than not to have food. After the Red Cross had been in the prison-camp (logor) the Croats began to give us a little more water. But it was not clean water, it was dirty. The water was reddish. But we drank it, because we were thirsty. When you had to pee or go to the toilet, you did it where we slept, and we did it in buckets and some days you did not know if you should use those buckets to pee in or drink water from.
The women and children also starved after being driven to the Muslim-controlled areas. At first some could live on the food they had brought with them, but it did not last long. Some food could be bought, but it was extremely expensive. So the money some people had managed to bring with them was soon spent. Here are the words of Nusreta:
It was a hard life, when we stayed there. So hard that we did not have anything to eat. Once we only had 350 grams of food for fifteen days. You were so hungry. And some of the old people, they starved to death. We ate grass. We soon learned to recognise every sort of grass, and that was one of the things that saved people, and then you ate fruit, grapes. Some got dysentery. A lot of people got that disease, because you drank too much water and hardly ate. The shells were falling all the time, and the shells killed people.
TK: Didn’t you receive humanitarian aid?
Nusreta: We didn’t receive much humanitarian aid, because the Croats would not permit it to pass through to us. They stopped the convoys […] and plundered them. It was very difficult […]. And the old people who could not search for food, they starved to death. There was this woman, one of the richest in Stolac, she lived alone in Stolac. When we were expelled she came to the same village as me and she also starved to death. Nobody could help her, or give her grass or grapes or other kind of fruit. It was terrible. I hope God will not give such a thing again (the saying spomenulo se ne ponovilo se: you can talk about it, but you do not hope it will happen again). Never again, it would be better to be dead than experience it again […]. I had a good friend, she took care of my daughter, she brought her some milk. Every night her son brought her some milk […]. One of her sons was at the front facing the Serbs, a Chetnik killed him. She and her family were very kind, and she saved my little daughter. We all had a hard time when her son was killed. It was like he was one of ours [one of the family]. I’ll never forget how well they treated us.
Anxiety about one’s family members
The last theme I will touch on here is the insecurity and anxiety people felt not knowing anything about the fate of family members. A related theme is the feeling of desperation caused by not being able to provide for one’s children, because it was not possible to fed or protect them. It was not just in Stolac that men and boys were imprisoned. It also happened elsewhere in Herzegovina, and formed part of a Croatian strategy of ethnic cleansing. The women knew that similar things were going on in other places, but nobody knew exactly what was happening to their men, whether they were dead or alive, until the men were allowed to send letters through the Red Cross. In these letters, the men always wrote that they were well; they did not dare to write the truth as they feared the Croats would read the letters. Emir was one of the first to be released from prison camp. He was then 18. He was sent to Germany, where he sent a message using a radio telephone reporting that he was all right. But he did not see his family for the next five years. The men who were captives in the prison camps were also filled with worry and anxiety: they had no news about their families for anywhere from five to ten months, depending on how long they were detained.
Osman: I was in prison camp for six months and it was terrible for me because I was sick. During the whole time in prison camp I did not get two litres of water. And we did not have food enough, and everybody just wanted water and food. But I escaped it without any injuries, and I was not beaten. All the time I thought that they were going to kill me, all the time, even though I was not guilty of anything. The worst thing was not to know where my family was, if they were alive or not, and when I got out of the camp, I had to start looking for them.
It was terrible for parents not to be able to take proper care of their children. The children were hungry and frightened. They could not understand their situation and were exposed to great danger, and the parents could do very little to help. A woman called Fata recalls how providing for her children made everything else less important:
They shot at us from two different sides. During the war between Muslims and Croats I lived in Mostar and we did not have water in the houses and you had to go to Neretva [the river] to fetch water. And we passed the Harem [Muslim graveyard] on our way to Neretva, and we saw them burying the dead soldiers and civilians. You did not think at all that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow you might be buried the same way yourself. You did not fear. You knew you had to go to the river to get water, because the kids needed water, and you just had to make it to the river. It was like you did not care about being killed. We just walked without fear.
The themes in this section all focus on aspects of an everyday world that suddenly became problematic: food, shelter, security, and basic social relations. Together, they constitute a fundamental aspect of the unmaking of my informants’ world.
The destruction of stories
Another aspect of the unmaking of the world relates to the destruction or questioning of the values and principles governing normal social life: what van de Port calls “the damage war can cause to stories” (1998: 109). The stories damaged by my informants’ wartime experiences were not epic, but rather the simple tales that make everyday social interaction meaningful, understandable and predictable: You can trust your friends. Children are the most valuable thing in life. Criminals go to jail. In hospitals sick people are cured. War happens somewhere else. The family is a safe haven. Jackson (2002) has argued that the fundamental function of stories and narratives is to enable the individual to integrate his personal world and the wider world of others, in his words “transforming private into public meanings” (ibid. 15). He describes how narratives meet an existential human need for “sustaining a sense of agency in the face of disempowering circumstances” (ibid.). The unmaking or questioning of peoples’ stories thus destroys the very foundation of self-identification and this sense of agency. However, unmaking relates not only to how such stories suddenly break down or slowly crumble away, but also to how one starts questioning the very foundation of (such) stories, that is, starts seeing them as only an illusion.
It is interesting that questions of identity often arise […] in the face of terror (warfare) and cruelty. It is perhaps here that people meet the most significant challenges to their sense of self and humanity. “Violence”, as Allen Feldman has noted, “itself both reflects and accelerates the experience of society as an incomplete project, as something to be made” (Nordstrom 1997: 189).
The following examples from my informants’ discourse will illustrate how their experiences affected the stories they lived by before the war. All of these people experienced the disintegration of stories which had formerly bestowed meaning on their lives. For the first time, they were led to reflect on values and narratives that they had always taken for granted.
Am I me?
Nusret is a sculptor, that is, he was a sculptor; he is not able to make art any more. Instead he makes tombstones – such is the irony of fate. Once he showed me some of the creations he had made at the academy before the war, and he was especially proud of a small, beautiful Virgin Mary sculpture. The first time I met him he was standing outside his house working. I started talking about my research, but he interrupted me before long. This is how I remembered part of the conversation afterwards:
Nusret: This country is not normal, nobody here is normal, but when nobody is normal you feel normal! People are crazy, insane. […]
TK: Do you make sculptures now?
Nusret:
