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Mnogi se pitaju, na prvi pogled logično i opravdano, koja je uopće svrha suočavanja s prošlošću. Prema njima, umjesto bolnoga i beskorisnoga pa i štetnoga suočavanja s minulim nasiljem i zločinima, pojedinci, narodi i društva trebaju ostaviti prošlost iza sebe i sasvim se okrenuti (boljoj) budućnosti. Iako prihvaćamo dobrohotnost većine tih kritičara, nas troje autora ove knjige spadamo među ljude koji se ne slažu s tvrdnjama o uzaludnosti ili štetnosti suočavanja s prošlošću, i to iz više razloga. Ponajprije ističemo razlog koji je po našem mišljenju najvažniji: suočavanje je ne samo potrebno nego i nužno zbog svih kojima prošlost uopće nije prošlost, već je traumatiziranost zbog neposredno ili posredno pretrpljenoga nasilja u ratnim i drugim sukobima osnovna odrednica njihove sadašnjosti, a nekima i budućnosti. Takav odnos prema prošlosti imaju milijuni ljudi koji žive u mnogim zemljama i na različitim kontinentima.
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Sukobi na području bivše SFRJ početkom 90-ih godina 20 stoljeća od mnogih njezinih građana stvorili su žrtve i svjedoke najstrašnijih zločina počinjenih teškim kršenjem međunarodnog humanitarnog i ratnog prava. Vrlo se često radilo o izrazito ranjivim skupinama poput djece, staraca i žena. Odluka o osnivanju Međunarodnog kaznenog suda za ratne zločine počinjene na području SFRJ (u daljnjem tekstu MKSJ), značila je put k smirivanju tih sukoba. Mnogi svjedoci i žrtve, svjedočeći na sudu, pomogli su međunarodnoj zajednici da sazna istinu o strašnim zločinima počinjenim na području SFRJ. Podrška specifičnim skupinama u društvu već je bila razvijena u velikom broju država manjim brojem organizacija za pomoć žrtvama, no podrška žrtvama i svjedocima pred MKSJ-om zahtijevala je novi, jasniji i uređeniji pristup jer se prvi put pružala neposrednim žrtvama i svjedocima ratnih sukoba. Haški je tribunal već od osnivanja vodio posebnu brigu o žrtvama i svjedocima koji su trebali svjedočiti u postupcima pred tribunalom.
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Profesionalna javnost u svim zemljama bivše Jugoslavije dugo je čekala na knjigu hrvatskog istoričara Tvrtka Jakovine o Budimiru Lončaru, poslednjem ministru inostranih poslova ove danas nepostojeće države. Podjednako dorasli svojim ulogama, istoričar i svedok istorije rad na knjizi započeli su razgovorom 13. jula 2004. godine. A zatim su, kao da pred sobom imaju sve vreme ovoga sveta, razgovarali do 2019/20. godine, kada su Frakturi predali rukopis za štampu. Već se javljala sumnja da će rukopis ikada biti završen. Na dugo nastajanje knjige uticale su, međutim, dve činjenice. Najpre, sadržaj knjige kao pokušaj razumevanja vremena, prostora i ljudi jedne male zemlje u svetu posle Drugog svetskog rata. A zatim, izvesne inovacije u metodu rada na knjizi takođe su zahtevale vreme.
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Based on the novel Putovanje započeto od kraja by Zulmir Bečević, the article aims to demonstrate how the thematic complexity encompassing growing up, undesired travelling, leaving home and searching for an identity of which the adult characters are not deprived, becomes transformed through narrative memories into a hybrid text, which goes beyond the common division of literature into children’s and adult books. The article shows how the narrator succeeds in interweaving the story containing a refugee trauma told from a child’s perspective with the world of adults, while not undermining the structure of the text and thematic orientation towards all readers’ groups.
