over all the weapons and all the men from 16 to 60 years of age to come out. They would start burning the houses if the villager s didn t comply within 10 minutes. Immediately, Hegici men came out of their homes and gathered in the centre of the village. A few hunting rifles and pistols were handed over to the militiamen . Most of the militiamen were not known to the villagers and some spoke the distinct Serbian dialect of S erbs from Serbia, but the villagers recognized one soldier in the group. It was J.M., a loca l thug who lived just a few kilometers from Hegici, in the Serb village of Jugovci. He was heavil y armed Rambostyle and was yelling at the villagers, all of whom he knew well, not to hide an yone or any weapons as he would personally kill each of them. No one dared to speak out. Edita s parents panicked and didn t know what to do with the 17-year-old Fikret. Edi ta s mother insisted on keeping him in the house, while her father thought it was too danger ous to hide him. In

the end, Fikret joined his father. The grandfather, who was 70 years of age, sta yed inside hoping that his son and grandson would be back soon. The morning started its bloody cou rse in the following minutes. While most women and children kept away from the windows of their house s, hiding behind the blinds of her kitchen window, Edita was trying to see what was happen ing outside. What she saw was the beginning of a nightmare, which was to become a defining part of her life. J.M. started swearing at Bego Alagic, one of the villagers, asking him for weapons an d accusing him of being an SDA supporter. Bego, a local farmer and a simple village man, tried to explain that he neither had a weapon nor knew anything about politics. J.M. hit Bego across his face. Bego was trying to say something, but before he was able to do that, J.M. aimed his gun a t Bego s chest and pulled the trigger. Almost instantly, Bego fell to the ground. Some 20 meters aw ay, Edita was witnessing a cold-blooded murder and she could not believe that what she saw was real. Was it so easy to kill a human being? Minutes later, all the Hegici men were marched outside th e village. Shortly after they disappeared from Edita s view, salvos of gunfire started. The shooting went on for halfan-hour and then stopped. Edita feared the worst. The soldiers returned to the village and started searching the houses, looking f or valuables, asking for money and harassing the women, children and the few elderly men. No-one dare d to resist them. By noon, most of the militiamen had left the village. Some dozen soldiers stayed in the village, preventing anyone from leaving. J.M seemed to be the guy in charge. Lat er that evening, J.M. and his gang were drinking and singing nationalistic Serb songs. No one slept th at night in Hegici. Edita cried with her mother. Her grandfather Smajo silently smoked cigarette aft er cigarette. In the morning, Edita could not wait any longer. With her mother and grandfather , she went out and, taking a shortcut behind the houses, walked to the paddock where the Hegici men were taken the previous day. On the paddock behind the houses, in groups of up to eight, 84 bodies were lying in the green grass. They were all dead. Edita felt paralysed while her mother En isa, frantically started looking for Ale and Fikret. She turned each body to see the face of the victim. Grandpa Smajo helped her. After a while, physically and mentally exhausted, they started to look for the light blue shirt Ale was wearing the previous morning. They spotted him among th e other dead men. It took them another few minutes to find Fikret s body. He was lying some 20 meters from the others. He might have tried to run away before he was killed.

The bodies were left lying for the next two hot days. The soldiers refused Smajo s pleadings to bury the victims. This was an additional humiliation of the survivors as Muslim custom required the dead to be buried within 24 hours of their death. On the third day, two truc ks arrived in the village and four elderly men Smajo Hegic, Hasan Hegic, Hajrudin Pelak and Husnij a Hadzic were ordered to go with the soldiers to load the bodies onto the trucks. The fra gile old men spent hours carrying the bodies of their closest relatives and loading them onto the t rucks. Most of those killed were from the Hegic family. When the collection of the bodies was complet ed, the four men were forced to step onto the truck themselves. When the truck passed next to Edi ta s house, she saw her grandpa Smajo for the last time. He was standing on the uncovered truck amon g all the dead bodies. He waved at her while the tears were running down his old cheeks. Next t o him was their neighbour, Hasan. Hajrudin and Husnija were on the second truck. All four disapp eared with the trucks that were driving the 84 bodies away. Years later most of the bodies and body parts were found in a mass grave in Jakina Kosa near the distant town of Ljubija. The surviving villagers of Hegici, the women and children, endured a month of pi llage, humiliation and violence before they were ordered to march to the football stadium in Prijed or from where they were deported in trucks and buses to central Bosnia, near Travnik, on 21 Au gust 1992. It took two days to empty the stadium in Prijedor of the thousands of desperate peo ple expelled from their homes. During the trip the convoy was stopped many times by more arme d Serb

