 Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us at the United States Institute of Peace for an event and a conversation that will be focusing on the importance of documenting the impact of war on civilians in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I am Philippe Le Roux-Martin, I'm the Director for Governance, Justice and Security here at the Institute. The US Institute of Peace for those of you who may not be still as familiar with the Institute was established in 1984 by an act of Congress that was signed by the public institution dedicated to helping efforts to prevent, resolve and mitigate violent conflict abroad. After two years, it's been two years of a long pandemic and after two years we're delighted, we're thrilled that we can open up the Institute to the public and we've been hosting an exhibit over the summer here at the Institute and we're absolutely thrilled to be able to welcome people back at the Institute so that we can have those kinds of events but also people can visit the exhibit here at the Institute. Arvin today is part of a series of events that we've been hosting that are focusing on themes or countries that are featured or chronicled by the Imagine exhibit we're hosting this summer here at USIP together with the Seven Foundation. The exhibit tries to chronicle the impact of war on communities in conflict affected environments and tries also to showcase how communities have felt the impact of the war but also have managed to overcome violent conflict in countries. One of the countries that is featured in the exhibit is Bosnia and Herzegovina and Bosnia was the theater of violent conflict between 1992 and 1995 where brutal campaigns of ethnic cleansing claimed the lives of more than 100,000 people and displaced more than 2 million people. It is a conflict for those of us who have worked either during the conflict who have covered the conflict either during the conflict or after the war. I think there's a feeling amongst us that it is a war and a violent conflict that has a lot of relevance when we look at other events today in the war particularly when we're seeing Russia's invasion of Ukraine playing out today. It is relevant for a number of reasons. I would suggest that it's relevant because number one of the very configuration of the conflict in Bosnia. It is a war that was that broke out in a former communist state in the heart of Europe. The war was the result of an expansionist nationalist project that was brewing in neighboring states and it is also a war that is relevant because of the manner in which this conflict unfolded. It's a conflict that was characterized by widespread war crimes, crimes against humanity, as well as an act of genocide that was committed in the town of Srebrenica. It is relevant as well for us because these atrocities were followed by efforts to hold perpetrators of crimes that were committed during the war in Bosnia accountable for such crimes and a number of institutions both international or national were established in the aftermath of the war to pursue accountability for these crimes and that work and those institutions relied on the work of journalists, photographs, academics, investigators who continuously tried to document the impact of the war on society but also atrocity during this conflict. This is what ties us to the exhibit that we're hosting here at USIP where the work of journalists, photographers who have covered a number of conflicts is featured here at USIP. And so to dive more deeply into how this work unfolded and the importance of this work in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we have the pleasure today of being joined by a set of panelists, a very distinguished panelist to help us dive more deeply into the importance of this work. First we're joined here on stage by Paul Kerring. Paul is an attorney but in a previous life was a foreign correspondent for the Globe and Mail for many many years and Paul covered several conflicts throughout his career including the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina where he was reporting from Bosnia and writing about the conflict in the summer of 1993. We're also joined by Gerard Toir. Gerard is an academic. He's a professor here at Virginia Tech at the school of public and international affairs. Gerard published a book on displacement as a consequence of conflict in Bosnia and international efforts to reverse the impact of those population displacements during the war. We're also joined online by participants. We're joined by, whom I see now, we're joined by Valerie Hopkins. Valerie is a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Valerie reported extensively on Bosnia and Herzegovina and the western Balkans writ large many years after the war and is now reporting for The New York Times on the war in Ukraine. Valerie, welcome and thank you for joining us. We're also joined by Emina Muzaferia. Emina is a researcher and she's a former staff member at the United Nations residual mechanisms for criminal tribunals based in the Hague. And last but not least we're also joined by Ayla Terzic. Ayla is also a journalist by profession but Ayla is also an author who published numerous work to fiction as well as short stories and poetry and so we're very pleased to be able to have such distinguished panelists today to help us dive into this important conversation that we're having. I want to just do this is a big subject as we can imagine and I wanted to structure our conversation today into three segments to make the topic more manageable. First I wanted to focus on the efforts that were undertaken during the war period between 1992 and 1995. Then I'd like to shift our discussion and talk about the importance of documenting the impact of war in the aftermath of the war and then have a conversation about that specific period and the work that was done during that period. And last I'd like to spend a little bit of time in order for us to connect the work that was done in Bosnia to other conflicts around the world including particularly the conflict that is currently unfolding in Ukraine. So without taking any much of your time with introductions I'd like to jump right into the first segment of the conversation which which will focus on the 1992-1995 period during the war. And I wanted to start with Paul as I mentioned and the reason Paul I wanted to start with you is as I mentioned in the introduction you were reporting from Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993 and you were one of the few foreign correspondents who managed to interview Ratko Mladic who was the Bosnian Serb general in control of an area in Bosnia around Srebrenica. And you were able to have a meeting with Ratko Mladic and interview him. Ratko Mladic who was later found guilty of war crimes crimes against humanity as well as genocide. And I wanted to start off just so that we understand the dynamics of the conflict and what was going on with more granularity. I wanted to ask you how did that interview with Ratko Mladic go? What was this perspective on the conflict and what was this perspective on Srebrenica? Well it's interesting because meeting Mladic was an accident and anybody who's ever spent any time in war zones and certainly a lot of time wars messy and lots of things just happen that you don't anticipate in June and in May actually but this happened in June. Like a lot of other journalists I was trying to get into Srebrenica. Srebrenica had been lots and lots of Bosnian Muslims had been driven into Srebrenica in large and violent and very effective campaign by the Bosnian Serb military to to the term has become ethnic cleansing to drive in tens of thousands probably over 25,000 people have been driven into Srebrenica and