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This paper is based on an anthropological study investigating the impact of forced displacement, genocide, and missing persons on the social identities of surviving women, their families and local communities in Bosnia Herzegovina and the Bosnian diaspora. By the end of the 1992-95 Bosnian war, more than 100,000 had been killed and close to 40,000 individuals reported missing – some 7,000 of whom have still not been found or identified. No knowing where the body of one’s loved one is, makes the grieving process of many surviving families much harder than it would be if they had been able to bury the victims. The issues surrounding the missing and their exhumation, identification and burial are some of the lasting legacies of genocide and war in Bosnia, that still affect many individuals, especially war widows and their families, as well as the respective local communities. The gaps, absences, and open-ended temporality the missing persons left behind also impact on politics, culture and reconciliation within the broader Bosnian society and the diaspora.More than two decades after the war, in many respects, Bosnia can still be seen as an exemplar of a post-conflict society, where the progress towards achieving a just and lasting peace has been halted by unresolved issues from the past, including the issue of the missing. In regard to the missing (presumably dead), what is often depicted as an “unresolved past” is in fact an unresolved present, spread through global connections across time and space and having significant affects and effects even on those who now live at great geographic distances from the original violence.The issue of the missing in Bosnia is predominantly, but not exclusively, affecting the Muslim (Bosniak) community. Mourning the dead in Islam typically takes place in the private domain and those who died in conflict or as innocent victims are regarded as šehidi, martyrs who will be rewarded in the afterlife. However, in the case of the missing, there are no adequate religious rituals offering closure or recognising a missing person as šehid able to “resettle” (preseli) in afterlife. Instead of referring to the missing as those who now rest in peace, or literally those who “resettled ” (preselili) in the afterlife (ahiret), the common reference for the Srebrenica genocide victims in 1995 is “those who did not get across” (nisu prešli), also symbolically sug¬gesting the inability of the missing to resettle (presele), thus remaining in a state of post-mortem liminality.While coping with their own trauma, loss and displacement, many Bosnian survivors, especially women, have taken up the crucial role in identifying the remains of relatives uncovered from mass graves spread across the country. They have often literally been the embodiment of the search for and identification of the missing in more than one way. They have preserved a link between those who perished and those who survived both through their narrated and documented memories of the missing and though their bodies. In Bosnia, DNA has served as a crucial piece of information required to establish identities of the missing. DNA matching technolo¬gies have equally challenged and reinforced the importance of blood relations and blood as the “shared essence” through which kinship is defined and relations between individuals are imagined, linking not only parents and siblings in a direct blood relation, but also husbands and wives and subsequently leading to identification of other missing “non-blood” relatives. However, as anthropologist Sarah Wagner has witnessed and described, DNA evidence does not exist in a vacuum; rather, its success depends on other manifestations of individual lives, social ties, and everyday practice: family members holding a piece of cloth, touching its fabric, whose pattern and stitching are indelibly etched into their memory, use their own recollections to help retrieve their missing relatives’ remains.In the first part of the paper, statistical and historiographical facts related to the 1992- 95 war casualties in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) are presented and the shortcomings of the quantitative research approaches in drawing conclusions about the es¬sence, character and consequences of the war events on different demographic and gender groups in BiH are pointed out.In the second part—through an ethnographic description of the life of one of the war widows and a mother who lost two sons and who now lives in the diaspora—the author describes the difficulties that accompany the war widows, both at the psychological and socio-cultural levels, as well as the reasons for many women to choose to migrate to third countries. The paper then describes how medical and forensic DNA biotechnology has helped to rehumanize the missing and killed, while the post-war bureaucracy in BiH has largely had a different, dehumanising effect on the war widows and survivors, which was often one of the reasons for their emigration.For mothers who lost children and war widows who lost husbands, it is expected that, for the rest of their lives, they will continue to perform the roles, adjusting their lives and embodying eternal grief for their loved ones. Across south-eastern Europe and the Balkans this aspect of patriarchal tradition has survived in many communities—among Christians and Muslims alike. Many women, once they lose their loved ones, spend the rest of their lives in mourning dress code. They also tend to become more religious and to perform regular rituals to honour and remember their dead. Even their everyday lives are readjusted so there are constant reminders of those they lost. Their public identities become those of mourning women. Often, they remain so for years, sometimes for the rest of their lives. These have been the unwritten rules and expectations of the women’s own communities that have been reconstructed after the war. In conclusion, the author advocates for an activist approach to socio-humanistic research related to the issues that accompany war widows, with the aim of protecting and promoting their human rights and dignity.
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Review of: Općinska udruga Nositelja ratnih odličja HVO Žepče – Udruga Nositelja ratnih odličja HVO-a Zeničko-dobojske županije, Glasnik HVO-a 111. xp brigade Žepče – Pretisak 1992.-1995., Općinska udruga Nositelja ratnih odličja HVO Žepče – Udruga Nositelja ratnih odličja HVO-a Zeničko-dobojske županije, Žepče, 2022., 595 str.
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Robert Hausvička rođen je 1968. godine u Dubrovniku, u obitelji koja potječe iz Češke. Početkom rata u Hrvatskoj dobrovoljno se prijavio u jedinice Specijalne policije te je sudjelovao u aktivnostima vezanim uz obranu Dubrovnika. Već na početku rata, 21. listopada, u jednoj od akcija u okolici Dubrovnika, zarobile su crnogorske paravojne postrojbe i odveden je u logor Bileća. Prva dva mjeseca zatočenja u Bileći proveo je u samici. Nakon gotovo šest mjeseci provedenih u Bileći, prebačen je u logor Morinj, gdje je ostao gotovo tri mjeseca. Oslobođen je u razmjeni 2. srpnja 1992. Nekoliko dana nakon povratka u Dubrovnik, ponovno je pristupio Specijalnoj policiji i otišao na bojište. Sudjelovao je u operacijama Maslenica i Bljesak. Zbog posljedica teškog zlostavljanja u logorima, kraj rata i VRA Oluja dočekao je na liječenju od PTSP-a. U studenome 1996. umirovljen je. Godine 2003. svjedočio je u Haagu kao svjedok optužbe protiv Slobodana Miloševića. Danas sa ženom i troje djece živi u Dubrovniku.
