seems so unreal. It’s abnormal, as I’m living in a fake world. I’m standing here watching the huge pile of garbage [a pile of rubble and garbage approximately two metres high and thirty metres long running along the road] and I don’t care. It’s as if it’s not my concern, or as if it’s completely normal, but it isn’t. The destroyed, mined and burned-out houses, everything seems unreal or normal at the same time.
The first time I saw a dead man it was terrible, it made me feel sick, but later I could see ten dead people, it didn’t affect me, I didn’t care. When you have seen dead women and children and experienced all this madness, how can you make sculptures? I cannot. Nothing matters. How can I laugh? Well I can laugh, a lot, but it is not I who do it…it feels unreal. I’m destroyed inside. It’s as though there’s a distance between me and the world, it’s as if it’s not I who stand here talking or laughing.
What do children play?
Lamira told me that watching children’s games during the war sometimes hurt her the most:
The boys gathered some old tyres, which should do duty as a bundle. The girls played women, they cried and kept asking: “Where are our men or brothers?” At one point in the game the boys would come out of hiding, dragging the tyres, they were pretending to be the men coming home from prison camps, and the women [girls] thrilled to see them. And then they would start all over again.
What is a school?
Normally it is a place where children are educated and socialise, but during the expulsion of the Muslim men and women, a school (as well as a hospital and a factory) was turned into a place for torture, robbery, humiliation and killing. Moreover, for many adults it was the very school they themselves had attended as children; the children had been students there only months before.
What is an enemy?
Normally friends and enemies are clearly distinguishable, but during war this changes. Mensur told me how in Blagaj the Serbs and the Muslims traded with each other. The Serbs sold coffee for DM 25 per kilo, which they may had bought for DM 6-8 per kilo, and the Muslim traders would then resell it for DM 50 to other Muslims, and after that the Muslims and the Serbs would shoot at each other again.
What is an ally?
Aziz told me that people were driven to eat grass during the war when there was nothing to eat. One day his mother was picking some grass in a garden when the owner (who was also a Muslim) came and kicked her out. He needed the grass for his cow. And another time when she went to a place where a little food could be bought, the owner told her that she did not have enough money to buy anything, but then he saw her ring and said she could have one kilo of food in exchange for it.
You don’t kill children, do you?
Several people expressed feelings like Nijaz: “I cannot understand how one can kill children; one thing is if a soldier meets another soldier and it’s a matter of life or death, but to kill a child, or like in Visegrad to throw them out from the bridge…old and children.”
You teach your children to be good, don’t you?
Senad’s mother’s experiences made her question the moral education of the Croats. On the day she and her family were driven from their home:
…one of the Croat soldiers had a knife in the one hand and a hammer in the other, then another came and opened the door, it was a young guy the same age as my Senad [her son], and I thought about what I had taught my children and how they [the Croats] raise their children. And I thought, how could they hurt an elderly woman? I was forty-eight at that time. Then a couple of them came in and beat me and my maternal uncle’s wife. My mother-in-law stayed in the house, and she begged for somebody to stay with her in the house, but they said that everybody had to go away from the house and then they burned the house with her in it. The worst is that we do not know where her bones are.
Normal people react to injustice, don’t they?
Anvere: I lived with the children here in Stolac. Nihad was in prison camp. One day one of the kids found a little piece of paper, something from the UN. It told us things I did not even know. And when you watched TV there was nothing [no information about what was happening to the Muslims in Herzegovina]. They knew out in the world what was going on, but they didn’t do anything and they didn’t inform us either. We were an experiment, a political experiment.
You trust friends and neighbours, don’t you?
The last example relates to the central value of inter-ethnic coexistence, condensed in the idea of neighbourliness (komšiluk). For many their betrayal by friends, neighbours and fellow citizens, with whom they had lived peacefully for many years (often their whole lives), was the most incomprehensible of many disillusionments. Here I will describe three examples, showing how such feelings of betrayal were expressed to me.
I
Nermin: I should never have thought that my friend, who lived together with me, would take the rifle and shoot at me. My best friend sang and drank together with the other Ustashes [term of abuse for violent Croat extremists], while I was locked up on the lower floor. He was my best friend from Stolac.
II
Ljubica: The people we had been drinking coffee and loza [grape brandy] with, it was they who picked up Nihad [her husband], and stole my jewellery. It was they who came and stole our things, they knew where they were.
III
Senad’s father: The worst is that up until yesterday we were neighbours and we lived well together, but suddenly they looked upon us as wild animals who should be slaughtered. It is totally inexplicable that some people can behave like that.
Lamira’s story
I will end this section with an excerpt from an interview with Lamira, a woman in her late 20s. The first time I met her was at her work. I introduced myself and told her about my study. We then went down to the canteen, where she started talking. We had coffee, but she did not touch hers for a whole hour, she just talked. She said that it had been a long time since she had last talked about the war, and that there was so much to tell. Sometimes, she said, she really wanted to talk and other times she did not even want to think about it. The excerpt consists of several small anecdotes about deceit and evil, which reveal how the world has been unmade. But there are also elements of pride and hope. Like Nusret at the beginning of this section, she said: “Often I feel like a bystander to it all. As if it is not I who have experienced it. It’s like I’m standing outside looking in at myself.”
I don’t know where to begin. There is so much to tell. There are so many stories. In Stolac there is a hospital for skin diseases. We have such good air here. So before the war a lot of people came to Stolac to get treatment, and there were a lot of disabled staying there permanently. When the Croats expelled us they turned this hospital into a barrack and all patients were removed. The Croat patients were driven to Čapljina, the Serbians to the Serb Republic and the Muslims were put in cars, and several of them could not walk, they used wheelchairs. They drove them to a place at Buna, near Blagaj. They abandoned them there, so that they were outside Croat territory, some of them died. We had to transport them in sheets
