Jasmina Tešanović: Mothers of Mass Graves

Text by Jasmina Tešanović
photo by Bruce Sterling ( Nura in Bologna)

The mothers of mass graves

Nura comes from Srebrenica and she goes to places
where her voice needs to be heard. For those who don't
know and the many who still refuse to know, Srebrenica
was and is the enclave of genocide in Bosnia,
committed there in 1995 by General Ratko Mladic and
his soldiers.

Mladic is still in hiding from the justice of
the international war tribunal in The Hague. The day
Nura came to Italy from her hometown, another war
criminal, the helper of Mladic, was arrested by police
in Bosnia. Nura saw helicopters above her head.

Some claim the arrest was all staged. How could
the third most wanted Srbrenica criminal be be
arrested within Bosnia? Obviously a conspiracy was
hiding him in the center of Belgrade, that capital
from where all the evil orders were given by the late
Slobodan Milosevic.

Says Nura calmly: that guy is half dead and only
a stuntman for the real issue: the issue of hiding
Mladic. It is a farce, who do they want to fool? Carla del Ponte arriving in Belgrade to check on the Serbian
secret police, always involved in hiding war criminals
more than finding them.

While us, the citizens from
the enclave, still have to live under the power and
law of those who killed our men en masse and raped
women who failed to flee. Ten thousand people
missing, twenty-five hundred of them found in mass
graves.

At first, says Nura, we Srebrenica mothers were
looking for our missing loved ones. Then we looked
only for a bone or two to bury. Now, my only hope is
to prevent this horror from happening again.

I loved the old multi-ethnic Bosnia, where we
all lived together. We didn't care about religions,
we never dressed or behaved like nationalists. Who do
they want to fool by claiming that this tragedy was
necessary? Necessary or what? Srebrenica needs a
spacial status: a failed enclave become a mass
grave. We are not going to leave Srebrenica: we are
going to bring all you other women here…

And we other women will go there. Women in
Black from Serbia go to Srebrenica all the time, soon
to be joined by Women in Black from Italy. The group
of Mothers from Srebrenica will together with Women in
Black to the the nearby village of Bratunac, where
Serb civilians were killed by Bosnian soldiers.

In Bologna, my chronicles of the Srebrenica
genocide trial were adapted for the stage by a young
theater group. I struggled to interpret my own
words back from Italian, but Nura understood their
macabre ballet. She saw in their body language the
pain of the dead, the grief of the survivors and the
guilt of the perpetrators. Nura asked me to tell them
to come to the mass graves of Srebrenica and perform
their work there. The language of crime is
universal. It always has the sound of war.

In the meantime the borders between ethnic
entities are getting tougher, the Serbian nationalists
in Belgrade are getting louder, the international
community with its regular policy of "let them fight
it out" is getting sloppier. What will become of us
all: this official Europe without a constitution,
this unofficial Europe with a fake rule of law?
Shall we ever meet, or just disintegrate in tandem?

Nura looks straight into my eyes as I pose that
difficult question to the Italian alterglobalists who
fight against G8. Bush and Putin are the left and
right sides of the same game, called: See you in the
next war, pal…

You must endure, Nura says. Nobody can do
justice for the dead, but instead of failing others as
others have failed us, we ourselves can do justice for
somebody else. We intend to sue the UN troops for
delivering us to the killers instead of protecting us.

War and war crimes have a pattern, their design is
predictable. In this new technological century, war
crimes can be predicted and outguessed: a quest for
justice as universal as the Internet.

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Jasmina Tešanović is an author, filmmaker, and wandering thinker who shares her thoughts with BoingBoing from time to time. Email: politicalidiot at yahoo dot com. Her blog is here.

Previous essays by Jasmina Tešanović on BoingBoing:

Hope for Serbia
Stelarc in Ritopek
Sarajevo Mon Amour

MBOs
Killing Journalists

Jasmina Tešanović: Where Did Our History Go?
Serbia Not Guilty of Genocide

Carnival of Ruritania
"Good Morning, Fascist Serbia!"
Faking Bombings
Dispatch from Amsterdam
Where are your Americans now?

Anna Politkovskaya Silenced
Slaughter in the Monastery

Mermaid's Trail

A Burial in Srebenica
Report from a concert by a Serbian war criminal
To Hague, to Hague

Preachers and Fascists, Out of My Panties

Floods and Bombs


Scorpions Trial, April 13
The Muslim Women 
– Belgrade: New Normality
Serbia: An Underworld Journey
Scorpions Trial, Day Three: March 15, 2006
Scorpions Trial, Day Two: March 14, 2006
Scorpions Trial, Day One: March 13, 2006
The Long Goodbye
Milosevic Arrives in Belgrade
Slobodan Milosevic Died
Milosevic Funeral