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This report describes how the clash between different approaches to history education has played out in Croatian history textbooks. Until 2000, there was only one nationalist textbook in use, presenting a one-sided image of Croatia’s war history, both in the Second World War and in the conflicts that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia. By 2013, when Croatia acceded to the EU, teachers could choose between four textbooks, which offered a much more nuanced picture. This reflected wider changes in how Croats viewed themselves, how they defined citizenship and how they saw their relationship with their neighbours and their Orthodox Serb minority.
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The fundamental principles of the renewed statehood of Bosnia and Herzegovina were defined by the decisions of ZAVNOBIH (The State Antifascist Council for the National Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina) and improved within the constitutional-legal and political construction of the Republic as an equal member of the Yugoslav Federation from the First Session of ZAVNOBIH in Mrkonjić-Grad on 25 November 1943 to the constitutional amendments adopted in 1990 according to which it is defined as “a democratic sovereign state of equal citizens, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina – Muslims, Serbs, Croats and other people and nations who live in it”. The author is engaged in how these principles were represented and articulated in the attitudes of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the peace negotiations conducted in various formats of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia in the period from February 1992 to November 1995, by negotiators and international peacekeepers, as well as their compatibility with the constitutional-legal basis of individual peace plans for Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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Territorial and border demarcation disputes brought diverse challenges to republics and provinces funded after dissolution of SFR Yugoslavia. Overview of the issues and lessons that have been identified regionally inWestern Balkans are presented in regional study „Drawing boundaries in Western Balkans: A peoples‘ perspective“. This case study provides an overview of peoples‘ perspective on terriotorial and boundary issues in South Serbia, near administrative boundary with Kosovo and Metohija. Data for this research were collected in Bujanovac. // Underdevelopment is the biggest challenge of this community. Participants in this region stated that society is devided along ethnic lines and other problems are non-recogniton of degrees awarded in Kosovo, the prolonged presence of armed forces in this region and lack of freedom of movement for the people living in Kosovo. Whith the recommendations of this paper We are addressing Government of Serbia, local authorities and the international community.
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In 2014, the Polish studio 11 Bits Studio produced the computer game entitled This War of Mine. The concept of this game was based on the course of the siege of Sarajevo. This production has changed the way of representation of war in video games. The main characters are not soldiers, but civilians, whose main aim is: to simply survive the war. Starvation, cold, lack of sleep and psychosomatic problems turn out to be more dangerous than the enemy’s army. Survival is possible, but forces the player to make ethically ambiguous decisions. The aim of the paper is to determine how the creators of the game presented the perspective of the civilians. This analysis will be based on the plot and mechanics of This War of Mine, on the historical context (war in the Balkans: the siege of Sarajevo) and with regard to virtual war schemes (topic of war in video games). The paper will also propose a concept of the game about war as an agon: the territory of not only a conflict, but also competition and a war spectacle.
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The political life of the Albanian minority in Serbia in the period 2010-2014 abounded in local level micro-conflicts motivated by numerous family, interpersonal and career confrontations. They reflected the differences existing among the three municipalities with considerable numbers of Albanian population usually referred to collectively as the “Preševo Valley”. The influence of the historical leader Riza Halimi was challenged by various powerful figures on a local scale and particularly by the faction of the former fighters from the Liberation Army of Preševo, Medveđa and Bujanovac. “Preševo” Albanians have alternated moments of cooperation with the Serbian government with moments of boycott, without ever discontinuing informal and behind-the-scene contacts. In 2012 the Albanian minority parties participated in the local, parliamentary and presidential elections, thereby ultimately fitting into the Serbian political system.
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Turkey's involvement in the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was caused by the need to reinforce Turkey's influence in the Western community, safeguard its regional interests, and support the election campaign. Turkey tried to correlate its policy with that of the West. However, the fundamental interests of Turkey and the West did not coincide. This was “Turkey’s Balkan Dilemma”.
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Flora Brovina, with this collection, builds her poetic homeland, which cannot but become our homeland in its national dimensions. It is not only geographic, but it is also the boundless space of love. Even enslaved (as it was in the earliest stages of the author’s poetic creativity), this homeland is a sacred hearth. It is an Albanian land created by the gods, a house that strives with all its strength, energies, and knowledge, tries with effort and sacrifice, tries, therefore, with all its being, not asking for any price to put a roof over his head.
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This paper aims to place the Srebrenica massacre in its broader context, both in terms of its place in the Bosnian war, and theoretically. The Srebrenica massacre is the only war crime of the Bosnian war that has, in legal terms, been solidly confirmed to have constituted genocide. In the ICTY, 2001 convicted Radislav Krstic of complicity in genocide for his role in the Srebrenica massacre, thereby establishing the fact of the Srebrenica genocide. The ICJ, in its ruling of 2007 in Bosnia vs Serbia, explicitly stated that the Srebrenica massacre was an act of genocide. However, the ICJ in the same ruling stated that other massacres of the Bosnian war, in particular those of 1992 when Bosnian Serb military forces were formally under Belgrade’s command, were not genocide. The ICTY has so far failed to convict any suspect of genocide except in relation to the Srebrenica massacre. Consequently, the Srebrenica massacre has assumed the status of a crime apart in the Bosnian war.
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The Croat-Bosniak war is one of the least researched episodes of the Bosnian war. I reviewed the recent works of two regional authors who had access to original war records of the Bosnian Croats and the Bosniaks and then compared their findings with some of the representative views of secondary literature. Among other things, I focused on the Vance-Owen peace plan and the initial hostilities in the central Bosnian municipalities. My chief conclusion is that the importance placed on the Vance-Owen peace plan in secondary literature is misleading as it ignores the local military and political dynamics.
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On June 13, 1992, with the help of the Joint Committee on Eastern Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, this journal sponsored a small conference on "The Demise of Yugoslavia." The editor's intention was not to provide any grand synthesis on the causes, course, and consequences of Yugoslavia's sanguinary end, which would in any case be premature, but rather to hear some preliminary views on these matters by a group by distinguished scholars and commentators. We were guided by the need to hear responsible voices of various provenances. Indeed, the intellectual rubbish wrought by the Yugoslav conflict, often from the cabinets of people with scholarly pretensions, simply defies comprehension and constitutes a separate chapter in the conflict's history. [...]
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The denial of the 1995 genocide against Bosniaks in the UN security zone of Srebrenica, has continued uninterrupted for 25 years. This denial has taken various forms and manifestations during that time; from denying the extent and character of crimes and the number of victims, to not accepting relevant court verdicts and especially, ignoring the consequences of genocide. As time passes, we are beginning to get the impression that an additional phase to the denial of the genocide in Srebrenica has emerged, in which, through the glorification of convicted war criminals and their affirmation in society, genocide is affirmed as an acceptable procedure and activity.We believe that this 25-year period of persistent denial, and even celebration of the genocide in Srebrenica, largely corresponds to the strengthening of neo-fascist and right-wing ideas and movements in European countries, which has been accompanied by an increasingly louder denial and relativization of the Holocaust.In this paper, we intend to analyze the connection between these phenomena, because we believe that the ideas pedaled by deniers of the genocide in Srebrenica, are significantly suited to strengthening the neo-fascism and Holocaust denial and are using this atmosphere to intensify genocide denial against Bosniaks and yet paradoxically, affirm the genocide, by glorifying the convicted war criminals and their ideas.
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The demographic development of a given area is conditioned by numerous factors; sometimes as the consequence, at other times as the cause of socio-economic events and changes (and more often disturbances). Changes in the dynamics and structures of a population are often the result of disturbances in social and economic development, and if they are abrupt and sudden, then the adverse consequences are more evident and pernicious. In this sense, the events of war especially cause great disturbances in demographic development, for they provoke numerous direct (immediate) and indirect demographic losses which, in the future, can damage and limit the stable population development of an area considerably. It is well known that war always alters the demographic picture of a given area, in the sphere of the natural, spatial (migrational) and general movement of a population, as well as in the sphere of demographic structures, be they age-sex, socio-economic, ethnic, confessional, etc. (Wertheimer-Baletic, A., 1992). The war against Croatia, in Croatia, from 1991 to 1995, as well as several years’ occupation of a significant portion of Croatian state territory (1991-1997), aggravated enormous material destruction. But more importantly, the war also exacerbated vast human casualties - some twenty thousand people killed, thousands wounded, tens of thousands of displaced persons. These are only approximate indicators of the demographic damage inflicted against the Croatian population during Greater Serbian aggression. In this article, we shall attempt to demonstrate one of the most significant ethno-demographic aspects (frameworks) of the war against Croatia; for by familiarising ourselves with it we will be able to disclose the cause of these consequences of war and occupation, and their motives from 1991 to 1997.
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