and none of the treatment they had been getting, so a lot of them died.
One day we were told to leave our house and leave the key in the door. It was the third of August, and all the women and children were expelled (proteran). My father, my cousins, and all the other men in town had been driven to concentration camps a month earlier. We women and children were taken to Željezara [a factory in Stolac], There we were locked up in a room and robbed of everything, money and gold. […]
I remember those women who came dragging big bags. Not real baggage, but for instance the kind of sacks you store potatoes in, they were dragging all these things, and they begged the soldiers to be allowed to bring them with them, they were weak women. And then there were the women who only carried a handbag with family photos. They were very aristocratic, and they didn’t deign to look at the soldiers. They were proud, and ‘If you want the bag, so take it.’ They didn’t want to beg for anything.
Afterwards we were put on trucks. Many of the trucks were stolen from Bosniaks, and many of them had previously been used for transporting animals. We were then driven to Buna, where we had to walk to Blagaj. It was terrible. It was a no-mans-land.
TK: Many people tell me that this walk of eight or nine kilometres was very terrible, why was it like that?
Lamira: There were dead bodies along the road, people died on that walk. I always thought that when you die, then you turn cold and stiff. But we were expelled in August, and it was very hot, and the dead bodies were totally swollen. And when we walked, the soldiers constantly told us to keep walking. And the people living in Blagaj said they didn’t have room, so we had to keep on walking, walking…and we didn’t have water or food. The disabled and sick we carried in blankets, and we kept thinking ‘Is there room here for us?’ At last we found an abandoned house, or what was left of it. Four families were staying in one room. There were thirty-five people in the house. There was one outdoor toilet, where you should see to everything. There was only very little water, water from the gutters saved in tanks. We had to live in the basement because they were shelling us. Next morning….We lived here for eighteen months. We had no food. We were starving and lost a lot of weight. It is hard to imagine, but try not eating for seven days, then you can imagine a little. And then there was the constant shelling.
In December 1993 – or was it January 1994? – We received aid from the air for the first time. It was American planes that were dropping relief supplies. I remember the night when they dumped those relief supplies; it was one of the worst nights in my life. We ran to the field. It was at night, but there were snipers. We ran to the packets that had landed in no-man’s-land. You have to imagine the Croats one the one side and the Serbs on the other, and then we were in the middle in a hole [Blagaj is situated in a kind of valley], and they shot at us and shelled us. But the packets weighed about 500 kilos each, so we couldn’t carry them back, we could just try to wrench something loose from the packets and then hurry back. People were scared, and some got wounded. I lost a friend that night. Snipers hit her. But the day after, it was absurd, because at night we hadn’t been able to see what we had grabbed/taken back with us, and some had only got hold of chewing gum, so all the kids were walking around blowing big chewing gum bubbles, but there was no food.
When we arrived [at Blagaj] we had to describe our skills, and my mother and sister told the soldiers they could cook, so they were stationed in the kitchen. I said I could type, so I typed some documents on an old typewriter. Then I started to teach the kids. We didn’t have any schools, but we tried to arrange some teaching, and I taught English. I had 130 pupils. We didn’t receive any pay. It was voluntary. We only got some candles as payment, so we could sit at night and prepare the lessons, write down some exercises. My friend and I got a candle each, we shared it, so we had a spare one. Then there was a woman who had a baby, and she had some instant milk, but she breastfed her child, so we traded our candles for some instant milk.
There are many stories from that time, a lot of sad and a lot of beautiful stories. There was a woman who had one of her hands so badly injured that she couldn’t use it, and she had to take care of her two children, she had to chop firewood and take care of everything with one hand. On one occasion my friend was wounded, and there was a man who had a wheelbarrow, we wanted to borrow it to drive her to a place where she could get some treatment, but he didn’t want to lend it to us, he had to take care of his family. We lived like animals.
What else? In my class there was a very nice girl. She was so lovely and kind towards the other kids, she was so full of life. But one day she locked herself into a room and didn’t want to speak to anybody, she withdrew into herself, into her own traumas. It was sad to see. There was an eleven-year-old boy without parents, he managed himself. Planted potatoes and harvested them.
Once we had a lot of glue, I don’t know from where, probably Germany, then we made a lot of collages, on paper. We picked a lot of flowers and used them to make a tree, a hand or other beautiful things with this glue. We also made a two-metre-long letter to a school class in Bremen with drawings where we wrote who we were. There were a lot of beautiful things then.
When we buried our dead, we didn’t have coffins, as there was no wood. The last one we buried in wood, was one we laid on a door, but after that it was decided that we should only use fabric, sheets and such, because we barely had enough firewood.
My father returned from prison camp in 1994, but he hasn’t ever been the same since. He turned silent, introverted and sad. […]
In 1994 I started on the faculty in Mostar. It was a long way to walk, eight kilometres each way. I was a teacher at that time, but I didn’t have time and had to stop. I remember the day the radio reported: ‘Today there are no dead.’ It was unbelievable. They had been reporting who had died every day. That day it was as if the whole world opened itself to me. There was a German journalist who interviewed me and asked how I could be so happy when the whole town was destroyed and everything was in ruins, but I said he should try to imagine finally being able to walk the streets without being afraid of getting shot. He wanted to give me some money. He felt pity for me, but I said: ‘Keep your money and write the truth about what has happened here instead.’
Sometimes I think it is all like an experiment. Like if you take two frogs and you put one of them into boiling water and put the other into cold water, which you then bring to a boil slowly. I felt like the last one.
Lamira’s story, as well as the other examples I have presented, on a general level reveal that nothing is sacred: social relations and matters formerly taken for granted reveal their illusory character; meaning becomes problematic; agency vanishes; and institutions, practices and values change character. All in all this leads to a general need for reformulating moral behaviour, and re-identifying social belonging (e.g. ethnic identity).
The destruction of communication
Lamira’s story is somewhat extraordinary, not in content, but in form. It has a chronological order and is coherent. Most Muslim women in Stolac would probably recognise the feelings and situations she depicts, but few would be able to express them so clearly. This brings me to the methodological problem of how to represent the violent memories and experiences of my informants, how to “write about the ‘unmaking’ and ‘creating’ of the world in a ‘made’ world of academic prose?” (Nordstrom 1995: 138). Theory and academic writing style have a structure and order which is removed from lived experience (Hastrup 1988), an order which is imposed on the world, “the academic will to order” as van de Port names it (1998: 25), an order which is especially intolerant of the chaotic experiences related to war, violence and the unmaking of the world. It is therefore unlikely that experience of war and violence can ever be documented in any real sense. Representations of human suffering will always have gaps in terms of experience, perception and the nature of pain itself (Perera 2001: 157-60).