so the objective was to get into Srebrenica and you couldn't get in there were two sets of lines it was a Bosnian Muslim line defending it and there was a very tight sort of iron circle of Serb military around it so crossing crossing front lines in active war zones is difficult and what we needed I was traveling with a journalist called Sue Lloyd Roberts of the BBC and we traveled a lot together what we needed was to find a local Serb commander who would let us cross the first set of lines we weren't actually looking for Mladic and we were hanging around the outside of a Serb base and Mladic gets out of a vehicle and I mean he wasn't infamous then the way he is now and frankly Srebrenica wasn't infamous then the way it is now Srebrenica at that time was one of four or five I think supposedly safe havens and there were all kinds of terrible rumors about it and that's why journalists try to get in anyway we saw Mladic and we ran over towards him and his guards kept us away and but he kind of waved us in and he said I'll give you two minutes or five minutes or whatever he gave us and and as happens you know two minutes lasted in to 15 minutes and then with this sort of hospitality that you find all over the Balkans he says oh you better stay for dinner so we stay for dinner and then it's there's it's this long alcohol fuel dinner and we keep asking if we can get into Srebrenica and the conversation goes on about how he feels the Serbs have been misunderstood and mistreated and he is at times very emotional but there's lots of slivovits around too so this is hardly your formal interview with a senior military commander and so we knew while this was happening that this interview with Mladic was fascinating because he was the Bosnian Serb commander the Serb commander but we also really wanted a piece of paper from him that would get us through the front lines and so Mladic was a happy accident the interview with Mladic was a happy accident in which he was stridently defending both his troops and his activities and you know the West was completely to blame for misunderstanding what was going on the Serbs had saved Europe from from Islam before and they were doing it again and they were deeply misunderstood at the end of the evening we wound up with a piece of paper and a great interview but that it was the piece of paper that we originally were looking for and it was that piece of paper that got us into Srebrenica the next morning and by piece of paper you mean a literally he scrolled a couple of lines and signed it and handed it to us and it worked but he there were conditions we couldn't drive in we had to walk in which probably seemed like an okay condition halfway through that meal the night before but it dawned the next morning as we walked in and the defenders didn't know we were coming I mean the Serbs knew we were walking in but the Bosnian Muslims defending the place didn't know we were coming in here these two idiots walking down the street or walking down this road with a hands up hoping that this is going to work and it didn't but it it was nerve-racking so you're armed with this authorization to to enter and you decide to go in so can you tell us about what you observed in Srebrenica in the summer of 1993 well it was horrific I mean frankly in some ways it exceeded the rumors in terms of how bad it was in some ways it didn't match the rumors I mean there weren't there weren't bodies lying in the streets but there was lots of death I mean you could smell it and it wasn't just livestock there were there were plenty of humans in very shallow graves the smell of death was there it was active zone I mean there was gunfire but there were also there were also internal tensions vicious nasty internal tensions inside Srebrenica because you had people who used to live there or did live there who had houses and farms and cars and there was no gas that you know they had establishments and then you had these 20,000 or more people who were refugees who put an enormous burden on the infrastructure and the relations between the residents and the refugees ranged from enormously kind and helpful to people to really ugly and nasty I mean there were there were more than a thousand people in school that had no water humanitarian agencies would bring in bring in baby formula but we talked to mothers with little kids who were refugees that they never saw in so there's a real tension internally too and the Bosnian Muslim commander got called Nasser Orich who was also accused and eventually acquitted of war crimes I mean he was running the show and that included you know he had fuel nobody else had fuel in in Srebrenica and but but cigarettes and American dollars would it was active prostitution rings who were active smuggling rings it was an ugly feted hellhole surrounded of course by people who were putting enormous military pressure on too I'm not I'm not there was ugliness on all sides this of course was two years before the massacre so Srebrenica now means something largely because of the outcome but the Srebrenica that I was reporting on in that brief time there in June of 93 was was frankly more about the grotesque ridiculous failure of safe havens than it was about the outcome I mean they were it's easy in retrospect to make judgments but there was no need for retrospect safe havens were really colossally stupid idea from the moment they were announced and they didn't get any better and and there are plenty of lessons to learn out of the Bosnian war and the massacre at Srebrenica provides plenty of lessons but the facts leading up to it provide other important lessons too because that was inevitable is the wrong word it was a disaster waiting to happen and it did happen and Paul we're talking about different perspectives on documenting and different roles and different professions helping to document what is going on for you as a journalist what it's hard to it's probably a hard question for you to answer but did you have a sense a specific sense of your mission as a journalist as you were entering such a sensitive point of conflict in in Bosnia at such a sensitive time um yeah it's actually not a difficult question because because I think good journalism whether it's in a sort of a suddenly bizarre place like Srebrenica or something far more mundane is is I mean there's this cliche but it's the first rough draft of history which is journalists like it because it sounds you know it sounds august that also means you're going to get lots of it wrong so your job that day is the same as the job every day which is given the circumstances how much can you get right about what's going on and you know sometimes you look back I I hadn't thought about Srebrenica for years and I look back on this stuff that I was writing and you know you feel good because wow that that looked okay but I'm sure there are other days where you'd look back on this stuff and think wow that was just completely wrong but but Srebrenica was pretty once you got in getting in was harder than doing the job once you got it getting in was the getting in and of course it's long before the internet filing was tough it's not like the Serbs are going to let you write or file the stuff you want to file but the mission if you will and that may be too being glorious a word for it is your your eyes on the ground and if you're the only eyes that day or there's only a couple of you that day and it's important and it's pretty obvious when it's important and there's a greater onus to get it right so to that point and on the role of journalists and I wanted to ask maybe Isla who is there in Bosnia at that very same time you were younger obviously you were a teenager what was the perception of journalists what they were doing the role