militias, each robbing and humiliating the expellees as they passed through. Som e 200 people were taken from the buses and trucks and disappeared before they reached safety on th e other side of the demarcation line on the mountain Vlasic (cf. Hecimovic, 2009; Obradovic, 2009).1 0 Once in the Bosnian government-controlled town of Travnik which was overpopulate d with refugees from western Bosnia and thousands of other destitute people with no she lter and limited food rations from the humanitarian aid Edita and her mother continued their oneway journey initially to Croatia and then further to Austria. They reached Vienna on 18 of O ctober 1992. Shortly after their arrival in Vienna, for the first time in months, they were touched b y the kindness of strangers. A friendly Viennese family invited Edita and her mother to stay with them and se parated them from the other refugees at the overcrowded refugee reception centre. From that d ay, Edita and Enisa have felt more like guests than refugees in Austria. They were accommodated in a small apartment owned by their host family, and shortly thereafter Edita s mother was employed by the hosts in their family-owned business, while Edita was enrolled in school. Both Edita and her mo ther still feel deeply indebted to their hosts, who, over the years, have become a second family to them. Edita s homecoming Fifteen years later, Edita made her first homecoming . There were almost no Hegics left in Hegici, apart from a few ageing returnees, mostly widowed women. Edita did not return to stay or to rebuild her house burned down 15 years earlier. As the only surviving child and grandchild, she was back to attend the burial of her father and her grandfather, whose remains w ere found in a mass grave. Edita s DNA had been used in the process of identifying their remains. She told me how, before the funeral, she went to the forensic morgue lab in Sanski Most where the bodies had been stored, and wept touching her father s and her grandfather s bones. Though the skele tons were incomplete as some bones could not be located, she felt that they belonged to her relatives. But her brother Fikret was not to be buried on the day: his remains were not found a nd he continued to be counted as missing . After a low-key religious ceremony to lay to rest the 100 victims of the 1992 eth nic cleansing of Prijedor s Muslims, the day ended at the rebuilt mosque in downtown Prijedor. C askets with the remains were distributed according to the victims place of origin. Most Bosniak v illages around Prijedor received some of their lost residents. At the cemetery in Hegici, 11 fr

esh graves were dug. Surviving relatives came from Austria, Sweden and the USA to participate at the funeral. Edita knew all of them, but it was a sad reunion in the place that once was home and w as now filled with painful memories. She was here to say her final goodbye to her Dad Ale and her G randpa Smajo. At times, her sadness was mixed with anger and something that could only be desc ribed as pride or defiance. We brought them home , she declared. They returned to stay. The 11 new marble headstones erected at the small village cemetery at the outski rts of Hegici in late July 2007 outnumbered the number of people who had returned to the village. On the day that the 11 victims were added to the graveyard, there was no public acknowledgement or mourning, nor any official recognition that something tragic had happened to the Hegici pe ople 15 years earlier. Only the dates of death engraved on the white headstones revealed that the people buried that day died together; in other words, they were killed on the same day in July 1992. The small congregation of some 50 people, made up of surviving relatives and neighbours, m ourned in dignity and prayed for the souls of the victims of the massacre. The religious ceremony itself was transformed by the massacres, as in Islam only men are allowed to participate in funeral pra ctices. However, on that day at the Muslim cemetery in Hegici, women were burying their men, performing the roles traditionally reserved for males only. The strict religious rules need ed to be adjusted

to reflect the new realities; mostly men perished and mostly women survived. Edi ta and her mother Enisa performed their roles stoically and with dignity. From the cemetery, the Hegici survivors could see the remains of what was once t heir village, the ruins and burned out empty shells of their homes, with only a few new red ro ofs of those who had returned and rebuilt their houses. They could also see the old untouched hou ses of their Serb neighbours. Former neighbours. The sight of their destroyed village, the funeral of their dead fellow villagers who had been gunned down in the field clearly visible from the cemeter y, the untouched Serb houses, and the same hot day in July must have reminded the Hegic i survivors of the hot July 15 years earlier. It seemed that time had stopped and everything th at had happened was still happening to them and their village. On this hot July day, 7 kilometers fr om Prijedor, in the green field marked by dozens of white headstones, again they felt as alone, aban doned and forgotten as they were in July 1992. But they also felt a strong sense of belonging to eac h other and to their dead relatives as well as a sense of moral superiority and pride for takin g part in the important ceremony. After all, they did not kill anyone and they were burying their dead i n their land. There was no one asking them for forgiveness that day; Serb neighbors and RS officials stayed away or watched from a distance yet another belated mass funeral of Muslims. Yet another return of those who once lived in the village bringing their dead home and leaving again until t he next funeral makes them come back. Instead of a Conclusion At Edita s invitation, I travelled to her former village to attend the funeral of her long-lost relatives. The locations of Edita s memories, which I had been in charge of recording for more than four years, were for the first time graphically presented to me. I saw the ruins of h er home, I saw the field behind the village where the Hegici men were killed in a summary execution a decade and half earlier. I saw the coffins and fresh graves where her relatives were put to their final rest. Without thousands of ordinary people such as J.M, who had participated in the kill ings of the Hegici men and boys driven by a logic, albeit perverse, that they were following their conscience and doing good for their people genocide in Bosnia would not have happened. Whil e the visitors former residents of Hegici were leaving their dead relatives and their former vi llage behind, some of the former Serb neighbours and their new Serb compatriots who settled in Hegici were

sitting in front of a shop which also serves as the only village pub. Among them was J.M. He was calmly drinking his beer and looking at the passing cars and the passengers in t hem as if all this had nothing to do with him. To me, he did not look like someone who showed any remor se for his deeds, or like someone who was worried because he had committed a war crime 15 y ears earlier. To him the crimes might have paid off as his pre-war status as a local thug was elevated to that of a Serb war veteran. I could only think of Hannah Arendt, of the banality of evil , even of the banality of my research. Here I was researching , but in reality I was overwhelmed by the gr ief of my research participants and their immense loss, and there he was, one of the execu tioners having another of his ordinary days, drinking another beer. I was unable to do anything but take notes about those who survived, those who died and those who killed them. Recreating t his narrative from fragments of Edita s memories and my field notes, I am aware that I am going beyond writing an academic article, becoming a witness of a local war crime that remains widely unknown and forgotten ; by the 1992 95 Bosnian standards , the figure of less than 100 victims of a massacre is too low to attract the serious interest of war crime investigators, even thou gh the massacre in Hegici had a clear intent to destroy in whole or in part the targeted group and th us was a form of genocide (cf. Lemkin, 2002).

