Remembering Wartime Rape in Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina Sarah Quillinan ORCHID ID: 0000-0002-5786-9829 A dissertation submitted in total fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July 2019 School of Social and Political Sciences University of Melbourne THIS DISSERTATION IS DEDICATED TO THE WOMEN SURVIVORS OF WAR RAPE IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA WHOSE STRENGTH, FORTITUDE, AND SPIRIT ARE TRULY HUMBLING. i Contents Dedication / i Declaration / iv Acknowledgments / v Abstract / vii Note on Language and Pronunciation / viii Abbreviations / ix List of Illustrations / xi I PROLOGUE Unclaimed History: Memoro-Politics and Survivor Silence in Places of Trauma / 1 II INTRODUCTION After Silence: War Rape, Trauma, and the Aesthetics of Social Remembrance / 10 Where Memory and Politics Meet: Remembering Rape in Post-War Bosnia / 11 Situating the Study: Fieldwork Locations / 22 Bosnia and Herzegovina: An Ethnographic Sketch / 22 The Village of Selo: Republika Srpska / 26 The Town of Gradić: Republika Srpska / 28 Silence and the Making of Ethnography: Methodological Framework / 30 Ethical Considerations: Principles and Practices of Research on Rape Trauma / 36 Organisation of Dissertation / 41 III CHAPTER I The Social Inheritance of War Trauma: Collective Memory, Gender, and War Rape / 45 On Collective Memory and Social Identity / 46 On Collective Memory and Gender / 53 On Collective Memory and the History of Wartime Rape / 58 Conclusion: The Living Legacy of Collective Memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina / 64 ii IV CHAPTER II The Unmaking of the World: War, Rape, and the Legacies of Conflict / 66 Political Backdrop: A Prolegomena to the Bosnian War (1992-1995) / 67 Mass Rape and Sexual Violence during the Bosnian War (1992-1995) / 72 On the Battleground of Women’s Bodies: The Logic of Rape in War / 78 Conclusion: Women, War, and Rape / 83 V CHAPTER III Remembering to Forget: Public Secrecy and the Poetics of Rape Remembrance in the Village of Selo / 85 The Masking and Unmasking of Public Secrecy / 87 ‘Beware your Friend a Hundred-Fold’: War in the Village of Selo / 90 Srcolika Spomenik: The ‘Heart-shaped’ Monument and the Production of ‘Truth’ / 93 Transgressing the Secret: The Burden of ‘Survival’ / 98 Bodily Remembrances and the Politics of Defacement / 105 Conclusion: The Public Secrecy of Sexual Violence / 115 VI CHAPTER IV Beyond a Manichaean Aesthetics: Voices from the ‘Grey Zone’ / 118 La ‘Zona Grigia’: The ‘Grey Zone’ / 121 Prvo Traži Komšiju pa Izbij Kuću: War in the Town of Gradić / 124 Women’s Voices from Omarska: Between Victimhood and Agency / 128 Return and the Paradoxes of Rape Victimhood in Gradić / 137 Conclusion: Representing the Unrepresentable / 142 VII CONCLUSIONS Towards a Gendered Semiotics of Silence and Suffering in Memory Studies / 144 References / 155 iii Declaration This is to certify that: (i) The dissertation comprises only my own original work towards the PhD; (ii) Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other materials used; and (iii) The dissertation is less than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies, and appendices. Sarah Quillinan iv Acknowledgements Remembering Wartime Rape is a project that has collected many debts throughout its development. First among these are the many survivors of war rape, whose names are disguised for obvious reasons, and without whose contributions and support, this research would not have been possible. The willingness of so many women in the villages, towns, and cities throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina to share their thoughts and experiences was truly humbling. I am also profoundly grateful to the numerous community members in my two key fieldsites of Selo and Gradić, many of whom generously welcomed me into their homes, workplaces, and social worlds during the two-year period of my fieldwork. Over endless coffee visits, they tolerated my curiosity and inspired my research by providing a window into the complicated experience of living with the very raw and very recent memories of war trauma. In conducting my research in Bosnia, I drew on the expertise and experience of many others whose support and assistance contributed enormously to my own understandings of the most recent war and its continued repercussions in the fractured post-conflict state. In particular, the insights of two people I repeatedly refer to as my ‘companions’, Una Tokmačić and Aida Begić, left a marked impression on my work and made the final dissertation far richer and more complex for their support with interpretation and translation services. A number of good friends have helped to ensure that both my doctoral work and I survived the many years of student privation that inevitably accompanies postgraduate studies. I am especially thankful to Emily Hill who provided me with valuable direction in the very early stages of my research, a home in the final months of my fieldwork in Bosnia, and a lasting friendship in the many years since. I am also deeply indebted to Eileen Archer without whose unfailing generosity, support, curiosity, wit, and