of journalists were there hopes attached to what they were reporting on hoping that the message would go out were there were there were people critical of the role of journalists how how did you perceive the role of journalists such a spa while during the conflict Isla well Philippe the role of journalists in and what in Bosnia was absolutely critical because I mean there was no any other mean to to convey the message to send a message to the outside world and Bosnia is very much relied on that on both local journalists and local infrastructure but also on on foreign voices and the bravery of foreign journalists who came to Bosnia to report and as it was earlier said I mean we from this perspective you have to understand that it was we were living in this horror reality show where we were trying to at the same time understand what was going on to to do our jobs at the same time who was doing their jobs and to to prep to to protect your life and your family and from today today's perspective it's just I think every year I need to revisit what I have experienced myself I was 13 years old when the war started and I was living in in Traunik in central Bosnia with my family with my my my my parents and my brother and many things have happened and as I said for me personally it was a learning curve how to process that hence the interest in journalism in in writing in just trying to understand how I'm 30 years on I still can't wrap my head around it to be honest and for me the I would say the turning point was when I read the book by Peter Maas Love Dye Neighbor the book was published just after translated and published just after the war and that was a completely shocking revelation for me I think Peter Peter Maas was a correspondent for Washington Post at the time and from today's perspective I'm understanding that it also took some a significant amount of time weeks months even years for the right information to get from one part of Bosnia to another so that was particularly important element in this in every discussion about war and everything was fragmented there it was I mean the war in Bosnia marked a completely new phase in in reporting in setting the infrastructure in as it was said in filing the news and just setting it to the outside world. Thanks Ayla for sharing your your using your thoughts and your insights about this. I wanted to move to the the second segment of the conversation and focus on again the role of journalists photographers investigators academics in documenting the impact of war in society but move to the period that followed the the active war in in Bosnia. I wanted to turn to Valerie too because I know that Valerie has been reporting and has spent a significant amount of time visiting Srebrenica several times after the war and Valerie published a piece in the Financial Times where she reflected and shared some of her observations visiting Srebrenica after the war recently but given that Paul visited Srebrenica during the war I'd be interested in your in your view of Srebrenica after the war but also if your perception of your role as a journalist aligns with with that of Paul at the time. Thank you so much and thank you very much for inviting me to this panel it's really a big honor to to be here with so many people whose work I've long admired and read and has shaped my own understanding of Bosnia and war reporting. I was lucky enough to spend about 10 years covering the Balkans three of those years living in Sarajevo and later in Kosovo and in Budapest but always being able to return to Srebrenica and if we want to talk about Srebrenica specifically you know each I'd say over those 10 years already a lot has changed I'll be very interested to hear Gerard's perspective as well because I think he was following developments in Srebrenica and the rest of Bosnia in terms of the way that populations shifted moved returned left and and I think the period that I spent covering Srebrenica can be sort of broadly defined as as you know people having returned and settled and then leaving again but but first of all I want to say that I think it's it's very important to I think it's very important to continue to report on these sites of mass atrocities on these communities because you know when everybody thinks about Srebrenica of course they think about the thousands of men and boys that were killed there brutally but they don't think always that this is a living breathing community that there are children being educated there that there's a music school that there's football teams that that there's life going on and that actually this is one of the unique places in Bosnia where Srebrenica and Bosnia are living together side by side in a community going to the same schools and hearing very different things at their homes than some of them may hear in the school but I think I think by and large unfortunately what I have to say is that this trajectory has been fairly negative people expect often with a passage of time that you know time heals all wounds and all this stuff and in fact I think in the case of Srebrenica things have have probably gotten a lot worse in many ways there's a much stronger prevailing climate of denial you know when I went for the first time on the Marshmita the the peace march that takes place in the three days prior to the July 11th the commemoration um you know we thousands of people would go and guarded by police or not you know march through through the same route that that people took through the hills when they fled you know now I'm told that even police were blocking the the route this year um and I think a lot of that probably started in 2016 uh when when a serve mayor was actually elected in Srebrenica you know everybody sees the the images of the commemoration the dignitaries that come every year that's one most foreign journalists remember to write about Srebrenica because it is you know it's a difficult I found it difficult seven years covering the Balkans to insist to my editors that we still need to write about this that we still need to cover this that that what's happening there is still important um and in 2016 yeah I drove I remember from Kosovo to to set up to Srebrenica um just a day or two after Mladen Grigic was elected mayor and what I heard from my friends in Srebrenica made me really sad because before they had always said you know look we all came back we found a way of uh coexisting we all agree each other you know we're friends the post office is integrated the institutions are are are working you know and my friend told me yeah that morning I went to the shop and nobody none of the serbs looked at me nobody said hello you know that they didn't put down the newspaper they sort of taught it up my my my belonging my purchases uh and sent me on my way you know that that something sort of broke and I think it's really really difficult uh for a community now to have a mayor who doesn't recognize what happened in Srebrenica as a genocide who you know when you log into the the the website I just checked the the mayor's website today and it says you know happy Easter there's no mention of of either recent victims uh there's a note that the municipality won't be working on the 11th or 12th because the 11th is um the day of mourning the Bosnian victims and the 12th is the day of mourning Serbian Serb victims excuse me um but but I think more corrosive than that is also just the increase in denial when I went in 2020 uh to spend a few weeks in Srebrenica you know I was there during the commemoration before and after and it was quite alarming to go on the 12th uh to the Serb commemoration because the the local priest of Srebrenica uh basically was repeating a lot of the same things that that Paul said uh Melanich was