Turning the record of a forgotten war crime into a scholarly article serves my des ire the unspoken moral obligation towards Edita and her perished relatives to share my findings wit h the wider community of scholars committed to addressing issues of human rights violations. This is a mission that sometimes collides with rigidly prescribed professional ethics of the institutio nal frameworks within which the researchers formally operate. The institutional frameworks and the aca demic genre can demand (over)theorized and detached scholarly (scientific) accounts of social re ality. Researchers are expected to convey their findings in a task-oriented, scientific and apolitical manner with the personal usually considered soft, lacking in rigour, too subjective, even emotional and fe minine . I have not attempted to create a scientific value-neutral representation of social reality in this article. Beyond an academic inquisitiveness and the epistemological relevance of the topic, my rese arch into memories of mass violence has been driven by a search for answers to ontological questions t hat affect me at a deep personal level. These questions are as much about what happened as about what co uld we memory scholars do to actively confront discrimination, marginalization, war crimes and genocide. Sometimes, if not always, confronting the causes and consequences of ongoing human sufferin g involves leaving the comfort zone of a scholar and intervening, even taking political actions if necessary. Crossing the line from pure memory research into intervention ultimately implies t hat the ethical imperative primum non necere is not sufficient when researching human ri ghts abuses ranging from banal institutional discrimination to the annihilation of whole communities. In such instances any researcher is tempted, if not ethically obliged, to work at actively protect ing and advancing the human rights and dignity of their informants. In reality, however, this is not a lways the case: as Herbert Hirsch (1995: 85) argues, blinded by the myths of objectivity and the mas k of scientific methodology, professionals are able to distance themselves, in the name of scien tific rigor, from emotional confrontation with mass death . I was not able to distance myself from e motional confrontation with Edita s memories of her immense loss, nor am I expecting the readers of the a rticle to remain indifferent to the tragic events I describe here. The aim of the artic le, however, is to go beyond the sadness of the great tragedy of a small village, to denounce evil and to celebrate the spirit of Edita, a Viennese hairdresser and a survivor of genocide. Notes 1. The 1992 95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) was the longest and the most bruta l in a series of the

Yugoslav wars of secession. The war started in March 1992 when the BiH governmen t followed the examples of Slovenia and Croatia and after holding a referendum (boycotted by th e Serb Democratic Party (SDS), the main political party of Bosnian Serbs at the time) declared ind ependence from the Yugoslav Federation. In late March and early April 1992, the Serbian governmentcontrolled militias invaded the eastern Bosnian border towns of Bijeljina, Brcko and Zvornik, killin g non-Serb civilians. By mid April 1992, there was all-out war in the country between the SDS militias (l ater Army of Republika Srpska or VRS) and the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) and BiH government-controlle d police and territorial defence (later Army of BiH) and Croatian Defence Council (HVO), the armed-wing o f the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ), the nationalist party of Bosnian Croats. 2. On 30 April 1992, the town of Prijedor was occupied by Serb militias and ren amed Serbian Prijedor in the Serb Republic of Bosnia Herzegovina (which later became Republika Srpska or the erb Republic ); and thereafter, the adjective Serb was added to the names of all the pub lic institutions. This practically excluded more than half of Prijedor s 112,543 population. At the time of the occupation, the ethnically mixed town of Prijedor with its surrounding area had 49,351 or 43.9 p ercent Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims); 47,581 or 42.3 percent Serbs; 6316 or 5.6 percent Croats; and a sizabl e number of others 9295 or 8.2 percent ( Yugoslavs , Roma, Ukrainians, Jews and members of other ethnic minorities). Cf. Government of Bosnia Herzegovina (1991).

3. The citation translated from German by Hariz Halilovich. 4. Cf. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia s (ICTY) Cases Ind ictments Proceedings Judgments: Tadic (IT-94-1) Prijedor , Kovacevic, Milan (IT-97-24) Prijedor , and Staki c (IT-97-24) Prijedor , available at the ICTY official website (ICTY, n.d.). 5. All the names of streets and squares that did not reflect Serb history as de fined by the RS authorities were changed during and after the war. While non-Serb street names were excluded, the new street names were inclusive of different Serb nationalisms and histories. The names listed in the text here include a local Serb militiaman who was killed during the war in Prijedor (Zoran Karlica); the f irst Serb political leader of rebellious Serbs in Croatia in the early 1990s (Jovan Raskovic) and the forefa ther of the Serb Radical Party from the beginning of the 20th century (Nikola Pasic). Other new street an d square names in Prijedor include names from Serb history, such as King Aleksander, Milos Obrenov ic, Petar Petrovic Njegos, Vuk Karadzic, Solunska, etc. 6. Kaiserin Sisi was the popular name of Queen Elisabeth of Austria. In 1854, a s a young girl of 16 years of age, she married the Austrian King (Kaiser) Franz Joseph and was in the spotligh t till she was tragically killed in Geneva in 1898. Her popularity at the time (which continues to fascina te many people today) could be compared to that of the late Diana Princess of Wales. 7. Altbau (lit. old building ) refers to an architectural style characterized by l arge rooms, high ceilings and large windows and doors in which most of the historical buildings in Vienna and other Central European cities have been built. 8. These represent some of the icons of Viennese city culture. 9. Regarded as the father of Serb nationalism, throughout the 1990s, Slobodan M ilosevic, The Bucher from the Balkans , led a series of wars against non-Serbs in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo . He was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for genocid e and crimes against humanity, but in 2006 died in prison in The Hague before being sentenced. Milose vic s right hand , Radovan Karadzic, Bosnian Serb war-time leader, is currently (July 2010) on tria l for genocide and crimes against humanity at the ICTY. 10. Some stable front lines between armed Serbs and BiH Government-controlled area s were established in the early summer of 1992. They were often treated as demarcation lines between t wo different territories rather than active front lines between two (or more) armies. They maintained Vla sic separated Serbcontrolled areas in western Bosnia from territories in central Bosnia, controlle