friendship I might have repeatedly abandoned this undertaking before its completion. My thanks are also due to the many fellow Balkan researchers whose paths crossed my own during fieldwork and who each helped to make my time in Bosnia both intellectually stimulating and personally rewarding. In particular, I am appreciative of the friendships of Jesse Hronešová, Valerie Safir Hopkins, Julianne Funk, and Maria O’Reilly who were each important sources of knowledge, advice, and constructive criticism. The School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Melbourne provided a thoughtful and creative environment in which to complete this research project. I am particularly thankful, here, to my supervisor, Professor Andrew Dawson, for his expert guidance during the planning and research phase, his constructive criticism and patience during the writing process, his loyalty and friendship, and his generous donation of time throughout the years. v Finally, my family has been crucial to the completion of this project at each and every step of the process. In particular, I owe much to my parents, Jim and Mary Quillinan, for their guidance and moral support as well as their practical assistance and ready company making the, oftentimes, lonesome process of writing a far more bearable endeavour. In writing about the deeply personal culture of war rape memories, I have endeavoured to piece together the inevitably subjective and fragmentary narratives of survival to which I was witness, and to portray the communities and the people with whom I worked with honesty, respect, and sensitivity. I can only hope that my writing does justice to the intricate textures of their daily experiences and to the rich complexity of the memories they saw fit to share with me; memories that were neither easy to revisit nor simple to make sense of, but that were always and everywhere an immense and humbling privilege to hear. vi Abstract Remembering Wartime Rape explores the complicated history of rape during the Bosnian war (1992-1995) and the collective efforts of local populations to (dis)remember the painful legacies of violence over more than two decades since the close of conflict. The organised sexual assaults of more than 20,000 women and girls was a defining characteristic in the history of Bosnia’s bloody secession from the former Yugoslav federation and the memories of such violence continue to influence the post-war recovery of communities throughout the small Balkan state. The research draws on intimate accounts of women’s suffering over the four years of conflict as well as personal stories of survival in the aftermath of the violence to provide a thick description of the place of rape narratives in Bosnia’s post-conflict memoryscape. Ethnographic data was collected over an extended period of 21 months in the two key fieldwork locations of Selo and Gradić in the Republika Srpska. The distinctive political, economic, religious, and social contexts in each community produced different dominant mnemonic threads as well as many and varied ways of collectively managing the sensitive local histories of war rape. The public discourse on the subject is, thus, explored through different notional frames as they emerged organically in each site over the course of fieldwork. The dissertation specifically employs the theoretical schemata of public secrecy (Taussig, 1999) and its relevance to the sensitive task of memory making in the village of Selo, and the grey zone (Levi, 1989) and its bearing on the recollections of women concentration camp survivors in the town of Gradić. In adopting these two principal thematic frameworks, Remembering Wartime Rape focuses on the discursive processes through which memories of sexual violence from the recent conflict are selected, shaped, and institutionalised in each of the key communities. It questions the ways in which women survivors are represented or erased in the crafting of official histories and the consequences of such for fostering social solidarity and division among those with competing versions of the ‘truth’. In doing so, the research considers which elements of women’s experiences of rape are more easily remembered and which are excluded or deliberately ‘forgotten’, which are grieved, and which are valorised, what complex reality is simplified as a result, and what broader purpose these interpretations serve. The research concludes with a discussion of the importance of enhancing current methodologies to explore more thoroughly the limits and the possibilities for both collective and personal mourning and for re-imagining social worlds in the aftermath of an immense disruption such as war. In exploring the messiness of the Bosnian memoryscape two decades after the close of conflict, the dissertation refrains from any attempt to establish a singular metanarrative of war rape and, instead, seeks to evoke a sense of the ineffable experience of living alongside memories of sexual violence in their countless manifestations and of the meanings and creativity always inherent in both individual and collective approaches to suffering, survival, and post-war reconstruction.