repeating that you know here in Srebrenica the DRS was defending against you know a century in a part taking part in a centuries long battle to defend the region against Muslims you know he tied it to the to the refugee crisis he tied it to ISIS uh and he you know he is a spiritual leader of his community imparting the next generation um imparting his wisdom on the next generation and and this is the message that he chooses to send um so I find I find a lot of these trends really really quite alarming and I think one of the main one um for instance I mentioned that we're you know multi-ethnic postal workers I think the main trend which which we can see also across Bosnia is just exodus uh and the same thing is true in Srebrenica you know I spoke to a lot of people who decided to return you know uh including you know the last uh postal worker the last Bosnian postal worker who lived in a village outside of Srebrenica he came to work every day delivered his mail in the wider region um and in 2019 he had finally had enough again after the municipal elections uh he said the way that people treated him in his office uh didn't make him feel very good you know he had insisted on returning even though he as a 16 year old child had fled the mass the genocide he spent 78 days in the forest eating grass and mushrooms um watching the people with him getting killed but you know he said I'm coming back to show that I wasn't erased and now you know 2019 he was like I don't need this anymore why why am I doing this he left he moved to Austria found a job and that's it and I think for me that's the most uh devastating one of the most devastating part of the whole stories is that there were people who as part of the efforts that I think Gerard will probably speak about hopefully um you know decided to to that home is exactly where they want to be uh and now his home I think is you know he was the last person living in his village his home is overgrown and maybe you know the whole village is overgrown with grass and and bushes and no one's taking care of it anymore and for me that's a that's a very big tragedy um Paul did you sorry you believe did you you wanted also to talk about journalism I feel like I've already been that's that's perfectly fine we have plenty of time we can come back to good thanks thanks Valerie we've talked a lot about the role of journalists and highlighted the role that journalists played I wanted to and Valerie was mentioning here um denial uh as well that certain facts and uh had had occurred and in that case the denial by a number of Bosnian serve politicians including the mayor in Serbia said that genocide the very active genocide that was internationally recognized as having occurred had occurred that ties and I think very closely to the work that academics and the the role of rigorous academic uh work in documenting in analyzing what happened in the war and I wanted to turn obviously to Gerard given Gerard's work in a number of uh you know post-communist conflict space where he's he's he's developed extensive expertise but also on on Bosnia but Gerard you spent a tremendous amount of time between 1999 and 2002 researching um the the internal and I think external displacement but the displacement of populations that was the result of the war and your work also focused on international efforts and the work done by the international community to reverse ethnic cleansing campaigns in Bosnia and you published and you co-authored a book that is highly regarded today by many people who are interested in in understanding what happened in Bosnia and are studying Bosnia as a subject can you tell us about your role your work and the importance of rigorous academic work in in such a setting sure um well first of all I am just one of many different academics who have done research in Bosnia and here I'd want to mention my collaborator and co-author on the book uh Bosnia remade uh Dr. Carl Dahlman who I traveled with and spent time with uh doing the research that uh you know it was the basis for that a book it took 10 years I mean we started in 2000 and we wrote a grant 2001 we went 2002 I went back a number of years the book wasn't published until 2011 and we built upon the work that rough first draft Paul that you talked about and the work that people like Valerie the great work that she's doing in Ukraine today and we built upon what journalists had written that was extremely helpful for going in and looking at what happened in these places to to kind of tell the story of Bosnia and how Bosnia had been remade we decided to focus on on three different places uh and so we had to go uh quite local in order to get that story um and so we were drew upon journalists but also a terrific effort on the part of the international community uh the people that went as part of the various organizations the aid organizations who were there during the war uh uh helping deliver aid and then a the various international organizations the United Nations uh the office of the high representative uh UNHCR uh you know Mercy Corps lots of other organizations and they had you know volunteers from all over the world uh who went to these small towns in Bosnia in order to try to implement the Dayton Peace Accords and and you will recall that the war in Bosnia in part was about the you know ethnic cleansing it's about demographic re-engineering it was essentially a war by men with guns and maps in their heads and they were going to make the real which is places and communities conform to the maps that they had in their heads and those maps were of cleared territories this is ours this is where the border is going to be that is there is going to be theirs and so in essence that was an attack on the real it was attack on communities it was attack on uh on families and on living places um and it unfolded in horrific ways ways we see in in our screens today in in Ukraine but the goal was that demographic engineer re-engineering of the of the country uh and terror uh murder uh forced violent force displacement associated with that and you know this was not only the VRS the the Serb army there also was a there was a Croat dimension to it Croat forces were doing this and then the there were various responses on the ground by the Bosnian army to this but by and in large it was uh it was essentially a pincer movement on the part of the militias that were supported by the Serb government at the time and the Croatian government at the time but but there were real you know local forces that were driving this um the international community with the Dayton Peace Accords had one annex annex seven and that's what my colleague and I went to research which was um annex seven said that uh there was the possibility that people could go back to their homes people had a right to return uh to their homes and crucially they had a right to get their property back uh and so what we did is we looked at this uh effort by the international community to try to reverse ethnic cleansing could it be done um and it was an enormous effort and so as an academic when what academics were trying to do we were trying to sort of document what the international community was seeking to do uh they the international community including the i4 the implementation force and s4 later on what they were doing was gathering very detailed information about the places and what had happened to the places where houses had been destroyed where communities had lost infrastructure and then the international community would put together a plan and it was almost like a battle plan of we're going to go to this community we're going to try to have return in this community and that requires a re-establishing electricity lines it requires a putting essentially an initial visit by displaced persons who want to go back to their homes to allow them to clean their homes it requires demining it was an enormous effort on the part of the international community um and this happened all over Bosnia and it wasn't a simply a case of Bosniaks returning to places where they were displaced from they were also Serbs and Croats who were Bosnian Serbs Bosnian Croats who were displaced too who had the right to to claim this um the upshot of all of this and it's a long story but the upshot of all of this is that a number of people were able to get their houses back they were able to get uh to reconstruct their houses but not all of them stayed quite a number of them were going back in the situations which as Valry pointed out it were you know hostile um and were places of trauma for them and after a while they they sold those houses and it went back to an area where they were more comfortable um you know there's lots more to be said but in terms of what academics are doing what we try to do is to sort of bring all of that together and tell that story but in a way that a doesn't fall into a trap of we're just telling the story from one perspective we're actually trying to have an empathetic stretch to other perspectives while not falling into the other trap of saying it's all equal everyone is to blame everyone is victimized that also is is that's inadequate as uh as a perspective thanks Joarn um we talked about journalists we just heard about uh your viewpoint on the the role of academic work and the kind of work that academics can can do in in those settings I wanted to turn now to to Ayla and um talk about the role of literature uh Ayla we are fortunate enough to be able to count on an author uh with us uh which I think gives and injects a lot of uh a fresher look on the on the attempt to to document what was going on after the war but for you what what is the role of literature in in in such a setting after the war and and the cultural feel more broadly could you tell us how you see literature and the cultural feel playing a role uh in in the aftermath of of of the war in Bosnia oh absolutely Philip uh so I mean aside that literature for me is a lifeline and uh it's kind of hard at this point to to to distinguish uh how to to what degree that was influenced by the war and certainly it was but uh literature and has tremendous uh importance in in not only in in documenting more but opening discussions uh during every uh war anniversary there are round tables there are uh panels and uh all sorts of um um gatherings not only in the capital Sarajevo but but globally for instance uh if you if you walk down down the main street in Sarajevo you will see a number of books uh fiction memoirs uh history books uh just recently uh a book by beloved general war general uh Yavan Devyak was was published uh titled don't shoot so those are those are extremely important accounts on on questioning what has happened to open the dialogue to reflect uh on our own role on our um on every possible to question every possible aspect of um the war has played in our lives and um so what I can say given that um my my background is literature um there has been a continuous uh production and then publication of of anti-war novels both uh regionally and locally in Bazi Herzegovina and most of these have managed to to get um translations not only to English but to so many uh European languages at the same time uh if if I will speak from my own perspective uh I had my own learning curve in how to process not only war in writing but how to process an abundance of those accounts and uh I would say from today's perspective I wish that I could read more of these accounts from from female authors because at some points there was an abundance of accounts from trenches from specifically from male perspective and that's something that has strictly marked the um the the publications um the the literature in general and at the same time as you know Bazi's are very proud proud of their attachment to to culture so that was also important lifeline during the war and um there are there are so many famous famous people that came to to Sarajevo during siege such as Susan Zanta to to uh to direct packet and then etc and that had huge importance for for citizens just not not to feel that they're there are a lot behind and of course risking their lives to to to leave the shelters and to go into to see the um a play for instance oral book reading and uh also during the war uh center Andremal Rowe founded European literary encounters and um that I think that that was that went on for a number of years and so many important literary names uh from globally came to Sarajevo and um discussions were held panels just questioning what has happened over the years and also we have to understand that new documents are resurfacing new um um new ways of tackling that very specific topic uh are emerging for instance uh right now we have a number of young authors who are writing in German they there are second generations of writers living in in notably in Austria where there's a big community of of people from the from from Yugoslavia and uh so they are they are questioning their identity from a very unique perspective and it's usually written in German and then translated to to to Bosnian or Serbian or or Croatian so I would say that just giving the voices and uh to not only young people but just bringing some new narratives into the whole discussion is of tremendous importance and also in my case uh I remember when I was working on my master thesis there are so many examples how how Bosnia developed over the years and there was a specific comparison between Rwanda at the time and uh and Bosnia the the book that I'm talking about is Hope in Memory by Tadaro Bulgarian, French, Historian and Sociologist and if I'm going to reflect to the ongoing exhibition at the US Institute of Peace it's very interesting to to look what is happening to to make those comparisons right now and uh Rwanda has has been recently pronounced as one of the safest countries for um for solo travels it has even space program um it's I mean there are so many Rwanda and in Bosnia went into completely different directions. Ayla thanks um you mentioned younger generations and that that um makes me wonder I'd like to ask Amina a question about the younger generation but before I do that I wanted to ask you a follow-on question about about what you were just saying and tying to the point that was made by Gerard Gerard was mentioning that um the conflict uh was uh essentially an assault on the real uh where these maps and these nationalists projects and objectives were we're trying to impose themselves on on reality and on very real communities. To what extent do you see that happening as well with the cultural field because by experience I've seen on numerous occasions whenever there's a book or whenever there's a film that comes out that touches a wartime question it ignites a debate there's a lot of pushback and to what extent do you think that this mindset that the the nationalist maps that are driving these objectives are also trying to take control of the cultural field of of free expression by authors filmmakers trying to write and process what happened what happened during the war. Well I would say that that's also part of the continuous battle that is happening that is taking place 30 years on. I guess the the fruitful conversation and fruitful activity once we see a movie or read a book what would be to to have a peaceful conversation about it. However given the the the contemporary social media and other channels that has been absolutely manipulated and I mean Bosnia is as I said 30 years on I'm I'm I had the custom of five years earlier to just round the number to say it's not 25 years it's almost 30 just to kind of to motivate discussion and to to to alert my colleagues and my friend in in in talk in in those discussions about war and as I said Bosnia and its citizens Bosnia and its citizens are are still hostages and collateral damage in in historical way in administrative way in geopolitical in ethnic in every possible way we are in in economical sense and that is absolutely spilling over in all of those discussions about a movie you will see and it always has to kind of like a pendulum to to flip on a on an on opposite side and to give a counter argument that should and annulate the something that was that was formerly said and as I said every anniversary and is marked by panels discussions and roundtables and it's really important to to continue those conversations and to spread the just to spread the the the good intention because I mean people who are actively part of what happened 10 20 even so 30 years on those people are moving on to different aspects of their lives and I'm still waiting to hear to to read more accounts from some local public intellectuals how how just to to like memoirs because that's tremendously important on that's tremendously important subject but I have to say in commemorating all those um it's a very thin line between commemorating and really traumatizing people so that's something that we have to be really careful in addressing including books and movie projections and to avoid in every possible sense we can do the manipulation and and I would say education plays an important part in all of that especially educating young people and and I was so glad to see not only this year but so many previous years in for instance in Porto Charo roundtables where a young number of young people were engaged and they have their own at least there are they they're bringing some likeness in discussions about war and genocide if such thing is as possible thanks Hila and so on that issue and I had promised the question to Amina about because we were talking about younger generations and you just mentioned Hila the importance of education and the younger generation and I wanted to ask Amina Amina you were born after the war and you also you were a researcher as well and so you you you conduct your own research but also you've worked as a staff member for the United Nations residual mechanisms for the criminal tribunals in the hay which is the follow-on mechanism after the international criminal tribunal for former Yugoslavia and you were working on a program or with a program that had a very specific objective which was to educate the younger generations about the atrocities and the crimes that were committing during the war can you tell us a little bit about about your work and the importance of that work yes Hila has made several good points about the importance of educating the younger generation and I would like to elaborate on that before talking about the importance of that program so the fact that I was born after the war ended in Bosnia means that I'm a member of the generation of Bosnians who do not have a war experience of their own but had to learn about the conflict from their families in the school on the street from their friends peers and so on what this means is that these war narratives in Bosnia tend to be heavily filtered exaggerated or otherwise based on information that are simply not based and not established as truthful facts and in the case of Bosnia where we have three ethno-national groups or constituent peoples as they are today their identities have been for the most part born out of this war which means that they these war narratives the discourse about the war is a discourse about nationhood and these sort of narratives tell the younger generation not just who they are but how they should be they they tell them how they should make a sense of their own national identity and how they should proceed the past and the future and this is where this outreach project and information programs of the international residual mechanism for criminal criminals a place a critical role the the program that I worked on at the mechanism is called the the mechanism information program for the affected communities and it is a initiative by the external relations office designed to to improve the knowledge and understanding of citizens and communities in the countries of the former Yugoslavia about the the war crimes that were committed at the territory of the former Yugoslavia throughout the 90s and the program itself is not new it is a continuation of the outreach program that was established by the ICT Y in 1999 and this established the establishment of this outreach program by the ICT Y marked a pivotal moment in the existence of the tribunal because it is a moment when the the court realized and became aware that its work would resonate far more and far further from beyond its judicial mandate it recognized that it had a role to play in this process of reconciliation and this process of reckoning with the past and dealing with the past and this is one of the key challenges for societies emerging from conflict and the program that I worked on throughout 2020 and 2021 uses the archives of the ICT Y and the mechanism to craft online interactive exhibitions and videos about the specific war crimes that were committed during the 90s. It is also a program that works with the positive generation but not just the the generation in Bosnia but the younger generations in Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo too in which students are invited and listened to lectures by the principals and senior officials from the the mechanism in which they are able to not only to get acquainted with the international criminal law and how specific war crimes were processed before the ICT Y and the mechanism but it is also a place for a dialogue between students coming from different not just from different universities but from different successor states from the former Yugoslavia. But there is also another very important part of this program and that is work with history teachers from the entire region of the former Yugoslavia except Slovenia. There are several workshops designed to teach and train history teacher high school history teachers from the former Yugoslavia and how to use the archives of the ICT Y and the mechanism in order to craft lessons about the conflicts and teach the students about war crimes that were established before the ICT Y and the mechanism. So this program has a critical role to play in educating the younger generation but not just not just the younger generation but also the generation that has experienced the war but it is difficult to determine the extent of its impact because it is hard to quantify this sort of impact and it is hard to observe it too. So it will only be possible in the upcoming decades to see how successful this program of educating the younger generation and history teachers was successful. Thanks, Amina. Time is flying. I wanted to jump into the third part of our conversation which is to try to connect the work that we've been talking about to other conflicts and particularly the conflict in Ukraine. And I wanted to start with Valerie who is currently reporting on the war in Ukraine and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And Valerie, I wanted to ask you, looking back at your reporting in Bosnia and what you're currently reporting on in Ukraine, what connections are you making between both contexts? Are there connections? And if so, what are those connections? Thank you for the... Absolutely, there are quite a lot and I don't think I spend a single day in Ukraine without thinking about Bosnia and my friends there, my time