d by Bosniaks and Croats. In many instances, these demarcation lines became (un)official borders between R epublika Srpska and Bosniak Croat Federation at the end of the war in 1995. References Assmann A (2006) Der Lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Ges chichtspolitik (The long shadow of the past: cultures of memory and the politics of history). Munche n: Beck C. H. Colic-Peisker V (2003) Muslims, refugees, white Europeans, new Australians: Disp lacement and re-identification of Bosnians. Paper presented at the Cultures in Collision Colloquium, 9 May, Uni versity of Technology, Sydney. Available at: www.transforming.cultures.uts.edu.au/pdfs/muslims_refugees _colic-peisker.pdf. Cushman T (2004) Anthropology and genocide in the Balkans. Anthropological Theor y 4(1): 5 28. Government of Bosnia Herzegovina (1991) The 1991 Census of Population of the Repub lic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sarajevo: Federal Bureau of Statistics. Hecimovic E (2009) Ratni zlocini: Potvrdena optuznica za masakr na Koricanskim s tijenama Zlocini po planu (War crimes: the indictment for the massacre at Koricanske stijene confirm ed planned crimes). BH Dani, no. 605. Available at: www.bhdani.com/ Hirsch H (1995) Genocide and the Politics of Memory: Studying Death to Preserve Life. Chapel Hill, NC & London: The University of Northern Carolina Press.

ICTY. (n.d.) Website. Available at: www.un.org/icty/cases-e/index-e.htm. Lemkin R (2002) Genocide. In: Hinton A (ed.) Genocide: An Anthropological Reader . Oxford: Blackwell, 27 42. Lippman, P (2010) Bosnian voice, Yugoslavian memory. Open Democracy, 14 February . Available at: www. opendemocracy.net/peter-lippman/bosnian-voice-yugoslavian-memory/ Obradovic G (2009) Iz sudnice: Pocinje sudenje za Koricanske stijene. Glas Srpsk e (From the courtroom: sentencing for Koricanske stijene commences). Available at: www.glassrpske.com/v ijest/6/hronika/28163/ lat/Iz-sudnice-Pocinje-sudjenje-za-Koricanske-stijene.html Orwell G (1961) Nineteen Eighty-four. Camberwell: Penguin Group (Australia). Ricoeur P (2006) Memory, History, Forgetting (trans. K Blamey and D Pellauer). C hicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Tochman W (2008) Like Eating a Stone: Surviving the Past in Bosnia (trans. A Llo yd-Jones), New York: Atlas & Co. van Gelder L (2008) Weaving a Way Home: A Personal Journey Exploring Place and S tory. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Wesselingh I and Vaulerin A (2005) Raw Memory: Prijedor, Laboratory of Ethnic Cl eansing. London: Saqi. Author biography Hariz Halilovich, PhD, is a social anthropologist working as a postdoctoral rese arch fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Hariz s research and professional interests ha ve been primarily in the areas of forced displacement, memory, politically motivated violence, hum an rights and mental health. Hariz has published articles, book chapters and short stories in Bosnian, Croatian, English and German.