there, what they went through and also how it is for them. I think maybe we'll get to this later but I do think this war has been very difficult for many of my Bosnian friends to watch. I think actually Gerard summed it up very well when he said the assault on the real. I think it was already incredibly extreme in the Bosnian war and things that we saw like Serb military leaders and political leaders saying that the Bosnians on the Bosnians bombed themselves in Markelei or were committing atrocities in order to get Western sympathy. This has been raised to I think an even more grotesque scale in Russia. Just every single day I received press releases from the Russian military saying like be aware if there is an incident in Odessa, they might name a location and say be aware that we have uncovered a plot, that these people are crisis actors, that they have received $100 in advance and $500 will receive $500 at the end of the plot to film what looks like a catastrophe that they will blame on Russians. So they're now sending these kind of advance warnings about conspiracy theories. Just this morning I think a Russian investigation into the bombing of the drama theater in Mariupol was concluded and those who carried it out said that actually they concluded that there was a bomb from inside. So the people who had been sheltering the bomb in the theater or the military that had been defending them, which of course the Russians will refer to as Nazis, blew themselves up. But anyways they say there was only a handful of victims. So this type of rhetoric and materials we are getting constantly and I think that's one of the things that scares me most having now spent time, spent the last decade or so reporting in the region is you know the consequences of this even if the war ended tomorrow, the consequences of this will now last for generations. I believe generations who have been you know fed propaganda to the extent that you know people with families in Russia don't sorry yeah Ukrainians with families in Russia are consistently calling them telling them what they're experiencing and the families don't believe them. You know the level of denial even now is so strong that I fear you know how it will affect the entire community as we've seen you know in Eastern Bosnia in a place where on July 11th somebody thinks it's okay to hold a dinner celebrating the liberation of Srebrenica. So I think you know having something like this you know for a country that has mostly based its pride and its you know historical power on defeating fascism in World War II at least this is of course what all the Russians are you know are proud of and talk about. I think this now will become a much darker even darker than it has been. What are the other I mean there are so many things but I think it's first of all the sheer horror and also just the the kind of cutting of of long-term ties between family and friends that existed you know before between Ukraine Belarus Russians and people who lived there that have now been completely severed. I was on the northern border in the training of region of Ukraine a few weeks ago talking to a family you know and one son is is in key of defending the city from a potential second invasion and the other son is in Belarus and doesn't believe what's going on and meanwhile you know the parents lived in a village that has a monument to what is essentially brotherhood and unity of the Belarusian Ukrainian and Russian people that's now soon to be destroyed so it's this it's this real it's it's I think it's told it's just so difficult even now after after five months or well into the fifth month for people to grasp and understand how this could happen why it happened and how propaganda can can be so much stronger than than family ties but the last thing I wanted to say too that I think really struck me is the resilience and the strength you know I was never in Bosnia during the war but many I spent many hours talking with friends about how difficult it was but also the many ways that I love mentioned some of them that people found to to show their strength to continue despite horrible conditions to to find beauty and and culture in life and I think that's also very true in Ukraine there is a real strong defiance and resilience despite you know the daily horrors whether it's an attack on a residential building near Odessa or you know the the killing of 25 people in a shopping mall in central Ukraine people are finding outlets creative outlets and and and resilience and and nobody more than than my local Ukrainian colleagues you know I get a lot of messages from my friends especially friends in the Balkans saying thank you for what you're doing it's so it must be really hard and I of course appreciate them but you know of my colleagues one of our local colleagues you know her her sister's house in in Bucha was occupied for a month by by Russian soldiers you know she gets up every day and like goes with the photographers and makes pictures and interviews of people whose lives have been destroyed you know when when her sister in law's house her sister you know it affects everyone our another fantastic little colleague's brother was just drafted in the army you know and these people are going out every day and and and helping us tell really important stories and I'm very very grateful to them thanks sorry probably not what you expected thanks so much for for your your account in the parallels that that you've seen on the issue you've talked about resilience and you've talked about how the population reacts when when facing the impact of war and atrocities I want to go back to Emina and ask her you know we we are reading continuously about the hopes and the efforts the unprecedented efforts by Ukrainians Ukrainian officials but as well as international officials in making sure that perpetrators of war crimes and whomever is violating norms of international humanitarian law are held accountable and during you know for whatever is in whatever crimes are being perpetrated in Ukraine so my question to you for having worked on such a mechanism or such as part of an institution what would be your recommendation if you were if you had the opportunity to talk to people in Ukraine were hoping for accountability what would you tell them to expect in the upcoming years well at the time when the ICTY was established in 1993 it was rather unclear if the tribunal would be able to make a single indictment the the road to justice in the case of Bosnia was was foggy it was it was really not clear what the tribunal was going to be able to do so speaking from the Bosnian experience I would emphasize that the the the journey to justice is a long one it is an uneasy one and can be often frustrating and this is particularly the case with prosecuting war crimes and holding accountable officials who are responsible for it and I think what the Bosnian experience can teach those seeking justice in Ukraine is that accountability is possible but that even the most obvious and self-evident work crimes take significant time to be judicially processed and the same applies to the process of determining the the line and the hierarchy of responsibility for the work crimes committed and there's also the issue of time and speed with processing work crimes and this the issue of speed at which these the trials were held at the ICTY and later at the mechanism were met with particular frustration in Bosnia to to this day there is still one case left before the mechanism that has not been completed so we're talking about more than two decades of judicial proceedings in order to to to reach justice so what I would advise to those seeking justice in Ukraine is is patience and effort in documenting what is going on. Thank you Amina. A few more questions before we we end up we're running out of time soon but I wanted to turn to Gerard and ask Gerard since we're talking about the connections between the events and the the conflict in in Bosnia and what we're seeing in Ukraine today you just recently published a very thoughtful piece in the Irish Times where you identified a number of parallels that you saw can you tell us a little bit more about the thinking that went behind that that piece and what were those parallels? Sure, so that piece in the Irish Times was really organized around four keywords that I thought emerged out of Bosnia but very much implied in in the Ukrainian context and the first of those words was ethnic cleansing. It's not a term that you hear a lot in the Ukraine war but behind that term is the idea of demographic reorganization demographic change and the this effort by a violent through a violent coup of violence of an army attacking in particular place to destroy it to remake it and that's something that we saw in Bosnia Herzegovina it's something that is playing itself out in Ukraine I actually do research in Ukraine and I know from the public opinion research that my colleagues and I do that there was no constituency whatsoever in the Donbass the Kiev control Donbass for its liberation by Moscow by the DNR and LNR there was no constituency for that whatsoever this was something that was sort of imposed upon that particular territory and of course Ukraine itself. There also wasn't there isn't support for this idea that Ukraine needs to be liberated form fascism and here and I didn't really talk about this in the Irish Times article but here we have to talk about the continuity between what communist myth has produced and the continuity is the fascist the fascist is the enemy right and so you justify your attack on others by saying they're fascist and so we saw that with the particular rhetoric that was used by Molosevic in Yugoslavia against Bosnia against the Croat forces but also including the against Bosnian Muslim forces too and of course this is the same particular rhetoric that Vladimir Putin is using the sort of the fascist is from the west and is constantly plotting against us and therefore that's a justification. The second thing that I talked about in that particular article was this idea of a herbicide and it's a term which comes out of you know those that are studying war and the way in which the material environment particularly cities places of mixing places of community of difference are destroyed in war and there's a sort of a war against the material environment that was something that this idea of herbicide was used to describe what was happening in Mostar by architects there and you know those of you are familiar with Mostar know how how the the the kind of center of it was completely flattened completely destroyed. Well, Siever Donetsk today and of course Maryupol completely destroyed so those are there's a really attack on the urban so that was a second thing. A third thing was this idea of refuges and again it's a term which goes back to Sarajevo and an art collective that used this particular term the great social anthropologist Steph Janssen Belgian who who studied refugee communities and displacement in Sarajevo has an article on this idea and it's essentially the ways in which refugees or space persons were moved around strategically to consolidate territories and we are seeing that today also in eastern Ukraine and the last term was was the term genocide and the way in which that itself becomes a way of a other ring and other community and you know if I would be very familiar with this the way in which Srebrenica was a vote by Putin and used as a justification that we have to protect the people of Donetsk and Luhansk from the genocide that is being perpetrated against them and there was also a rhetoric of mass graves too that was all part of the attempt to try to create a justification for what was a what is a criminal war against Ukraine launched by Russia and its allies. Thanks Gerard I wanted to end with a question to Paul we started with you Paul we will your book ending the event but I wanted to ask you you covered the war in Bosnia and you've interviewed victims and perpetrators of atrocities and war crimes when you see what is going on right now in the world and it can extend beyond Ukraine because you've covered a lot of conflicts as well what do you see what are your reflections today about the role of journalists in covering these these issues. I'll let me preface by saying I have nothing intelligent to say about the Ukraine I'm not there I'm not doing it and there's nothing worse than journalists talking about stuff that they're not covering I do think as a consumer that overall coverage of conflict and it's very different communications are different I mean there's always differences but in general I think an extraordinary job is being done by lots of people and it's not easy it's hard it's dangerous and the world is a better place because there are people laying it on the line every day to do that. So I think there is a fundamentally important role for the day-to-day witnessing without extrapolating to Ukraine I do think that there's we tend to get very I think we tend to get very short-sighted and I'm a journalist I'm not a policy guy but you know there's nothing new whatsoever about driving populations out of territory as a warring I mean talk to the Aztecs or the Kashmiris or the Palestinians or the Navajo it's gone on for thousands of years it's gone on for as long which doesn't make it right but wars end and when the shooting ends most of the time there's been significant change in demographics and for a long time now we in the west have sort of had this Helsinki Accord's notion that lines are in violet and we just have to somehow work it out and yet we haven't managed to work it out on those criteria this war is going to end like all wars with the facts on the ground being different and and if the starting point for the policy community is we have to go back to the status quo ante we'll wind up with the kind of things that our Bosnian colleagues have been talking about which it doesn't really resolve it just hangs on the trauma continues people relive it every time I don't have a solution I'm simply saying that what we've been doing we in the west have been doing at the end of conflicts where we've had a role or we've interfered for generations isn't working that hasn't worked for the Kurds hasn't worked for the Palestinians hasn't worked for it didn't work in Rwanda and it's there's some clearly some new ideas are needed well thank you for for your reflections and I want to thank everyone we're running out of time we we were planning on on finishing the event much earlier but we wanted to thank everyone for participating and we want to invite those of you in the audience who would be interested in visiting the Imagine exhibit to head this way and you can go and visit the exhibit which is right next door and if you want to visit or have a look at the exhibit online as well you can go on our website at www.usip.org forward slash imagine and you can have a look at the exhibit or if you're not here today and if you would like to see the exhibit you're more than welcome to sign up online and secure your place and your position and your time for him to go and see the exhibit here I wanted to thank everyone I wanted to thank particularly our panelists today for what was an excellent conversation about the role of journalists of writers of academics in documenting the impact of of war on on the civilian population in Bosnia so thank you very much for joining us today at USIP and I wish all of you a very good afternoon thank you